[FF Meme] 07, 08, 09, 10

[seventhe]

Alright, let's get some more of these out of the way, now that everybody else is done with this meme.

#07 - Least Favorite part of your favorite FF game.

I picked a bunch of favorites, now, didn't I?

FFIV - My least favorite part of the game is, really, anytime the grinding gameplay starts to weigh the story down. The stretch of gameplay from the Dark Elf to the Tower of Zot, for example, starts to feel really really long. Likewise, grinding in the core of the moon is hard as balls but necessary to get all the weapons and, you know, that Zeromus dude, and I like grinding but at that point of the game I am usually ready for the ending. Plus, about half of the versions of this game have really fucking high encounter rates, which might be my least favorite part OVERALL.

FFVI - Again, my least favorite parts come with gameplay: I don't like having to chase the light through the room, I don't like getting stuck and lost on the Floating Continent (which, even though I have played this game 600 times, I still do... probably because I legit get lost every time and so I never learn it), and there are a few parts of the story that just seem slow./

FFVIII - My least favorite part of FFVIII is between Disc 2-3 when you realize Quistis, Irvine, Selphie, and Zell are never going to get the attention they deserve :(

#08 - Favorite Chocobo Version

I love them in FFIV because they come in fun colors - White Chocobos give you MP~! Black Chocobos fly! But I also like the Chocobo Knights of FFX/X2.

#09 - Favorite Moogle Version

I loved that the moogles in FFXII were engineers and e-techs. ♥

#10 - Best Final Fantasy Scene Ever

There is absolutely no possible way I am going to be able to answer this at all. :/ So here are some favorites?

- Rydia and Rosa appearing on the Big Whale
- Final Battle with Kefka (self-help book!)
- FFVIII Sorceress Parade - it's the moment where you realize how fucked everybody is because Edea is for real
- Palom and Porom turning to stone :(
- Yuna jumping off the tower in Bevelle
- The Scene Where Aerith You Know
- aaaaaaaaaaaaas;ldka;lsdkals;kd;laskd I don't do Best, okay



Day 01 - Your favorite Final Fantasy game.
Day 02 – Your least favourite Final Fantasy game.
Day 03 – Your favourite Final Fantasy theme/song.
Day 04 – Your favourite Final Fantasy party from your favourite game.
Day 05 – Your favourite Final Fantasy City/Town.
Day 06 – Favourite part of your favourite Final Fantasy game.
Day 07 – Least favourite part of your favourite Final Fantasy game.
Day 08 – Favourite Chocobo Version.
Day 09 – Favourite Moogle Version.
Day 10 – Best Final Fantasy scene ever.
Day 11 – Final Fantasy game that disappointed you.
Day 12 – Final Fantasy game you’ve played more than 5 times.
Day 13 – Your favourite version of Cid.
Day 14 – Favourite Final Fantasy male character.
Day 15 – Favourite Final Fantasy female character.
Day 16 – Your favourite Final Fantasy limit break.
Day 17 – Favourite Final Fantasy mini game.
Day 18 – Favourite Final Fantasy opening sequence.
Day 19 – Best Final Fantasy outfit.
Day 20 – Best Final Fantasy hair.
Day 21 – Favourite Final Fantasy pairing/ship.
Day 22 – Favourite Final Fantasy summon.
Day 23 – Least Favourite Final Fantasy mini game.
Day 24 – Best Final Fantasy quote.
Day 25 – Final Fantasy game you plan on playing (old or new).
Day 26 – OMG WTF? Final Fantasy moment.
Day 27 – Best Final Fantasy storyline.
Day 28 – First Final Fantasy game obsession.
Day 29 – Current Final Fantasy game obsession.
Day 30 – Saddest Final Fantasy character death.

Comments

[salarta.livejournal.com]

My personal best Final Fantasy scene is when Cecil transforms from Dark Knight to Paladin. It's obviously a major turning point for FF4 and the character himself, but I feel it also stands for overcoming the dark influences in one's life, triumphing over everything trying to drag you down and make you less than you can be, realizing the greatness you have within you and actually putting it to use.

As for chocobos, I agree with you on FF4's chocobos but I honestly feel FF9 did them best of all. Chocobo Hot and Cold and the subsequent treasure hunts were fun as hell, chocobos were more than just horsebirds and actually had a story of their own, and they could do everything past chocobos could do in terms of world map capabilities. At a few points, I even used the chocobo to get around instead of my airships.

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

You know, at the time I played FFIX I didn't really get into it, and I am not a big minigame fan in general, so I never got into Chocobo Hot and Cold -- but I have seen a ton of people mention it on this meme. I will pay more attention to it when I replay IX later this year XD

[salarta.livejournal.com]

Those tons of people are all me wearing different mustaches. :P

It's understandable not to pay much attention to minigames, but I feel they add a fun detour from the often slowly serious nature of the games. It's also something the more recent games have lacked, among many many things wrong with the more recent games. But that's a completely different topic. :)

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

Hahaha: I actually don't like most minigames! Here's the truth, I am a pretty bad gamer when it comes to dexterity and coordination and shizz like that, and so whenever there's a point in a game where I suddenly have to pretend I'm playing a FPS just drives me up the wall. And other minigames that may be more fun are often super complex (Triple Triad I am looking at you) and too annoying for me to spend much time on. That's just me though - obviously there's a big fanbase for them since they show up in almost all the FF games. XD

[salarta.livejournal.com]

That's understandable, on the dexterity and hand-eye coordination. From what I've heard, that kind of stuff in video games is more of a thing men excel at.

Man, I remember growing up when there was this notion that video games were only for boys, no girls allowed in the clubhouse, and so girls playing video games (at least in my life) were practically non-existent. Now, I'm in my mid-20s and there are girls everywhere that play video games. Granted, most of them aren't playing games as much as I do (which is increasingly less for me; I find myself going for days sometimes without playing any, and only a couple hours when I do, when I'd have spent entire days on it when I was younger), nor the same kind of games in most cases, but they play at least some kind of video games. The world's a-changin', and sometimes I wonder if I was born just a few years too soon. Or at just the right time, too, since the industry is so much more focused on money over quality these days.

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

I... am not a huge fan of that generalization! I don't suck at them because I am a girl, I suck at them because I'm not interested in most games of that type and thus never developed the skills in the first place. I *have* beaten Halo and Halo II, I will point out, so it isn't like my vagina is getting entirely in my way of being able to use a controller. :/

Video games are becoming a lot more accessible in the first place - I am older than you, only by a few years but with the way technology moves I do think it's significant. Like, I remember being excited to find A PERSON who played video games when I was younger - an aunt bought us the SNES for Christmas and it just took a while before games were as widespread as they are now. Now, a household without 1 gaming system is rare, and most have more than one. It's just funny to me; I am older than you, I think, only by a few years but with the way technology moves it's probably significant.

[salarta.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the offense! I didn't just come up with the statement based on assumptions, I thought I read it in a legit article on the differences between the sexes in how they play video games. However, I tried to see if I could find what I saw again and it turns out I'm wrong. Hand-eye coordination is better in women, while men are better with spatial skills, when it comes to video games, and apparently over time the spatial skills gap can be closed by women playing more games.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n654102g527v8kj2/
http://www.physorg.com/news110203374.html

So yeah, I wasn't trying to sport some harsh bias, I honestly thought I read an article in the past that said coordination was better in men than women with video games as a whole.

Though the lack of interest in FPS type games is also sort of supported in a sex sense by studies as well.

http://crx.sagepub.com/content/31/5/499.abstract

Though I AM also aware that just because there was a study with these results doesn't mean those results are accurate, that they need more testing and whatnot.

[sissyhiyah.livejournal.com]

We're pretty close to the same age, right Sev? 28, 29-ish? I never even knew there was a division in 'guy' games versus 'girl' games until I was in college. Seriously. I know that makes me sound a bit ignorant, but this is one of the few areas where I never noticed a gender split. They were simply games that we all played. We met after school, played games, got in fights over characters, drank unholy amounts of Dr Pepper, and kept playing. It wasn't like football where I was forbidden to play (until I got on the field anyway and outran the boys. Run, Forrest!Sissy, run!) or like in art, where I was encouraged to "express myself" while the boys got to build cool shit. I could play Tetris, switch to Doom or Final Fantasy, then rip out intestines in Mortal Kombat. I was good at some games, bad at others, and some just didn't snag my interest. I think I laughed when someone first suggested to me that girls suck at games. Really? Is that why I just kicked your ass? Go figure, dude.

[salarta.livejournal.com]

Hehehe.

I think that the assumption that someone sucking at a game solely due to sex is misguided, there are many factors that go into what it takes to play a video game, and even then there are always outliers (and as I said in a different comment, I was wrong about what I thought I read on the subject).

I don't consider the mere fact that a woman plays video games to be strange, I have plenty of female family that does these days, but growing up, advertising in the United States for video games was heavily male-focused. Some idiots still think in those old advertising schemes, too, which is the cause of things like this getting made fun of online:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/gamesforgirls.jpg

But I did have a case of not playing games with any girls as I was growing up. It was always guys, and even in my teen years, the most girls would do around video games is talk while guys played them. I'm specifically thinking of Super Smash Bros. Melee when I say this. My very first time playing any sort of game with a woman was freshman year of college.

[sissyhiyah.livejournal.com]

That's the thing. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. I meant that for so many years, video games were just that. They were games. We played them and had fun. We didn't think about it, ya know? At least not until we got a bit older, but by that point gaming had changed. A lot. It wasn't 'grab your friends and play for hours' anymore. I mean, there is still that element to it, of course, but it feels different now. It goes beyond graphics and fancy systems and women in bikinis with handguns. Even when games were marketed for boys, they weren't at the same time. Now it seems like that way of thinking has been embraced even while it's been shunned. Sex sells, and sexism helps. There's a lot of hypocrisy in marketing because of gender. Drives me nuts. (That goes for everything, though. Advertising in itself is a sexist enterprise. I know of only two or three products that cater exclusively to women, and all of them deal with periods. Everything else is based on men or what men want. Clothes to perfume to food to weight-loss products to games to college. It's all related to how women are seen by men, how we react to it, and it ain't cool.)

I played mostly with guys growing up, but that's also because I simply knew more boys, plus typical boy activities were actually fun. Sell cookies? Screw that. I want to tie knots and ride in a canoe! Home ec? Pfft. Wood shop has saws and blowtorches! My friends were mainly guys, but I also played with girls. We were a fairly mixed-up bunch, but we never really learned about things like this until people tried to point it out to us, which is kind of funny, now that I think about it.

And that ad? I blame Disney. Disney has done more harm to how girls and boys think than any video games ever have or ever will.

[salarta.livejournal.com]

I'm honestly seeing more sexism these days than I did when I was younger, in video games. There's a stupid concept companies have that a game with a female protagonist can't sell as well as one with a male protagonist. And then there's stuff like what's happened to Aya Brea in 3rd Birthday and accused of happening to Samus in Other M, where formerly tough, strong and smart female protagonists are forced to have weak, submissive and overly emotional sides to them, always in connection to a male authority figure looming over them. I even questioned these evolving trends on my LJ last week.

And then on top of it, there's an issue relevant to Soul Calibur V. In video games (and anime), there's a bias that if a woman is past a certain age, she's an "old hag," and if she's an "old hag," she's no longer allowed to be one of the major, playable characters; she's only allowed to be a side character with barely any purpose to the story. Male characters don't have that problem. In fact, there's even a concept of male characters becoming more badass with age, while female characters magically become weak and useless. It annoys the hell out of me as someone that likes mature older female characters more than immature teenage girl ones.


In sum I hate how the video game industry is becoming more and more restrictive toward female characters as actual characters and not as a piece of ass on the screen for consumers to drool over.

[safety-caesars.livejournal.com]

I, for one, was a beast at DDR back in the day, even while loaded down by my rad phat raver pants and skater chains. I can't play FPS-type games cuz I have zero interest in them story or gameplay-wise, not because I inherently have inferior female dexterity/coordination.

[salarta.livejournal.com]

Left a reply to sev's comment that applies to your comment too, didn't want you to think I ignored it. :)

Also your icon scares me!

[safety-caesars.livejournal.com]

That's my (=not actually my) face of intimidation!

[salarta.livejournal.com]

Note to self: do not piss of safety_caesars or else risk an eternity of being chased by a Silent Hill monster. :)

[venefica-aura.livejournal.com]

My mom is still to this day the best gamer I know.

I have no game reflexes because she always beat my ass. XD Also she'd beat all our old Amiga games and unlock the levels so my sister and I wouldn't get frustrated.

Getting her a Wii was both the best and worst idea. Christmas will never be the same.