That is so nice to hear 
this club had more than 100 people voting in the first poll, but less than 10 users commenting in the last threads, so it’s hard to know how many actually played the game! Would be curious to know how many finished (or plan to), maybe @simias you can set up a poll after the last week?
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I’ve decided to just play the last 3 weeks together once they get posted (since I was already behind a bit). So I’m planning to be done with the club for the last week.
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I feel like the each thread’s poll already gives us this info? What would be the difference?
At any rate we had 22 people saying that they were still playing the game last week, 12 weeks into the club, a good majority of which were following along. I think it’s pretty good by “book club” standards, especially given that it’s a fair bit more challenging than the ABC or even the BBC for instance.
I remember a similar pattern when we had Full Metal Alchemist in the IMC. Many people immediately got excited because it’s a very popular manga that a lot of learners want to read in Japanese. But then the club actually started and it turned out that it was, in fact, an intermediate manga not suitable for beginners, and things got real quiet real fast.
The distribution of learners on these forums (or any language learning forum really) always skews heavily towards beginners, and I’m sure many people said they were interested in the club but then realized that it was more than they could chew at this point. If you look at the list of people saying that they would join the club at the start, there are a few single-digit WK level accounts. Assuming that this is representative of their Japanese level, this was kinda doomed to failure.
And I want to be clear that I’m not trying to make these people feel bad or foolish, there’s no harm in trying and I hope that it’ll be motivation to improve and eventually return to it. I certainly have been in this position in the past. I’ll have to return to Persona 4 eventually… That was a little too hardcore when I first tried.
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When I finished my first book club on WK, there was this post at the end of it, I thought it was quite cool. I also thought it was standard (since I had a sample size of 1) but turns out it wasn’t, haven’t seen this kind of wrap up since, which I think is too bad!
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I dipped my toes into the FF6 PR (since it was the first RPG I fell in love with) a few months before starting this, and it is BRUTAL compared to FF1. FF5 PR was also difficult, but simpler language than 6. FF2 PR is harder than FF1, but not much. Of that sample of 4 that I’ve tried, it really seems like they get harder as they go along. Coincidence? I have no idea, but it looks like going through them in “release” order is a good plan,
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Even in their own language, players are bad at finishing games after they’ve decided to start. I’ve heard numbers around 10-20%. Looking at the pixel remasters, about half of people have finished it FF1 (it’s a darn short game), but only about 1/5 of people finished FF6 (at least 3x longer).
Let’s look at it more closely, actually. Week one, only 62 people voted! By week 2, that was 46. By week 12 we have 21. One third of all people who were here on day 1 are (theoretically) still playing, and almost half of people who stuck around for the second week are. That’s pretty good!
(Compare to trails in the sky, where 16(!) people voted in the first week, and 47 weeks later, it was down to 6 hardcore players)
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Yeah I think the technical and memory limitations forced them to use a fairly simple script to begin with. The 3 first Famicom games are full kana, and Final Fantasy I was limited to one textbox per character for some reason.
Even with the script revisions in the various ports, that core simplicity remains.
For 5 and 6 the constraints were mostly gone (just some kanji restrictions). Starting with 7 the writers could basically use the full Japanese language without hindrance, plus the CD format meant that text size became irrelevant (1MB of text was unthinkable on Famicom, heavy on SNES but basically negligible on PS1 when you have 600MB of storage at your disposal).
As a random datapoint the total script of FF1 per our communal spreadsheet adds up to 15k characters, counting all optional dialogue.
Meanwhile I just checked with a random website and the dialogue of the mandatory parts[1] of what is effectively the tutorial/introduction of Final Fantasy VIII adds up to about 20k characters. That bit of the game is about one fifth of the first disc (out of 4) of FF8, and there’s a ton of optional dialogue on top of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could reach 10k chars just chatting with random NPCs in the starting area, before you even fight your first enemy.
That is, the dialogue required to progress the story, ignoring all optional convos with NPCs ↩︎
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I’m one of the people who is still playing and intends to finish (I’m way behind, as reflected in my vote on the week 12 thread - I’m still all the way back at week 6 
). I’m planning on using the upcoming holidays to catch up, since I’ll have a lot more time available to play while I’m out of office…
Uh oh… 
FF6 was my intro to video games way back when, so it’s definitely my favorite in the series. I’m really looking forward to it, as well as FF4, which is my second favorite. So far FF1 hasn’t been too bad (so far, though I am so far behind, it might change before the end…), but ‘brutal’ as the comparison does make me a bit nervous…
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It’s hardly a perfect comparison, but I played through the intro of FF6 PR, until you get to Figaro. Honestly, you could rush that in maybe half an hour, playing normally in English. I added 78 obscure new words to my deck. In contrast, I’ve added about 240 new words through the entirety of FF1. The grammar is also more complex than FF1 - less archaic, but more literary, with longer sentences on average. I can’t wait to tackle the spreadsheet on that one.
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I’m sure I will be very grateful to you and anyone else who works on the spreadsheet! Actually, I already am - I’ve been using it as a reference for this game too.
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I have been following along and playing each week without voting or commenting much. There are probably dozens of us! Now that I think about it, this is my first time actually completing FF1 after 2-3 attempts over the years. I am notoriously terrible at completing single player games.
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It’s true that the Japanese gets more rich and diverse in future entries but if you make it through FF1 you probably have the level required to figure that out. You’ll just have to be patient and look things up.
The real challenge will be the sheer amount of text every week. I still want to be reasonably beginner friendly but I’m not going to be able to progress the story with ~1k characters every week on average like we’re doing right now.
I was toying with the idea of compromising by making several smaller threads at a higher frequency to make it more approachable. Like making two or three threads a week with a smaller amount of text every time. We’ll see when we get there… FF2 will be relatively tame still.
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I think it depends on how much emphasis there is on the world building, which might be indeed something they put more and more focus on as the series went on.
I had no problem with FFI and FFII, just a few lookups here and there, but struggling with ゼノギアス, lots of world building and political explanations right from the start 
Makes also sense that it evolved thanks to the technological improvements.
Good to know! So we shouldn’t rush with starting FFII but give people time to finish the first one
Nice, welcome too and congrats! I think you’re right, there are probably more lurkers than people commenting! Are you going to play along for FFII as well?
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Oh that’s pretty cool I like that
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I’m the same as well. I got up to week…8, cleared (dungeon) Gulg but not the (dungeon) Ice Cave, purely due to time reasons. Hoping to finish up during the holidays before the end of the year.
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Lol, yeah once we get to FF4 and beyond I think I will need to dedicate a lot more time to this than I have with FF1… But the nice thing is that I have already played everything FF4 and above multiple times, so I will already know where the story is going. And I will be more motivated to look up and actually learn more words, since I really love those games.
I think these first three games are fun, but I am not taking them too seriously, and not fretting on adding tons of words to my decks and stuff, as I am just here for the fun of playing through them and picking up the basics. Maybe they deserve more loving, but at WK level 28, the siren song of the review queue is strong. And like I said, once we get to 4 I will be pretty invested in learning more for replayability and for better understanding future games.
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I am the same way! I have owned this game on multiple systems and never actually finished it! But reading everyone’s comments and their excitement and interest in the game keeps me motivated (along with learning the Japanese, of course). I guess I am just more of a lurker than a poster, but I enjoy seeing everyone’s experience with the game, especially those who have never played a final fantasy game before. I also love all of the random final fantasy lore everyone shares, and the translation help in the spreadsheet. Really spices things up.
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Yes, I know I’ve never played FF2, so excited to continue along for that one.
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I started adding the polls to next week’s thread draft and decided to hold our own awards while I was at it.
Currently I have:
- Best class
- Best dungeon
- Best boss
- Best NPC
All the votes are ranked for maximum confusion.
If you have other ideas of categories or want to nominate NPCs, you have two days to let me know.
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This looks fun!
Some other categories I thought of:
- Best enemy sprite (boss excluded)
- Best boss enemy sprite
- BEST MUSIC!!
EDIT: i guess the enemy and music one’s can’t be made into polls for too many options, but we could still simply express our preferences in the thread!
And to nominate a couple memorable NPCs:
- The pirate captain
- “WELCOME TO CORNELIA” guy, for creating maybe the first meme/reference of the saga and naming a trope
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