Update on my adventure through final fantasy xi:

I have learned the basic systems. I steamrolled the first 3 missions of my nation of Windurst now that I have trusts (AI companions). I helped some new players level and showed them some dungeons. I had a great, 2002-flavored time. Matchmade parties are definitely the standard for good reason, but finding someone and chatting with them in a final fantasy dungeon we walked to the long way was so intimate and refreshing.

Made some mistakes buying gear I thought I could use. The red mage can equip bracers, but it turns out that class has no hand-to-hand skill that can progress innately, so he just flails his arms very slowly. It does quite a bit of damage though!...every so often. It was funny and sad, but I learned from my mistakes. Can't take anything in this game lightly.

Inventory management was labyrinthian with different categories for wardrobes and items and stuff but I think I got it somewhat down.

I'm really surprised by the differences between this and 14 in terms of how they expect you to level. Leveling is only done through combat, not quests, like a traditional rpg as opposed to a standard mmo. You would think grinding in this game would be just a process of attacking and repeating the same actions in a set region with little variation, not so different from 14, but turns out every enemy has totally variable stats and defenses and I got killed by the same type of enemy I was previously farming singlehandedly just cause I moved slightly away from the area. Chests can drop randomly and just have all sorts of random items, food, temporary stuff, weapons for random classes, its insane what you can find just outside. When a locked chest drops, you engage with a minigame that takes a while to guess digits. It's refreshing but weird that the game is built around walking and attacking stuff and even lets you set optional objectives, not one, but two different ways for targeting specific enemy types and fighting them over and over but yet still inserts danger and variation. It's outdated but also very ahead of today's practices of monotonous encounter design??

The penalties for dying in this game are nuts. I'm a sub-level 30 character right now so I don't lose any exp, and getting exp is actually pretty quick anyway. However, the amount it sends you BACK in distance if you've ventured across the map for a quest is insane, and the time it takes you to walk is slow. I'm on a quest right now to give the thief cat lady some rock for a book she (shamelessly) STOLE from the library. I have to use some kind of glass she gave me to investigate the cave for her thing. Sure, I'll do it.

The cave is not on the map and in fact the very corner of a terrifying canyon that has no music, just the wind and my heavy steps. I see some ghosts floating in the distance of some large animal fossils. They attack me and I shortly die.
I was unprepared for that and didn't have my AI comrades with me.

I respawn at the town and use one of my 3 chocobo passes to get there faster. I avoid the ghosts entirely. The cave is full of goblins, butchers and ambushers.
I cannot get away in time from one of them who is very angry at my face. I didn't get my AI friends to block for me in time. I try firing an arrow from a distance. It misses. I run.
I am dead.

I realize I am sitting on a mountain of gold from helping my nation with conquests. Time to deck out, get gear, get magic, the works. I remembered I passed a teleport book so I try and figure out how to teleport there instead of walk. Turns out that costs 1000 gold. That's how much I made playing finishing the last mission! I could also use 30 "tabs", but those take a while to farm from repeating combat with monsters outside after accepting training regimens.

This time I'll just walk leisurely. I enjoy myself. I kill some monsters. I pick a level up. I learned Cure II, Bio, and Aero. I avoid the ghosts before the cave. I enter. I have killed some goblins. I healed my companions, I let them tank, I use my new sword, use a new sword ability. I aggro two goblins at once. I barely make it. I rest for hp and gather my thoughts, fix up my inventory. I feel I'm getting the hang of this.

A skeleton walks out of a dome of discarded skeletal debris. He looks not too different from the skeleton gouls I fought and killed earlier. I check him, the game tells me he is very tough and dangerous. I am a man of hubris so I fight him while a goblin sees and approaches. I realize that the skeleton hits hard but not so bad. I position myself such that I engage the goblin while my friends fight the skeleton. The combat text is flying as i select spells, job abilities, and sword skills. I killed the goblin! One of my companions just evaporated. He said something about his time being up. Are AI companions timed? I wasn't told about this.

I realized his hp must have depleted as my other, tiny ninja friend is dying. I struggle to heal him. I struggle to heal my healer. I am dying. I struggle to heal myself. My companions cannot body block for me any longer.

I am currently dead. When you die, the game lets you stay dead for an hour in case another adventurer happens upon you and revives you. You can end this wait by respawning at your last home point, but that place is miles away. I am poor and cannot afford the teleportation fees. I have but one chocobo pass left.

Let me just sit and decompose. I try to use the /shout command "HELP ME SOMEONE" . It doesn't work when you're dead.

/Say commands don't either, I tried.

I can't even access the main menu to search for players in my area to send them private /tells and tell them to revive me. I can't access any part of chat at all. None of my groups, linkshells, unities, nada. I can just lay dead and watch the environment and its inhabitants, and sky change color from the mouth of the cave. The clouds move beyond me. Dawn has come and gone 3 or 4 times.

An adventurer and his AI party passed me earlier. I saw him fight near me. I was hoping he would notice me. I don't think he did. He seemed too young to have a revive spell anyway.

I realize that rather than be frustrated at my situation, I can just enjoy the absolute absurdity of this. It's so hardcore.

This is like Ultima, but expanded to the nth degree. Not Ultima Online, but just the original old school Ultima. This is the endgame of that philosophy of design. A world is out there and you see things come up to you and you come up to them too and something in the text spews out that tells you what kind of stuff is happening. You get things, you lose things, you die, you come back. The world is still there for you to walk all over until you finally get it to click, once that moment finally comes.

Right now this game is just a screensaver. It's a beautiful screensaver I have for an hour. If someone doesn't revive me by the end of the hour, I am alive again for another chance to get back here. If someone does, the screensaver is over and I can walk through it. But eventually, I guess it will become a screensaver again.

I don't know if I will ever even finish the story content of this game, if I will ever see it click and see the world before me make sense as one living, breathing organism with how much time all these things take. But damn, what a thing.

Was excited to play this game during my explorations of the mmo final fantasies to see how it stacks up. I find it rather dull. The opening was amazing, and it steadily declines in interest after that. I enjoy the design of the world and lore, and I like the feeling of exploring outside with those large crystals gleaming over the horizon.

However, I think the dungeons are an awful slog. I played up to escaping the underground mineshafts after being imprisoned. They are excessively long, mostly linear, and almost all the fights play out the same way. I set up some gambits, sit back, watch, and occasionally cast a spell. I specifically chose to try the ps2 version to try and see the merits of the original license board and flexibility of the system, perhaps thinking it might have been part of the original vision of the game. I also heard that the zodiac age had a nerfed difficulty, and I prefer my rpgs to have difficult combat. The original license board is a mildly interesting system, but it doesn't help the autocombat battles at all. I had heard people say everyone plays the same at the end, but I was feeling it already in the beginning. It's interesting how random actions and interactions in combat affect character stat increases, and certain weapons and equipment change things like evasion, magic resist, etc which combined are meant to be a kind of invisible class diversity, but playing the game just felt like I had 4 characters who do slightly different things, some of them hit slow, some of them evade more, some of them have lower health. But unlike FFII you don't really feel the differences when combat runs automatically, because it's mostly a process of waiting for the enemy to die and making sure nobody is in too much danger. ​It just felt repetitive and a little meaningless.

I think if the dungeons were either shorter, or has more options per minute of gameplay they would be a lot more entertaining. Older final fantasy games had either short linear dungeons with occasional divergences and dead ends, or in the NES days, tense and dangerous dungeons where running from battle and prioritizing a few treasure rooms and then leaving before death and coming back again later were common affairs. Even dragon quest viii, which came out around the same time, had dungeons way smaller in comparison to ffxii, but still felt like they had better exploration, more interesting designs, more choices to make, and were more dangerous.

Even when I fought the bosses and barely survived the encounters, it still felt dull using items on fallen characters and pausing to edit gambits when they ran out of mp. So maybe a higher difficulty isn't what this kinda game needs after all. I plan to try the zodiac age to see if it manages to make these systems and dungeons more fun with a class system to build toward something rather than just buy licenses for weapons I find and things I don't have yet. I think the zodiac age starts you off with more gambits too, which might give me more choices to make earlier. It's ironic but I found the combat of both mmos more engaging than this version of xii's single player mmo style combat.

Regarding the other aspects of the game, I liked the characters all a mild amount, but it doesn't feel like it stacks to the amount of intrigue other games in the series manage to build early, and they don't give enough to tide over the lackluster systems and slog dungeons.

I dug up a review/piece I wrote about Earthbound in 2017 on my old blog. I'd like to post it here:

"What does Earthbound mean to you?

In Itoi’s interview regarding Earthbound’s U.S. re-release on the Wii U Virtual Console, he looks back on Earthbound and describes his views on it now as a playground he threw stuff in for himself and everyone else to play in, and that everyone takes something completely different away from these bits and bobs he's filled it with. A communal sort-of game, in which children make up stories and ideas as they go along and put it right in with the rest of the make-believe. When you have a group of friends in a playground, kids will often enter and leave as their parents drop them off and pick them up, and little by little the stories the group goes on changes as children come and go. Between zombies, aliens, the future, and whatever else kids either think about or wonder about their own world. And of course, the longer this goes on, eventually dark thoughts and feelings enter. Relationships form, and people realize things about themselves and each other.

A lot of the spirit of a shapeshifting make-believe can be found in the game’s stories themselves, as each town is going through some crazy problem, and as the heroes continue their adventure, each new scenario adds something completely separate to the mix of fictional situations, drawing from all sorts of American cultural iconography and imagery.

This is another reason the game is so interesting, it as an adventure through a self-parody of the American youth, the landscape of American suburban adventure (or as it is referred to in the game: “Eagleland”) with the coming-of-age spirit so prevalent in American fiction. But it is told through the mechanics, systems, and interface of classically Japanese role-playing games, namely Dragon Quest. The inclusion of (pseudo) first person battles (albeit influenced by psychedelic visuals, as they take over the background of each fight), a command menu, stat growth, and equipment/inventory all pulled from the Dragon Quest system. This combination of simultaneous parody of Japanese systems and American culture and iconography makes it a truly unique international cultural creation.

In addition to this, the localization of the game lends itself very much to the identity of Earthbound. Much of the Japanese humor that would have been lost in translation is rewritten, but still preserves the wit and verbal/deadpan tone of the original. The octopus statue blocking your way in a valley is replaced with a pencil, to allow for the invention of the iconic “Pencil Eraser” (Just don’t use it in a pencil store!), a now staple joke of the game, with which the identity of the American version of the game just wouldn’t be the same without. Of course, the “Eraser Eraser” continuation of the joke found later in the game acts as an even better secondary punchline to the same joke.

Much of the game often feels like a rambling collection of jokes, ideas, and views on the world. Nothing is quite told boringly or without clear authorial perspective. It brings to mind the sort of writing that books like Cat’s Cradle used, in which Vonnegut described as each chapter being a small chip of the whole book, and each chip is a little joke in and of its own.

The U.S. release, in specific, is the Earthbound I think of so fondly when I think of the game. And I find that name so fitting as opposed to its Japanese name.

Earthbound.

Despite all the adventuring, all the crazy, wacky, surreal stories you learn and experience, even with the threat and exposure to extraterrestrial life within the game, your characters, your experiences, everything you do is very much bound to the planet Earth. Every idea in the game, every character you meet, makes up one grand image of the world that the game, in essence, is presenting to you as you explore it with your d-pad.

The NPC’s of the game are some of the most iconic in any, and the reason for that is that their dialogue is written so unpredictably and humorously, but yet so truthful to their representations of their roles as humans. A businessman in Earthbound will not sound like a businessman you meet on the street. He will sound like a caricature of what a businessman would sound like, knowing that he’s a businessman in this world of hundreds of other people and hundreds of other types of people. And in knowing that, he has found joy and laughter understanding his place. Each character is a figment of themselves in the eyes of a child innocently wandering around.

There is a famous English saying, “it takes all sorts (to make a world)”, that is often used to understand strangeness or foreignness in the world and in people. People often use it when they find something difficult to understand, because of how strange and foreign it might be, so they make the claim that the world must be so big, that it must require all sorts of strangeness and foreignness and things of all sorts of manners hard to understand, for it to exist as big as it does.

Earthbound, to me at least, is like a literal, humorous depiction of that phrase. Every character, every strange, surreal person that appears so plain, has to be there to make up this world. This Earth that we are all bound to."

If you read it all, thank you

Its got great pacing, art, and music, but the combat is really shallow with little moment to moment choice, the fixed encounters make exploration a huge chore, and the story and characters are a little too stock to find personality in. It's got heart in a lot of places, but like the most polished, studio-made work, despite being so handcrafted, it's kind of a vapid blockbuster. Not trite, but vapid. You could say it was too many cooks. Too many hands building towards a really general, mass appeal vision.

I often hear this game lauded as the best of both worlds with regards to the creators of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy coming together, but it would honestly feel like the weakest entry in either series if put side by side to them. I don't like this frame of looking at it.

Dragon quest games use simple plotlines to convey often extremely subtle and sometimes very complex themes. They feel timeless because of that. The combat systems are made from really simply conveyed choices that feel really weighty; even simple attacks feel intentional, and have the ability to perform unexpectedly to lots of random factors like enemy stat variations, class stats, and flat fractional critical rates. Its combat is like a wizardry 2.0. The best dragon quests have a random encounter rate just low enough to make the player think they can get away with peering just around the corner, while dreading every step in case they run into something truly devastating. Every treasure nets a huge boon, but each one may be your last, with penalties for death being very real. Exploration is the method, and adventure is the dream. To reiterate, complex themes, simple plots, simplified combat terms, devestating and exciting blows with real choice that furthers the desire for more exploration and adventure.

Final fantasy has often really complex plots that have simple themes guiding them. They feel personal and grandiose at the same time. The characters are often commentaries on the tropes they wear on their sleeves, with a lot of hidden depth and backstories to chew at for miles. Exploration is there, but it's in favor of highly scripted and exciting setpieces. Like those setpieces, the combat favors theatricality and performance that heightens the player-character relationship, and the product of that relationship guides the player to navigate the often complex character-building systems of those games. The combat then has complex terms and systems although streamlined for a mass audience to operate on a base level, and play the entire game that way if they so choose. Rather than having a combat around survival and risk/reward, between loot/exploration/death, final fantasy combat is about giving the player a language to understand the world and personality of its inhabitants. It is communication serving the themes of the story (DQ does this too, but in very different ways). To reiterate, complex systems made feasible guided by complex characters, in a complex plot guided by simple themes.

Chrono trigger has simple characters, a pretty simple plot, simple themes, and a simple combat system.

You don't have much say over how you build the characters, the combat doesn't serve as a language, its a bit too easy with penalties too light to serve a vehicle for adventure, not to mention most battles playing out the same way, with a generally unchanging player psychology (tactics are simple, rules generally stay the same, even the introduction of magic mostly keeps characters fighting the same way as before). It's just kinda alright. I play it when I want a simple linear game. (But tbh even ff4 is kinda better at that)

For a long time, I thought this was the best game in the series because I had grown with it. It was one of the first rpgs I had played that wasn't either mario and luigi or pokemon. It truly blew my mind with its sheer scale and ability to make me relate to the characters just through their mechanics. Somehow, this game also took me the longest to actually finish, and still I have trouble with kefka's tower.
Looking back, there's a lot of things I don't like about the game that I couldn't point out as a kid. While I love all the characters, some of the characters in the back half of part 1 of the game don't get nearly as much characterization and are kind of recruited in with few personal events. Cyan, Sabin, Locke, and Celes are still the most fleshed out and best characters by the end, and they are some of the earliest you meet.

This game truly set strides in allowing the personality and story of a character define their battle mechanics, and I really respect that to this day. But, the problem with the way the combat is in this game is that the skills some of the characters have are crazy strong, and always available. Unlike ff4, characters in ff6 have moves that make both normal attacks and weapons barely required for most of the game (not to mention front rows at all), and the difficulty is generally low as a result. Plus, once magic enters the picture, the need for using weapons lessens even more.

The magic system, kind of a precursor to the materia system and the junction system thematically, fits extremely well for the themes of the game. Using materials acting as symbols or tethers to god-creatures of old to channel and use their power makes a lot of sense and adds weight to the worldbuilding of the conflict being set up. But, it can be really tough figuring out what magicite to give to who and when, if one should go for spell learning or stat growth. And in the end I think spell learning outweighs the stat benefits almost every time.

A big feeling this game gives me now is a kind of general bloat. Unlike ff4 and ff5, equipment and accessories have different pages on the menu entirely, and have different functions. Equipment goes on the full body, covering each part, and accessories usually do lots of different things, like prevent status ailments, or reduce mp costs, but they can also do things like make a person attack 4 times per turn, give weapons instant death properties, which really adds customization, but when you add the magicite system on top of that, you start juggling lots of different systems, not to mention subsystems with some character skills like blitz. It's very easy for me to completely forget who has which spells and a lot of them end up overlapping totally, which starts to lessen the impact of individual members to the team. This game has so many characters too. Probably the biggest roster of any in the series still, to this day. This is the kind of bloat I'm referring to. There's a mechanical and narrative bloat that especially begins to slow down the latter parts of the game.
I'm also not a big fan of the controlling multiple teams thing. When one team dies, it's an instant game over, and switching between them can be a hassle. I do however, think it's a cool as hell idea, and I think in some ways this game manages to be really cinematic in scope, pacing, and structure in ways that the ps1 titles don't manage to reach, simply because of ongoing parallel narratives in both scripting and dungeon design.

I think in the end, parts of this game contradicts itself. A bloat of character choice and customization that isn't done truly right by a lower than average difficulty, characterization through mechanics and combat that gets undermined by the magic system, a lot of characters and a somewhat rushed second half, etc.

I think this game is probably perfect in nearly every other regard though. The music, plot, art design, the big twist that happens, all that stuff is fantastic, and really, really grand. This kind of feels in a way like some of those epic movies of the 30s-50s felt like, in full color and wide visual scope. Probably no other game in the series after this one manages to reach those pure scenario ultra-wide angle style highs. Nor do they need to, though!

I think future games figured out that they needed to give character skills a separate place from the mainstay of battle, which is what 7 chose to do with limit breaks and instead allowed you to build your character in a way that compliments those skills in the way you wanted. In comparison to the later titles, the limit break model and ff6 model both really prioritize performance, by having character mechanics highly motivated by themes and personality, with actual winning/losing battles (fighting to survive) not being as important as learning about these characters and your relationship with them as the player. But, with 6, it's more of a complete hodgepodge of mechanics and systems per character that is kind of just there for you to do whatever with, balance notwithstanding.

In the end, a pure classic game with some unique traits to it. I'll come back to it again as I always do despite everything.

This game is great! Whoever came up with the idea of of the music dynamically changing as the tide of battle shifts and also the world map theme gaining an additional instrumental track with each new party member recruited (I'm assuming it's the same person) is an absolute genius. I love the score of this game. It's a grim, natural fantasy style with a lot of organ and overarching motifs.

The battles are smooth and fast, the dungeons are alright, the story is truly ambitious with the generational paths, and the magic system is unique. It took some getting used to but after some learning I really dig it.

For anyone playing this game now, I highly recommend the updated translation patch, which comes with tons of additional changes including faster walk speed, restored parallax scrolling in battles, and some other minute visual tweaks and minor restorations to aid the fact that this game was rushed and had some content cut.