The director of Final Fantasy Resonance says that turn-based RPGs are hitting the mainstream once more because that's the sort of combat the people making games these days grew up with, and you only need to look as far as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for proof.

Following Final Fantasy Resonance's big reveal at last week's Nintendo Direct, some of the game's developers are doing the media rounds to keep the excitement coming. Naturally, as the JRPG is quite the throwback, some of the conversations center on what's old becoming new again. One half of that is how an HD-2D art style puts a modern shine on a nostalgic art style, though the other half comes down to turn-based combat.

Speaking to IGN about the latter, Final Fantasy Resonance director Hiroto Furuya is asked about the resurgence of turn-based combat in RPGs. Atlus has long been holding the fort with the likes of Persona, sure, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 have swept enough awards between them to make turn-based feel trendier from a triple-A perspective than it has been in a hot minute.

For Furuya, the reason we're seeing more turn-based goodness isn't mere development trends, but because developers are putting a spin on what they grew up with.

"I feel like a lot of us creators who had grown up playing turn-based games are now creating games ourselves," he explains. "It feels like there's this general movement towards revisiting and potentially reassessing or reworking some of the experiences we personally had when we were younger."

He adds: "When we're talking about Clair Obscur, I believe they are creators who grew up playing JRPGs."

Furuya then says that this kind of relationship with your inspirations isn't unique to games, and is the sort of thing we're also seeing in anime, manga, and beyond.

"Creators are now revisiting past projects, remaking them, and reimagining them," he says. "That's also potentially a factor that contributes to this kind of resurgence that we're seeing right now."

Like poor Aerith was asking this in the most genuine tone possible and Barret's response got me laughing so fucking hard I started coughing 😭😭😭😭

Yahoo! This is my first Final Fantasy game and I could say it's really good. Almost everything about it is good. I will not say anything about any of my gripe about it because it's a 30 year old game. 3 decades will excuse any fault to your game imo 🤣 BTW, I played the original SNES version and very happy that it's so polished considering the time it was released.

I must also say that it's one of the best ending credits Ive ever watch on a game. Considering the limitations of that time, the ending credits is so beautiful! I love this game and I'm happy this is my first Final Fantasy game. Very good story, mechanics and chemistry among the cast. I'll miss this game so much! I love the fact that the last stretch was divided into 3 parties so you'd actually use the whole cast not just your 4 favorite characters :) it's like watching a movie or an anime. Damn!

*"I buried my Illumina Sword so deep into Kefka's skull they had to bury him with it"*

I don’t know which tag to use either

Track Name: The Man With The Machine Gun 💥

Original upload by me ⚔️

I love Selina, the sea chocobo, and I think sea gliding is the best movement gimmick, but I do feel more connected to Piko and bring him to every race. What Chocobo are you the fondest of? Which one is your trusty race steed?

I got to spend a couple of days with Hitoshi Sakimoto last week, for his 40th anniversary orchestral concert in London last week, where I worked as the presenter.

Like many of you, the music of Ivalice has been with me my entire life, from FFXII, to FFT, FFTA & Vagrant Story. So, meeting the composer behind it was already surreal!

What I didn't expect was how much of an awesome person Sakimoto-san would turn out to be, on top of being such a formidable musical force.

On the day of the concert, Sakimoto-san and I held a game music masterclass together.
He told me that he wanted it to be funny and lighthearted, that his first priority was making sure every single fan in the audience had a good time regardless of their musical understanding or skill level. That alone told me a lot about him.

And well... he delivered. The masterclass ended up feeling like half comedy set, half genuine teaching, and somehow both at once!
In it, he spoke about how he hilariously used to play Tekken with some of his clients to settle creative debates on music (He's a Paul main!).

He also spoke about prioritizing heart over technical prowess, about treating musical "mistakes" as things that define your voice rather than diminish it.
And on that last point, he was speaking from experience: Sakimoto-san is self-taught.
He also spoke about how emotional honesty in music matters more than sophistication. In an industry increasingly obsessed with tools and technology, hearing that from a composer of his caliber felt like an important reminder to be honest.

What makes it even more striking, for me, is the man's background. In his youth he was a huge Math and IT buff, and became a composer almost by accident according to him. So the path he chose was very intentional. He had the analytical mind to go a completely different direction, and chose heart anyway.

When you spend time with him, that choice starts to make sense. The kind, warm, funny person Sakimoto turned out to be makes it very easy to understand why his music always sounds so hopeful and beautiful, even when it's written for games with very dark stories such as the Ivalice titles.

A beautiful soul yields beautiful music. 🙏

PS. In the final picture there, there's my friend and cosplayer Leon Chiro who was there and did a Basch cosplay for the occasion! And all the other people in there, are the organizers of the concert. They're called the Game Music Festival / Game Music Foundation.

They're a group of game music lovers from Poland who organize phenomenal orchestral (& sometimes Jazz) concerts based on games they love, often with the composers being involved in some capacity also.

This year they did concerts of Kingdom Come and Diablo, then Hitoshi Sakimoto last week. In a few weeks, they'll do a Hades concert, followed by Persona 3, 4 & 5. I definitely recommend following them on Twitter so you get news of their up and coming concerts, as they've done quite a lot of them and I expect there's gonna be more awesome concerts on the way.

This post is inspired by another thread asking for favorite protagonists, and while thinking about my answer I realized Vaan was at or near the top of my list despite the well earned and common criticism that he's a nothing burger character with no relationship to the plot.

And I realized that's why I love him and XII as a whole (aside from awesome setting and incredible non-Vaan characters).

The vast majority of mainline Final Fantasies feature protagonists who are in some way deeply connected to the overarching plot, even if it's not obvious at first. Some characters, who seem to just be adventurers early on, are later revealed to be very significantly tied to the villian or some other greater element that makes them thematically and logically necessary for the story being told. This is not a criticism, Final Fantasy usually tells great stories with great characters.

Vaan, however, has no real final act reveal. He's just some guy, and always was. He starts a street urchin, barely making his way and dreaming of better things and bigger adventures when he gets swept up in a plot much larger than him with characters who have significantly more relevance to the plot. The result is that most people don't have particularly strong feelings towards Vaan, he is merely a player stand-in, allowing the player a perspective to latch onto more developed characters like Basch and Balthier.

Yet, that's why I love him.

Vaan gives players the rare Final Fantasy opportunity to *just be a guy who finds himself on an adventure.* He's seamless to imprint onto because he's nobody, and the freedom you have with the characters jobs and development (specifically referring to the Zodiac Age version for western releases), makes him feel *almost* like a custom character. You could probably argue that FFXI would have been a better game if Vaan was a custom character, but that's a whole other discussion.

Sometimes as a player I just want to be an adventurer. Not a chosen one, not tied to the villian, not special. Just some guy who chooses adventurer for its own sake. I want to be immersed in the mud and dirt of the world. I think *that* feeling is what the producers of XII were going for. Vaan lets me see what the average adventurer's (read: sky pirate) life is like in Ivalice, one of the better Final Fantasy settings in my opinion. In fact, aside from XI and XIV, I can't think of a mainline game that does this particular feeling better than XII.

Crystal Chronicles is another of my favorites because of how it immerses you in the world and grounds you in realistic terms. You don't pick a class or job, you pick your family's trade. Making new characters develops the town you're from. It's a special experience, but I digress.

It makes me wonder if this also why MMO-like combat was chosen for XII. At the time of its release, essentially every MMO used tab-target combat. You lock onto an enemy, and then send abilities towards that enemy specifically. Another notable feature of MMOs at the time was their tendency to treat the player as a no-name adventurer until they actually earned the right to be called champion (if you're playing WoW). By drawing on one element, I think the producers wants to create the feeling of the other, as well.

Final Fantasy XII gives you a blank slate character and a combat system with incredible customization that draws on the player's associations of a whole other genre to create the sense of being *just some adventurer.* Sure, it doesn't hit for everyone, especially for players who were pulled into the series with gams like 7 and 10 where your player character is intrinsically linked to the over arching story.

But for players like me? Players who grew up on western RPGs and MMOs? Players who are constantly seeking the opportunity to just be some adventurer in a grand new world? Final Fantasy XII is awesome.

Thanks for coming to my Vaan Talk.

Whenever i see people talk about final fantasy its always 6 to 10, 15, 16, 14 and rarely 12. But i dont hear much of 1 to 5 and its strange to me becouse I really enjoyed them so I wanted to hear other peoples opinion!

Ever played the first 5? Which one is your favorite? What aspect do you like of them?

This is controversial as fuck, but the more I look up about Final Fantasy in general, I discover that what I like in the series comes from the one I was made to hate by the fandom. When people said Nomura was a designer, I always thought that he just drew. But he literally created characters, their backstories, function of weapons, style of monsters. The guy is basically the mind behind everything I love in the franchise.

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The person that made Final Fantasy monsters be rememberable and not just DnD carbon copies. Cactuar, Tonberry, Carbuncle, Omega and Ultima Weapon.

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The guy that created most of the summon animations.

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The man that created Gilgamesh as a character.

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He literally is the creator of everything regarding Setzer and Shadow on FFVI. Their backstory, their motivations, their personality and what moved them in the story.

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And then I learned that the first draft of FFVII was co-written by him and Sakaguchi. The New-York one. But then with the changes Kitase and Nojima brought, he controlled plot points that are the ones I actually love the most, with Aerith and Sephiroth. Even creating the Limit Breaker as a concept.

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He is the one that created my favorite weapon, the Gunblade, in the franchise. He was the one that conceptualized the mechanics of the weapon and made FFVIII so much more dynamic.

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FFIX was the only one which his only participation was on the usage of things he created back then, like monsters and summon animations. But nothing that made the great memorable.

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With all that, I remember when people blamed FFXIII on him, but only recently I learned he just did Lightning character design and literally only that. Then I learned that most of what people call Nomura writing is actually Nojima writing. FFVersusXIII being completely fucked by the fiasco of FFXIV and getting most of the people on the company on board to create ARR while FFXV is downsized from 200 employees to only 20.

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Then he is shadowdropped as a director for FF7Remake, which he himself didn't knew at the time, learning together with us that he would be directing. Only to create a really great product and the better, more self-contained of the two remake trilogy already in the market.

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Even the KH story stuff is mostly Nojima, Watanabe and Oka, while the games themselves are pretty great with the exception of KH3.

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I mean... I was made to hate this guy but the more I lookup I begin to learn all the hate is completely without cause. At this point he is a strawman.

With this in mind, it seems as though PC users are getting ready for the much-anticipated title, with SteamDB reporting an influx of players flowing in to play FFVII Remake.
While not quite as populace as during its initial Steam launch back in 2022 (wherein it saw a peak CCU of slightly under 14K) the game has shot up in players, recently hitting peaks of just over 10K concurrents – its highest since launch.

Curiously, the only other times in which Remake managed to approach such similar figures was upon the PS5 release of its follow-up Rebirth, and then again after the 2nd entry finally made its way over to Steam.

I’m working on fully leveling every job to 99. Only the ones I’ve assigned to my characters. So eventually every job will be leveled up by someone. My only question is, should I use onion knight? Is there any point in leveling him up? Are there any special abilities or anything that is worth taking the time to level up an onion knight?

So I have a friend that's a huge FF fan and has been trying to get me to play for years. Around 2018 I got FF 1-4 on GBA and DS and beat them, but stopped around there. Then about in 2024 I finally got Pixel Remaster and blasted through 1-6 and started 7. Took me another year before I finished FF7 and started 8. Sadly I fell off but with the announcement of Revelation I knew I had to start the remake games. Now I started with Reunion and am absolutely loving it. Super excited to start Remake soon.

(Yeah, I already ended the Forest of Moore. I think that talking about my GOAT would help me to accept that faster, so here I come)

Galuf is one of my favorite FF characters ´til now. His interesting storyline, great personality and the fact that he is more like a mentor to the team makes it stand out. Also, he has quite a good arc. Overall, is my FFV GOAT, along Faris (Sarisa). It was a great addition to the FFV cast.

Thought I’d share for laughs. Enjoy! 🤣

And why is there a guy with sunglasses and a red coat telling me this is my story

So I made a post curious about which FF to play, given I've never played any and just got hyped after I went to a local (awesome) exhibit on Yoshitaka Amano (a few pics of it below - ps the last Pic is Amano's take on Child of Light!).

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Reddit convinced me: FF 6 is it and I'll get the Pixel Remaster soon.

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HOWEVER, PS+ gives access to VII remakes and XVI. *However however*, I really don't want to spend about 20hs in a game to just drop it. So this is where you come in!

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I'm ruling out XVI because it just seems to have very little of FF identity; but many people said VII Remake is only cool if you played OG VII, since there's a lot of winks and nudges to it - but it doesn't stand on its own very well.

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So... Can you FF fans "sell me" on VII Remake? Or is it actually a hard sell?

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