Final Fantasy 10, FFX, was to be my first Final Fantasy game on the new PlayStation 2 console. FF9 being a downturn for me after both FF7 and FF8 had be once again back in the tentative mindset I was coming out of FF6 into a new console and FF7. But when I started playing FFX it was what I would realize that it was the game I would have expected to come on the tails of FF8.

Now on new hardware the non-full motion cutscenes looked nicer, and with the new space allotted on the DVD format of the disks, we got speech in game so that I could be lazy and not read everything. Now the story played out like a long movie. You could just sit back and watch what your actions had caused. No pausing to read an oddly translated line, now you could listen to an oddly voice acted line. Now the whole game wasn’t audio, minor stuff still had the old text boxes, but the audio shift can’t be ignored for overall ease of enjoyment.

So, back we were, to playing the game to completion as best as I could, straight away. This game was in a lot of ways the high-water mark for the series. Whereas FF9 wanted to use the nostalgia from previous titles and rehashed the cumulative efforts of the SNES/NES Final Fantasies. FFX ended up being that without retracing old story beats from games gone by without pandering. It followed in the same spirit of all the other games and was still the same general design, just neater and taking advantage of the groundwork of FF7 and 8 as well. Barring the one exception of not being as open with the airship at the end of the game, which could have been a deal breaker had not everything else worked so well.

This game also had the interesting fortune of coming out near the start of the holiday season in 2001. This was a really weird time for me emotionally. I was just kind of all over the place. It had now been months of being back home, I was working at Sears and all that. Then through thanksgiving I was working on the title, felt ill, called in sick to play a little more and rest up and then found myself let go from Sears. This was oddly fortuitous for me in the short and long term but was weird when it happened. And it just happened to be the game I was playing during this time and not the cause of any of that drama.

No, through it all it was just a cozy playthrough on the floor during the nice grey time of year.

However, this is also an interesting moment in time for the series, when it seems like it got so big they didn’t agree with what would be next, so they went in many directions. I was at the time rather dismayed to find out the next title in the series, Final Fantasy 11 (FF11) was set to be an online multiplayer RPG only. I liked multiplayer, but after a decade with these titles, Final Fantasies were my stories, and the single player mode was really important. At this point in my life too massively multiplayer rpgs (MMORPG) were something that came from the old BBS door game era and were called MUDS (Multi-User Dungeons). Chris K. had been into them, and they seemed oddly unappealing to me.

Star Wars was starting to poke its tows though in the water with the popularity of a game called of Everquest, and I realized the idea of playing in a fun world with others wasn’t a bad idea, for say Star Wars, but I just didn’t want it for my world saving anime kids in Final Fantasy. In fact, later on in the decade I would give in, try World of Warcraft and find the MMORPG fun, but I wasn’t trying to save the world there either, just play with friends and get gear. The Final Fantasy games were always something more than that, so, yeah 11 had me worried.

Beyond that the battle system was that of what I’d seen in other games in that new MMORPG genre, a sort of real time hack and slash with stats idea, and not my beloved strategy driven, turn based system that the Final Fantasy titles kept making interesting in my mind. That is at its core one of the more interesting points to me. It is hard for me to play a game with the Final Fantasy title and have not be active time battle turn based battle simulation. That is the game play loop that feels right for it.

They (Squaresoft) also started to dabble with film making. The feature film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, I went to go see, with Jim, Jackie and Karl too, I think. It was interesting, I bought it on DVD. But the next single player installment, Final Fantasy XII (FF12) seemed a million years away. Luckily Square Soft broke with another convention and suddenly Final Fantasy X-2 (FFX2) was coming out. Although I felt FFX had a complete story, the idea of getting to return to a mainline world was interesting.

So, in late 2003 I got to go back.  The game worked, it was simply more FFX, except with FF5’s job system integrated in. I found it delightful, and it kept my energy for the series going. Now at this point there were rumors that there was a secret ending that, in my opinion, broke the narrative and ruined the story for the games. But with video on the internet not being a big thing, I could kind of ignore that, for the time.

This game would feature the smallest cast ever, but with its familiar setting and just not having a dud of a main character added to its pleasure. This game also featured only female protagonists, which is no issue to me, but I bring up because of later events. Well, a later story, I guess.

Later in my life when I worked for EB Games, I would push FFX, and FFX-2 a bit on people not sure what to play. I loved the games and thought them pretty good chances to take for people into those kinds of games. It was in this role that I found out there were some patrons that refused to play FFX-2 because of its estrogen only lineup. I kid you not, I once had a young gentleman, somewhere in his twenties I would guess ask for another title like FFX which he said he liked. I said “Well, obviously the sequel.” To which he replied with “I can’t play the one with just the chicks.”

Sort of a weird look into how sometimes manhood could be potential lost if your onscreen character is not the manly avatar of the player. This theme would crop up more and more I noticed when I entered the MMORPG scene and found out there is a large section of people in this world that project themselves personally onto their fantasy video game characters. Which makes an odd case for how many guys are comfortable being an overweight plumber who seems to have a hallucinogens addiction, but can’t stomach the idea of projecting onto a girl dual-wielding pistols.

However, the precedent of Spirits Within and the MMORPG, of making bad decisions was coming. Which leads us on the slow march to 2006 and the release of the next mainline adventure, Final Fantasy 12(FF12). To me also known as the game that broke any love I had for the series. Now I have hard line fandom and crazy nostalgia for the FFX and back, world of the series. But the complete course change in FF12 caused it to be the first game ever in the series that I turned off and never played through. Beyond the graphics, the game felt like a letdown of everything that made the prior games fun. Maybe it could work in my brain as a different RPG series, but not as a Final Fantasy.

Now we had 12, a game based in a world square had already introduced. Gone was “clunky” (but fun) turn based combat that the series was known for, for two bots and a weird hybrid fighting style of what they were seeing in the new MMORPGs. I know people liked it, but it wasn’t good, and the game deviated enough from the structural template of the games that it was a game breaker. Thus, officially began the “modern ff era” in my eyes. These are games I have really had no interest in playing and was when I stopped paying for things that had the Final Fantasy name slapped on it, because you no longer knew what you might get.

Oddly as popular as the games have stayed over the years, you can see that they have missed a lot more than they’ve hit with the changes to the formula. Which is an issue a lot of things have. New developers like to change the things that work to pave a new way versus finding inventive new ways to continue a good idea. In other words lets invent a the wheel again versus figure out how to it better. Which I guess is an easier and more satisfying way of doing things, but it has made for some gameplay that doesn’t look exciting.

When I was older, I watched the story elements of Final Fantasy 13, it was okay. But it’s been as of writing this, 21 years since the last playable Final Fantasy games. I will mention the 14th installment, which was a new version of the 11th, as in online multiplayer. I have played it a couple times, it’s okay, but it’s also just anime graphics on a WoW clone with classic FFX and pre bosses sprinkled in to use the fact that those were when the title was neat and fun. But it’s not bad either, just not what I would say is a single player Final Fantasy experience. But unlike SimCity, the series is still going and there is always a chance someone will realize there is a throwback style that could be updated and sold to old men like me pretty easily. And the FF7 remake was at least fun to watch.