i like when video games get the relaxing town music right, because they almost never do
instances i can think of: Suikoden (Rising Tide), Wild Arms 3 (A Person's Warmth), and Baten Kaitos (Bellflower)
can anyone else think of more?
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Marbule (Another World version) from Chrono Cross comes to mind. It was a so-so game, but the soundtrack was phenomenal (hardly surprising coming from Mitsuda).
@dodec We should play it sometime, we've had it on our shelf for a very long time
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Play it for the music and some interesting gameplay mechanics. The graphics are pretty good, too; they manage to get some pretty good-looking stuff out of the PS1's limitations. The writing isn't great and a lot of the setting feels thrown together out of random pieces - Chrono Trigger at least felt like the time periods had their own flavor but were part of the same world. Chrono Cross is like FF8 or Saga Frontier where they were clearly trying a lot of new ideas all together at once and some work better than others.
@dodec Near the end of the PS1's life they knew how to get some really good graphics on it. Look at Final Fantasy IX for instance.
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It's the same pattern from FF1 to FF12.
1/4/7/10: We have this hardware that lets us do cool stuff, so let's put it through its paces (even if the results are a little rough)
2/5/8/11: We learned something from doing that - how can we expand on it with more gameplay ideas?
3/6/9/12: Let's take some good parts of those ideas and the good parts of those first games and push the hardware as far as we can make it go.
@dodec I think they did a pretty damn good job with X though!
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I like FF10 as well, actually. I don't think it's as bad as people say. But there's a big component of "we have a DVD worth of storage now and we can render cinematics with voice acting for all the story stuff, also check out these water effects".
@dodec Yeah, that there definitely is. We spent too much time trying to figure out what the significance of the water was thematically and then someone pointed out that they were just showing off the rendering power
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I'm probably also weird in that FF4 is my overall favorite Final Fantasy game, for mostly sentimental reasons. I remember going to a sleepover birthday party at the house of a friend who just got a brand-new SNES and what was then called FFII and all of us there stayed up all night watching the game and marveling at the soundtrack. I can't remember how far we got. It might have been all the way to the first trip underground.
When your only prior experience with the Final Fantasy name was FF1, FF4 is pretty dang impressive. It had actual characters and more of a plot than "go places and do quests and also beat up these elemental fiends".
@dodec yeah it's a pretty good game too! It's probably the second best of the nintendo final fantasies after VI in our opinion
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@Felthry I kind of like Tarry Town in Breath of the Wild, especially considering it builds up as events progress. Every time I go there it just... makes me want to /live/ there with how serene it sounds
i'm not talking cases where it's just easy on the ears, i'm talking where it's actually *memorably* good
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