Have a good evening, yall.

oh my god really, it was that long ago?

I'm so out of touch with final fantasy I'm still convinced 10 is like The Most Recent One

Today's the 20th anniversary of 10's release

sob

oh god my hip

Imgur

Game News: I'm old

...oof

Oh my god I’m old

oh......

and i just replayed X a few months ago lol

NO THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE

Yep, FFX came out when I was 17. Now excuse me while I get my cane and rant about whippersnappers.

do note this is the anniversary of the jp release, the us release was...well, december's not that far off

while aus and europe aren't til next may

but that also says a lot about twenty years ago, since a lot of stuff comes out all on the same day in most regions

shit, that says plenty about ten years ago

i'm just happy that X still holds up. it's so good.

it's really good is the thing

Half-tempted to toss up a screenshot of Record Keeper for "Final Fantasy Today" Of course, that's an intentional stylistic throwback.

(And Record Keeper's been around for a while)

Of course, 10's arguably the last mainline FF of its kind... SE seems to be a driver of the "turn-based is outdated!" bandwagon nowadays.

IIRC FFX was fairly unique with its turnbased system as well though. It ditched ATB and instead allowed you to use your turn as it came up while seeing the turn order several turns in advance, allowing you to strategize for particularly tough bosses for when their turn would come up

Yeah. The closest predecessor to FFX's turn system was probably FFTs, but the strategic options there were a bit more limited and focused almost entirely on when charged abilities would go off.

Only other game I can think of off-hand with FFX-ish levels of turn order shenanigans is Radiant Historia.

Yeah. If you did just the main plot of FFX the strategic turn-based system didn't really come into play that much, though it did make it easier to do certain fights underlevelled (especially since you could literally dictate how strong or weak you were with the sphere grid). It's because you could see the turn order that you could really have moves planned

Still, I'd consider FFX's pure turn-based to bear a closer resemblance to the ATB FFs than to the open-world FFs that came after that, personally.

Ah, though notably Hexyz Force did let you see turn order and how your choice of action would affect it. Just no party swaps to help you exploit it further.

And yeah, ATB vs FFX/FFT-style turn order were more or less different interfaces for similar timing schemes, with the big difference being just whether you could pass time by idling at the command input prompt. Which is still a big difference, but worlds away from the round-based schemes of the Famicom-era FFs.

yeah, though round-based is still around in Dragon Quest. They did a single-turn base in DQXI but the option for round-based is there if you play 2D mode

Famicom-era FFs had something that was more clearly an Initiative system a la D&D

Except that they recalculated it every round

Earlier editions of D&D recalculated it every round too.

some GMs still do, it's a matter of preference though

(And earlier than that, initiative was side-based, not individual. Which wasn't the most organized thing unless you used the suggested "caller" role, where one player was considered to speak for the group once decisions had been made.)

y'all really making me want to start replaying the FFX remaster

do it :3 I want to play it now too though, it was my first FF game

Notably, Record Keeper is ATB but their wait mode is actually a pretty good option for people who want something a bit less twitch-gamey. Specifically, it pretty much allows any action to eat about a quarter-second or so, and then stops the clock to wait for input if it's someone's turn.

The quarter-second cost means it really can matter in what order you specify characters' moves, too. There are battles where I've had to skip over a lot of turns at the beginning to avoid a wipe because Divine Veil Grimoire goes off too late.

Which is consistent with the ATB style of the super famicom games

Well, FFVI in particular, since that's the one that makes it possible to immediately switch to other characters at ATB without costing someone's turn

Really, a lot of thing block turns coming up in ATB. Which is one of the reason game speed matters so much.

Er, battle speed setting, I mean

ffrk's wait mode is pretty bad, because it's locked to one speed that doesn't line up with the durations of most things

jp just got new speed options for wait mode that should help a lot, so global will probably get that in six months

also i wouldn't consider x the last classic ff, that's ix

x was the one to start playing around with what we think of as an ff

i also wouldn't consider xii or xiii not turn-based, since they both work on their own versions of the atb system

Well, it was the first FF to feature voice acting. You could still name your own character but Tidus was the only one you could name (though you could still screw around with the aeon names at least)

i genuinely wish they didn't let you name tidus tbh

same. It'd have ended the whole "HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE HIS NAME" debate from the get-go

exactly

also when everyone else is talking out loud it gets really awkward that they have to avoid saying his name

god that was especially bad with Yuna's recording

hell even persona gets around this with giving the protagonist nicknames

they nixed that after one game at least, so we got Vaan in XII

Even then I still really hope P6 gives us One Canon Name.

If you can still put in whatever, that's fine, but ENOUGH OF THIS MANGA NAME, ANIME NAME, AUDIO/STAGE DRAMA NAME STUFF...

Valid. I do like that they could call the protag Joker in P5 at least, if only because CODE NAME

Yeah, the code name's not the problem here.

(I called him Thief Phantom in my most recent playthrough to make everyone in text sound either sarcastic or stupid and it was the best naming choice I ever made)

The problem here is 'they gave the P4 manga artist a list of names to choose from and then doubled down on something else for the anime.'

(beautiful. XD I tend to dub the PTs as a group Voltron.)

("We will steal your distorted desires. Sincerely, Voltron.")

if you want there to be a canon name, you should give it to the audience at the start

that's the really annoying thing about persona protag names

I named mine the Robbin Hoods because I was having trouble thinking but then just figured "hey they're good thieves right so why not"

also yeah

like if the game gave a default name

that's one thing FF games did well, they gave default names so that there was a decided "canon" and people had something to pick if they couldn't think of anything

::nods::

On-topic, I shoed this to my wife and they went '... .......... ............... Where's that 'I GUESS' guy?'

(that said while his name is stupid the anime dub at least takes advantage of Yu Narukami's name. One of my favourite jokes is that a brat kid literally refers to him as "HIM!" as if that's his actual name)

didn't it take kotone nearly fifteen years to get a canon name

She had it in the stage play stuff for a while but Atlus only recently confirmed it.

ah, i'd only ever seen her referred to with a feminized version of minato's name, so that must've just been my assumption

I think that was a lot of peoples' assumptions TBF, I've only seen Kotone showing up as her name recently

Yeah, Minako is very common, riffing off Dudetag's Manga Name. (And then his Anime Name is in fact unisex, so they could both be Makoto Yuki.)

There's a stripe of the fandom that also calls her Hamuko, which... I personally Do Not Like. Feels too fake to me.

I don't think Atlus felt a need to confirm anything until she was a major part of PQ2, so...

... I'm confused about where they got Hamuko

oh is that what finally did it, i thought it was already out before they made the announcement

I think it's just 'ham' as in 'she has a much larger personality than Dudetag' and '-ko' for 'Japanese Girl's Name.'

i have a friend who plays her and i feel like she was talking a lot about pq2 like a year before it, at least

I think PQ2 finally made people aske if she had a canon name enough for them to say something, yeah. Feels like the timeline would fit.

i haven't played a pq, do they still let you name the characters?

I think so, but HILARIOUSLY the DS has a smaller input field.

SO YOU CAN'T USE 'NARUKAMI'

... I want to be a smart-ass in FFX now and to just name the character "Protagonist" if there's enough room. Protag if there isn't

Or Hero. Jecht would definitely have that kind of hubris.

Hamuko is actually an intentional misreading of the characters for "female hero"

Maybe!

Also as awful as it is I actually like how the game showed the dysfunctional relationship between Tidus and Jecht. And showing that while he was stupid he actually did try to make sure that Tidus wasn't completely ignored even if he was absolutely terrible about showing he cared while he was still there

主人公 protagonist
女の子 girl
Read the last character in each vertically

the thing tidus' parents make me thinks about is like

dream ghosts deserve reproductive rights and not having them is the only reason i can imagine these two had a kid

but at the same time i like tidus and would be sad if he didn't happen

I don't really want to get into that aspect of it just because I've never seen anything confirmed or denied either way. If you collect all of Jecht's spheres you can tell that he realized that he actually did care about his kid a lot and was just garbage at showing it. It felt more like a case of not realizing what he had until he didn't have it anymore

As for Tidus's mother... My view of her has soured over the years

honestly it's not even just jecht

we know very very little about his mom, not even her name, but the one thing we can tell from this barely anything is that she clearly never wanted a kid

Yeah, that much is... while not confirmed, it's highly likely

I do like that Tidus did come to realize it on his own though, not necessarily that his mom didn't want him but that it wasn't exactly his dad's fault that she ignored him. At least, it wasn't his intention.