FF7 REMAKE. IT'S A THING.

Metal Gear solid is astonishingly silly and tongue-in-cheek. As is FF7.

By that measure, every single video game story ever written is astonishingly silly and tongue-in-cheek. Which is a valid point of view that I actually share, but you can't possibly say FF7 or MGS is lacking in seriousness for a video game, that's absurd.

I don't actually think either of them is any more silly than Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Macbeth, anyway.

In Metal Gear Solid, Snake checking out a girl's ass is a plot point.

I dunno man. Have you ever seen the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars? Or watched the rather extensive series of scenes involving ewoks, where they defeat giant robots with slings and dance around a fire making cute fox noises? Or even just listened to R2D2 and C3PO?

You can't tell me Star Wars doesn't take itself seriously. It has amusing parts in it to lighten the mood; that's absolutely not the same thing as not trying to make you care about its story. You can argue all day about how terrible a job they did at successfully lightening the mood without removing the audience's ability to take the story seriously, but the authors were telling the story as well as they possibly could.

I think FF8 took itself seriously until the time compression thing. You'll have a hard time convincing me that time compression was an honest attempt at making an interesting and compelling story - I feel pretty confident that the key writers all just quit early or went on strike or something, and whoever was left to pick up the pieces didn't care about the story so he decided he might as well just erase it all and handwave the last couple hours of the game with a few paragraphs of technobabble to keep people from noticing. Your mileage may vary - maybe you have faith in the FF8 writers and enjoyed that part, but you believe the entire world of balance in FF6 is just a joke riffing on star wars. You're super wrong and I'll cut you, but I can't prove it or anything.

Yeah I have no idea what's going on anymore

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Liberty
Granted, it does require you to grind - if not for levels, then for growing your materia and getting your limit breaks

I agree with most of the rest of your post, but I'm not quite sure I agree with this. FFVII is one of the easiest RPGs out there. Assuming you play through the game normally (at normal levels) you can literally get through most of the battles doing nothing but 'Attack', something I've actually done myself.

Perhaps required was the wrong word. It's ridiculously easy, yes, but every time I play I find myself grinding out for full materia and limit breaks anyway. Even if I don't need to. It's a 'requirement' to me for some reason. :shrug:


Also, Cloud is the dorkiest dork to ever dork. Seriously. Let's mosey!
Granted, there are serious parts of the plot but my god, I'm watching one guy play it blind in an LP and it is the dorkiest game! From Red walking around on his hind legs, to Vincent floating out of his coffin, to Hojo sunning himself in Costa del Sol, to the Honeybee Inn. The game is littered with all these funny, silly pieces and moments to stop it from getting too dark and edgy. It hits the perfect balance between darkness and hilarity.

I mean, you're sitting on a Moogle slide talking about the plate having crushed a shitton of people... a fucking fat moogle slide, people. They could have easily designed the park to come before the industrial zone so that you'd be sitting there instead, but nope. Moogle slide.

Sephiroth kills the president of ShinRa and leaves the place bloody. You head out and face Rufus... who brought his fucking dog to the party. WTF? Why?! (Also, no wonder he hates Cloud and co - we killed his dog!)

Head into Gongaga, a place obliterated by the destruction of a Mako reactor, only to have a scene between the Turks, talking about who they have a crush on. Ask a guy there about his story to have him just say "Reactor exploded and they all died (basically)". Just a sentence.

The game is ridiculous, wonderfully so.

author=Liberty
Perhaps required was the wrong word. It's ridiculously easy, yes, but every time I play I find myself grinding out for full materia and limit breaks anyway. Even if I don't need to. It's a 'requirement' to me for some reason. :shrug:

Ain't no shame; I do the same thing. Hell, I was playing FFVII a few hours ago! I really wish they gave the player incentive to obtain more Limit Breaks, however. The game is more or less over before you get most of them.

3 minutes in and already level 3. You can't get that kind of power-leveling anywhere else.

Current save (follow my progress here)

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=LockeZ
The narrative takes itself more seriously than probably any other video game

Xenogears? Metal Gear Solid? Silent Hill?

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin from what I've seen. However, this is an example of seriousness being so overdone that it comes off as silly again.

The thing about FF games is every single one of them is experimental and tries new things. I can respect that even if it doesn't always work. As a result, the FF games are all over the place tonally.

FF1 had virtually no story beyond "go kill the bad guys' little in the world changes as a result of your actions and your characters have no interactions with anyone.

FF2 and 3 had a little bit more of a narrative and explored the ideas of characters with personalities joining your party, and sometimes even dying for you, and villains with motives and personalities. But your main PCs still had no real emotional investment, that was all left to the player.

FF4 was the first FF, and one of the first games period, to have the game's narrative be a major focus of the story. Characters have relationships and the scope of everything that happens in the game world is examined by how it affects the characters in your party. Thus, FF4 is very dramatic, with betrayals, redemptions, and sacrifices being cornerstones of many of the game's most memorable scenes.

FF5 is, by comparison, lighthearted and silly. There are some dramatic moments but for the most part it's just a fun quest with cool mechanics, lacking in the dramatic tone of its predecessor. Exdeath is basically the Skeletor of FF villains. This is a villain who says "prepare the giant mirror!" without irony and later has a fist fight with a turtle. His top henchman is a pop culture-referencing comic relief character. Interestingly, for being a mostly lighthearted game, FF5 probably has the highest body count among named characters.

FF6 tries its hand at drama again, but this time with an ensemble cast. The early game is filled with a lot of fairly silly moments but the game gets darker and darker as you go along until you reach the midpoint where everything comes crashing down in spectacular fashion and you spend the rest of the game clawing your way back. Rather than have the plot of the game being character-focused, FF6's character development happens almost exclusively in self-contained character vignettes, and almost none of them are happy. I'm not sure I'd say FF6 is the darkest FF, FF4 might be bleaker, but it's up there.

FF7 is an extraordinarily silly game by comparison. The main character cross-dresses to sneak into a pervert's private bordello, one of your character's is a talking animatronic doll, one of the secret characters has one of the most hysterical side quests of all time, and most of the characters are saying hysterically funny things every time they open their mouth. I'd go so far as to call FF7 a black comedy honestly. But these moments are punctuated by several moments of extremely potent drama. So potent were these moments that most people remember FF7 as being a dark, dramatic game instead of a comedy.

FF8 is one of the strangest entries. Rather than focusing on world-saving, the story is that of a slower, more character-driven drama. The characters of FF8 are very human characters; they get annoyed, they act stupid, and the plot focuses on very human things like unrequited love, wanting to change the past, and drawing an antisocial character out of his shell. FF8 probably has the most dramatic elements of FF8 but the fact that it's almost purely character drama can make it unpalatable for some. Personally I'd have loved to see what this game could have been if it and Xenogears hadn't been eating each other's budgets. It's pretty plain to anyone who's played through this game's third disc that this game wasn't finished when it was released.

FF9 swings back to being really lighthearted. The whole point of this game is to make you remember the good times. It's a feel-good game with an upbeat protagonist and a fantastic, whimsical world to explore. I think FF9's setting is complex and mysterious in a way few other games in the series even make an attempt at, and exploring it for the first time really evokes a sense of wonder. Who FF9's plot focuses on changes frequently and the result is at times a bit incoherent, but I think FF9 honestly has some of the best character writing in the series. Vivi and Steiner are probably the two best characters in the franchise.

FFX was a big step forward technologically, with fully realized 3D worlds and voice acting. FFX's world is one where despair and hope walk hand in hand, and we explore it mostly through the lens of a young woman's journey through a decaying world on an inevitable march to her own death. That's pretty heavy. The characters in this game are mostly defined by their relationships, and it is the bonds they have developed that eventually lead them to the climax where the heroine breaks the cycle only for the one she loves to turn to dust in her arms as a direct result. Yeesh. This is definitely the heaviest FF, if you can get past the at times unbearable voice acting.