I’ve only played Tactics Ogre (they’re all tactical RPGs; I don’t know why that game is singled out by name) in the recent Steam rerelease. It’s definitely worthy; it’s very similar to FF Tactics. I don’t remember much about that game, but there’s permadeath in Tactics Ogre and a level cap. You can have practice battles (where character deaths don’t count) but you can only rise to a certain level. As you win battles and go through the game, the level cap inches up so >there’s a limit to how much grinding/XP farming you can do.

I’ve never played TO but I did know there was a similarity to FFT. FFT is Godlike to me so I probably should have played TO. The level cap is an interesting idea; FFT has some very challenging battles, but you can always do lots of levelling up/slaughtering for experience between them. There’s also one somewhat poorly kept secret method you can use to basically knock out any battle in the game involving some abilities that only the main character (Ramza Beoulve) can learn. There is one battle in FFT that can actually ruin the entire game for you if you make the mistake of saving before being able to win it; it relies annoyingly on luck; it’s back to back with another battle that most people consider the nastiest in the game if they’re unaware of the Ramza trick.

Still…whatever one thinks of that challenge level (i.e., if they consider it annoying and arbitrary if you can just level up) it’s a lot less of a criticizable problem than the difficulty of this, y’know, other game I’m trying to play right now.

…yeah, I played the original Final Fantasy VII for the first time in a couple of decades recently, starting last fall and playing it up to the Temple of the Ancients before the end of 2023…then I stopped for six months and am only just a couple days ago getting back to continuing my game.
I’m enjoying it a lot, don’t get me wrong. But…it’s not a hard game, no, not at all. And looking up old reviews from 1997, I found complaints even back then that the game wasn’t very hard. So the enjoyment is mostly just about revisiting a place in the mind. It’s sad that being 40 years old now means that I have to have a fair mind about such things, but I do.

I watched some clips and looked up some stuff about the new FF7 remakes…they look like they’d be fun to play, but I’ve found it stunning that 20-25 years after games really starting to have such stunning graphics, they STILL haven’t found a way to make computer-animated faces not look the same as uncanny-valley AI faces look now. I was specifically thinking of images of the new Aerith, but whatever. It’s like a game they have to play with us, seeing if they can get something 99 percent right, but your eyes automatically look for the one percent that they didn’t get right, and it’s ruined.

I still have not played that FF1/FF2 PS1 comp that I found used. I haven’t even put it in the machine and turned in on just to see what it looks like! Gimme a while.

I only played FF4 once, and it was back in high school, and I used an emulator, but I did know it was still held in reasonably high regard, but probably not as much as FF5, FF6, FF7 or FFT. At the very least I know those dragons on the moon were a pain in the ass!!!

I have to say that I have never played a Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest game!!! I downloaded a couple, then never played them! You’re not making it sound like something I’d like to enjoy these days, though–just a bunch of levelling up, huh?

The Shining Force games were (are?) pretty well regarded back in the day, but I missed them during my old emulator days. I also missed Phantasy Star and Lufia and Breath Of Fire and Lunar: Silver Star Story and lots of others.

Fuck anyone who ever says a single unkind word about Chrono Trigger. DIE!!!!