Sunday, June 22, 2014

Game Inspirations #2


Final Fantasy. Enough said.

My first FF experience was Final Fantasy VIII. I jumped on the bandwagon a lot later than any of my friends because other FFs was never on the console I had..! I always seemed to choose the most unpopular console. When my friends all bought a Nintendo, I had a Sega Master System.. Then later I bought a Sega Saturn, everyone had a Playstation... Then, just before I was gonna buy a Sega Dreamcast, I thought twice and bought a PS2 lol. I even missed out on the awesome Sega Megadrive dammit.

Anyhoo, back to Final Fantasy. My friend lent me his Playstation along with VIII. Everyone was raving about VII and VIII had been out for a while. When I played it... It blew my mind! Had some really fun elements, a great story and the way they did the graphics was just awesome!

What FF had was getting a player into the game and making them get to know the characters, the villains, the world. It made magic and summons common place and made it feel as if we could do magic outside the game.

In recent times FF has become quite epic. The graphics are so phenomenal and I love how Full Motion Videos (FMVs) / cut scenes seamlessly blend along with the game. X did this really well. XIII series introduced load screens though, but what I really loved was XIII-2 "..the story so far" cut scenes when you load your save game.

I have done everything I could iVIII, then eventually went back and played and did all I could in VII. I think I still have my PS memory card saved games as proof lol. I've finished IX but couldn't get into the story enough to finish all the side stories unfortunately. But X.... Boom, that was so awesome. Finished it and played it so much that I collected enough materials to rebuild everyone's Sphere Grids to the point of Over Powered (OP). XII completed to max if I recall, XIII 100% all trophies, XIII-2 all trophies and XIII Lightning Returns 100% all trophies.

When I started developing some basic games, I started with FF concepts with turn based battles. But nowadays I find that there's lots of games like this already so in my developments I hope to make something different and hopefully a bit more innovative.

Current progress so far is slow but every bit of work is steps to completion!