In 7, practically all the characters come along with you throughout, there are only a few times when people leave, and few times when the party splits up and does totally different things.
In 8 and 9 it’s a lot different. At times the party just splits into 2 for different things. Such as attack missile base VS warn Garden in 8. And even more so in 9, almost half of the game is 2 seperate parties doing different things, like Burmercia [Zid, Frey, Vi] VS the cable car trip [Stein, Dagg].
And your pont is…? They split up a bit in FFVI too. Aside from Tidus being thrown off the Al Bhed ship in the beginning of the game, once someone joins you in FFX they never leave. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
In some of the earlier Final Fantasies people leave as well, and come back later. You know…Kain from FFIV, and characters from FFII (or FFIII, or both, can’t remember) as well.
Guys, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a point to Miltank’s comment. It’s a Final Fantasy messageboard, he can talk about anything to do with the games. I mean, we spent weeks discussing how much Cloud’s sword weighs and that doesn’t really have a point either.
And I think that you split up into parties more in FF9 simply because the characters are more interesting then they are in FF7. In these situations emphasis is placed on the character’s emotions and thoughts, and since the FF9 characters seem to have more of these, it makes more sense to send them out into groups and let their personalities “bounce” off each other.
And it’s nice to have a different character in charge of your team, right? One of my favourite scenes in Final Fantasy VII was seeing Cid trying to lead your party for a while.
Sorry I didn’t mark for spoliers… I don’t know how!
Dalton, I don’t think the fact that Cid contols you party for a while, is really much of a spoiler. Why Cid has to, is more of a spoiler.
Although when teams split up like they do in FF9, it means you have to use characters that normally you may not have touched with a 10 foot barge pole. So it adds more variety to your team.
Yeah, Im replaying FF9 for the first time in two years. It’s my most disliked FF of the PS genre, and well after playing it again, it’s not so bad. I don’t necessarily like the characters (except for Freya and Amarant ^^) but it’s still cool that it’s totally diverse like that. Jumping back and forth in between parties.
The only time character switching is really bad is when someone permanently leaves your team, and you left good equipment on him or her! Certain FF games such as FF4 don’t give that equipment back to you!
In FF1 and 3 you use the same four characters throughout the game, although you can change their class in 3, which doesn’t much matter because none of them have individually defined characters (At a few locations in 3, you may have a fifth person tag along, but they are an npc who doesn’t participate in battles). 5 is similar, except their are a couple points when you temporarily lose characters, which can be tricky if you haven’t leveled a second white mage or something. In FF2, three of the characters are constant while the fourth character varies depending on where in the plot you are. The party varied significantly in four depending on where you were in the plot. Six varied a little in that sometimes the party was predetermined and sometimes you could pick. FF7 essentially kept everyone together the whole time with a few exceptions. 8 and 9 split up your group at points, and FFX keeps it together the whole time once you’ve finally gathered everyone, Auron and Rikku taking slightly longer to join the party.
11 doesn’t apply since it’s an MMORPG, and we don’t know about future games.
I’m not going to count MQ because two people isn’t a party. I haven’t played Tactics yet. FFTA has some characters that must be present for certain story missions, but you’re mostly free to use whomever you like.
Panama, I realize the point of these forums is jut to talk about the games and their doesn’t need to be a point, but the topic is kind of like saying, “Hey guys, the sky is blue, but sometimes it’s grey.” Not that it’s a bad observation or anything, but it’s not a revelation, so we don’t exactly have a topic to launch of, although aparently it does work as a conversation starter.
So anyway, I didn’t intend to come off as mean or anything, I just hoped that there would be some sort of theory that went along with the observation.
But surely you realize that what you said has not been written in the Message Board Rules, so how could a new person have known? I have not seen Miltank here before, so if the post was really pointless, we would let it slide, right?
I like topics like these. They branch off into fun conversations about RPGs and controllable characters.
Then there’s the issue of the PHS. As in any save point Neither 8 or 9 has such a common source of switching members. You need to go somewhere, eg Garden cockpit, or Blue Narciuss [sp?].
Yeah, the phs in 7 pretty much makes party splitting pointless. But then, the junction exchange in 8 more or less does the same thing, given the monsters’s level system.
I think that pretty much epitomizes the message board. These topics can really turn into anything, and thats really fun to watch.
And the PHS was fun… I never really liked how you had to go back to your ship or whatever to change characters. Having a system like Chrono Trigger would be BLISS, being able to change your characters at any given time is awesome.
You actually could switch your characters in FF8 at any save point (unless they were unavailable due to story issues). And I agree, it’s way better than having to go to specific places to switch. Basically, it’s just a way of fastforwarding the whole “I go to the airship, we switch characters, I come all the way back to where I am” thing. Pretend they did all that and get on with the game. 8p