Final Fantasy

It's alright. Very different from normal FF games, but it can be fun once you get the hang of it. HG101 should only be used as way of discovering obscure games you wouldn't normally hear about(and even then, there are better sites for that.) Don't take any of their opinions seriously. They've always been terrible reviewers.

the GBA remake is closer to the Wonderswan Color version than anything considering it doesn't have any of the PS1's FMVs or nifty spell effects.

Not remotely. It's battle system is wildly deeper and funner than any other Final Fantasy, HG101 are salty about it because the braindamaged faggots couldn't figure out how it works and tried to level grind in a game with no leveling. In terms of gameplay this was the apex of the FF series tbh,

Pretty much this. The SFC release is downright unplayable, but the remakes are pretty neat games.

The remakes are all complete pieces of shit with a heavily neutered difficulty level and auto-targeting, which completely destroys the gameplay of the original. The auto-targeting can be disabled but the easymode can't.

Can you explain some of the depth of mechanics user?

you're asking this as if HG101 was an authority on videogame quality, not chicness of feminine dicks

You realise the PS1 (and WSC) version of FF1 is mechanically identical to the NES version right? Providing you're not playing on easy. It was only with the PSP and mobile versions that started changing the enemy health/experience/gold levels and replaced the DND magic system with MP.

FF2 was always shit, it's purely contrarians and Saga-autists who think it has any value.

Stop.

Nigger what?

This is the "I can't handle different opinions" faggots go-to buzzword.

Ignore the S. Meant FC release.

Except it isn't.
and a few other things

it was an experiment. The leveling system was a prototype of what became standard for the SaGa series, which makes sense when you consider Akitoshi Kawazu (who worked on FF2's system design) also created Makai Toushi SaGa

the leveling system in FF2 has a number of bugs related to when the system makes its calculations. Time of input is when it decides if it wants to buff a stat so you can repeatedly declare an attack on one of your own party members and cancel it before the turn begins to buff attack, defense and HP ad infinitum
this timing is fixed in later version to be less exploitable but the fastest way to level a character's health remains attacking them

the story is pretty good and the PSP version is by far the best incarnation in this respect, having a final chapter not present in other versions in which all of the side characters who joined and left the party fight their way out of Hell

Why is this? You can't go to any of these places without running into dozens of trannies, goons, and the like.

It's like TES in the sense that you get better at something by doing it, but it executes the concept a lot better than TES ever has. The more you hit a monster with a weapon the better you get at said weapon, the more you use magic the more MP you get and the stronger your spells become etc. Your characters also gain HP based on how badly they have the shit kicked out of them.

The monsters are arranged in two rows, the front row and the back row. Monsters in the back row can't be attacked by melee weapons and can only by hit by bows or magic attacks. You can do the same thing and put any of your characters in the back row, too, and give them the same advantage. This creates some interesting situations and can really make you think about the best way to pick apart a mob of enemies.

You also have to make some hard choices when it comes to shaping your characters' stats, like "I could equip a sword and use it at full strength, or I could equip a sword and shield which would give me a penalty to strength, int, and spirit but allow me to evade, or do I equip two swords in both hands and make gains in the sword skill twice as fast and give myself two chances to hit at the expense of lowered damage output?", also too much physical combat makes a character weaker at magic and vice versa which is another factor you have to think about and carefully balance. Any character can learn any spell and equip any weapon.

The way you're meant to play FF2 is to figure out how you want to mold each character at the start of the game, because trying to change character builds midstream isn't going to fucking work. You'll just end up with a character who's mediocre at everything. You're supposed to tackle dungeons by exploring them as much as you can, getting rekt to the brink of death, barely limping out alive and resting at an inn, then coming back stronger than ever. It's basically Saiyan Zenkai: The Game. You're not supposed to grind or abuse the game mechanics to boost your stats. That takes a fucking long time and removes every bit of fun and strategy. You're just supposed to adventure, fight, and gain strength without looking for loopholes.

One of the neatest aspects is the fact that different characters keep leaving and joining your 4th character slot so you frequently have a new character to mold and play with from scratch. Of course monsters also have different damage affinities and all that shit. And areas with both weak and extremely powerful monsters are accessible right from the start, so you can wander into the wrong neighborhood and get raped by ogres 10x your strength. Or try to rape them if you have a death wish. Shop prices tend to be high and the money you get from battles low so in addition to everything else, you really have to think about your purchasing decisions.

My only complain is that the music is mediocre. So overall FF2 is 10/10 okay. The only reason people don't like it is because they're either too stupid to figure out the game mechanics or they attempt to power up their characters to godhood using exploits so they can sit back and enjoy the story unhindered, which they expect to be a grandiose, but barely exists.

nah ur shit lol

Unless you're using a bugfixed copy of the ROM.

Hard to tell how many contributors are SJW since discussions on the forums never go well.

What is everyone's problem with HG101

Read Kurt's twitter and some of Bobinator's articles and forum posts on the site.

Goons have tendency to worm their way into any retro video game community and slowly try to take over it. The only place this doesn't happen is with places that outspokenly hate goons, like /vr/I hope.

Jonathan Kaharl, for starters.

See

Also just take a look (or don't) at the trash written by Kaharl

The PS1 version has an option between the regular NES difficulty and the easy mode, whereas the later remakes have easy mode enabled by default, you immense fucking faggot.

I don't feel like it Mr. Trips why don't you just give me the red pill

I don't know what HG101 is, but FF2 is the worst in the series. That includes the really modern shit. The leveling system is just straight fucking stupid.

What is the problem here

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lolnope

Every single version of FF2 besides the original NES version is stuck in permanent, gameplay-destroying easymode. That's why I fucking hate them.

Not just retro game communities. They worm themselves into anime and translation communities too.

I doubt they start off that way, but goons seem to enjoy infiltrating places and making them into colonies of their own.

A part of me thinks it might be neat to have a site somewhat in that vein, with the aim being anons writing about games with the idea of other anons being readers (and with contributions also being anonymous; no namefagging there either). That said, I also perceive a number of problems with that as well. Either way though, it certainly doesn't help matters that we STILL don't have a stable, working archive for 8ch.

If you mean 8/vr/, it's sadly pretty dead here. Can't speak much of half/vr/ as I haven't been back to halfchan in years now, but last time I came across an archived thread from there, the way it derailed and devolved so fucking hard does not bode well.

Didn't Holla Forums also find goon connections in relation to political parties as well? But yeah, they seem to like sticking their fingers into whatever pies they can, seeking control.

SA is dead. Has been for years. Their poisonous influence lives on in a new generation of freaks and losers however.

It should be a general on Holla Forums rather than its own board tbhq

Ambassador Stevens was a goon. They try to parasitize the government as much as possible. They're not having much luck at the moment though lel

I kind of agree. In a way, /vr/ you'd think might have gotten legacy board status here, sharing a name and purpose with a prior board on halfchan, but there is a big difference in population between here and halfchan (and I'm not saying that difference is necessarily a bad thing; halfchan got way, WAY too big), and combined with what I call the "decay spiral", even if a more vidya niche board gets popular for a while, everyone eventually winds up back on Holla Forums anyhow, for better or worse.

In general, I think more people that have made their own boards here ought to have weighed the factors of demand vs nicheness (make a board for a topic too niche, and chances are you're not going to see much, if any traffic; /bane/ admittedly having been an outlier). Looking at the entire list of boards, the sheer bulk are barely active if not outright dead and just littering the list with their corpses.

finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Origins
and all I had to do was google "Final Fantasy 2 normal mode"

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I wonder if 8ch would have been better if legacy board names like Holla Forums and /a/ were unclaimable.

You can change the board name but you can't change the faggots who post there.

I've already played the GBA remake, are there any other ways to play the game that I've missed out on?

I mean that most people will gather to the boards they are familiar with. If those boards didn't exist then there might be more varied board instead.

Every FF2 remake has heavily neutered difficulty, including the FFO version, and the so-called normal mode does fucking nothing about it. Like I said, it's stuck in permanent easymode.
The original is a wildly different experience. How does it feel to be wrong?

That's part of what I mean about "decay spiral". Should an alternative option or more niche video game board somehow get popular, it will eventually, inevitably die: As posters who want more discussion head back to the more broad board, more people leave because there's less active discussion in turn. The problem becomes self-perpetuating death-spiral where both reactions feed into each other (no one posts because the board isn't active because nobody posts), until everyone's back on Holla Forums. And that's not taking into account lack of general visibility (with this many total boards, it can't be helped that you can't keep them all in a header/footer bar, whilst with other chan-style imageboards, there's a low enough board count that they can all remain visible), or cases where various posters opt to help kill off potentially rival boards.

I assume that might also be true in regards to other topics, but what I've personally noticed has been in regards to video game boards here.

source your claims or fuck off you reddit pseudo-intellectual elitist

Nigger, what do you think this is, a ruse to get Anons to play the NES rom? lel

Every version of FF2 beyond the original has been significantly easier and dumbed down. It started with the WSC remake and then every subsequent remake and port was based on the WSC version. I've tried them all and there's no way to enable the original difficulty level on any of them.

Fuck, they even removed the equipment penalties.

finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Final_Fantasy_II_weapons

There is something very wrong with the proportions of that Asuka

Halfchan /vr/ is even more cancerous than halfchan's Holla Forums now.

oh god you're right

what the fuck I don't even remember saving that

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I read the whole FF2 review on smps again and it amuses me how much the author hates Kawazu and his work.

I started playing the first games a few years ago, knowing the deal with II from the start. It didn't bother me as much as people say and I enjoyed it more than I.

I started playing it again.
Is it just at the start or are axes lighter and more accurate than swords? They have a better hit percentage and get multiple hits more often. This is a huge contrast to 5 where their accuracy was abysmal.

you don't
This dude sounds like he loves grinding, he just seems ticked that it's horribly inefficient to make everyone good at everything despite being able to theoretically.

It's good. It has some flaws and I can imagine there being a lot of confused nips on Xmas morning thirty years ago because shit was sorta obscure. But if it wasn't popular it wouldn't have spun off the entire SaGa series of games.

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HG101. Hardcore Gaming 101. Believe it or not, they actually used to be legitimately good at one time. Then they decided to include indie games since they realized their list of noteworthy retro gems was finite, and quality control started to dip dramatically as they took in different writers. Now, they are a sad shell of what they once were.

It is a shit game…. but HG101 is worse.

Because it doesn't exist.

For starters the writing of their articles is fucking atrocious. They don't even proof read their shit.
Secondly they don't fact check and they insert opinions/old gaming myths instead.
Thirdly they inject their horse shit politics down everyone's throat and they get angry if you have a different opinion.

The PS1 version and everything after simplified the gameplay, which can be good or bad, but I'm not fond of the new graphics and sound. Why does everyone recommend the remakes instead of the FDS original?

Their older articles are better, however take HG101 articles with a grain of salt, as more than often they're prone to contain false or missing information, and any declarations concerning the difficulty of a game are to be largely dismissed.

Your wording was terrible. You kept referring to FF2 being "easymode" so of course people would look up the difficulty select option.

When he pointed out the difficulty menu you just said "lolnope" and acted like the option didn't exist. You should have just said to begin with that the game was globally easier on every difficulty. Would have been way less confusing.

I've only played the GBA version so I can't be sure, but if it's anything like the original, I would say fuck yes.

final fantasy is dead

I believe this game could use a remake. A real one

The whole skill concept is not bad but it feels like it was not well executed. I dont know, I played years ago and even then I didnt know what exactly was wrong. I think this kind of system where you make minuscule steps every time needs rewards for every small advancement, more spells, unlock extra effects for spells you already have, just minor things that pile up after a few levels
There's also the fact that you level up single spells or weapons. For weapons it's alright but they should've grouped spells in schools for the leveling. Offensive, defensive, buffs, debuffs, healing, etc. Either you grind a lot or you follow the natural flow of the game and end up with a mage that can use only 2 spells

This is specially true (and comical) when you get ultima. Most powerful spell in the world unlocked in the end game? Better grind it for an hour or so, because it's level 1 and it does shit damage. So basically, speed up the grinding just a bit, group skills, give more unlocks for each level on a skill (burn for fire spell for example, or bleeding for weapons, all that stuff), and making a story I actually care about

If you liked FF2, go out and play some SaGa. The SaGa series was made by same the director Kawazu and they continually refine the "Get stronger doing stuff you actually do" system. Pictured are two great starting points.

FF2 wasn't horrible, but it is dated in the same sense that FF3 is. FF5 really does everything that FF3 does better, and the SaGa games are far better mechanically than FF2. Still FF2 can be fun, lot better than FF8 and FF13 at least.

I'm still halfway into Frontier. Great game.

Good shit man. And yeah I'm playing the NES version; I don't really give a shit about games being old or outdated and in fact, I appreciate seeing the old tech and shit and how it was used. I'm playing the OG versions strictly for the most part for my blind series run, because I've put off this series for far too long even though I've been familiar enough with it through my exposure to it throughout the years.

I'm adoring the NES games so far, even though FF2 kind of stretched on and got kind of boring and tedious a bit of the way in, but it's picking up again and it's starting to get really exciting and fun like it was earlier in the game. I think I'll enjoy it even more when and if I decide to replay it in the future. FF3 is looking really exciting to get into and I'm looking forward to pretty much every game in the series for at least one reason or another. I'm only planning on playing up to 10 for my series run, because I feel like everything after that is a little weird. I'm gonna play 12 and I might take a look at 13 in the future, and I'm already rather far into 14 even though it's not a traditional FF game. It's a pretty rad series tbh.