What exactly makes a Final Fantasy game?

What exactly makes a Final Fantasy game?

How is XV one?

What exactly makes a Final Fantasy game?
Lightning
It's not.

Does it have impractically big swords, magical mechas, chicken horses and very unimaginatively named spells? Then it's a FF game

swords
yellow chinken
moogres
summons
edgy jap shit mixed with cringey jap shit
overly complicated side minigame
industry standard FMVs
tranny crossdressing cutscene
neat music

Chocolate.png

Each FF game is different, but they usually feel cut from similar cloth.

Though I don't know why FFXV feels more like a spinoff. Is it

>bland and unmemorable, uninteresting characters with not a lot of interactions between them aside from flashbacks or shallow banter? Seriously Luna, who Noctis loves but hasn't seen her in 12 years, is absent for most of the game, and when she and Noctis finally see each other for the first time, she gets stabbed and killed by the big bad. Is that supposed to mirror Aerith in some way? Because I don't feel anything. I don't even know Luna. I've seen her in a few cutscenes and flashbacks, but never any interaction between her present Noctis or party members

I still enjoyed it somewhat, but dear lord it has shitton of flaws and a lot of things like untapped or wasted potential that hold the game back from being what it is. And as it is it's just barely better than 13

*what it could be

Being named Final Fantasy.

Gentiana/Shiva is my waifu.


No one likes that assless bitch Toriyama

at least it's not Lightning

SquareEnix.

Have you forgotten? XV literally started as a spinoff title. Square vastly overestimated the appeal of XIII, so on top of the direct sequels they signed-off on a couple of side-titles to take place in the same setting. XV was originally "Versus XIII", and was gonna be a companion game to XIII along with Agito XIII/Type-0.
But of course, XIII flopped, it's sequels sold like shit, and the whole "Fabula Nova Crystalis Series" idea was scrapped and it's individual projects had to be repackaged.
That one of those failed abortions actually got passed off as a mainline title and explicitly has the fate of the company's future riding on the line of it's success or failure just goes to show how cripplingly close to creative and literal bankruptcy SE has driven itself by pandering to Western critics, fujoshits, and it's directors own retarded fetishes.

Title screen saying Final Fantasy.

I wonder who's fault was that ?

I hate how Final Fantasy started to veer towards this weird mixture of j-pop, fujoshi/tumblr pandering, pseudo-spirituality, weird interpretations of what the company thinks westerners want and uninspired gameplay design and writing. They have the talent to make great games but it seems like the ones that are capable of doing so are either handcuffed by executives who think they know how to design a game or are ignored in favor of people like Toriyama.

Chocobo, moogles, division of magic into several colors which occasionally intermingle (ie how Haste and Scan show up as Time Magic in some games but White Magic in others), Dragoons, handful of monsters like cactaur and malboros, self-contained world for each game/story not counting crossovers like Dissidia or continuations like Crisis Core

I need some citations for that. Nobody could be so delusional.

Going off the old formula


Then it was more like

Now it's

FF series has always had shitty characters and shitty writing.

Galuf was cool.

All of those, except crystals, are just hallmarks of typical fantasy stories.

...

that picture is so retarded. did they all just pop some lsd and were now seeing some blue shit in the sky?

Closet weeabos and actual weeabos clinging to it not letting it die and claiming it is the golden standard for JRPGs, storytelling, characters and feels.

These days the only thing that holds the franchise together are name recognition, the fact that the games are JRPGs and really good orchestrated music, for the most part.

Before it was kinda like a custom D&D campaign with each game with some new stuff in each one like Dragoons and Dark Knights (as their own class, they were in NES FF3 but their abilities were in line with Paladins) or the Job system in general with a focus on crystals and its own little continuity through spells available to you and what classes you can choose from/the characters are by default.

The Bad guy isn't the real bad guy.
Chocobo
Someone named Cid

Has Nomura actually done anything for the series other than design characters? The only FF games he's directed were Versus 13, which doesn't actually exist, and the upcoming FF7 remake. I don't think he's even done any writing for the series.

Themes and elements from other Final Fantasies.

It has themes and elements from the other Final Fantasies. But these later games are pushing further away from what Final Fantasy established itself as. It's not longer Final Fantasy, more Final Urban Fantasy. I'm not a fan of the modern technology that's in it.

Every Final Fantasy game tries to improve a bit on the series a bit, except for the online games which did their own thing.

They try looking at what was popular with the previous game and see what they can do better with the next which could be a good trend for years.

With FF7 you had 3d models that helped give the world a greater sense of depth, music was improved, you even had cut scenes which greater illustrated big moments in the game.

With FF8 they tried out improved the models a bit and as usual with the series they tried improving aspects that were popular in the previous game. FF7 had materia you equipped to different characters to help set them to act how you wanted, so FF8 had you equip Aeons and choose how you would have the characters stats be like through that whole system, while having mobs all scale throughout the game which probably seemed like a decent way of keeping some challenge to the random fights rather than having it feel like you needed to sit and level for a while before proceeding.

It just goes on like that with little things being done based on what seemed to work well previously.

FF15's big thing is likely the technological side for the developers. The fact that they developed the graphics engine so they can have it look as nice as it does, much more easily than they could do previously, and it could be a particular world that they could do several sequels with (I assume).

There's nothing necessarily connecting each game to define the series except the general attempt at quality. When you get into a Final Fantasy game you can expect to be following an individual character's journey for a good amount of time (20 hours or so at minimum?) while having a rich selection of side characters who will also have their own stories told in a relatively compelling way. There's usually a fairly good attempt at creating a story arc which you don't see in many games which prefer to have the story focus on some ongoing crisis and treat the character development as a sidenote.

And of course, public SDK release never ever

Oh god, that game is still in the works, isn't it?

You know this to be true