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Remembering the place and time you played FF





0
 02.06.2018 9:19pm
Thread Creator (Edited on 02.06.2018 at 9:29pm)

Scribe
The Taru



If I were to close my eyes and think back to the first time I played FFVII and FFVIII or even FFIX, more than just the game comes back to mind.
 
For FFVII I saw the commercials which were pitching the game like it was a full-blown movie experience in a game and that advertising worked on me big time! I was going to play the game for the cinematic sequences and at the time I believed there would be a 20-30-minute movie as a reward at the end of my long journey. Back then Blockbuster Video was doing 5-day rentals and I was staying at my friendâ??s house almost every day that winter break (1997). One of the weeks we went and picked up two games: one was a fighting game called Bloody Roar where your fighter could turn into an animal and the other was Final Fantasy VII. I convinced my friend and his little brothers to let me try FFVII before we started our fighting matches and they agreed.
 
I had never played an RPG before. At the time I hadn't even played a Zelda game. Super Metroid was my favorite game and I didn't really believe it could be topped by anything. With that being said: I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I made it all the way to the red scorpion boss at the start of the game and eventually beat it. The timer started, and I had to run out of the reactor. The first time playing a game where I controlled a 3d character on a 2d map was very difficult for me as I would run into walls and miss ladders, etc. The timer eventually ticked down to 0 and I got the game over screen. I reloaded my last save only to learn the harshest lesson of RPGs: you have to save A LOT. In frustration I threw my hands up and said fuck it.
 
For the next few days FFVII stayed in its case as a loser game and we learned the moves, combos, and strategies of Bloody Roar. It wasn't until the very last day that I picked up the instruction booklet of FFVII and discovered that you could escape battles (something that I abused at first only to find that without proper leveling bosses would become unbeatable) and with that I knew I could beat the timer. The four of us for the next eight hours pushed through the Midgar content, thinking that was the entire world and game scale. We get to the Shinra HQ with hours left on the rental and the first plot twist forever changed video games for me. I was caught off guard and very few times in my life had a story completely changed in a way I couldn't predict or in a way that just blew my mind.
 
Everyone that I thought I'd be fighting against was now dead and there was this new, SUPER villain in the mix with a big ass sword he used to treat the President of the Shinra corp like a butterfly specimen and pin him to his own desk! And my character knows this villain?!
 
**PAUSE THE ARTICLE** The reason I think people who played previous FF games didn't like VII as much or don't hold it to such high esteem is because they already had a sense of how big these games were and that nothing ends as it starts. They expected things to happen when starting FFVII whereas I had no fucking clue as to the depth a game could have. This ruined video games for me. After VII, VIII, and IX I have never had this same feeling of shock and awe. After 20 years I'm getting to the point that I might never feel that way again. At least there's the scale of the GTA games lol **UNPAUSE THE ARTICLE**
 
As the escape from Midgar took place we found our party sitting outside the walls of Midgar and I felt so different. I was sure we were finally at the end, but the script was leading on that we were just getting started. I thought that the two extra discs were for my big 20-30-minute movie at the end. Then the world map. Holy. Fucking. Shit! This place I spent eight hours in was a tiny blip on the map!
 
We spent our last hours in Kalm hearing Cloud tell the party what went down years before when Sephiroth lost his mind and killed a ton of people while burning Cloud and Tifa's home town down. At this point it was inevitable: we had to extend the rental another week. It was so captivating that for an entire week a bunch of kids gathered around a tv and watched me play through FFVII. When we finally got to the end, which was another weekâ??s rental later, we were sad that the ending video was not an long one. However, this experience was a deeply planted seed that still to this day, 20 years later, I can say is one of my favorite memories in my life. The story of Final Fantasy wasn't just a video game to me, it was the first time I really felt the depth of an adventure. It did for me what books have been doing for people forever. I escaped into that world and had a hell of a time.
 
It's no wonder that when FFVIII got released in JP I read a translation of the entire first disc months before it was released in the US. I almost had a completely different life, if you believe the butterfly effect, and would have never had my words reach you at all. To imagine my life with never playing FF... well that would have been hardly living at all.


I'll add a FFVIII story if there's any interest. Believe it or not, my FFIX story was filled with drugs. I couldn't have been the only teenager at the time making bad choices. Do you guys have a story?







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1
 02.07.2018 12:22pm


Inquisitor
Jericholic V2.0

Really great idea for a thread. Enjoyed reading this. I will add my own story later when I get more time, but wanted to drop in a positive drive by comment real quick before heading into the office today. 




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0
 02.08.2018 5:25am
Thread Creator

Scribe
The Taru



Inquisitor said:

Really great idea for a thread. Enjoyed reading this. I will add my own story later when I get more time, but wanted to drop in a positive drive by comment real quick before heading into the office today. 

Cheers! Looking forward to your story and thank you for the positive feedback!




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1
 02.10.2018 5:28pm


Inquisitor
Jericholic V2.0

My first experience with Final Fantasy was in 4th grade. I want to say around 1991 or 1992. The SNES was already out, I know that for sure, but I did not have one. I had spent most of my time gaming playin Super Mario Brothers 3 and The Legend of Zelda. I enjoyed the escapism those games brought. I love exploring the mushroom kingdom and Hyrule. Beyond that I was developing an interest in Dungeons and Dragons. 

One day I was over at a friend's house and his older brother was playing Final Fantasy on the NES. He was late in the game and had already gone through the class change. He had a party of a Knight, Ninja, Red Wizard and Black Wizard. I was totally drawn in to the very concept of the game. My friend's brother started to explain the concept of the game to me. He started with explaining how Garland and Chaos were connected. How the characters in his party started from humble beginnings and went through class change. I heard about how you visited a town and fought a group of pirates who had taken over the town and took their ship. I heard about Elfland and how you had to slay Astos to wake the prince. Then he started to explain the four fiends. Lich, Kary, Kracken, Tiamat were names that I wanted to learn more about. Somewhere the name Crescent Lake was mentioned. Then he detailed how the party had to go through class change by finding the Rat Tail. 

I was blown away. This was the fantasy world I wanted to experience and live in. Every time I would visit my friends house we would play Final Fantasy. There was no consistency to how we played through the game. Some of this was because my friend played through mutiple times and I would just pick up the story where he was at when I was over. But I soaked in every second of it and wanted to experience it on my own. 

Later that year my parents got me the original Final Fantasy for my birthday. They left it by my bed overnight so it was the first thing I opened on that day. I woke up early and popped the cartridge into my NES, and was already in Elfland grinding for levels by the time anyone else in the house woke up. I was in heaven and finally able to dive in to this fantasy world I wanted to be a part of. I actually never finished the original Final Fantasy, but I still appreciate the game for what it is, what it meant to me. This was THEE game that made me a gamer and helped me realize what games could be as a medium. So it will always have a soft spot in my heart. One day I'll even go back and finish it from start to finish it. 




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1
 02.15.2018 3:32am


Id82
Fuck Shit Stack.



My first experience really playing Final Fantasy began with Final Fantasy 2 snes. I was familar with Final Fantasy, but never owned a copy, or got around to really playing it. I was a Dragon Warrior kid. That being my first RPG experience. So I was familar with the concept of RPGs, but for some reason I felt intimidated by Final Fantasy nes. I was like eight or nine and the game just seemed to hard for me to wrap my brain around.
Anyway fast forward to about 1992 when I went over to a friend's house and saw him playing Final Fantasy 2. I had seen the game in Nintendo Power, but didn't really understand it. I just remember my friend was playing through the tower of Babil and was fighting Dr. Lugae. I remember being really impressed with the graphics and the music and how the story was more easy to follow, than the more open first game. Needless to say my interest was piqued. I also got the boss song stuck in my head.
I the school bus to school I would ask my friend every morning how the game was and to explain the story to me. Eventually when he finished the game he let me borrow his copy. So I started playing it and I was hooked.
I played through the game pretty poorly though. I ran away from nearly every battle and was usually under leveled for most boss fights. For some reason I believed this story someone told me that you have to beat the game in over 30 hours or the ending doesn't work.
Around the time I got to Rubicante my little brother saved over my game. I was fucking furious. My parents told me I was being a big baby. They didn't understand.
So I played through it again. Still underleveled I had a lot of trouble fighting the four fiends. So I finally started leveling up some so I could blast them with third tier spells.
Eventually through a tough slog of the final dungeon. The last area being the toughest because every random battle was a boss battle and the only way you could run away was to use the exit spell. Seriously two behemoth and two red Dragon battles were brutal. I finally got to Zeromus. Really underleveled. I think my party was at around level 30. My party members couldn't withstand Zeromus's Big Bang attack. I was able to survive using Cecil by himself. I would heal with an elixer. Take damage from big bang, Attack, take damage from big bang and heal with an elixer repeating that process until Zeromus finally died.
When I killed him and he began to sink through the floor. I remember running to my parents so excited that I beat that game.
But I would say that it was Final Fantasy 3 that actually blew me away. It was just leagues above of 2 and is still one of my favorite games to this day.

Also what the fuck is Zeromus. I still can't make out what the form is supposed to be to this day.




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