Crisis Core informs a lot of what they're adding to the rebuild trilogy but it's not essential. You are good with just playing Intergrade and then Rebirth. Wouldn't hurt to watch a recap of Crisis Core though.

When they released Crisis Core, I thought it would be so important for Rebirth. In the end, I could have watched a YouTube video recapping the story or compiling the cutscenes. I feel the ambition of this game was constrained by the PSP. It's not a bad game, but it's not great either.

This isn't really true but as someone who loved the SNES FF games, VII always felt kind of edgelord-y to me. My favourites are still VI and IX where they have a bit more of a traditional fantasy vibe even though the tech stuff is still there.

There is an "edge lord" vibes with Cloud. But the more you go into the story, the more you get attached to these characters. Each of them are flawed in their own ways, and it all ties up beautifully with the themes of loss and dealing with trauma.

It is different from the more fantasy-fantasy FF, but in a good way. Remake / Rebirth have been great so far (even though I thought Rebirth suffered a bit from modern open-world "too much stuff to do"). The third part is now one of, if not THE, most anticipated games for me. Can't wait!

Also there was a bit of a "Finally a REAL Final Fantasy for GROWNUPS" thing going on when it came out that always rubbed me the wrong way.

It is nice that the Bravely Default and Octopath Traveller games have basically become the "What if the pixel FF games had kept going" series.

This has been "Darren Loves the Final Fantasy Games but Has Opinions"

Please enjoy this portrait of Cyan Garamonde, A.K.A. "Mr. Thou" from FFVI, the best Final Fantasy.

FFVI is a straight-up masterpiece! No wonder people inside Square-Enix are pushing for a remake (either in 2D HD or 3D). Although I understand Kitase being afraid of the scope of such a task. If FFVII trilogy took 10 years for the whole thing (2017-27), how long would FFVI take to be remade?

I have mixed feelings about a remake but would definitely be interested. If nothing else, we have the pixel remasters.

"FFVI, the best Final Fantasy" Objectively true. Also, I loved Cyan more than is probably rational, given that he's not one of FFVI's "big guns".

VI was overstuffed and lacked dramatic direction! Final Fantasy IV is the true best.

Near-theoretical levels of wrongness.

Well, keep in mind, i was a Story Whore rather than a Grindmonkey. I thought the World of Ruin was the dullest, most boring thing... no more magical adventures with Terra, Locke, and Edgar, just grinding and taking on Kefka at your leisure. Honestly, the first time I got to the end of his...

...junky tower, I thought okay, beat Kefka and then the next chapter opens up! But as the fight went on, i realized... wait, is this the end already? I'd leveled up my party so much it was too easy. Over too soon. Bleh. But FFIV... I guess i was just younger, because i LIVED with that game...

...for years. Getting to the center of the moon to face Zemus was EPIC. That shit was my Star Wars, bro. Golbez was my Darth Vader. Memories of FFIV are just unbeatable. I'd give anything for a version of FFVI where the story wandered off into magical Esperland rather than the World of Ruin. : (

This is so good! VI and IX are my favorite too. Cyan looks just like my dad so I always changed his name in my playthroughs.

I named all of the characters after myself and my friends at the time so I still tend to think of them as those people (Cyan became Brian). 🙂

I have some friends who feel the same way. On the other hand, I was a prejudice little shit who didn’t know anything about rpgs, so I always dismissed them for having “bad graphics” /tiny sprites, so FF7 was my first and I was like “no one told me these are cool story games!!”

Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly it was that turned me off about FF7 at the time. It was visually very dark and felt kind of claustrophobic because of the pre-rendered backgrounds. It still has a lot of the FF series wackiness to it and I've come to appreciate it more with time.

As someone who resented games jumping from beautiful SNES 2D art to really assy-looking 3D on N64 (& later the jump to better but brown muddy "realistic" 3D), I get this. And yeah, the palette in FF7 was very dark, particularly the first Midgar parts of the game.

I remember having it when it originally came out for the PSP. It centered around Zack in the days before FFVII, and you get to see how Sephiroth was like before he went bad. I still have to get the recent version to see how it is.

"Crisis core" is now my fashion niche