There’s something I’ve been working on for a few years now, but I’ve never actually mentioned to anyone. A personal quest of mine, I guess. It’s not really a secret, I’ve just never bothered to explain it. I told someone yesterday, though, and I think he was impressed, so I feel like posting about it now.

        My goal is this: play every game in the main Final Fantasy series to completion. A dozen games right now, thirteen if you include FF X-2. I’ve finished some of the earlier NES titles in 20-30 hours, but the newer games are easily twice as long. More if you run around doing sidequests and finding secrets, which I tend to do. I’ll post my final times when I’m all done, but let’s just say I’ve put hundreds of hours into this series.

        At the moment, I have three games left to finish: Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy VIII. I’ve put a few hours into FF V already, but I haven’t started the other two at all. At a wild guess, I’d say 40 hours each for FF V and VI, but VIII could take a while longer than that depending on how much extra stuff I do. It’s looking good, though - I think I can finish before the end of the year, even if I get a job for the summer.

        I don’t know for sure when I started doing this. I think it was a little over a year ago that I told myself I’d actually finish them all, but it was a few years before that when I decided to collect all of the games. I still remember when I got each of the games, but the thing is - I rarely ever finished them. I actually did complete II, VII and IX before dedicating myself to it. But since last spring, I’ve finished FF I, III, IV, X, X-2, XII, and XIII. Most of those games only took 10-20 more hours to finish from when I’d stopped playing, which may sound ridiculous if you don’t play RPGs, but it means I was pretty close to the end.

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far:

• Basic plots can work, over and over again, as long as they’re well executed - you can make a dozen “go save the world” games, but if you make the player an integral part of the story and give them compelling short-term goals, they really won’t care (good examples: FF VII, FF X - bad examples: FF XII, FF XIII)
• When the player takes control of existing characters, choose your “protagonist” carefully - the player shouldn’t feel like someone else is doing all the important work, but making the protagonist a supporting character can make things really interesting (Yuna is the most important character in FF X, and it’s her job to save the world, yet Tidus is the protagonist and manages to be integral to the story anyway - Vaan is the protagonist in FF XII, but Ashe is the only character that really matters to the story, and you’re left feeling totally unimportant)
• Repetitive gameplay can be rescued by altering the feedback by a tiny bit - if the player has to fight 50 battles in order to get a single level up, they’ll feel like they’re making no progress, but if you give them stat boosts every 10 battles it’ll seem like they’re constantly getting stronger (FF II is great with this, while ability points in FF V and IX fill a similar role of constant feedback)
• It takes a lot of work to make a great character, but it pays off in the end, so don’t skimp on the supporting characters - every character needs their own personality (this means you need to write well enough to show it off), a unique look to complement that, and an interesting role in the gameplay (every game from FF IV to X has a… mostly great cast, but X-2, XII, and XIII have boring, underdeveloped, and relatively uninteresting characters - they’re very pretty, though!)

        There’s probably a lot more to be said than that, but I haven’t thought of it yet. You really need to compare individual games in order to notice this stuff, because the strong points of one game can shed light on the problems of another. So even though I’m almost done playing the games, I’m nowhere near finished thinking about them. I could easily write this much about Dissidia Final Fantasy, the fighting game that pits characters from across the series against each other. I intend to write a whole lot more about the stories and characters of FF XII and XIII.

        I mean, someone’s gotta do it.