I Have Regressed to a JRPG Sicko Again

Author’s Note: This started out as a FF7R blog – which is to say I had every intention of just chewing over FF7R as I dove back into it after a typically (for me) years-long pause, but then I kept getting distracted by wanting to talk about other stuff and gave up about three paragraphs in. So instead you get a rundown of how I’ve been spending my time since I turned 40.

I don’t think I am alone in saying this, but when it comes to playing JRPGs as a (very recently) 40 year old man, I find that I just don’t have the sort of time to devote to them as I did back when, just as an example, I played through the entirety of FF7 over the course of a summer. It doesn’t help that I have maybe the worst attention span known to mankind, which is why my FF7 Remake save game sat for like a couple of years until I picked it back up this past weekend, in part because there was a Steam Sale and I finally got around to picking up Rebirth (figuring, as one does, that I will get around to it Eventually. This is also why I have so many SMT and Persona games, all of which have save games going, all of which are in various states of completion. I only recently finished a Persona 4 Golden playthrough on my PS Vita that I started in 2015. I have bought two more copies of Persona 4 Golden since then. This is pervert behavior).

Picking Up Where I Left Off

The save was on chapter 11 (I think, I was finding my way out of the sewers after Don Corneo dropped me down there), and since then I’ve completed another couple chapters along with as many sidequests as were on offer in Chapter 14. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get back to grips with the combat system, having been spoiled, somewhat, by all the turn-based combat in the Persona series (which I will get into all the Persona/SMT games I have been playing later). I think something about the button-mashing form of combat just doesn’t quite click for me still, although it’s satisfying enough (especially playing as Tifa whenever the option arises). Part of it is because I am a control freak in all other JRPGs – I simply do not trust AI companions to reliably act accordingly.

Fortunately you can at least slow the game down and trigger specific abilities/spells in the combat system, which gives me some modicum of the control I crave. That said, if I have to watch my two companions just stand in a fuckin’ puddle of poisonous goo instead of getting out of it again I am going to lose my mind. It’s the sort of jank AI behavior that you just kind of have to accept – nobody’s ever quite figured it out! It’s a real damn mystery.

Anyway, as of writing this I’m two chapters from the end and I am pretty pleased with how it’s going. I do know that Rebirth got a lot more complaints of being bloated with Open World Crap, which like… I dunno, I have a weakness for Open World Crap, so I am sure I will end up getting bogged down in it when I do eventually get around to it. Who knows when, although I’ve got a copy of it ready to go for whenever I get through the rest of Remake (and the Integrade stuff too, naturally). That might have happened by the time I get around to actually finishing this post! Who knows!

UPDATE: I did in fact end up finishing the game. It was good! I think not being able to save before the final boss fight is fucking bananas, but You Do You, Square Enix. I’m playing Integrade right now, and Yuffie is my favorite idiot daughter. She is also a murder machine, and I respect that a lot! This was a good sign that I need to finish this fucking post, because I it has now been sitting in my drafts for way too long. The reason for it taking so long? Well, I mean read on, I keep picking up new (old) JRPGs and giving them my time instead of, you know, focusing.

The Old Ways

A side effect of playing FF7 Remake, of course, is that it did the thing that I assume the Remake is meant to do in that it made me think about playing the original. It made me think so much about the original, in fact, that I went ahead and started a fresh save of it on my Switch. It is hilarious how quickly it moves compared to the Remake – I got from the start through to getting out of Don Corneo’s sewer trap in something like an hour and a half, maybe two hours tops. This takes something like 20 to 30 hours in the Remake. That’s not like, an earth-shattering revelation or anything, that’s more or less what you sign up for when you hear Square-Enix say “Hey remember that game we’re splitting it into three parts and the first part only goes until you leave Midgar,” but it is kind of funny when you think about it. Like goddamn man there is so much more game to go and y’all turned this into a 40 hour campaign or whatever.

The other thing about the original FF7 that really surprised me is just how… good it is, still? Like you all look like little Playmobil characters for the most part, but the writing and the music (and the pre-rendered backgrounds, which don’t look quite as impressive at higher resolutions, sure, but still) all kind of carry it off. The sequence where Cloud remembers making his promise to Tifa – something that happens like ten minutes in, by the way – still hits!

Combat also feels great, which is mostly because the ATB system remains kind of undefeated for me. I do, I confess, prefer more straightforward turn-based combat when given the choice – we’ll get to that once we get into Metaphor – but I have to admit the ATB system keeps you from overthinking things by adding that time pressure. Spend too long debating what to do and the enemy will get extra hits in, something you probably don’t want. I do generally set it to Wait mode, meaning that I can at least make sure I'm not picking the wrong spell by accident because I'm in a hurry to get a heal spell off before the enemy strikes a deathblow.

It also helps that the re-release of the game lets you do stuff like speed the game up (valuable when you're just trying to get through some fights) and flip random encounters off and on at will (extremely valuable when you're trying to find the few pixels of the pre-rendered background you can actually interact with ). That's a nice way of saying that some of the bits of Final Fantasy 7 suffer from Old Fuckin' Game disease, an affliction where certain limitations of technology cause issues that you wouldn't know were issues if not for the fact that you have now played a bunch of games which don't have those limitations anymore. Like did I think “oh it is a pain in the fuckin ass to tell what bit of this background is actually a ramp you can walk up” when I played this back in the early 00s? Probably not, although even by Final Fantasy 8 they'd done a better job of making the pre-rendered backgrounds a little more readable.

Speaking of Final Fantasy 8

So I need to stress that I haven't gone terribly far in this, but once I started up a new game of FF7, it was only a matter of time until I did the thing I had been thinking about doing for Actual Decades and started up a new game of Final Fantasy 8. Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but my first impressions upon playing FF8 was that it was not very good and needlessly confusing.

I was into the plot, which was extremely Angsty Teen even by the standards of JRPGs mixed with… I dunno a lot of time travel and also the whole premise was that you were kids going to mercenary soldier school(?), but all the drawing and GF junctioning and whatnot just really seemed complicated for someone who was coming off of playing Final Fantasy 9, which was Square’s whole “let’s get back to the classics” entry and thus was

1. Pretty much straightforward fantasy

2. Pretty much played the same as like FF6, but also you could learn skills off of your equipment.

It was a lot more straightforward, is what I am saying. You don’t have to do anything like individually assign specific bonuses to characters based on skills learned by your GFs which also include customizing your action menu to the point where you might not have a slot free for “use items” depending on what you’re up to. It’s something that I just didn’t have the fuckin’ time for back in 2003 or whenever it was I got around to it, which is why the vast majority of my FF8 memories center around lounging either in my attic or my friend’s basement watching him actually play the game. In fact, to this very day FF8 remains the only one out of the PS-era Final Fantasies that I never saw all of. My buddy, in an act of heinous betrayal, did all the bullshit where you take a rocket to outer space (or something?) while I wasn’t around and filled me in afterwards. I missed a weird musical number, is what I’m told.

So maybe this is a bit of me filling in a gap in my knowledge as well as like, coming back to a game some twenty years later (more than that, actually) and giving it another shot. I’m playing the Remastered version, which means that the character models have been considerably updated (it’s actually quite impressive, although part of me does of course think I should be playing the uglier original version which was yes, ugly but also charming). The moral of the story here is that sometimes you go back to a game you were cool on twenty odd years ago and it’s suddenly compelling to you. Also time will come for your ass and you will be 40 goddamn years old writing about JRPGs on the internet.

I’m looking forward to putting some more time into this one, is what I’m saying. Like significantly more time, even? I can see a world where I actually play through this one to completion! It will be easier than playing through FF9 again because unlike FF9 I do not have multiple copies of FF8 (and also I am not currently holding out the desperate hope that we are still going to get some kind of FF9 remake which would then obviously take priority).

Oh Right the Other Final Fantasy Games

I couldn’t just stop with FF8 of course – no sir, I’m on a roll, which is why I also jumped back into Final Fantasy X, XII, and XIII – I’ve been picking away at XIII for ages, because I never finished it and also it runs nicely on a Steam Deck (X and XII are very recent additions, like in the last week or so recent, and while I’ve started a game up I haven’t gotten particularly far in either of them). XIII is weirdly compelling to me – I once got reasonably far in the game (like to the part where it becomes a more open world, so like 30 hours-ish in?) but I’m still in those early linear sections for now.

I think the combat system in XIII is a noble effort to keep the ATB vibes without being completely boring in the way that XII’s combat can be – you have to be a little more active in it and it’s almost turn-based – but like XII it takes away the ability to control your entire party in favor of having you just set up roles and the like. I do like swapping roles on the fly, and the Crystarium is a nice alternative to the Sphere Grid or the License Board I guess. I am kind of determined to see XIII through to the end one of these days, sit down and put Real Time into it instead of having it just be a thing I will dump a couple hours into while watching Blight Club or whatever. I think it is Neat, although maybe not necessarily Good.

FFXII kind of shares the same thing – it was a game I got pretty far in Way Back When, but god knows where that PS2 memory card is and also where that PS2 is. I wouldn’t go back to it now at any rate, since the ability to speed up the game in the Zodiac Age re-release makes the combat about 100x less tedious to sit through. Sometimes it is nice to play the game at its intended pace, but most of the time I am just like running around waiting for the bar to fill so I autoattack again. I mean it was Square Enix going “hey we made an MMO combat system for FFXI, but what if that was also the combat system for our single player game too” which hey, spoilers, it isn’t that compelling. They gave you lots of ways to program your companions but this is the start of not having Complete Control in Final Fantasy games, something I have never quite gotten used to.

It also made me dig out my Final Fantasy Tactics Advance cart and boot it back up, because Ivalice is a neat setting and there are hot bunny ladies. That game does have my original 60-something hour save in it, and I’ve picked up where I left off. Took me a minute to remember how to fucking play and also to remember what I was doing (by “a minute” I mean “I still do not remember what I was doing but at least I have done some fights and such, but I don’t remember how like, law cards work or anything”) but turns out that save (which conservatively was last picked up in 2004/2005 if not 2002/2003) was still there. Real blast from the past, all the music came back to me basically immediately.

Speaking of things that came back to me basically immediately, that was the case with FFX, a game which my brother and I wanted to play so badly we bought a copy for my friend’s PS2 and, when it turned out the copy we got had a scratched disc so that the game froze when we got to the cutscene where Yuna does the first Sending you see, we replaced it for him too. It was a good game then (corny-ass voice acting and all) and it is still a pretty good game now. Just don’t ask me to play Blitzball, I do not fuck with Blitzball. I do think it was the last great combat system in a Final Fantasy game though, because it is that pure turn based shit, a thing which I am , as I said, kind of a sicko for.

The Entire SMT Franchise Busts Through the Wall Like the Kool-Aid Man

I would be remiss in this roundup if I didn’t mention that I am still, eternally, playing through the Persona games (3R, 4G, and 5R) at various levels of completion. I’m closest to the end in 5R, I think? I have completed the hamburger palace. 3R I ended up restarting because I dropped my Game Pass subscription and instead of buying the game through the Microsoft store, I bought a Steam copy so that, obviously, I could play it on my Steam Deck. I like the Persona games on a Steam Deck, as it turns out – most of my progress in them has been made there (sometimes docked to my TV, sometimes not). Turn based JRPGs are real good for playing while you are also watching something in the background, because if you get distracted by a good bit of tv the game just waits for you to get back to it.

It helps that the presentation in the Persona games is (and has been at least since the original Persona 3) slick as hell. It feels great! There are few better feelings than downing a group of enemies in Persona 5 Royal, running up on them, and hitting the “beat their ass” button just as you arrive so that you basically run up and immediately backflip out to do the all-out attack. It is so satisfying. Plus the games all share kind of universal mechanics – even with their Shin Megami Tensei brethren – the spell names and even weaknesses of enemies are more or less universal. If you know what a demon is weak to in SMT III: Nocturne ft. Dante from Devil May Cry, you will probably be able to exploit that same weakness in SMT V: Vengeance. Or in the Soul Hackers series (which I haven’t gotten back to but I do in fact have games going in Soul Hackers and also Soul Hackers 2, look, I know. I know. Stop judging me!). Metaphor: Refantazio (which I recently started playing as well, no, please, stop judging me I am begging you) is the first Atlus game in a while where I did not immediately grasp what the best options were within like five minutes, which is to the game’s credit, I think! It puts having a Persona and doing social link stuff into the press turn system of SMT, and that is a good mix, for me – even if it is, more than the other Atlus games of that ilk, waaaay more exhausting for me to play. It’s hard in a way that like, not even SMTV is hard, and I think that is pretty much down to it being totally new in terms of what the enemies are like and how effective spells are and all that biz. A new setting completely divorced from SMT did a lot to make the mechanics feel fresher than other entries – and I don’t mind that the mechanics of like, P3R are more or less identical to P4G/P5R with the exception of some quality of life stuff and like, One New Mechanic, to be clear.

Okay Buddy Wrap It Up

I think it is fair to say that Atlus is making the kinds of JRPGs I am into – which is to say they are doing turn-based combat in a way that I am having a lot of fun with. They are where I am spending the majority of my time, especially now that 7 Remake is off my backlog (replaced by Remake: Integrade, which I did start and don’t have a ton to say about that apart from Yuffie is my precious idiot ninja daughter, I love her). Of course freeing myself from that particular game just means I can focus up on other Final Fantasy entries, or maybe buckle down and finish Persona 5? It’s impossible to say, honestly.

I think what ultimately keeps me from focusing, apart from the possibility that I have undiagnosed ADHD like everyone else on the internet, is that I just like bouncing around these games – something that is especially easy to do with games I’ve played before (so most of the Final Fantasy games that aren’t XII or XIII (or XV, which I did pick up on a recent sale but have yet to start) and Persona 4 Golden, which as I mentioned roughly 2000 words ago, I did actually get around to beating earlier this year). It was honestly something of a miracle that I suddenly was able to focus on Final Fantasy 7 Remake enough to actually get through it while I was throwing this thing together. It helps that I am not immune to nostalgia, and even though Final Fantasy 7 isn’t my favorite game, I am still a sucker for Aerith’s theme just like everyone else in the world. Either way it’s been nice to sink my teeth into these games and come away from them thinking the same thing I’ve thought ever since I was a kid trying to figure out what the shit I was supposed to be doing in Final Fantasy: JPRGs are pretty fucking good!