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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Crichton" data-source="post: 2711482" data-attributes="member: 4779">Not a bad theory at all.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I do have a very fond memory of FF IV.  It took me forever to beat and it was my first square game.  Was so good that I bought every single Square RPG over the next 5-7 years for every available system (for good and ill).For me, the highlights of the franchise were VI, VI, VII & Tactics.  When VI came out in the states, it was something like $75 and copies were really hard to find at launch.  I was in high school at the time and had a job so the money wasn't a huge killer but I remember that the local EB (which weren't as popular as they are now) got 3 copies.  2 of them went to employees and I happened to have an in with one of the cashiers - she hid the third copy under the shelves somewhere until I could get there after school and pick it up.  This was before the time of pre-orders and all that so it was much harder to get games.IV (US FF II) was odd.  The game had been out for over a year and I saw it *everywhere* it seemed.  The really simple red box with the funny animal on the front didn't exactly sell the game.  I saw it sitting on store shelves just about everywhere I went and it didn't look like it was selling.  I was looking for a game to eat time over a school break and a friend said I should pick it up because I liked D&D.  Picked it up and that was that.VII was an experience that I'll never forget.  Anyone remember the demo disc that was circulating for about a year before the US release?  It had the first part of the game, up until you destroy the first reactor, with full cinematics.  I must of played and watched friends play that demo about 50 or so times.  It looked SO good and there weren't any really good RPGs out on the PS1 yet (Wild Arms was a pleasant surprise that came out a few months earier out of nowhere) - anyone else remember Beyond the Beyond?  I was so hungry for a PS1 RPG that I played through and beat that game.  When it finally came out, I was continually blown away.  It was also at that time that I got really sick and was confined to the house alot, so I had much time to kill.  My PS also happen to go on the fritz about halfway through so many of the FMV sequences and even sometimes during the game would stutter, freeze or crash.  Very frustrating.  But still, the game was tons of fun.Tactics is a whole other thread but it took me about 18 months to beat and that was on purpose.  I never finished VIII (my least fav) and didn't try IX because it didn't appeal to me and I had too much of a social life at the time for videogame RPGs.I never though FF would be good again by this point and pretty much wrote it off.  I didn't pay much attention to FFX before it came out.  I saw screenshots here and there but I was already too put off.  Then the game came out.  I read a few reviews and decided to pick it up.  Blew me completely out of the water at first.  I actually stopped playing it for about 8 months in the middle and got back to it later but it was still really fun and it got me interested in the franchise again.  I enjoyed FFX-2 (about 2 hours from beating it) and am really hyped for XII.But through all that, I still do rank IV as one of my faves of all time.  One of the things that I will mention is that IV was a heavily scripted game for the first few hours and in spot through the whole game.  People keep mentioning that the cinematics and sit-n-watching are a current trend for the franchise.  No way.  There was a ton of dialogue reading and no interaction all the way back to IV.  The stuff now is just prettier.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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