Final (Fantasy) Countdown

I finally finished Final Fantasy XII yesterday, after clocking up around 65 hours of gameplay (plus all the times when I died before saving). That feels like quite a lot of hours to have constructively used playing a single game. It was good though and long. Sometimes the story was a bit hard to follow because a few of the characters look the same and a lot of them are heavily into that shades of grey thing. But maybe that's just me being stupid.

I think the first FF game I played was on the old black and white gameboy many years ago. It was called Final Fantasy Adventure or Legend (it was a long time ago!) and I later learnt it wasn't even strictly a FF game - it was a completely different Japanese game that had its name changed for an English language release. There were a lot of confusing name changes that went on back then, but they're all well documented now and I suspect anyone who cares would have spent many hours reading up about them on the internet.

The first proper FF game I played, like I suspect was the case for a few million other people, was FF VII on the old original Playstation. It was fantastic. Great story, long, lots to do and apart from the odd particularly irritating boss, was always fun. I especially liked the way it had FMV that seamlessly merged into the game's pre-rendered backgrounds. It's an effect that still looks bizarrely impressive today. I never saw it happen on any games outside of the series. Also, the main character had fantastically inspirational hair.

Then for some reason I missed the next two games (imaginitively titled XIII and IX) completely and don't even particularly remember them coming out. I think it must have been after my Playstation kicked the proverbial bucket. I also missed the first two PS2 games, X and X2, because I refused to buy a PS2 until they brought out the little cute slimline tonic version.

But just in the last few weeks, I have managed to find all four of these games! I was especially excited to see the two for PS1 (in the same shop at the same time!) as they're much harder to track down.

And FF III has been reworked on the DS. And I've ordered FF IV for the GBA from Amazon. And I think FF V is also coming out on the GBA. I also have Final Fantasy Tactics Advance knocking around somewhere which I'd like to finish at some point.

So if you don't see me until Christmas... you know why.

If you've never played a FF game before, I'll summarise what happens.1

1. Introduction
2. Fight something (by choosing "attack" or occasionally "magic" off a menu)
3. Level up
4. Fight something
5. Level up
6. Fight something
7. Level up
8. Sometimes fight something three or four times because it's a hard bastard and you haven't repeated steps 3, 5 or 7 enough.
9. Repeat steps 2 to 8 for approximately the time it would take you to have a full and rewarding real life.
10. Finish it.

But it's all good clean fun and the stories do tend to be good. And what better way to use my shiny new PS3 than by sticking mostly old PS1 games in it :-)