In what should probably not be a surprise to anyone who knows me and my video game habits but is probably nevertheless a surprise to everyone I know, I’ve gotten really into Final Fantasy XIV. To be abundantly clear, given the way some people get super obsessed with this game, I’m playing it a normal amount. I’m slightly less into it than I’m into Baldur’s Gate 3 every time I start playing that again and much less than I was into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which means it will probably become a sustainable habit. Which is probably what is surprising to the people who know me since I’m not really into Massively Multiplayer Online games. The only two I’ve ever played with any regularity are Overwatch and Destiny 2 and have bounced off literally every single other MMO I’ve ever tried. Hell, I eventually stopped playing Overwatch and Destiny 2 as well. Those were extenuating circumstances, though. I stopped playing Overwatch after a couple years because they changed the game to support play at their league level and that made all the things I enjoyed doing absolutely unpleasant to do unless I had a solid team behind me (and that almost never happened). I played Destiny 2 for years and only stopped because the people I played with were no longer available to me due to my connection to them revealing himself to be undependable in a way I couldn’t overlook or let go. Neither of those reasons has anything to do with a commitment or my attention span, but every single other MMO I’ve tried–like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Runescape (back in the day), League of Legends, and so many more–fell by the wayside in less than a month. Even Palia, as much as I enjoy it, rarely lasts a month before I forget it exists for six to twelve months. But Not FFXIV, though. At least not so far, anyway.
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Back To Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Posting
One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
Continue readingI Played Original Final Fantasy 7 So I Can Critically Engage With Remake & Rebirth
Just a quick head’s up: this post contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7: Remake. Feels a little weird to put a spoiler tag on a game as old as FF7 (it is only six years younger than I am, after all!), but it’s pretty relevant given Remake and, more recently, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
For the fourth time, I started playing Final Fantasy 7. The original, I mean. I’ve only started playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake three times so far. I actually played Remake before I’d played the original. I grew up in a limited console household and none of my friends had a PlayStation around the time that FF7 came out, so I missed my opportunity to enjoy it in my youth. When I had subsequent opportunities, mostly in college and afterwards, I just never felt inclined to spend the time. After all, so much about Sephiroth and the major plot twists of FF7 have seemed into general knowledge of the world. I mean, I knew Sephiroth was a ghost, that Cloud wasn’t really in SOLDIER, and that Aerith dies no matter what you do. Hell, a great example of that is that I’ve never once had to add the word “Sephiroth” to a personal dictionary on any web browser or cell phone I’ve ever owned and that’s not even true for “Aerith” or her incorrectly spelled variant name, “Aeris.” I was under the impression that there wasn’t really much left in the game for me to experience, especially after I watched Final Fantasy 7: Machinabridged and got a lot more of the details. Still, as I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and realized that my save data for Final Fantasy 7: Remake hadn’t transferred from my PS4 to my PS5, I figured I might as well give the original game another try.
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