Rajaah
Honorable Member
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In FF12's newer Zodiac Age version, there's some kind of trial mode where you play a series of battles with your characters from the main game (then take whatever you get back to the main game). I was able to totally jack up the game and make my characters OP with this. Near the beginning once you get access to the town outskirts and can leave, you can go to trial mode and fight your way through a few battles until you get to one in particular with a chest that can drop Danjuro. I don't remember how, but I gimped it in some way to be able to keep trying until the chest had what I wanted, then bring it back to the regular game. Very quickly I had 3x Danjuros (I think) for my characters, which is a full-on endgame weapon and obliterates things.
FF15 really was shredded. I watched the Kingsglaive movie and was so stoked for FF15 before it came out. Actually bought a new TV for it, since FF15 uses HDR and my old TV couldn't do that. How I got my first OLED. Was completely wowed by FF15 on that thing. Then I progressed in the game and quickly discovered that it had very little to do with the movie, didn't follow up on any of the plots set up by it, and didn't even feature the villains that the movie had set up so effectively. Well, you get the main villain and he's solid. However the rest of The Empire get built up and proceed to do jack squat. Hell, the Emperor himself doesn't even have a battle, he practically dies offscreen. You defeat some random enemy late in the game and then a character voiceover is like "that was the Emperor! He must have been transformed into a monster!" and it sounds like "we forgot to do anything with this major villain and need to give him a resolution real quick".
FF15 drove me nuts. It borrows a TON of elements from FF6, maybe my favorite. From the villain to the World of Ruin to the Empire and its various members (there's a Celes, a General Leo, an evil Cid equivalent, the Emperor himself, and the main villain is a fleshed-out Kefka in some ways). Except...it's like if FF6 were missing its entire second half and the first half had most of the interesting plot threads taken out after the early really good setup pre Narshe War. With the World of Ruin being 20 minutes long before the final tower. Whole thing is wasted potential upon wasted potential.
The fact that FF15 doesn't play that well combat-wise...doesn't help. I think most of the people who like FF15 just didn't have any expectations for it beforehand, maybe they didn't see Kingsglaive or the original world maps* or play FF6 to draw a comparison. Having done all of those things, 15 was the biggest letdown for me.
* - They released world maps of FF15 beforehand, then the actual game ended up only having like 1/8th of the map as part of the game world. They actually made a lot of the rest and it can be glitched-into, but it's all empty. Just unfinished as fuck. I'm particularly disappointed that you don't get to explore the Empire outside of the couple of parts in the Vector equivalent. World map had a few other really interesting-looking provinces that ended up being nonexistent. Such a bummer.
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