I've played every single mainline Final Fantasy game - except the cursed XI. I haven't finished Final Fantasy XVI yet, because every time I do, the music puts me to sleep.
I also haven't finished Final Fantasy XIV, nor do I think I will, and that's the primary reason for this post - but not until I ramble for quite some time about other, related Final Fantasy things.
You see, recently, Wizards of the Cost (sic) - (I know it's of the coast, but if you know, you know) teamed up with my favourite Japanese game development company and publisher, Square, and decided to create a Final Fantasy x Magic the Gathering cross over.
That has now been in the wild for a few weeks, and I attended pre-release, a draft night, and will be going to commander and subsequent draft nights while the set stays in rotation - its fun, and it got me into Magic The Gathering again because of the beloved cast(s) of characters and monsters and villains.
There's "three" sorts of cards for this collaboration. There's FIN cards, which are the main MTG set for Final Fantasy, then there's FIC cards, which are designed for MTG's Commander format. Then there's also FCA, which are reprints of older MTG cards, just with Final Fantasy art on them.
A lot of the representation in the Magic the Gathering set is from the one game in the series that I haven't played at length. As discussed earlier, that's Final Fantasy XIV. It has 45 cards, with FF7 getting representation at 43. These are probably the biggest Final Fantasy games by playtime and popularity, but for people who cherish a lot more than just that, it feels unbalanced.
But is it? There's a thread on reddit... which I've taken the below picture from, detailing the representation seen in each game.
If I compare this to my personal Final Fantasy favourites (see the peakd collection here) I guess that I should be somewhat disappointed. Final Fantasy IV is probably my favourite in the series, owing entirely to Rydia.
I can't complain about that, I mean, Rydia is represented on two cards.
They've got pretty art work, and they work quite well with what her character actually does in the game itself. That is one thing that Wizards have done really well and really intelligently throughout the integration of game mechanics between a JRPG and a TCG.
There's so many great synergies everywhere in the set. But so much of that set is Final Fantasy XIV. Fourteen. That dang MMO that I've never played.
Up until recently. You see... the popularity and representation of XIV in the MTG Final Fantasy set made me install the free trial to go and see what all the fuss is about. The Internet curdles with rumors and anecdotes of XIV being "THE MMO" these days, but with my only real experience of MMOs being Guild Wars from well over a decade ago, I'm not sure that people are right about XIV being The MMO.
I know that MMO games are built with grinding. They're built with fetch quests. They're built with mechanics that make you crisscross a map multiple times, often in the same direction, often fighting the same creatures just to tell someone that you found the loaf of bread that fell off the wagon that you previously saved from the kobolds, after the merchants asked you to find the wool to decorate the sets of said wagon, and the carpenter asked you to slay the 12 dragon hatchlings protecting an iron deposit, which you mined in order to give them the raw materials to make the nails, which you delivered to the ....
I hope you get it. I certainly do. MMOs do this because they sell time. You pay for your period of gameplay, and the game will happily waste it, just as though you were paying for minutes on dial up Internet in the 1990s.
As a result, they're slow paced, they're a slow burn, and owing to their MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER worlds, often; the game mechanics are simple. Particularly for a MMO like this one, which seems to be primarily PvE, there's a lot to be done with pacing, accessibility, and the psychological force majuere to keep the player coming back for me.
Only... none of that worked on me. I found combat boring and unchallenging. The world was charming enough, sure; but even after trying two different types of characters (a marauder and a caster-type) - the combat didn't feel different in the way that I remember there being very distinct play styles for my various Guild Wars characters.
As a result, I didn't get very far, nor in story, or in level, because if that was the gameplay between the story beats, then why would I play the game? Why shouldn't I just watch a movie, or read a book?
Perhaps I was too blessed by all the storytelling that came before XIV, or the sheer joy that the (admittedly) - very MMO like FFXII brought to me, accompanied by a good story and WONDERFUL gameplay, that I have come to expect more from things with the Final Fantasy moniker on them.
Maybe as I'm getting older, it isn't just enough to give me a menu and some Nobou Uematsu inspired beats to chill to. Maybe it is time to fully adopt THE CARDBOARD?
Well, that is rather an expensive proposition. I preordered a lot of cardboard for this final fantasy set, and I'm ashamed to tell you all exactly how much, so I won't be doing that.
But I have a draw full of cardboard, with pretty art on it. That art reminds me of the joyful memories of the games I played throughout my youth, and in recent years in order to complete a self imposed quest of playing every final fantasy game in sequence.
And the art is great.
Here's some of the different art works of Lightning, for example:
And then there's some stunning full-art cards for various characters and summons:
In short, there's so much Art. At length, there's so many cards. So many from Final Fantasy, and so many of them from fourteen, and I'll never quite get the injokes for all those. But for the others, this crossover scratched an itch I didn't know that I had, and consequently ... it scratched, nay, gouged a hole in my wallet.
But I can't wait to play more. I won't be paying more, though. I've spent enough on this set. I must exercise restraint!