Square made up for the trash FF4 and FF5 covers by letting Amano do his thing for once. One of the best videogame covers ever made IMO.
I’m starting this preplay early because FF6 feels daunting for me to prepare. It’s a pretty huge game and I only played it once over 20 years ago.
Having played the first ~2h of the game, I’m surprised by how much more difficult than FF5 it feels so far Japanese-wise. It’s the biggest difficulty gap so far IMO, higher than the FF3 → FF4 transition. I think I will have to aim for a slower pace than FF5, which means that my estimate that we would reach FF8 within a year might have been a bit optimistic indeed.
Having this up before we’ve even properly started 5 feels wild but makes sense that you’d want to get started early. Really looking forward to this one when we do get to it. Especially given the reverence with which fans discuss the game these days
Also proud of the club for getting to the not-quite beginner stage. To be fair I think we already reached that to an extent with 4
FF6 was the first JP game I tried to play. It was **** brutal so I backed away and did more study. I started a “proper” preplay, but since I haven’t finished transcribing FFV, it isn’t too far in.
It is much more manageable for me now. Nowadays, it’s Persona and Trails games that kick me in the teeth.
I haven’t played any FF in Japanese besides FF4, but it’s not that surprising to me since FF6 starts to build a more complex narrative. Despite having proper character backstories and such in FF4, the narrative is still pretty basic. As long as you have a decent understanding of medieval terminology, it’s really not that complicated. FF6 steps into a completely different kind of setting for the first time.
It’s true of course but I didn’t expect the magnitude of it. I feel like I had to look more things up in 2h of FFVI than in the entirety of FFV. It seems that this was the point where Square decided that they were making games for grownups.
It’s a little bit of everything. The level of language used by NPCs varies a lot. More slang. More idioms. The narrative is also more complex and you’re dropped in the middle of a pre-existing conflict, so you have to infer a lot at the start. It all feels very dense.
But I don’t want to scare people away, if you make it through FF4 and FF5 you can deal with that stuff, it just requires a bit more effort.
I’m really torn about the first character’s name. She’ll always be Terra to me, but the character is technically named Tina in the original Japanese, so I guess I’ll refer to her as that in the spreadsheet. I’ll be calling her Terra in any discussions though.
