13Jul09
Birth of a fanboy
The boy was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games. He first learned about it when the first Final Fantasy came to America. He was too young at the time to know what it was about but his father seemed to enjoy it. He heard about Final Fantasy again when Final Fantasy II (now IV) appeared on his Super Nintendo. He was still quite young to be able to play but he could understand what was going on. Then came Final Fantasy III (VI) which was a gift from his father to his mother (obviously a joke). He was now old enough to play, but he was too shy to take the controller from his older brother’s hands. Instead they played together, the little boy would observer and advise his brother. He had a fantastic memory and everything that happened on screen was embedded forever in a part of his brain. This would help him play the game himself once he would dare try the game.
A year or two passed, he now had enough confidence to try the games he only saw others play. He first played Final Fantasy III, then II. He played a bit of FFI but it was too hard for him. His parents even bought Final Fantasy Mystic Quest which he enjoyed even though it was not really like the other games. As the time passed, he learned to love those games and the consoles they were made for. He was not only a Final Fantasy fanboy, he was also a Nintendo fan. He made his parents buy the Nintendo 64 along with the excellent Super Mario 64. Then Squaresoft decided to leave Nintendo (rather, Nintendo decided to use cartridges that could contain a tiny fraction of what CDs could). The boy followed Squaresoft and sold a bunch of old games for the privilege of playing the newest Final Fantasy game.
A seasoned fanboy
In the following years the boy would play everything related to Final Fantasy. When he couldn’t find the original game he would find the ROM. He played and replayed the classics he had learned to love in his youth, he learned the correct numbering of the SNES games, he played the real Final Fantasy II and III. He played Final Fantasy V and bought all the remakes (Final Fantasy Origins, Chronicles, Anthology, Dawn of Souls). He tried Final Fantasy Adventure (which turned out to be a marketing name since it was really a Mana game) and the Final Fantasy Legend games. Even when a game was not really fun, he forced himself to play it just to know more about the fantastic universe of Final Fantasy.
He played everything.
The enlightenment
He loved the series so much that he spent a lot of time in forums discussing the games (released and announced). He learned about all the re-releases of his games, how plenty of games were first released in Japan, then in North America then re-released in Japan with just enough additional content to make plenty of fans buy the games again (and make the North Americans envy them). He learned about the shady marketing tactics the company had used to sell games. They used the Final Fantasy name to boost sales of other series.
One day they announced what fans everywhere were hoping for since the release of Final Fantasy VII: more Final Fantasy VII. They announced a mobile phone game, a movie and a spin-off game based on a character from the original game.
It was really that one game that put the last nail in the coffin. The game didn’t appeal to the boy (who had become an adult) at all and the reviews didn’t help either. The low scores confirmed the boy’s suspicions: SquareEnix could make a bad game. The fanboy in him had died. He was still very much a fan of the series, but he no longer bought games just because of a name stamped on it.
26Jun09
As a lot of other games, Final Fantasy has a limit of 255 for it’s character stats. You may have wondered why such an arbitrary limit? Limits of 99 or 999 (or any number of nines) make sense because they are limited by the number of digits used to display the value. 255 uses 3 digits, so why not go up to 999?
The reason behind this has to do with the way the data is stored in memory. Computers only understand binary numbers so every number or word of anything used to communicate with a computer is encoded in binary, each binary value is represented by a bit. The bit can either be 1 or 0.
Here’s how bits represent values:
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0100 = 4
1000 = 8
1011 = 11
...
Since only one bit doesn’t give much information, bits were grouped together to make a wider array of values available. This group was named a byte. Typically, one byte is a group of 8 bits. Every information transmitted to and from the computer or console is transmitted using this byte format. Nowadays, computers send multiple bytes at the same time to improve the efficiency of communications, a 64 bit computer transmits information using 8 bytes (8 * 8 bits = 64 bits) at the time.
Now let’s take a look at the range of values one byte gives us:
1000 0000 = 128
1111 1111 = 255
As you can see, 255 represents the biggest value that can be represented by a single byte and that’s why Final Fantasy (and other games) have used this value as the limit for stats. Nowadays, most information is stored using at least 32 bits at the time so we could technically use values up to slightly less than 4.3 billion, but that wouldn’t be so practical.
04Jun09
As you may know, there have been quite some news about Final Fantasy games lately.
First of all, coming from E3:
Final Fantasy XIV
- FFXIV is the sequel to FFXI in the sense that it is a MMO
- They currently want to make it a global game, meaning no separate servers depending on the region: Japanese players will be able to play with American players
- They are aiming for a release in 2010
Final Fantasy XIII
- Summons are once again a central part of the story. Characters will be attached to one summon (not selectable by players). It is not known if more than one summon will be attached to characters or if all characters will have a summon (or more). The attached summons seem to be fixed by the story.
Final Fantasy VII
- It’s a direct port of the PlayStation game.
- It costs 9.99 US$
- Available for download now (1.32GB required)
And finally, news coming from Nintendo:
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
- The sequel to the excellent Final Fantasy IV (also known as Final Fantasy II in North America)
- Released on WiiWare at the beginning of the week
- Contains all the episodes (9) from the cellular game from Japan
- Costs 800 Wii points
02Jun09
Final Fantasy XIV was just announced at Sony’s press conference at the E3. Not much is known yet, but it’s supposed to be a PS3 exclusive and have some online features.
02Jun09
Sony has just announced that Final Fantasy VII will be available for download over the PlayStation Network today. This is great news for people who have been waiting for a port/remake for so long. So if you have a PSP, you’ll be able to play this classic that changed the role playing genre anywhere you want.
13Feb09
I remember when I first discovered the fantastic world of japanese RPGs; I was very young, too young to be able to play, but a few images stick in my head.
I was probably around 5 to 8 years old at a family Christmas party. My older cousin and my dad were discussing this new game called Final Fantasy. They had trouble playing because they didn’t know how to create a party approprietly. This is the first image I remember:
Yes, that is a 4 black belts party. Of course I didn’t really know what it was and it was all a bit overwhelming to me so I didn’t play that game until much later. I didn’t hear more about Final Fantasy or any other RPG until years later when my father bought Dragon Warrior.