Tiers of the Kingdom: Final Fantasy

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Speaker 3 Hey, everyone. Welcome to Get Played.

Speaker 3 You know, once in a while, when we are doing the show, we like to onboard new fans or new listeners and tell you a little bit about how the show works and what we do.

Speaker 3 So, my name is Heather Ann Campbell. I'm one of our three hosts.

Speaker 3 Our other host here is this is Matt Apodaka.

Speaker 1 I also produce the show and edit the show myself. And, you know, I'm just here to make sure that everything's, you know,

Speaker 1 going as planned. You know, I I keep the train on the tracks, as they say.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We have a third host here, and I don't know why he's not piping in.

Speaker 3 Please say hello to Nick Weiger.

Speaker 3 I mean, Nick, you should.

Speaker 1 Guys,

Speaker 1 my active time battle gauge isn't full yet. Like, it's just, it's going really slow.

Speaker 1 I'm not allowed to.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 You guys could just vamp until my gauge fills up.

Speaker 1 Sure. Okay, great.
Yeah. Because, you know, we have like a turn-based conversation system where, you know, our initiative governs how fast our agility, how fast our, and my mind just really is.

Speaker 3 This is the first I'm hearing of this. I thought we just were riffing this whole time.
I wasn't even aware of having an active time conversation system.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not like, again, you know, I'm not supposed to be talking right now, so I don't want to get in trouble, but it's like in trouble. In trouble.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's not like we just like, you know, because turns can be kind of staggered because we all have different gauges filling at different rates.

Speaker 1 So like, it's just, just, just whatever, like, my gauge, my gauge is filling up. I'll be able to talk to you.

Speaker 3 Nick,

Speaker 3 have you been monitoring all of our conversations for years and waiting for your

Speaker 1 turn? Yeah, it's extremely stressful. Honestly, it's hard to just kind of stay in the moment because I'm just watching bars fill up at all times.

Speaker 1 Yours is flying, by the way.

Speaker 3 Because I don't even know that it exists. Like, I feel like this is something that's exclusive to you.

Speaker 1 It's starting to make sense a little bit, though, because I feel like sometimes, like, when one of us is going off, Nick is always saying that

Speaker 1 we're using our limit break. And I'm always like, that's like, what are you talking about? But now it sort of makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, did you both slot in like haste materia or something?

Speaker 1 Like, what the fuck's going on? You're fucking so fucking fast.

Speaker 3 I'm not slotting in anything. I'm just talking like a human fucking person.

Speaker 3 Nick, what else in your life functions on an active time system?

Speaker 1 Like meal breaks. That makes sense.

Speaker 1 Exercise, sleep,

Speaker 1 you know, reading. If I want to turn the page of my book,

Speaker 1 gauge has got to get all the way full. You can't turn a page until your gauge is full.
Yeah, if I read it too fast, I'm like, I just got to wait here for a second.

Speaker 1 This thing to spit up.

Speaker 1 It's tough.

Speaker 1 It's our life. But you know, things are good.

Speaker 1 Again, I shouldn't be talking right now.

Speaker 3 I feel like if this is somebody's first episode of the show, they're baffled.

Speaker 3 One more logistics question here, Nick. Do you think a limit break is like a joke?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, kind of, yeah. You know, you power up, you have your big moment where everyone reacts to it.

Speaker 3 So you then have never used a limit break?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 The page is full.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Nick Weiger.

Speaker 1 We cast Thundaga and guzzle high potions as we rank Final Fantasy games this week in Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy on Get Played.

Speaker 3 Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

Speaker 3 It's time to get played. I'm your host, Heatheran Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

Speaker 1 Oh, you know that's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Abadaka. Oh, hello, everyone.
Oh,

Speaker 3 hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where, you know, we do what we want.

Speaker 1 We're seeing

Speaker 1 what the fuck we want. This show is unfiltered and uncensored, and you can't cancel it.
No.

Speaker 3 I mean, you could, so please.

Speaker 1 You could honestly

Speaker 3 don't.

Speaker 1 Stitcher may be canceling it.

Speaker 1 Who knows what they're going to do? Yeah, we're recording this, and it might not come out.

Speaker 1 That's not true. No, I don't want to cause any alarm for anybody.

Speaker 1 They're mad scientists over at Stitcher HQ. Who knows what they're going to cook up in that lab? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's always a bright idea. You know, it's, you know,

Speaker 1 how about this? How about this? We just make it all go away.

Speaker 1 Wait.

Speaker 1 Is this a risk?

Speaker 3 Because if

Speaker 3 there's a thing that's a real risk, then I'm getting to shut my laptop and go out and have a fucking beer.

Speaker 1 And we should reiterate to people who maybe missed a recent episodes, you can have a beer and that's not an insane thing to do because it is evening your time. You're over in Amsterdam.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, these, I mean, if you're

Speaker 1 listening to this, might not be, it could be an appropriate time to have a beer anyway.

Speaker 3 Yes, I am in Amsterdam here on the international push of Get Played Pod, where I've got a couple of great leads.

Speaker 1 Can't wait to explore them.

Speaker 1 I mean, set up a couple of, huh, what

Speaker 1 us, me and Nick, me and Nick, we're on PT Pacific time. That's right.
If you were on the East Coast, you'd be on ET. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What is yours? Is it? It's not GMT, is it? It's not Granite Scheme Time.

Speaker 3 I'm GMT plus one. Oh.
So

Speaker 1 GMT Plus. You got that GMT Plus, baby.

Speaker 3 I think it's Central European time.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 3 Maybe?

Speaker 1 I'm not going to remember, so I don't know why I asked.

Speaker 3 I'm an hour ahead of London. So if you're like, oh, what time is it in London? I'm an hour before that.

Speaker 3 I'm racing into tomorrow faster than anybody except, I think, Japan.

Speaker 1 And that's, that's, hey, that's not nothing. That's pretty good.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Matt, we, we're, that, that just, I just realized we are in PT.

Speaker 1 Like.

Speaker 1 Nick, don't even say it. I'm just saying.
Have you looked behind you recently? Oh, God.

Speaker 1 Wait, you guys.

Speaker 1 You've seen my new place, right? It's just this hallway?

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's kind of hard to...
I kind of get lost in there. Yeah.
Find my way out. Yeah, the bathroom is fucked up.

Speaker 1 Oh, so much to discuss this week. We're talking PT.
So much to talk about.

Speaker 1 And And I should say on that note, because we go back and forth, you know, we have our little group chat and

Speaker 1 we try to decide how we're going to book out the show. Yeah.
And one thing we have,

Speaker 1 look,

Speaker 1 I feel like I've been beating this drum.

Speaker 1 We've been talking a little bit about just internally, like, we don't want to just set the expectation that whatever big new AAA release that comes out each month, we are going to dedicate an episode to it.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 However, the way this year has worked out, it kind of is just sort of like we're kind of in that rhythm. So we are going to do a WePlay Uplay of Final Fantasy 16 because we're all playing it.

Speaker 1 That will be coming Monday, July 31st. So hopefully, if you're listening along, you'll have enough time to get through a lot of the game by then.
And you'll hear our extensive thoughts in a few weeks.

Speaker 3 I also know that a lot of listeners may be frustrated with us doing a console-exclusive video game for our WePlay Uplay.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 it's the first Final Fantasy to come out exclusively on PlayStation 5. It's also the biggest selling PlayStation 5 game so far, I think.

Speaker 1 I think. Really? Yeah.
It's also, as of right now, one of the only PlayStation 5 exclusives. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 And so for that, we're sorry, but it is a mainline Final Fantasy game.

Speaker 1 And what do you want us to do, not play it? We played Zelda.

Speaker 3 Nobody was like, I can't play Zelda on Xbox.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's different somehow only because

Speaker 1 grandmas have Switches. You know what I mean? Like everybody's got everybody's got a switch.
It's true.

Speaker 1 Some grandmas have PlayStation 5s.

Speaker 3 Some grandmas have PlayStation 1s.

Speaker 1 That's true, too. Yeah.
And that's, we, we salute them here on this show. This show's for the grandmas.

Speaker 1 We love the grandmas. If you're a grandma and you listen to this show, let us know.
Like, honestly, we want to know.

Speaker 1 I had, I, my grandparents, first off, my grandma and grandpa, I mentioned before, they had a, God bless them, had a, on my dad's side, had an Atari 2600 at their house that like the kids could play.

Speaker 1 So it was like, hey, there's like, it's whatever, it, versus what I was used to, it kind of sucked, but it was just like video games were there. They're not the kids.

Speaker 1 And then my, my, my grandfather on my mom's side and my grandma, my, my, my grandpa was a, was a big computer enthusiast. Uh, he worked for JPL back in the day.

Speaker 1 And like, there's like photographs of him with like those old school like room size computers. Like that was the stuff he used to work on.
Wow. And, um,

Speaker 1 but he always like had a, had a, had a PC capable of playing games, and he would just have games installed for the kids to play.

Speaker 1 So, he'd go up there and play, like, Hexen or whatever, or, uh, or Secret of Monkey Island. That's how I got introduced to that game.

Speaker 1 So, it's just some grandparents are like, hey, we're going to encourage a kid's habit or a kid's hobby. You were playing real-life war games, too, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I inadvertently got us into a Balkan crisis.

Speaker 1 I didn't realize that thing was wired to fucking NORAD.

Speaker 1 I want to say, because you were saying, you know,

Speaker 1 we're not always going to do big releases or whatever. It just really so, it just so happens that this year in particular is like a banner year for video games.

Speaker 1 Like maybe one of the great years in the last decade. It's unbelievable.
It's, it's, yeah, it's tricky.

Speaker 1 Man, I, yeah, again, I just, I would like to have time to cover something classic or something smaller, something indie, but it just we'll do that next month. That's the

Speaker 1 game. We're going to mix it up.
We're going to mix it up next month. And something you can play on PC and something you can play on other platforms.

Speaker 3 You've heard it here first.

Speaker 3 We're going to play pole position for the Atari.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're going to play something unfun.

Speaker 1 I remember pole position being okay. Yeah.
I think my mom likes pole position. All right.
So we talk about some video games.

Speaker 1 Not just video games, not just like the idea of talking about video games, but to actually talk about video games. I think people like us talking about the idea of it.

Speaker 3 The concept of video games.

Speaker 1 about scheduling yeah yeah

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 all right so i'll put this question to the panel what are you playing

Speaker 1 well

Speaker 3 i kind of i feel like my what i'm what am i playing segment might merge a little bit with um world warrior because like

Speaker 3 did you made a sting for that oppadak i heard the sting yeah

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 alex alex did the bulk of it i'd sort of put it in order and was like this is the vibe. And Alex executed it.
So Alex, our engineer.

Speaker 3 It's hard for me to talk about gaming without talking about context.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Can I do this then? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Speaker 1 Can we start the discussion here? Because I know we're going to talk about it in depth, but we can get early impressions. Should we just talk about Final Fantasy 16 a little bit? We've all played it.

Speaker 1 Yes. All right, great.
Yes. Well, let's start there because I've

Speaker 1 played

Speaker 1 slash watched the first two hours. I finally, I got back into town and I played a little bit last night.
That said, I am really enjoying it so far.

Speaker 1 I should say that, like, on my morning walk, I listened to the triple-click episode about Final Fantasy 16. So I'm trying a lot to, which is a great pod, check it out.

Speaker 1 But I'm trying not to let their thoughts affect mine too much.

Speaker 1 Based off of my experience, things I really like, active time lore system,

Speaker 1 which is you can get, you know, if you've played the game, you know what this is, but it's, it's, it's basically at any time you can pause

Speaker 1 any game action that's going on, and it essentially brings up like a like a like a Microsoft in Carta that just has like a visual representation of all these concepts and you can go, you can, you know, mouse over them and click them and it will give you an explanation of what's going on.

Speaker 1 So like the name of a kingdom, the name of a character, the, you know, what's that? Mouse over?

Speaker 1 Whatever. Like, what's the term for moving a cursor over something with an analog stick? Nick's playing with a mouse keyboard.

Speaker 1 He's playing with highlight. Fine.
You can highlight it. It's sort of like on, if you watch anything ever on Amazon Prime,

Speaker 1 it has like that parents mode where if you pause it, it tells you who's in the scene and where you know them from.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, okay, good.
Yeah. Oh, that's that guy from that thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 There's also a new thing because I heard about this with Amazon and I was like, I have to see this in person. I have to see it.

Speaker 3 In what's their new one citadel right their big their big high budget triple a

Speaker 3 thing if you pull up at the bottom of the screen like more info it will also let you buy the outfits you see on screen is that true yeah i had to see it in person i had i had to i was like holy is this real and i went and watched citadel and like During the first scene, I pulled up the bottom menu and it was like, shop the dress.

Speaker 3 And I was like, fuck.

Speaker 1 Wow. i can't wait to dress like the amazon hit citadel i wrote on an amazon prime pilot uh years ago

Speaker 1 that that did it

Speaker 1 earlier this morning

Speaker 1 uh years ago and this was a that it was heather ex like built around what you just said like the idea wasn't just that it was going to be i'll talk about it very circuitously but it was was essentially going to function as an infomercial for like a comedy, but also an infomercial for products you could buy.

Speaker 1 And it was like the most dystopian thing I've ever had any sort of hand in. And I was like, all right, sure.

Speaker 1 But it would be, you know, like we'd like there'd be a character would be, you know, whatever, drinking a coconut water in the screen, and it would have an integration for you to buy that coconut water.

Speaker 1 It was like that level of like, like, here's a, like, it's, this is just an ad that's disguised as entertainment. I was thinking it was maybe going to be like all like Amazon basic stuff.

Speaker 1 So it's like stuff that you like could use, but it's like a shittier version of it. Well, there was shit like that, too.
There was like also like, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1 You could like, hey, I can order this extension cord or what have you. Very strange.

Speaker 3 That's a really funny. Buy their underwear.

Speaker 1 Like, huh? I don't even see it.

Speaker 3 Product placement is to like walk through a set designed thing and be like, Actually, we're going to bring this fan into the middle of the room and use a yellow extension cord and be like, well, but I don't want that.

Speaker 3 No, no, we're going to do do that so that they could buy the extension cord.

Speaker 1 Yeah. For the fan?

Speaker 3 Why not just have them buy the fan? Both. Both are for sale.

Speaker 1 They're both. They're both up for sale.
And then also we're going to add a line where you say like,

Speaker 1 hey, don't trip over that extension cord. Like, don't worry, it's yellow.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to miss it.

Speaker 3 This person keeps their toothbrushes in the dining room. On the dining room table.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 yeah, all right. They need to be able to see them at all times.
A lot of the action takes place in the dining room. And we got to know that they brush their teeth.

Speaker 1 Look, we could be executives if we wanted to be it's not hard no man could do it we could be executives we could be cops we can do anything yeah

Speaker 3 if i was an executive i would ruin the industry within six months

Speaker 3 it wouldn't be hard it would be the easiest thing to do like if you walk if you walked in with absolute confidence and yet also had the creativity of a writer you could like fucking destroy the system from the inside with like one bad idea like that's like really all it would take is like one like bad idea one excellent bad idea like that sony idea where you have to stand up and shout the name of the uh product before the commercial can can end oh yeah

Speaker 3 like that was some that's some writer who has been cornered by the tech division and they're like i don't know maybe you have to you gotta stand up and shout mcdonald's

Speaker 3 if uh if you're if listener if you don't know what we're talking about there's a sony a famous sony patent which is for

Speaker 3 a commercial detection

Speaker 3 apparatus for your television, where you can skip a commercial by shouting the name of the product at the television.

Speaker 3 Maybe they patented it so nobody would ever do it.

Speaker 1 An altruistic patent, yeah, just kind of sitting on it. Yeah, that'd be good.
I'd be all in on Sony then.

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Speaker 3 So I've got a question for all the gamers out there. Are you seriously,

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Speaker 3 Well, I want to talk a little about, or unless you were going to keep going, Nick.

Speaker 1 No, please. I want to hear your thoughts.

Speaker 3 So, my main thoughts are that the combos, so it's a great, great combat system,

Speaker 1 super enjoyable.

Speaker 3 The layout in any of the layouts,

Speaker 3 like if you switch between controller schemes and you play any of these layouts,

Speaker 3 there are some baffling choices that prevent the execution of combos that are built into the system.

Speaker 3 Like, there's a lot of stuff where you have to be charging one button and like rapidly tapping another button in order to set up a specific chain.

Speaker 3 But both of those buttons in the default controller setting are face buttons.

Speaker 3 So unless you're holding the controller in your left hand and tapping with right with your like index and middle finger, it's kind of impossible to execute those combos.

Speaker 3 But if you switch it so that you can, so that you can charge those magic spells while also doing the combo systems, then your icons are rotated to a different place. And it's just a very strange,

Speaker 3 it feels like an excellent combat system, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, have not properly been

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 tested.

Speaker 3 Like, it's like, if, it's, it's like if you, if you had Street Fighter VI and, like, light and medium punch were on, you know, in their standard location on the face of your joystick, and then heavy punch was to the left of the joystick.

Speaker 3 Like, on the other side of your so, like, in order to execute certain moves, you'd have to switch hands to press heavier, heavy punch or heavy kick.

Speaker 3 So, that's, that's my only complaint about what has been a very delicious game.

Speaker 3 That, well, speaking of delicious, that and the fact that the food in Final Fantasy 15 is so much more beautiful than the food in Final Fantasy 16.

Speaker 1 Took a step backwards.

Speaker 1 I think that I had the same issue with just the way the controller is mapped out.

Speaker 1 I just kind of accepted like, okay, I'll get used to whatever the default is.

Speaker 1 This is a larger issue I have with they just got to have like some sort of conference and just the UN maybe has to get involved and decree that there has that buttons just have to correspond to a certain function across different character action games because it's just too much to like to me.

Speaker 1 The most disorienting thing is that R1 is essentially your dodge. And that is really fun.
When you get a perfect dodge and then you can counter, that's a super satisfying like rhythm to the game.

Speaker 1 I love that, but it just feels unnatural to use for me, having gotten so used to where dodge roll is on other games, to be using R1 to dodge and then like square to counter.

Speaker 3 Well, your second controller mapping resets dodge specifically to circle, which is where it is in like Dark Souls and stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe I'll try that then.

Speaker 3 And the problem with that is that then your

Speaker 3 action, I think, is triggers.

Speaker 3 So in order to charge

Speaker 3 your in order to charge magic, you have to be holding down the second trigger, what, L2 or R2,

Speaker 3 in order to, like, I wish you could just,

Speaker 3 I wish that you, the player, could create a, uh, a control scheme that then was mapped on all games for you.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, this is how I play.

Speaker 3 This is part of my online identity. It's part of my, so that, for example, the Fortnite controls, which I have become, you know, it's now part of my blood.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I could just map those on everything.

Speaker 3 And like, weapon switching, if it exists, would always be in the same place. Jump, always in the same place.

Speaker 3 Dash would always, always be, you know, push in the joystick Halo style as opposed to in Breath of the Wild, where you got to like fucking like move your thumb up to the top of the controller in order to dash.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's the ultimate solution.

Speaker 1 Some sort of profile system where just like when you log into your to your console, it just loads your profile of how you control games, and then you can just import that in anything, or it's just applied by default.

Speaker 1 That might be the solution.

Speaker 3 It could be applied by default, and if the game had specific actions that weren't universal, then it would give you the option of where to place those around your default control scheme.

Speaker 3 Because I always want jump to be X. I don't want it anywhere else on the controller.

Speaker 1 I pretty much agree with that. The other thing that I have, and I run into this a lot when flipping between like Switch and PlayStation, is I got so used to confirm being where where Circle is

Speaker 1 at aka, which now I gotta look at my fucking Switch controller. Is that the A button? That's the A button on Switch, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Sony at a certain point decided that that should be on X, which for me is unintuitive in a couple of ways.

Speaker 1 One, it's just like different than what I get used to, but two, it's like X and Circle have like Circle has like a like an approve connotation to it, and X has like a no, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's like, so symbol

Speaker 1 from from a symbology standpoint, it like confuses me. So, yeah, I wish I could fly, I could just set that shit, whatever,

Speaker 1 never gonna happen. No, we're still gonna be having this issue in 2035, uh, yeah, right on the heels of uh, PlayStation 7.
Um,

Speaker 1 I will we're in seven by then, um, still

Speaker 1 be in six. I was reading recently that uh they're predicting that the next cycle will be 2028.
Uh, wow, so still, still a ways to go. A longer, I think, a longer console cycle than previous.

Speaker 3 Well, that's in part because they couldn't get the fucking systems out of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because nobody has them three years in. That's true.

Speaker 1 I've been playing this

Speaker 1 and something has happened to me.

Speaker 1 You're glowing.

Speaker 3 Oh, my God. Are you a dominant?

Speaker 1 I'm a dominant. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm branded.

Speaker 1 I love all the

Speaker 1 I love all the stupid bullshit in this game.

Speaker 1 Like that, like just like the lore stuff. I'm like, yeah,

Speaker 1 I love it. It's active Time Lord just delicious so much.

Speaker 3 People are comparing it to Kingdom Hearts stuff. I'm like, oh my God, Alpadaka must be just in his juice.

Speaker 1 Well, the combat is also similar.

Speaker 1 And there's like, I've had to, I've messed with it.

Speaker 1 I don't even know if I have a complaint necessarily.

Speaker 1 I have found the game to be pretty easy so far. and I know that there are charms that are rings that you can wear that sort of eliminate some of the things you were speaking of.

Speaker 1 There's a thing that you can wear that

Speaker 1 makes all combos and

Speaker 1 other

Speaker 1 actions. Like if you want to

Speaker 1 activate the dog Torrigal or something.

Speaker 1 Also, Torrigal.

Speaker 1 Turgle from Jedi Survivor.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about it. Those names are pretty similar, if you ask me.
Anyway, that's the end of the end point. That's the new name.

Speaker 1 That's the new name of this year.

Speaker 1 But yeah, there's a thing you can wear that if you're wearing it, all the combo actions and stuff are assigned to just the attack button. And so

Speaker 1 you could just mash square the whole time and activate your other abilities and stuff or send Torgle. And like that, I was like, this is cool.
I'd rather be sort of just doing it myself.

Speaker 1 So I took that one off. And I took there's a couple of other like easy mode rings that you can wear.
I was like, I'm just going to take this off. I've died one time in 20 hours.
There's

Speaker 1 20 hours. Wow.
I played 20 hours already. I just got, I got to it.
I don't want to say where I got to.

Speaker 3 But there's a new game plus

Speaker 3 that I hear is a real royal good time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because this, I mean,

Speaker 1 I know that this is very different than other Final Fantasy games. I've not played very many,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 I'm currently Final Fantasy pilled.

Speaker 1 Just to expand into

Speaker 1 what else I'm playing,

Speaker 1 I got the

Speaker 1 Pixel remaster on Switch. Yes.

Speaker 1 And I was worried that I had heard that they fixed a couple of things about it, you know, like the font, namely, was like the main thing that people were not super happy with.

Speaker 1 I don't have a problem with this font now. Um,

Speaker 1 because I've, you, you have the option of restoring the old font and like the old like scan line like screen. Sure, and I activated those.
And let me tell you something.

Speaker 1 They look like dog shit. They look so bad.
Uh, like, it looks, it doesn't look good on the, on the OLED. It's just a little too, um, a little too old for such a nice screen.
Uh, so

Speaker 1 the HD graphics and the

Speaker 1 HD graphics, they're not even that.

Speaker 1 They're just a little cleaner, I guess.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the updated font that is more similar to the old font than it is the original new font that they picked

Speaker 1 is good, is good enough. And look,

Speaker 1 I'm playing Final Fantasy 3.

Speaker 1 And I'm about halfway through that one. Holy shit, simultaneously? I'm playing two.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy 16 is my daytime game, and Final Fantasy 3 is my nighttime game because it's a lot less to do. It's, you know, the whole world's on a single map.

Speaker 1 You're just sort of, you can, you can walk, you could walk around the entire map in a single go.

Speaker 1 And in like a minute, basically, you just go around it.

Speaker 1 But I, and then, and there's some quality of life things in there that they've added that I'm particularly enjoying.

Speaker 1 I'm not trying to have a hard time with this one. So So

Speaker 1 there's boosts that you can add. So you can get four times the amount of

Speaker 1 exp and

Speaker 1 gill per fight. So I just have that on because I'm just trying to fly through these fuckers.

Speaker 1 I think that's the way to experience. Yeah.
Because otherwise it just gets so tedious grinding all those random encounters. Exactly.
And I'm having a blast. I love my team right now.

Speaker 1 This one introduces the job system so you can change jobs, but I haven't changed jobs because I haven't felt the need to because everybody's doing excellent work on my team.

Speaker 1 My monk in particular is wrecking house. He's incredible.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I'm playing that. And I mentioned Jedi Survivor a little bit ago, and I did finish it.

Speaker 1 And I got to say that I think when it gets to the end of the year and game of the year discussions are being had, I think it's a contender. And I think

Speaker 1 it won't, it obviously, it's not going to win, but I don't want it to be left out of that conversation. I think it's an incredible, incredible video game.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And they, it's iterative of the, you know, of the first one, not unlike

Speaker 1 Tears of the Kingdom to Breath of the Wild. But

Speaker 1 the combat late game, it becomes like such, it becomes a different game. Once you have all the stances and all these like abilities unlocked, it is like,

Speaker 1 it's like, I don't know. There's like, it's, it's incredible.
This year is nuts for video games. They really, I can't believe what they pulled off, what Respawn did with

Speaker 1 Jedi Survivor 2. It's unreal.
And the story

Speaker 1 is the Jedi, the Jedi games are some of the best Star Wars stories in Star Wars. They're fucking great.
Really, really well done. Well acted.
The stakes are incredible.

Speaker 1 Hats off to them. They fucking crushed it with that one.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 I'm impressed with your enthusiasm and it makes me wish that I did not bring, I brought, I bought a physical copy of that game and I didn't bring it with me. And

Speaker 1 I wish I had.

Speaker 3 I wish I had.

Speaker 1 You got to get, once you get, I know you're going to love it. Once you get the fucking Kylo Wren stance.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're just fucking people up with that.

Speaker 1 It's heavy and it takes, it has a rhythm to it because you can't just swing it at all times. It's like a slow sort of swing.

Speaker 1 Man,

Speaker 1 it's fucking great. It's so good.
I locked house.

Speaker 3 He, oh, I hope he's in the new movie.

Speaker 1 He, well, he famously died.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but

Speaker 3 so did, you know, Alec Guinness. And I mean, Obi-Wan died and he just shows up in the next movie.

Speaker 1 The thing that here's something that I've been thinking about with Star Wars, not to get us too far in.

Speaker 1 It sounds like every single person that worked on these movies fucking hated it. Like they hated it so much.

Speaker 1 Like you ask Oscar Isaac if he returns, if he would return, and he doesn't even think about it for one second. He's just like, nope.
Like,

Speaker 1 nine was so rough. Yeah.
Rise of Skywalker was rough. I am going to, I have a couple more things to say about Final Fantasy 16, just real quick.
One, Kazuya Takahashi did the character design.

Speaker 1 I do really like the character designs in this game. There you look.

Speaker 1 I like it. I know it's like very, it's a little more regal and and austere than I normally like.
I don't respond to the high fantasy stuff.

Speaker 1 Even though I like high fantasy a lot, it's just like what I like in a Final Fantasy is usually when it's a little bit more, you know, steampunky or

Speaker 1 cyberpunky. They don't usually say fuck in these games either, do they? They don't usually say fuck.
They say fuck a lot in this one. They do.
They bust out a cock pretty early on.

Speaker 1 Also, I don't know. I went and sucked my cock.

Speaker 1 Hey, Ifrid.

Speaker 3 So I feel like they tested that water on

Speaker 3 that. What was that one? The Final Fantasy Paradise or John.

Speaker 1 Strangers of Paradise. There it is.

Speaker 3 Strangers of Paradise is where

Speaker 3 they were like sticking their toe in that water and being like, what if Final Fantasy characters said fuck and they said it so much?

Speaker 1 I don't give a fuck who you are.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they were like, okay, roll it back, roll it back a little bit. Like, and say it while running from something.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 1 It's, they, they do that in Logan too, a movie I like, but it's like, you know, when, when Wolverine and uh, and Professor X are just saying, like, fuck, just constantly, it's like, at a certain point, this is just a distraction.

Speaker 1 If you have the leeway because you have the R rating, but dial it back a little bit. Fuck, Charles.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I don't know what point in the Final Fantasy lore, at which point in the series, the enemy, one of my favorite enemies, the Marlborough, became the Molebro, but that's like a thing, like it's it's happened now.

Speaker 1 Like the, you know, the enemy that casts that that has, it's like this gigantic, like Kraken-like abomination that blasts out bad breath is its big attack. But now it's called a Molebro.

Speaker 1 Maybe that happened in 15 or 13 or something like that. But I do kind of miss Marlboro, though I understand the reason for the change, obviously.

Speaker 3 Well, I thought that it was called a Marlboro because

Speaker 3 cigarettes gave you bad breath.

Speaker 1 That's what it was, I think. And then they changed it to Moleborough.
They're like, nobody smokes anymore. Nobody smokes anymore.
And also, this is an insane copyright infringement.

Speaker 1 Like, we can't do this.

Speaker 1 How have we not been sued? I feel like you used to be able to maybe get away with stuff like that. Or like, it's on the cart.
We can't patch it out. It's on the cart.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I have some,

Speaker 1 I want to touch on Diablo 4 a little bit too, because I played some more since the last time we recorded.

Speaker 1 I did roll a new character. I rolled a rogue, and I played a little bit with a rogue.

Speaker 1 There's a thing it lets you do on your second playthrough, which is skip the campaign, which I checked just to be like, all right, yeah, I can just skip the campaign and go straight to the open world.

Speaker 1 And I kind of regret that because I do think the campaign is pretty engaging.

Speaker 1 And although there are a lot of cutscenes, I'd almost rather like just sort of speed through the cutscenes and still experience them than just go straight to the open world, which,

Speaker 1 you know, it's a challenge to make these games endlessly replayable. And, and, you know, know, I think they've done, they did, they did a really good job with the launch of this game.

Speaker 1 I'm, I'm sure a lot of new content will be coming. A lot of new content is, as, has already been promised that will, that will fix this.

Speaker 1 But it, the open world feels a little bit barren if you just jump into it without the context of the narrative. So I, I kind of regret that.

Speaker 1 The other thing that, that I, I was kind of, I was looking forward to,

Speaker 1 I was just sort of like rolling through Diablo 4, like on the, the, the, the level, the world tier 2 difficulty.

Speaker 1 And then once you do that, then you have to go to a specific dungeon to unlock nightmare difficulty, which I was like, great. Now I can have like a little bit of a challenge here.

Speaker 1 But you can't use nightmare difficulty on your character until you hit level 50.

Speaker 1 And so my new character, I was looking forward to like having, like, playing in a more challenging difficulty, but it's not available to you.

Speaker 1 And so I was reading some guides and they're basically like, yeah, you might as well just go down to, you know, tier one difficulty and just blaze through things as quickly as possible so you can get to level 50 to experience that.

Speaker 1 And it just kind of felt like something of a grind. So, I might be taking a break from this game, which is fine.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Speaker 1 I got you know, 30 plus hours of enjoyment out of this game.

Speaker 1 It's really well made, it was really satisfying, but it might take a little bit of time before I come back to it and play another character all the way through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just finished act three of Diablo 4, actually.

Speaker 1 So, I'm like, I'm slowly tipping away at it, but I'm not in a rush because I mean, it sounds like it's like you know, you can just play it forever if

Speaker 1 that's how it's designed. So I'm not in a rush to

Speaker 1 finish it yet.

Speaker 1 But I'm going to get back in there because I do miss my sorcerer.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I was having a lot of fun with the rogue.
The rogue is very active. And, you know, the character I played before that, the Necromats are super duper active.
Lots to do.

Speaker 1 It's a very fun gameplay loop. I just might be taking a little breather.
All right. Heather, do you add something else?

Speaker 3 Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about my international experience here

Speaker 3 as the World Warrior in Amsterdam.

Speaker 1 Amsterdam!

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 Couple of things. One, I texted you guys this because I was stunned.
You can go into a store here and there are just stacks of PlayStation 5, both models.

Speaker 1 Wild. Stacks.

Speaker 1 Totally wild.

Speaker 3 Like it's... a fucking Nintendo Wii in late in the Wii life cycle.
Like it's it's crazy to me that you can just like walk in and be like, well, I guess I'm going to get a PlayStation 5 today. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That is not the case in the United States.

Speaker 3 The trade-off is that

Speaker 3 here in Amsterdam,

Speaker 3 I've learned how secondary the European market is. And this is anecdotal, but a game like Fortnite, an international super hit, right?

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 hours for maintenance are scheduled during prime playing hours here in

Speaker 3 Amsterdam, whereas in

Speaker 3 New York or California,

Speaker 3 they're scheduled for the middle of the night, right? So it's one of those ways in which like the game companies just throw like a little bit of shade at

Speaker 3 Europe as a market, which is crazy because like it's a big, it's a big fucking game.

Speaker 3 I guess it's a, it's a North American game, so of course, but like, still, it's, I can't imagine that Grand Theft Auto, which is technically a European game, is, I mean, I guess not anymore, it's Brexit, right?

Speaker 3 So, isn't it like a

Speaker 1 British game now? I don't know the rules.

Speaker 1 Um, this shit works. That's Prince Andrew.
I know, I know I support it, but I don't know good on that.

Speaker 3 Uh, so that was uh, that was a a surprise. Finally, um, I went to Amsterdam's only retro game store, which I don't think I've talked about on the show, correct? No, I don't think I have.

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 3 It's a store. So

Speaker 3 in LA, and I know that this is also like there's retro game stores. Like I stopped at one in Portland.
I stopped at one in Seattle. Like there's tons of retro game stores in the United States.

Speaker 3 Here in Amsterdam, one retro game store. It is down an alley.
The sign on the, on the, on the window is cardboard with like writing on the cardboard. And the story's called Game Over question mark.

Speaker 3 And you go in, and it is

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 Akihabara adjacent density.

Speaker 3 There are two aisles. They are shoulder width

Speaker 1 across.

Speaker 3 And all of your games are just stacked and stacked and stacked like

Speaker 1 a hoarder's apartment almost. Sure.

Speaker 1 Without

Speaker 3 without any judgment, I guess. It's just, I'm trying to convey that density.
And I don't know. Like a library, but

Speaker 3 more packed.

Speaker 3 But they had an incredible selection of games that I realized I would not buy because they were all PAL versions. And I was like, well,

Speaker 3 sure would suck to get like a PAL.

Speaker 3 PAL version of any of this stuff is kind of a dead end

Speaker 3 purchase.

Speaker 3 But it was pretty neat to go in that store.

Speaker 3 I have plans to,

Speaker 3 uh, there's a video, no, a home computer museum,

Speaker 3 uh, a couple hours outside of Amsterdam that I plan to take the train to, and then also, uh,

Speaker 1 rocks, yeah, doesn't that rock? Yeah,

Speaker 3 like a home, home computer museum.

Speaker 1 Um, that's awesome, that's great, yeah.

Speaker 1 You could take the train there and back, yeah,

Speaker 3 all right, this is Nick's best day,

Speaker 1 took the train to the computer museum,

Speaker 1 they put you behind a case

Speaker 1 ah the nick has arrived

Speaker 1 finally the final piece he belongs in a museum

Speaker 3 but i'm also gonna there's a apparently an arcade here now in amsterdam oh uh that i plan a to take a visit out and then i also you know i've i've uh received a lot of dms and like um leads on people who might want to you know be featured on the show And I'm getting to it.

Speaker 3 I'm getting to it. It's been, it's been a lot to set up my life here and then

Speaker 3 answer all that stuff. But I promise if you're a listener, then no, I'm getting to it.

Speaker 1 I promise. We'll get to it.
We'll get to it. Calm down.

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Speaker 3 You know what else we should get to? Is the meat of the episode?

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 You know, we should get to what we're talking about today, which we thought because Final Fantasy is so back in the zeitgeist in 16, everyone's like, oh, it's a high, I have, I love it, I hate it.

Speaker 1 I think it's the best one. I I think it's the worst one.
Where does it rank in the hierarchy? Well, we can't determine that, but we can determine the hierarchy itself.

Speaker 1 It's another edition of Tears of the Kingdom, T-I-E-R-S, for Final Fantasy. That's right.
We're going to do tier rankings of the mainline entries. I think we just have to do mainline.

Speaker 1 I don't think we can do everything else. Now, do we want to do like the, you know, the three remake? Do we want to do, you know, X2

Speaker 1 slash 10-2, however you say it? Do we want to talk about the Final Fantasy VII

Speaker 1 remake? You know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll get to that.

Speaker 3 What about Dirge of Cerberus?

Speaker 1 I don't think we can do Dirge of Cerberus.

Speaker 1 I mean, just want to give it a tier, just give it a tier. Nobody does stupid shit like Final Fantasy.
That rules.

Speaker 1 Stranger of Paradise. Just give it a ranking.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, we'll do

Speaker 1 Tier of Cerberus

Speaker 1 is C tier. All right, let's move on.

Speaker 3 Wait, what about the Dirge of Cerberus lost episode, which was only available on mobile phones?

Speaker 1 S-tier. That's it.

Speaker 1 Easiest S-tier of my life.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 let's just get into it.

Speaker 1 Damn it, Donald. I can't believe it.

Speaker 1 This is more fraudulent than the 2016 election.

Speaker 1 What about, okay.

Speaker 3 Legitimately, though, like, what about like crisis core?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this is the, the, let's just get into it. Let's just start going in chronological order.
And anything anyone wants to shout out, we'll definitely do the main line.

Speaker 1 If we want to throw in some other ones, that's fine. Okay.
But, you know, well, so we don't have all the time in the world. Okay.
All right. First up.

Speaker 1 The game that started it all, Final Fantasy.

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy 1, as it is now known. But back then, it was just Final Fantasy, so named,

Speaker 1 because...

Speaker 1 There was the thought of it being

Speaker 1 the end of Hironubu Sakaguchi's career. That is just like, hey, this is my swan song.
Here's my Final Fantasy. And then we're done.
No, that didn't happen. Lo and behold.

Speaker 3 That didn't happen until Spirits Within.

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy was originally released in Japan in 1987, in North America in 1990, and in

Speaker 3 the PAL market in 2003.

Speaker 1 Isn't that wild? How, like, how just even the first thing, that there was a three-year gap before it came out for the Famicom and then released for the NES was localized.

Speaker 1 And I think there was thoughts of like, are we even going to bother to, because, you know, they did localize, I think what, I think they, I can't remember what happened first, but I think Dragon Quest was localized as Dragon Warrior, and that sold better than they expected.

Speaker 1 And so that's when they started like the Nintendo was like, okay, let's, let's publish some more, uh,

Speaker 1 let's port some more RPGs. Yep.
I, I have a lot of fondness for this game.

Speaker 1 I do kind of feel like it's the game that, that made me, you know, that I got in on the ground floor with this franchise, and it's what made me be fascinated by Final Fantasy and want to play all of them.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 it's aged okay. You know, if you play like one of the remakes, it's

Speaker 1 pretty good for an 80s RPG. Certainly compare it to like,

Speaker 1 hey, compare it to Dragon Quest I, I think it's a lot more robust and playable than Dragon Quest I and that you can create your party and that it's got some of the elements that kind of persists throughout the franchise, like the, you know, the

Speaker 1 things like a submarine and an airship,

Speaker 1 all of the

Speaker 1 character, I think Sid is present. I'm pretty sure Sid is present in Final Fantasy I.
Like a lot of that stuff is seated.

Speaker 1 I think that it's a

Speaker 1 and it certainly like hit really well in the 80s and 90s. So I think this one,

Speaker 1 I don't think it should be below a C tier, even though it's very dated. I was thinking it's a solid B, solid B tier for the exact reasons that I could boost it in a B tier.

Speaker 3 C plus tier.

Speaker 1 Well, all right, fuck it, B plus tier.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, here's the thing: C plus, C plus, not B plus. I was downgrading it.
C plus.

Speaker 1 I could rock with C plus.

Speaker 1 I should have said this. The tier list that I'm looking at.

Speaker 1 Right here has S, A, B, C one, and C two. D.
Can you screen share this bad one? Yeah, I'll screen share. Is that a possibility? Yeah, okay, great.

Speaker 1 This might make our lives easier.

Speaker 1 Here we go. And I, I, I, I added a tier down here that has them just in order because the icons are really small, and some of the things, like, it's like it has all the

Speaker 1 spin-offs here and stuff, but I was like, there's too many,

Speaker 1 there's too many to get through. Uh, I have

Speaker 1 one through

Speaker 1 one through 15 here, uh, and then maybe a couple extra selections if

Speaker 1 so, you know, if they apply.

Speaker 1 Can you delete the C2 tier? I feel like this is going to just confus you. Delete the C2 tier.
Yeah, maybe click that little gear and delete that row. And then relabel C1 just C.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 There we go. All right.
So we're sitting pretty. So we have to

Speaker 3 A, B, C, D, and can we change E to F?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I could do one better.

Speaker 3 Double F tier.

Speaker 1 No. Great.
Not confusing. Not confusing at all.
Get out of there.

Speaker 1 FF tier for the worst.

Speaker 1 Let's slot Final Fantasy I into C tier and keep moving. Okay, that sounds good to me.
All right. Because

Speaker 1 I think then

Speaker 1 I think we can make a case for Final Fantasy II being in B tier then.

Speaker 1 Because I think. Wait, Final Fantasy II? I think so.

Speaker 1 I mean, I completely disagree. I've only played it on Emulator.
But my experience with that in an Emulator is that it's a pretty broken game, really.

Speaker 1 Because I, I mean, I guess I played my experience with these first few

Speaker 1 is in the um

Speaker 1 uh the Game Boy Advanced version, Dawn of Souls. So it has one and two on the cartridge.
I played through two, and I really liked two.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I liked one more, but uh, I remember playing through two quite a bit and enjoying it. Here's my issue with two: okay,

Speaker 1 it doesn't have an experience system,

Speaker 1 it's instead got like you just, you know, it's it's a it's arguably a more modern RPG system

Speaker 1 where you use a skill over and over again, you get better at it, but because it's such an early version of that, it's completely broken

Speaker 1 where you can just make the game completely unbalanced depending on how you play it. I don't know.
I mean,

Speaker 1 it could be in C

Speaker 1 unless you think it's worse than that.

Speaker 1 I do not like it as much as Final Fantasy I, but also Final Fantasy II was not localized for NES, so I only played it later.

Speaker 1 I don't have the same nostalgia for it, so maybe it is just as good, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think it's more of a D-tier. D-tier.

Speaker 3 But if it's, if, if we're going, if, if I'm saying it's a D or a C,

Speaker 3 and you're saying it's a D, and Matt's saying it's a B, then I think it's a C.

Speaker 1 All right, see it, put it in the C tier. That's

Speaker 1 and see, that's wrong.

Speaker 1 Donald, if you're going to argue all day, we'll never get through this. All right, moving on.

Speaker 1 I can't even think of one.

Speaker 1 It's just so funny. I just enjoy it.

Speaker 1 I'm like, can we put one on instead?

Speaker 1 Okay, Final Fantasy III, I think, is better than one and two.

Speaker 1 And I know that that game didn't come out stateside for like a long time. My experience with it for the first time was with the DS version, which is a 3D remake of it.
Yes, yeah, completely.

Speaker 1 And that's what I wanted to talk about because that's the version I know. Yeah.
And that's its own thing.

Speaker 1 Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, again, it's 3D. It's got a 3D engine.

Speaker 1 It's, it's, uh, it has cutscenes that are more cinematic than you would get from a, yeah, like a top, sort of top-down isometric Final Fantasy. So like it, it feels completely different.

Speaker 1 Are we evaluating that version or are we folding them into each other? I think, well, here's the thing. I've only played through some of Final Fantasy 3,

Speaker 1 the original, and I'm really, really loving it. So I could evaluate that.
But if we want to say that Final Fantasy 3 for our ranking is

Speaker 1 the DS version, that's fine.

Speaker 1 I think we evaluate them both because I think that tracks with all of our experience. I want to say, why don't we just shift that one up to B tier?

Speaker 1 And then I have a feeling we might be doing a little scrunching a little bit later. We might be moving some things, just shifting everything down a little bit.

Speaker 1 Because we'll get to one later and be like, well, it's not as good as this, right? Maybe you have to put this one there and then bump up

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy 3, you know, or down even. Who could say, you know?

Speaker 3 I'd put three on C tier.

Speaker 1 You put three on C tier as well.

Speaker 3 I think these early ones are

Speaker 3 really good games for their time,

Speaker 3 but ultimately,

Speaker 3 none of them are,

Speaker 3 say, Super Mario Bros.

Speaker 3 You know, like none of them are going, are like, great way to think about it. Holy shit, this game is still, people are rounding up at a party to play it on a fucking, on a, on a screen.

Speaker 3 And I think that what these games sort of represent to me are, are like

Speaker 3 potential.

Speaker 3 And if you put them at a C, you have everywhere to go. And I don't think any of these are bad.
C is a is a is an average passing grade. It's a good grade.

Speaker 1 You're not going to be able to do that. I'm telling that to my parents.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that's a that's a really good point, Heather. These, these are more, all of these, the 8-bit Final Fantasies are more prototypes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And four, which is the next one, is when the series really comes into its own.

Speaker 1 And that's the first one I think that probably holds up in contemporary terms. I'm fine to put it in C.
Yeah, let's put it in C.

Speaker 1 I'm fine to put it in C, but just so everybody knows, I'm putting it before Final Fantasy 1 and 2. Okay, so that's the top of the CC.
Yes.

Speaker 1 All right, Final Fantasy IV released as Final Fantasy II on Super Nintendo. That's the version that I played and that absolutely blew my mind.

Speaker 1 Look, I'd played PC RPGs, and you know, I'd played like the Might and Magic franchise and the Wizardry franchise, and

Speaker 1 I'd gotten used to a lot of those conventions. Those games had were technically more advanced,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 they did not have the JRPG storytelling, which was obviously a presence in the Dragon Quest games as well that were localized for NES, although the Super Famicom ones were never localized.

Speaker 1 But Final Fantasy IV, I think, was like the first version of that that you were encountering

Speaker 1 in the West. I think this is an A-tier JRPG.
Wow. I mean, that's where I'd put it.
I think that because I think that the games that follow are better, but I do think this is a really

Speaker 1 great, you know,

Speaker 1 great early iteration, like baseline of this is the world-sprawling epic narrative with a bunch of well-drawn characters that are your party members.

Speaker 1 What I understand about the franchise, I feel like people say

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 when we get to Final Fantasy IV, that's when like the shift shift happens, kind of they start building to the Final Fantasy that we all know today as like, yeah, you know, as Final Fantasy.

Speaker 1 So I'm happy to put it in an A.

Speaker 3 I'd put it in A or B.

Speaker 1 Let's put it in A. And if we have to dip it down, maybe we have to dip it down a little bit.
Yeah, we might do some dipping. Okay.

Speaker 1 All right, Final Fantasy V.

Speaker 1 This is another one that this one was not localized. They localized Final Fantasy 2, at least in Super Nintendo.

Speaker 1 They did Final Fantasy 4 as 2, Final Fantasy VI as 3, which made shit extremely confusing for about 20 years.

Speaker 1 But Final Fantasy V remained on the Super Famicom. So this, again, was one I played on Emulator later.
I really enjoy this game. It's got a job system, which is really cool.

Speaker 1 I actually think the gameplay is probably the best of any of the

Speaker 1 Super

Speaker 1 Famicom

Speaker 1 era Final Fantasies. It's just the story is a little bit more inert.
And it's just

Speaker 1 the core characters are a little less because you're customizing them and you're changing

Speaker 1 whatever, like you're altering them so much. I feel like they're just a little bit less fully realized.
So to me, this one's a B tier, but it is a cool game.

Speaker 3 Well, you do get

Speaker 3 names like King Tycoon and X Death in

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy V.

Speaker 1 That's a good point.

Speaker 3 That's worth something.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not nothing.

Speaker 3 It's not nothing. I mean, considering like like before it's like Cecil, you know, like

Speaker 3 Kane, names of

Speaker 3 people. But then like suddenly you're playing against.

Speaker 1 How many people do you know named Kane?

Speaker 3 I know one.

Speaker 1 There was a Fuso Ra. I think that was his name or Fuso Ya in.

Speaker 1 What the hell is that guy's name?

Speaker 1 In Final Fantasy IV.

Speaker 1 Well. It's not the name ranking.
Yeah, we're not ranking names here. That's a different podcast.

Speaker 1 We'll do it, but we're not doing it today. Okay.

Speaker 3 So A or B?

Speaker 1 B. B.

Speaker 3 B.

Speaker 1 I say B. I'm not trying to steamroll people here

Speaker 1 to disagree.

Speaker 1 That's the story to put it. I haven't played that one, so I defer to you two.

Speaker 1 It's cool. It's like you could,

Speaker 1 you know, like, again, like, you could, you could be a fucking class change to a time mage. Like, that sort of shit is cool.
I'm working my way forward. I'm going to play it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Where was I going?

Speaker 3 Now we're in a difficult place. Oh, six, yes.
Because all of the rest of the games are S tier.

Speaker 3 Like, you're going to, it's going to be bad.

Speaker 3 When I look at these games, I'm like, no, that one's. No, yes, that one.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy VI is S tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think

Speaker 1 that's honestly the easiest S tier of this entire exercise for me. No,

Speaker 3 I have another one that is absolutely easy.

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy VI,

Speaker 3 I don't know of a game where I have played the opening three or four hours more than Final Fantasy VI, because sometimes when I'm not feeling great, I'll be like, well,

Speaker 3 let's play Final Fantasy VI.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 truth be told, I didn't play it at the time. You know, I didn't have a Super Nintendo.
So I don't know when I came to Final Fantasy then three,

Speaker 3 now six.

Speaker 3 I know I have my cartridge. Like I have my Super NES cartridge, but I don't know if I got it in

Speaker 3 like, did I get it after college? Like, I don't know when the fuck I got it.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 man, that game is beautiful. It has an incredible soundtrack.

Speaker 3 I bought the Final Fantasy VI orchestral suite or whatever the fuck it was called in like the year 2000 and have been falling asleep to it for 20 fucking years. Wow.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 3 it's a great goddamn game.

Speaker 1 And it's the last of the 2D Final Fantasies, correct? Like, yes, yeah. And it's the perfection of that formula.
I mean, I played this game at the time. I played this game when it was released.

Speaker 1 I returned to it several times. I think I played through it three times.

Speaker 1 I really, yeah, like everything you're saying, aesthetically, it's great. It's the best character design.
It has the best story.

Speaker 1 It has moments of like storytelling that are just like that are completely divorced from combat.

Speaker 1 Like infamously, like the opera scene is just like so, like, that's just such a cool thing that comparable to the trial and Chrono Trigger. It's just like, wow, you could do this with a game.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that bit of innovation, I think, really puts it over the the top over the other

Speaker 1 Super Famicom era Final Fantasies.

Speaker 1 It's also just like the most refined version of that combat system.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we can spoil it now because it's like 30 years old, but like the world of ruin is such an unbelievable plot twist. Like, I think for any kind of media.

Speaker 1 Just like the idea of taking that huge fucking swing of just, you know what, the rest of this game is going to take place place in the end of Evangelion. Yeah, it's just like fucking that's wild.

Speaker 1 That's a wild thing to do. And it and it rocks.
Yep. Yep.

Speaker 3 It's a fucking S-tier game, man.

Speaker 1 All right, great.

Speaker 3 God, that's that. Just the opening, like the little mechs go out on the on that bridge of ice or that cliff of ice and they're looking out and it's like, all right, let's head out.

Speaker 3 And then that music kicks in and you're just watching them walk through the ice.

Speaker 3 So fucking good.

Speaker 3 also the um

Speaker 3 mode seven scaling so it feels like you're moving through it's so good it's great well i think that was some of that was present in in four when you get the airship yes yeah i could be wrong i mean it's not it's not the first time like i think secret of mana uses mode seven to fly around yeah But artistically, you were right.

Speaker 1 As an artistic use of that technology, it's fucking, it hits so hard. Yeah.
Great game. All right, Final Fantasy VII.
I think a lot of people would put this in S tier. Um, Nick's not going to

Speaker 1 no, I think, I think this absolutely belongs in S tier. I'm just like, I'm just like,

Speaker 1 I, I, uh, you know,

Speaker 1 is it my favorite of the PlayStation Final Fantasies? Is the question. It's obviously the one that has the longest legacy, that has the most fandom, but well, I do think it's a great game.

Speaker 3 It's it's a great game.

Speaker 3 I think Final Fantasy VIII

Speaker 3 is the,

Speaker 3 and I'm going to say a really controversial, huge, heavy take here.

Speaker 3 I think Final Fantasy VIII is the game they were trying to make with seven.

Speaker 1 Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think that the,

Speaker 3 I think that the

Speaker 3 different, like, I think that the conceit of having these,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 super deformed is the name of the style. It's not the, not how I would,

Speaker 3 those were words that I wish I didn't have to say to describe the style, but that's what it is.

Speaker 3 These super deformed versions, these chibi versions of the

Speaker 1 character

Speaker 3 interacting in the, in the,

Speaker 3 the space, and then

Speaker 3 there's like three versions of the character designs in Final Fantasy VII. There's the map version, the

Speaker 3 interactive cutscene version, and then the regular cutscene version. And I think that in Final Fantasy VIII, it was like, no, one version effectively across all of those things.

Speaker 3 Squall always looks like

Speaker 3 a high school student to the best of our rendering ability. Right?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Like he doesn't change shape and his shoulders don't get crunched when he like exits

Speaker 3 a cutscene and like begins to be playable again. So I think that Final Fantasy VIII is the game that

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy VII was aiming at,

Speaker 3 which is interesting to consider.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I think that's certainly eminently possible from a technical standpoint.

Speaker 1 I think that, yes, you are right. It is a thing when you pop between, you pop out to like Chibi Cloud.
And sometimes Chibi Cloud will be like in a cutscene, and that's jarring too.

Speaker 1 A lot of that, I think, was just them figuring out how to do a 3D Final Fantasy.

Speaker 1 That said, some of the decisions they made, like using the PlayStation era technology, deciding to like, okay, from an art direction standpoint, we're going to use pre-rendered cutscene, or I'm sorry, pre-rendered cutscenes, yes, but pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed cameras with, you know, 3D character models moving both in those.

Speaker 1 Like that makes it look so much better than it would have if they tried to do a fully 3D environment with that level of polygon pushing.

Speaker 1 So I think that was like, you know, that was really a clever solution that obviously a lot of other games did that they retained for seven, eight, and nine.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think the music's great. I think it has one of the top 10 all-time plot twists in gaming, and it is, and it sticks the landing.
Yeah, I think this is an S-tier.

Speaker 1 Matt, do you have any other thoughts on this? I just remember my uncle playing this game when I was a little kid, and I didn't have like the language to describe why I was bored by what he was doing.

Speaker 1 And I would forget what it was called, so I would call it the boring game.

Speaker 1 How dare you? Do we want to put it ahead of Final Fantasy VII? But then also, then where does six go in relation to

Speaker 1 let's let's not worry about that right now because that's going to be a whole thing okay but I yeah I like six more but let's not worry about that I thought we were talking about seven we were talking about seven okay because Matt just put eight up on the S tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, very bold stroke to take eight.

Speaker 1 I thought we were talking about eight.

Speaker 1 We'd been talking about seven, but we can move on to eight. Okay, seven stays in S tier.
I think eight tier. Wait, can I just point it honestly?

Speaker 3 Can I say one thing, which is that one of my most treasured things in my whole

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 I have a pre-order poster that is made out of translucent

Speaker 3 cardboard, translucent paper. I don't know what the fuck.
It's translucent media. So it could be put in a light box in a store window and lit from behind.

Speaker 3 And it is my Final Fantasy VII pre-order poster. And like having that poster and like cloud with the sword looking up at Midgar and people not knowing what it was that they were pre-ordering.

Speaker 3 I mean, the demo had come out and like there was this, you know, the vague sort of pop culture enthusiasm was starting to like crescendo.

Speaker 3 But like still, that poster to me is like, it's like the Star Wars teaser poster.

Speaker 1 It's like,

Speaker 3 this is going to be 20 plus years, 25 years of media is going to come out of this game.

Speaker 1 So and such a consequential game in terms of gaming history.

Speaker 1 Like, like,

Speaker 1 obviously the migration of Square and ultimately Square Enix from away from Nintendo, you know, to Sony shifts the console wars so much. I've been such a system seller.

Speaker 1 I bought a fucking PlayStation 1,

Speaker 1 a thing I did not expect myself to do because of Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil. So,

Speaker 1 all right.

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy VIII. Look,

Speaker 1 Heather, people might be mad at us. I like eight more than seven.
I have such a fondness for this game. I think that

Speaker 1 the combat system is maybe not as great and it's maybe a little narratively uneven, but I just find it so like I find the world so appealing.

Speaker 1 And despite its flaws, I just have such affection for this game.

Speaker 3 I would say that my love for eight is colored by nostalgia, sure.

Speaker 3 But then I remember things like, oh, yeah, they go to space. Yes.
They go to space in this game.

Speaker 1 They go to space.

Speaker 3 Like that, you, you fly around in your school building and then they go to space because monsters, if you read the, like there's like a full Wikipedia on the, on the like school computer systems.

Speaker 3 And if you read that, you know that they think the monsters are coming from the moon. So when the game's like, we got to go to space, you're like, ah, fuck yeah.

Speaker 3 I read the, I read the supplementary material because I was a good student and I studied. I studied for my test that you have to take like within the first 20 minutes of the game.
It also has,

Speaker 3 and this is nothing to shake a fucking stick at,

Speaker 3 it has triple triad, which also on its own is a fully fucking great game. So

Speaker 3 eight goes in the S tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 3 It also has Fisherman's Horizon, one of the best tracks ever made in these classic.

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
That track, along with the Bollum Garden theme, it's like, to me, those two in and of themselves, but the track, the soundtrack holistically is like one of Uematsu's best.

Speaker 1 It might be my favorite Final Fantasy score.

Speaker 1 I think this game is great. People are going to be mad at us, but it's fine.
That's tier. All right.
Final Fantasy 9. Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 A lot of people thought there was a bit of a backlash to eight and nine, they went into more, you know, sort of like, it's kind of honestly kind of akin to 16 of just like a little bit more of a traditional high fantasy sort of feel to it.

Speaker 1 It's my least favorite of the PlayStation Final Fantasies,

Speaker 1 but I still think it's awesome.

Speaker 3 Nine is when I was playing nine all the way up until the end, I was like, this is my favorite Final Fantasy game. This is it.
This one, it knocks all the others down a tier.

Speaker 3 And then the ending wasn't satisfying to me.

Speaker 1 Not a great ending.

Speaker 3 And I was like, oh, but in the last game, like Squall was in like a

Speaker 3 liminal space space and had to remember his friends as like triumphant orchestral like music played.

Speaker 3 And then like you saw, like you couldn't remember his faces. And then

Speaker 3 Eyes on Me starts screaming out over your speakers and it's all mocapped and it's incredible. And then this one, I think, is just like, she runs down a flight of stairs and says, I love you.

Speaker 1 Fucking yeah, it's it's a little and also I feel like Vivi, the black mage character. Vivi fucking rules.
Vivi rules. It's such a great character design, cool character, but it feels like it's.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It feels like

Speaker 1 they weren't willing to commit to the tragedy that that character's existence implies

Speaker 1 in the end game. That said, that's not the only issue I have with it.

Speaker 1 I do think it's really good, but I just found it's like by this point, I felt like the formula had been perhaps a little bit exhausted.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, I think pacing-wise, I just was just less engaged by this game, but also maybe it's when it hit me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say,

Speaker 3 but the fucking music is so good. Nine is such another great score.

Speaker 3 Fucking music.

Speaker 3 Am I? I mean, no, it's an S, it's an S game. It's S tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, put an S tier. I mean, let's

Speaker 1 go ahead. It's still S tier.

Speaker 1 That's amazing. Great.
I haven't played played that one, but I'm excited to get to it.

Speaker 3 All right. Here comes a hot take.

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy 10, B tier.

Speaker 1 How dare you?

Speaker 3 B tier. Here's why.

Speaker 1 Don't make me laugh like Titus.

Speaker 3 That's why. That is exclusively why.

Speaker 1 That's exclusively why.

Speaker 3 And not that scene, but the production value of the dubbing of this game, the game is like they fucking shout from the rooftops. Here it is, a voice-acted Final Fantasy game.

Speaker 3 And it, for me, ruined my ability to enjoy the game because the

Speaker 3 direction and the production values of that, of that,

Speaker 3 it sucks.

Speaker 1 It's fucking terrible.

Speaker 1 It's awful.

Speaker 1 It doesn't bump me as much as it bumps you, partly because

Speaker 1 you're a sick fuck.

Speaker 1 I'm a sick fuck no I was just I think that era had so much bad voice acting sure that it was not like anywhere near the most egregious example so I just kind of took it in stride and some of it is okay some of it is embarrassing a lot of it I think just came from the way it was produced and the actors not having a lot of context for what they were doing based off some of this some of what I read about this game I'll say character designs I think are great.

Speaker 1 I think this is like the best. This is like the best looking party, I think, of any of these, any Final Fantasy game.

Speaker 1 I just like the, the, the array of different looks that we have are just so fucking good.

Speaker 1 I really like,

Speaker 1 I mean, I enjoy the gameplay. I don't love Blitzball, but I think the idea of Sin as just like an entity and as like a thing that's giving this game narrative thrust is like fucking fascinating.

Speaker 1 And it's a legit such a moment anytime Sin shows up and Rex House.

Speaker 1 To me, this is an S tier game. And this is, at times, times, this has been, you know, people made fun of me for this, but at times, this has been my favorite Final Fantasy.

Speaker 1 I think maybe, Heather, we meet in the middle and we put this in A tier for now. Okay.

Speaker 1 I could make a case maybe for A to. I've played a good chunk of Final Fantasy X.
I borrowed it from my uncle because

Speaker 1 I played it probably after.

Speaker 1 I had played the First Kingdom Hearts. So I just have like a different familiarity with the characters because a few of them are in it a little more.

Speaker 1 And I remember getting to the Blitz Ball section and just being at an age where I was like, this is kind of cool. Like

Speaker 1 I was like, maybe like the one of the, I was the exact age to think what they did with that was a good idea.

Speaker 1 Maybe in hindsight, it's not good. But I didn't have a problem with it when I originally played it.
It's a little clunky. I don't love it, but I do love the world.

Speaker 1 I do love, like, kind of, I do honestly love it just being like a,

Speaker 1 what's it, like, Scarif from rogue one like a beachy sort of environment is just such a cool place to set something that's that's kind of that's the that's that's fantasy and then also and and unexpected

Speaker 1 and I like the sphere grid system yeah sphere grid is fun

Speaker 1 let's put it a tier we can adjust yeah okay what do we think are we doing final fantasy 10 2

Speaker 1 I think we skip it

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 I don't know. We could.
I don't know. It's cool.

Speaker 1 I like that it exists. It's the first direct sequel to one of these.
I don't think it's above a B tier.

Speaker 1 Because some of these other games have sequels too. Like, there's like a couple of different Final Fantasy XIII, I think, sequels.
And some of them have expansions. So I wasn't sure.

Speaker 1 I didn't want to include expansions, right? Because that's like its own thing. Let's, yeah.
Let's stick with mainline games.

Speaker 1 All right. Let's Final Fantasy XI.
Uh, I didn't play 11. All right.
Uh,

Speaker 3 here's here's some reasons why 11 is S tier.

Speaker 1 Wow. Um,

Speaker 3 one,

Speaker 3 it is uh, the first massively multiplayer, perpetual Final Fantasy XI, okay?

Speaker 3 But you might be thinking to yourself, well, just because it's the first doesn't mean that it's good. Counterpoint, this game is still online 20 fucking years later.

Speaker 1 You can still play

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy XI. And I want to share because

Speaker 3 I believe the website needs to be accessible from inside the game. So the website, which has, I've just put it in our chat, like our

Speaker 3 text chat.

Speaker 3 The website has dates that are seemingly visually in conflict with the design of the website, which is fully buried in 2003 web design.

Speaker 1 Oh man, yeah, this is angel fire shit.

Speaker 3 So that you have so that you can access it within the game. But the dates on the game are like, hey,

Speaker 3 the new Hot Vanadiel Knights campaign is launching on June 28th, 2023. They're still fucking providing content to this game.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 this is nuts.

Speaker 3 I played, I played

Speaker 1 official support or is this fan support?

Speaker 3 No, this is official support.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 I played,

Speaker 3 I think I spent,

Speaker 3 oh, God, I wish I remember the amount of time. I think I spent five real world months

Speaker 3 in Final Fantasy XI,

Speaker 3 which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is when you consider that I was playing for like two hours a day. Yeah, it sounds like a lot.
That five months of my life are memories of a virtual space.

Speaker 3 That's a lot.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's a lot. That is a lot.

Speaker 1 Sounded like more than a lot. It both sounds like a lot and is a lot.

Speaker 3 I was living in Amsterdam when this game came out and I

Speaker 3 imported

Speaker 3 because like, who the fuck knew when it was going to, so I brought, I imported a PlayStation, imported the hard drive, imported, like I played it on my laptop, but my laptop was like setting itself on fire in order to play the game.

Speaker 3 So I was like, well, the only way I'm going to be able to play this fucking game is if I get a PS2. So I imported a PS2, imported the hard drive, imported the game, and was like,

Speaker 3 I hope that

Speaker 3 this fucking machine can log into

Speaker 3 servers from, and it could. It fucking could.
And I played Final Fantasy Online. It's S tier game.
S tier game.

Speaker 3 It wouldn't still be running if it wasn't S tier.

Speaker 1 I'll defer to Heather because I never played Final Flight. Put it in the S.

Speaker 1 Great. Final Fantasy 12.
S-tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is an S-tier.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing about 12 is

Speaker 1 this was like

Speaker 1 I think this one

Speaker 1 is a really important Final Fantasy game because they kind of were like, okay, the existing formula is not sustainable forever. We can't just have the same sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 turn-based, exact same sort of turn-based encounters encounters combat system that we've been doing for, you know, for the game's run up to this point.

Speaker 1 And they really mixed up the formula, which in and of itself has kind of become a convention of Final Fantasy now. Like, how do we change up the formula? How do we update it?

Speaker 1 How do we make it more approachable for modern players? And I think they hit it out of the park. I also just like love the world.
Like, I think the world design is fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 And then the

Speaker 1 definitive version they released of this, what was that called? Zodiac Age. Zodiac.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just like, it's, it's such a refinement of everything. And

Speaker 1 yeah, one of the, one of the best Final Fantasy games.

Speaker 3 I, for, for a, a window of time, Final Fantasy 12 was my favorite Final Fantasy game. I was, I was like, man, I don't think it gets better than that one.
Uh, I love the combat system.

Speaker 3 I love the music, which was not done by Nobu Umetsu. Uh, it was done by

Speaker 3 a different artist who had also done Final Fantasy Tactics, whose name escapes me.

Speaker 1 I'll bring you the name.

Speaker 3 It's great, and it was the first voice-acted Final Fantasy game that I felt like was treating me with a little bit of dignity.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 3 So, by comparison to Final Fantasy X, I was like, fuck, this game is fucking great. It was also insanely detailed spaces.

Speaker 3 Like, there's, I remember a time where you're walking through like a market, and there were people in the market. And, like,

Speaker 3 you'd like walk around people and like you could see wares out on the, in these outdoor market spaces. And I was like, God damn, I don't even know how you do that.
And now that sounds stupid.

Speaker 3 That me saying there was stuff in the stalls sounds like a dumb idiot's like take on a game. But at the time, I was like, this is the most detailed thing I've ever seen.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So Final Fantasy 12, also great logo.

Speaker 1 Fucking great. No, I think

Speaker 1 a fantastic logo. I think you're absolutely right in terms of like, oh, this world feels inhabited and populated.
This doesn't feel like a video game environment.

Speaker 1 And that's again, I mentioned the world. That's part of what I liked.
The Hitoshi Sakimoto is the composer. I should know this name, and I'm going to retain this name because not only did

Speaker 1 Sakimoto Sun do the score for Final Fantasy 12, also Final Fantasy Tactics, as you mentioned, and one of my favorite games of the PlayStation era: Vagrant Story. Oh, there you go.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 Where are we at now? Final Fantasy 13. 13.
All right. Okay, so here's where my whole ass hangs out.

Speaker 1 I did not play Final Fantasy 13 or Final Fantasy XV.

Speaker 3 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 So those are big gaps in my knowledge. Final Fantasy 12 was the last mainline Final Fantasy I played until 16, which I was considering.
Wow. I was like, am I going to play this one too? Wow.

Speaker 1 13, you know, it came out at a time where

Speaker 1 it didn't really have time to play it. And it also had, like, I think the worst reviews of any mainline Final Fantasy.
And I was like, you know what? Maybe this is the one I skip. You know what?

Speaker 1 Maybe, maybe this is the week I don't watch the new Simpsons episode. And so I didn't watch it.

Speaker 1 And then when 15 came out, I was like, well, shit, I really should play 13 before I played this, even though they're not related. So as such, I haven't played either game.

Speaker 3 13.

Speaker 1 So I'll defer to either.

Speaker 3 13's having a renaissance online right now. People are returning to 13 and they're like, fucking fucking great.
Yeah, much like lightning.

Speaker 3 I saw a really good joke about that, which is that

Speaker 1 I don't want to remember who wrote it, but somewhere on Twitter, I read

Speaker 3 the name Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII. Sounds like she's bringing the game back to Best Buy.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 so I

Speaker 3 liked. Final Fantasy 13 at the time.
I was like, okay, it was much more linear than Final Fantasy Fantasy XII, which made it feel like a step backwards.

Speaker 3 Because Final Fantasy XII had these huge play environments where you could like run around and

Speaker 3 fight monsters you weren't supposed to, which, as we know, is one of my greatest thrills in a video game.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Final Fantasy XIII was extremely linear, but because of that, the environments are gorgeous. The music is gorgeous.
The character design is fantastic.

Speaker 3 Ah, man. I think it's an A-tier game.

Speaker 1 Wow. Same level as Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy X for Final Fantasy 13.

Speaker 3 It's A tier. It's an A tier game.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 It's an A tier game, but the drink was really good. There's a really good drink.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 if all these games had drinks, this ranking would be different.

Speaker 3 I really like the battle system in 13. Battle system is fucking great.

Speaker 1 I got to just play it. I gotta play the final game.
I'm saying this now, and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to keep this up, but I want to play through all of them.

Speaker 1 I would like to say that I do that. I think I'm gonna try and do it.
That can just be your life. Yeah.
Like, you can just be like, I'm gonna do that.

Speaker 1 The problem is, and you have to choose other things not to do, and that's what I run into. Yes, because, well, right now, the thing that I'm looking at is the release calendar.

Speaker 1 And like, I know what's coming up the rest of the year, but I think if I maintain a two-game sort of thing and have my console game be whatever big experience I'm doing, and I don't think there are any big Switch games coming out until like the end of the year or the beginning of next year, that I'm like, Switch could be Final Fantasy.

Speaker 1 And I think I can play through all the Final Fantasy games on Switch

Speaker 1 until I get to like

Speaker 1 15, obviously, because that's not on there.

Speaker 1 But I think I can do it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I heard that

Speaker 1 the Switch version of the Pixel Remasters is a really nice pack. I'm loving it so far.

Speaker 1 But 14 is next. And I know that we all threatened at one point to play this game together, and we have not done it.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I also have,

Speaker 1 I got it deep on sale because there was a period of time where like you could get all of the expansions and, you know, and the base one for like 30 bucks. And it was like a, it was like,

Speaker 1 it was like 90% off or something. So like, if you bought all the expansions at full price, it would have been expensive.
But at 30 bucks, I was like, let me do it. And then another expansion came out.

Speaker 1 Well, hold on, though. Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 Are we talking about Final Fantasy 14,

Speaker 3 or are we talking about what is effectively the sequel, a Realm Reborn Final Fantasy

Speaker 1 14? Oh, I think the original Final Fantasy XIV

Speaker 1 was, you know, there's a reason they

Speaker 1 destroyed the world.

Speaker 1 Literally, like, there was a world-ending event, and then they rebooted it.

Speaker 3 14 on its own is an F-tier game.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 1 I jam it in there. Put that, put the, let's, let's get something in the F tier.
Like,

Speaker 3 Realm Reborn,

Speaker 3 incredible game.

Speaker 1 Loved playing it.

Speaker 3 Like, great music, great fan service, fucking great.

Speaker 1 Fan service, eh?

Speaker 3 But final, no, I mean, like, fan service for people who play Final Fantasy games.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy 14 was such a catastrophe

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 people weren't even leaving Final Fantasy XI to play it.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 Like, it was like, why would I waste my time on this?

Speaker 3 Like, there's a famous press conference where, like, Square Enix apologizes

Speaker 3 by like deep bowing and being like, we're so sorry.

Speaker 1 We fucked up.

Speaker 3 And then they bring out, and then they, they, they have um

Speaker 3 a meteor hit the game inside the game

Speaker 3 destroy the world

Speaker 3 everybody's waving to you mary hi there

Speaker 3 um destroys the world so a meteor flies in in-game, destroys the world, and the whole thing is completely reborn with an absolutely new but like story, everything.

Speaker 3 And that's the Final Fantasy XIV that everybody loves.

Speaker 1 I put, we, we, we shouldn't play it on the show because we don't have time, but I put the um

Speaker 1 the video in the chat, Matt. You should watch it later of the final, uh, the end of Final Fantasy 14 when they destroyed the world.

Speaker 1 And it's great because it's just like everyone is just standing around, just like watching like this meteor come towards them, just like awaiting oblivion. Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't, I also don't know that there is any

Speaker 3 like, okay, depending on how Phantom Liberty goes,

Speaker 3 like for Cyberpunk,

Speaker 3 I can't think of any game that has had such an arc

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 3 repentance?

Speaker 1 Is that a word?

Speaker 3 Redemption. Redemption, sure.
Yeah. And the game is

Speaker 3 like has gone from one of the biggest laughing stocks of all of Square Enix's library to

Speaker 3 a tried and true, massively successful RPG.

Speaker 3 And I don't, I can't think of any, any other time that a game has gone from zero to hero.

Speaker 1 No Man's Sky, I think, is the other recent example

Speaker 1 of just like as initially released, there's a huge backlash and they've updated it so much and given so many free updates that people love it now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 we can't publish this list as is because it looked like we're putting Final Fantasy 14 in F tier, but I did just for our purposes, Final Fantasy 14,

Speaker 1 the original version, is going in F tier, and then a Realm Reborn A tier, which they don't have as a separate thing on the tier

Speaker 1 with

Speaker 1 where it where I have it, but I can find it and put it in.

Speaker 3 I'd make that an A, an A or an S tier game.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 people are going to be so mad if 11 is S and 14 is A.

Speaker 1 Just saying.

Speaker 3 All right. All right.
So they're both S tier. That's fine.

Speaker 3 I have no skin in this game.

Speaker 1 All right. That takes us to Final Fantasy 15 again.
Another one I'm going to play. S tier F play.

Speaker 1 You put that in S tier.

Speaker 3 I platinumed that fucking game.

Speaker 1 Wow. I got to play it.
I'm really excited to play it after 16.

Speaker 3 I platinumed this game and

Speaker 3 opened up an account on Coleman Japan to import the camping gear that the boys use in Final Fantasy XV so that I could set up my actual campsite as a recreation of the Final Fantasy XV campsite.

Speaker 3 The music is godly. It is fucking godly.
It is some of the best music of the entire series.

Speaker 3 I think the battle, I've played the battle theme in our

Speaker 3 battle tier, like our battle theme tier ranking shit.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. The fucking, it also has

Speaker 3 relationships that like actually work as opposed. I mean, they're like, sure, all these boys are tropey,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 3 the relationships work and it fucking sticks the ending.

Speaker 3 I think, especially if you take all of the side stories and shit, like if you do like Final Fantasy 15 Royale Edition, which is all of the supplementary content all packed into the package as was intended, but could not be released upon.

Speaker 3 Because originally, this game was a spin-off of Final Fantasy XIII called Final Fantasy XIII versus.

Speaker 3 And after like 15 years of development or some shit, like 10 years of development, they finally were like, this isn't going to be happening. Nobody cares about Final Fantasy XIII anymore.

Speaker 3 We have to make it its own game. We're going to retain some of the elements of this original story, scrap all the rest of it.

Speaker 3 There is such a

Speaker 3 behind-the-scenes drama, like meta-commentary that happens because of the way this game shifts internal power dynamics at Square Enix.

Speaker 3 People have argued that elements of Kingdom Hearts 3 are direct criticisms of Final Fantasy XV. All that being said,

Speaker 3 game fucking rocks. It fucking rocks.
The animation's incredible. The music's incredible.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I love my boys. And also, I want to say, when it was like, oh, it's four boys on a road trip, you could not have found a less interested person.
Like, I was like,

Speaker 3 Jesus, that sounds like it sucks. And then I played it and I'm like, nope, this game fucking rolls.

Speaker 1 All right. I think

Speaker 1 this is a pretty good listing. I think, you know, probably something, the D tier should not be vacant.

Speaker 1 There's probably some things we should shuffle around, but we don't need, we, we, you, Heather, you got now. We got to keep moving here.
I will say that overall, that just to recap,

Speaker 1 we are saying that pretty much the entire series from six on is edited.

Speaker 1 So there you go.

Speaker 1 Which is what Heather predicted.

Speaker 3 We put X and 13 in

Speaker 1 A.

Speaker 3 But they're still great games. We're still putting them them at A tier.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Fuck.

Speaker 3 Are we taking any of these other boys? Any of these other? Why do I keep calling everything a boy today?

Speaker 1 If there's anything else you want to toss in there real quick, but I think we haven't touched on any of the spin-offs yet.

Speaker 1 I feel like it's probably easiest just to keep it as a main lane thing, unless there's something you feel really short.

Speaker 3 Well, I was going to say Final Fantasy Tactics, S tier.

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced S tier.

Speaker 3 Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

Speaker 1 Woof.

Speaker 3 C tier.

Speaker 1 C.

Speaker 1 because of the remake.

Speaker 3 Oh, if it was because of the remake, it'd be F.

Speaker 3 But C tier, because you can hook up your Game Boys and you play it all together.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but ultimately, it's not a perfect game. I'm not going to lie to myself.

Speaker 1 What else we got? Scroll down. Final 507 Remake S tier.
S tier.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Stranger of Paradise, S tier.

Speaker 3 I wish you guys would play it.

Speaker 1 It's fucking fun. I have it, and it's not on my list to play.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 It is so funny. It is so funny.

Speaker 1 It's okay.

Speaker 3 Keep going.

Speaker 3 Let's just shout through these.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 we can't do all of these. There's too many.
We don't have time. We have time to talk about Chocobo's Dirge or Desidia

Speaker 1 Fantasy Record Creep. Record Keeper.

Speaker 3 Desidia.

Speaker 1 There's just too many.

Speaker 1 Final Fantasy Dimensions, never even heard of it.

Speaker 1 Record Keeper. Holy shit.
You love Record Keeper.

Speaker 3 I used to, yeah, I I spent some money on Record Keeper back in the day.

Speaker 3 What about Final Fantasy the First Soldier, which was my entry point into the battle royale genre, which because of its existence,

Speaker 3 the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog is in prison?

Speaker 1 What do you think? Is that F tier? Because

Speaker 1 what it did to you? I know.

Speaker 1 There's just a lot. There's so many.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 we're very comprehensive. Yeah.
All right, great.

Speaker 1 All right, let's move on. That was Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy.
I got a segment. Oh, there's a new segment.
You got a segment.

Speaker 3 I forgot. You have a segment.

Speaker 1 This one is called Button Mash.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 the arcade and

Speaker 3 dining place in Los Angeles?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess like that. But it's a term that predates that.
But it's button mash.

Speaker 1 This is button mash. Button mash.

Speaker 1 This is a controller-based quiz.

Speaker 1 And the way this will work is: there is one question regarding a controller for each console generation in chronological order. This might be too hard.

Speaker 1 In fact, I'm going to just say this is too hard, but I think this will be fun.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 So we understand, I'm going to ask a question about a controller, buzz in, and answer. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 First up.

Speaker 1 The Magnavox Odyssey controller has two paddles and one button. So it's a little box with two paddles and one button.
What is the button labeled?

Speaker 1 Heather. Play.

Speaker 1 It's not play, Matt. Is it

Speaker 1 start?

Speaker 1 It's not start. The one button on the Magnavox Odyssey controller is a reset button.

Speaker 1 They were figuring it out.

Speaker 1 All right, next up,

Speaker 1 jumping ahead to Gen 2.

Speaker 1 What color was the button, the one button on the Atari 2600 joystick? What color was the button? Beep, beep, beep, beep.

Speaker 1 Red.

Speaker 1 It is a red button. Matt is on the board with one point.

Speaker 1 All right, next up.

Speaker 1 This is a Gen 3 question.

Speaker 1 You can get two points here. The Sega Master System controller had an eight-way D-pad and two buttons.
Name those buttons. Eight-way D-pad and two buttons.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Uh, Heather.

Speaker 3 Button one and two.

Speaker 1 You are correct. Get two points for that.
Bonus points. What is the alternate label of the one button?

Speaker 3 Alternate label.

Speaker 3 I want to say select.

Speaker 1 It's not select, Matt. Is it A?

Speaker 1 No, it is one

Speaker 1 slash start.

Speaker 1 It's a dual function button.

Speaker 3 Do you know that the master system,

Speaker 3 the controller also came with a tiny joystick you could screw into the D-pad?

Speaker 1 I remember that because my friend had one, and it did not work well.

Speaker 1 Really clunky.

Speaker 1 I had a PC, I had like a Gravis gamepad that had that too. I don't know why they thought people would want the mini stick.
Whatever, they're figuring it out. Next up, skip ahead to Gen 4.

Speaker 1 We're in 16-bit land now. Heather has two points, Matt has one.

Speaker 1 The Super NES face buttons were two shades of purple. The Super Famicom, which was released in Japan and PAL territories, face buttons were four different colors: red, green, blue,

Speaker 1 and blank. Heather.

Speaker 1 Heather. Yellow.

Speaker 1 You're correct. It is a yellow button.
Bonus points.

Speaker 1 Which button was the yellow button?

Speaker 1 Heather.

Speaker 1 Go ahead, Heather.

Speaker 1 A.

Speaker 1 not A.

Speaker 1 Is it? Well, you said there's how many buttons are there? Four. Four buttons, four face buttons.
Red, green, blue, and yellow. What color is the yellow but what label is the other buttons?

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 It's not why. It is the B button.

Speaker 1 The B button is the yellow button. Oh, well.
All right. Next one.

Speaker 1 Gen 5.

Speaker 1 Namco bundled the PlayStation 1 port of Time Crisis with a light gun. Name that light gun.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. Oh, man.

Speaker 3 I know it. I know it.

Speaker 1 Nick, this is hard.

Speaker 1 This might be too hard. I had one of these, so

Speaker 1 I know this.

Speaker 3 I don't remember. I know it, though.
I cannot.

Speaker 1 It had a pass-through, so you could, you take your RGB cable, or you take your, you know, the yellow video input cable, and it would pass through to the light gun.

Speaker 1 So it'd be like a really precise aim. It would be like pixel perfect.

Speaker 3 Don't remember it.

Speaker 1 Anyone want to take a guess?

Speaker 1 I can't even, I can't even

Speaker 1 think of what it could be called.

Speaker 3 Can't remember.

Speaker 1 It was the Namco gun con. That's it, fucking shit.
The gun con.

Speaker 1 But then you hear that and you're like, oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember. God damn it.

Speaker 1 The gun con coming to the Toyota Center

Speaker 1 in July.

Speaker 1 Next up.

Speaker 1 Gen 6. The GameCube controller had an asymmetric design with only three shoulder buttons or triggers.
Which side of the controller had two shoulder buttons? Heather.

Speaker 3 Heather. That would be the right side.

Speaker 1 You are correct. It was the R button and the Z button were both on the right side.
Heather has four, Matt has one. Heather's doing really good.

Speaker 1 Skipping ahead. Gen 7.

Speaker 1 Also staying with Nintendo. There is a small button in the dead center of the Wii Remote bordered by minus and plus buttons.
Heather. What is the button between minus and plus? Heather.
Home.

Speaker 1 That is the home button. Heather has five points.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Matt playing for personal pride now.

Speaker 1 Jenna 8. Which I have none.

Speaker 1 On the Xbox One controller, what is the position in the diamond of the Y button?

Speaker 1 It's Matt.

Speaker 1 I heard Matt.

Speaker 1 It's the top of the diamond.

Speaker 1 It is the top. You are correct, Matt.
Matt has two. Heather has five.

Speaker 3 We've done, Matt.

Speaker 1 And final question, caught up to modern times. Gen 9.

Speaker 1 In U.S. dollars, what is the current retail price for a PlayStation 5 dual sense controller?

Speaker 1 Matt. I believe it's $69.99.

Speaker 1 You are correct. Shit.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of money for a fucking controller. Oh, God.

Speaker 3 Fuck, that's so much.

Speaker 1 Heather 5, Matt 3, you did well. We did good.

Speaker 1 You collectively

Speaker 1 got like seven or eight of the nine fucking.

Speaker 3 I forgot about Gun Con. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 How can we forget? So near and dear to our hearts. Yep.
Yep. I can't believe I got rid of my fucking gun con.
That was so fucking funny. Nick, it wouldn't work for what you're trying to do with it.

Speaker 1 That's this week's Get Played. Our engineering is by Alex Gonzalez, Dead Air Alex G on Twitter and Instagram.
And also, we got Get Animated, our paywalled show.

Speaker 1 You know, Stitcher Premium might be going away, but you can still find that on Patreon, patreon.com slash get played.

Speaker 1 Heather, we're still working our way through Haruhi Suzumiya.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're in the final few episodes of the melancholy of Harahi Suzumiya, which is the mid-2000s mega-hit anime that inspired dances all over the world, including prisons.

Speaker 1 They were dancing in the prisons.

Speaker 3 They were dancing in the prisons to Harahi. So please check out us on patreon.com/slash get played.

Speaker 1 That's right. If you're on Stitcher Premium and you're like, well, hey, where's all this content going? Well, you know what? You can find it all on patreon.com/slash get played.

Speaker 1 We got our whole archives of all of our animated episodes going back to when we started things out off by watching through all of Evangelion. So check that out.

Speaker 1 Well, we'd love to have you over there. Is there content? DVD.

Speaker 1 We'll find out.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 oh,

Speaker 1 the episodes that we're watching of Haruhi Susamia

Speaker 1 this week are

Speaker 1 episodes 27 and 26 in that order.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're watching it in broadcast order. So don't just hop on Crunchyroll and start with episode one because you'll be disoriented.

Speaker 1 Huge mistake.

Speaker 3 Guys,

Speaker 3 it's been fun hanging out with you. What a blast.

Speaker 3 And I want to say all the way from Amsterdam,

Speaker 3 you both got played.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Still stings.

Speaker 1 What's going on? It's Lamorne Morris.

Speaker 3 And Hannah Simone.

Speaker 1 And we host The Mess Around, a New Girl Rewatch podcast now on Headgum. Now, here's the thing.
Every single week, we chat about an episode of New Girl, and we really get into it.

Speaker 1 Like we get up in there. We get up in there.
You know, we reminisce about our times on set. We share behind the scenes tea.
We react to re-watching episodes that we haven't seen in years.

Speaker 1 We talk about how Jake Johnson is dog f ⁇ ing.

Speaker 3 That's not true. We talk about so many memories we have of working with the biggest stars on the planet.
I'm talking Prince, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo.

Speaker 1 We're just two BFFs having a good old time, okay? Sometimes we even talk to other co-stars like Zoe Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Damon Waynes Jr.

Speaker 1 And your dad, we talk to your dad on this show as well.

Speaker 3 Make sure you subscribe to the mess around wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every single Tuesday.