Good God...WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO FINAL FANTASY!!!

Hello gentle viewers, tis' me Nollaf again. Sorry that I have neglected to post recently but I have been on a lengthily trip to Yellowstone National Park...it was...kinda fun. Anyhow, I have come to rant about how Sqaure Enix is destroying the franchise of Final Fantasy. 15 years ago, you had a awesome RPG with a final battle based off of Divine Comedy, a tower of Pandemonium and thousands of horrific aberrations before you and on top, Kefka Palazzo...in a monstrous form resembling Lucifer himself. Now that is BAD ASS!!! (Pardon my french) Final Fantasy was always a great franchise, with a brutally awesome storyline which often times reflected modern day issues seething with rich character development and a musical score that could make Chuck Norris cry. That was FF during 1994-2000. But then, the fan girls came...because of Sephiroth.

Sephiroth, the One-Winged Angel...he was a flawed villain, a homicidal mama's boy who wanted to become a god, destroy all life and recreate the planet as a utopia. Then he would sail the cosmos with his disturbingly alien mother, Jenova. Aw...isn't that sweet? Sephiroth was your fallen angel sort of villain, he used to be a famous hero who worked for an organization called SOLIDER (essintatally the game's equivalent of the army) a branch of the Shinra Electronic Power Company (Shinra Inc. for sort). But then he found that he was injected with the DNA of an alien goddess named Jenova and went insane, thinking that it was his birth right to rule the planet with his umm..."mother". Cool concept, he was sort of the hidden villain, he stayed in hiding throughout most of the game and had his "mother" do most of the dirty work for him, including killing one of the lead female protagonists (Click here to view one the most famous scenes in video game history). Keep in mind, most of the carnage was caused by either Jenova or the biological horrors known as the WEAPONS which the main characters accidentally released. Sephiroth had no major quotes to speak of, no epic moments, he didn't really do much of the carnage in the game.

But he had one saving grace, looking ridiculously hot. I mean, "Edward Cullen" hot. That's how FF began to become shallow. Final Fantasy VIII, wasn't really all that good...the character development was replaced by an incredibly long and complicated love story, to put it roughly it was a soap opera in a semi-futuristic setting with scantily clad witches as the villains. Not to mention the main villainies suffered from the Mortal Kombat disease (ie, replacing C with K) due to an awful mistranslation error which was fixed in later copies of the game.

Now we come to Final Fantasy IX, the villain was Kuja. Oh good god...Kuja. His personality was a mishmash of the best qualities of Kefka and Sephiroth. Unfortunately Kuja was such a god damn pretty boy that you couldn't even tell his gender really, there was this huge debate about Kuja's gender. Why? Click here. All though he did have some of the best minions of all time (Black Waltz, Zorn and Thorn), the guy walked around with a man thong...that isn't sexy that's just ridiculous. But apparently, love-starved fan girls disagree with me. I can't go to a chat board about Final Fantasy IX without seeing KUJA'S A SEXXXY BEAST!!! or something similar.

That was when the line between Final Fantasy and just your normal bull-crap anime based RPG was getting disturbingly thin. Now there's all these Fan Fiction writings about Cloud and Sephiroth making out, I'm all for gay rights but some things shouldn't be on the Internet.

Now, when Final Fantasy VII was just Final Fantasy VII. That was great, I loved it. But...then it had an anime series, then at least 3 spin off titles and then a freaking movie! What happened?! It's a video game people, one of the greatest games ever but, what the hell! Your turning one of the best creations in the history of electronic arts into just another commericalized piece of crap!

Now, Final Fantasy XI and XII were just AWFUL. The good thing about it was the graphics and one or two pieces of music. What happened to good old RPG when the story and character development made the games what it was? Now you have the main character waltz around without a shirt! Don't believe me? Click here. The story is getting repetitive and the characters are getting frankly shallow and archetypal (there only saving grace is awesome hair). But hopefully they will come to their senses and make FFXIV into a reflection of the good old days when your villains were insane dictators who actually destroyed the world...sigh.

On the Lighter Side

Well, despite their all too shallow and utter lack of taste in video game villains...fangirls are...kind of cute...I guess. With the makeup and the awesome hair...but meh. Too bad that they take style over substance any day of the week. Which is why the franchise is becoming rather shallow, but at least they know who Jenova is. But it's just their also into Twilight often times which is kinda sad. But they're...kinda...cute...esppically the older ones.