The Butterfly Effect: The Evolution of Graphics in Final Fantasy

[eXo]

Edition: 01 Series: Final Fantasy Topic: Graphics Welcome to the first installment of our newest Editorial (at the time of writing) series, The Butterfly Effect. This edition will be focusing on the Final Fantasy series and how graphics have evolved over time. My goal with this is to try to highlight how graphical changes have effected the games [...]

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[Adiuvo]

Fantastic article Serideth, you really bring up some good points, especially about the useless minigames that developers like the shove in. The further installments will definitely be worth a read.

 

[xploren]

Excellent read. I agree with Adiuvo, you brought up some very good points, some of them being ones I've never really thought about before. Keep it up.

 

[Serideth]

Oh you guys *blushes*.

Next thing is a retro review which I'll be hopefully doing tomorrow, then I'll do the next one of these, basically trying to do them a lot more frequently now.

 

[xploren]

Looking forward to them. Maybe you should make it a weekly thing to lighten your work.

 

[Serideth]

Looking forward to them. Maybe you should make it a weekly thing to lighten your work.

Well I'm out of a job right now and all my money goes on cigarettes so I'm trapped here at my computer so we'll see.

Also I meant to add in the article if anyone has any opinions in the next one (Metal Gear Solid (Story lines)) feel free to email tenchitsu@mformature.net or it's just going to me my opinions (which is fine too since I rock).

 

[twelve]

I quite like the minigames. Except Blitzball.

7 had the best for sheer amount of them, especially the snowboarding.

Never really thought about the problem with finding things on the world map due to the graphics but you're definitely correct.

I dunno about this tho:
"The third generation of Final Fantasy games took a huge step forward (I'm actually tempted to include FFIX in this group) in terms of graphics"

I was going to say I didn't think IX was much better than VIII but when looking for examples I found that IX was actually a lot better looking that VIII. Still nowhere near X tho.

What I find odd though is that XII looks a lot worse than X. It seems they've tried to add too much detail into it and have sacrified clear visuals for high detail with jaggy edges.

 

[Serideth]

What I find odd though is that XII looks a lot worse than X. It seems they've tried to add too much detail into it and have sacrified clear visuals for high detail with jaggy edges.

I noticed that myself, I disliked 12 anyway though.

 

[twelve]

Another factor in XII looking worse is that I played X on a CRT and XII on an HDTV (tho it was with the component cables so should have looked good).

 

[Lampworker]

....

 

[spike021]

Great read Serideth.

I agree that the touch on the subject of mini-games was definitely worth the time since I never really thought of it that way myself before. Chocobo racing was always my favorite, but I guess these things can vary from person to person . I always find it puzzling why some mini-games are added due to their highly irrelevant nature to the game itself, but I guess it really depends on how the development studios think of them. One great example for me is actually in Ratchet and Clank where you have the option of going to gladiator rings to do numerous side activities in return for artifacts.

Great nonetheless Serideth, and I hope to see you continue writing great stories

 

[eldiablov]

Interesting article Serideth. Hope we can get some more people onboard and a few more ideas off the ground in the near future

 

[yellowdrops]

To me, games in the last generation lost a lot of its argument...

I think that this is the reason why we see a lot of series being expanded eternally... (not FF in this case)

But since they are working so hard on the graphics, they lost a little bit of the guideline and gameplay. Few games have a great history at nowdays and thats really sad for old school gamers...

Cool article, Serideth.