Final Fantasy Retrospective: Mobius Final Fantasy, June 24-June 30

 

And so it ends. Mobius Final Fantasy is now gone for good, unless the company were to make a surprise announcement in the future of a remake or re-release. This is, after all, a series that keeps on reselling its games for newer consoles and devices, even all the way up to Final Fantasy XII, and I’m sure the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy will eventually get that same treatment. Even Type-0 was re-released for PS3 and PS4, although Crisis Core is still a PSP exclusive.

That said, there are Final Fantasy games that are permanently out of reach, like the two WiiWare titles in the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series and unremarkable mobile titles like Final Fantasy Tactics S and Final Fantasy Agito. As far as I can tell, Mobius is the first time that we’re going to lose a Final Fantasy title that was treated by the company like a main series game even if it was never given a main series number.

While playing Mobius, this thought lingered in the back of my head like a cancer. If Mobius is going away, after five years of constant development, then what else is going to go away? Are the floodgates about to open and is Square-Enix going to swing the axe and shut down other long-running on-line games?

The example I keep coming back to is Final Fantasy XI, although I should probably be concerned about Brave Exvius, too. That game was released just four and a half months after Mobius, so unless it’s still doing extremely well, it would logically be next on the chopping block if Square-Enix needs to free up internal resources. The next one to go probably should be All The Bravest considering how unpopular it was, but the game might still be making the company more than enough money to keep it active.

Actually, Square-Enix claims that they never intended for us to think of All The Bravest as a game in the series, and thus they feel like they can get away with its existence.

The reason I keep thinking about Final Fantasy XI going away is that, if Square-Enix doesn’t come up with anything to take its place and carry the Final Fantasy XI name, it truly would be the first time a major Final Fantasy game is forever out of our reach. Right now, there haven’t been any announcements of anything else shutting down, but over the next five years, don’t be surprised if more of these long-running on-line and free-to-play games begin to disappear.

During the final week of Mobius, I tried to experience as much as I could, but I quickly realized that even though I was willing to sacrifice the Warrior of Despair storyline, I might not even get around to playing everything that I originally thought I had time for. As the Warrior of Light storyline continued, the developers structured the story so that players were required to do extra busywork in order to make progress. Chapter seven was an even bigger offender than anything that came before, requiring players to accumulate the Light of Hope by defeating powerful bosses. Despite that my I vs. I card didn’t exist at the time, the first several super bosses were Earth-elemental and thus it really felt like my strategy of using the card as an I Win button was being given a nerf from beyond time. My Phoenix Down supply was completely exhausted by even three of these fights, so I basically hit a wall until I could rent one of my other favourite crutch cards in order to brute force my way through. But make it through I did, only to find another potential wall blocking the path. A fight with a massively overpowered Garland ate up a significant amount of Phoenix Down, but through sheer brute force, I finally managed to make it through.

The Garland fight is a bit different, for as soon as he’s down to a sliver of health, he heals himself to full and must be brought back down to the final sliver of health a second time, upon which he heals himself again, then you’re actually allowed to defeat him. All the while, he has the power to defeat you in one round, and given his exceptionally high defense against Break attacks and his extreme amount of HP, using Limit Breaks against him are only marginally more effective than regular attacks. I feel like if I’d been playing the game for two years and built up my power and my knowledge of the game mechanics, I’d have had a bit of a better time of it and would be able to overcome him a little bit easier. Or maybe the fight is just there to sell Magicite so that players can go into the fight with a ton of Phoenix Down and brute force their way through. Garland is so strong, even my overpowered crutch cards aren’t enough.

Before returning to chapter seven, I decided to play through the entire Final Fantasy VIII crossover event, The Sleeping Lion. The event was released later on in the game’s life, during the Warrior of Despair storyline, and thus it incorporated characters that were active at the time. Garland was nowhere to be seen, but Meia, Sophie and Graff joined Sarah and the Warrior of Light as they participated in the story of Squall’s struggles against Ultimecia as the sorceress threatened the existence of Palamecia. The event doesn’t actually explain how the pair got there, and only at the very end, when the Warrior of Light awakens, do we wonder if this was just a dream he had. His waking up from the dream is presented as him barely remembering an adventure that happened, as if the act of sleeping it off caused the memories to slip through his fingers like wisps of smoke.

The hints are there, though. I touched upon it last week, but the effects of time compression unraveling are shown at the very end of Final Fantasy VIII in a video where it looks for all the world like Squall actually dies. This doesn’t happen, for after the end credits, we see that he survives and joins Rinoa under the stars. Despite the ending, fans have been debating for years whether or not Squall died, and they also debate when the death took place, at the end of disc four or at the end of disc one. His adventure in Mobius would seem to indicate that he and Ultimecia find themselves in Palamecia and continue their struggle until Ultimecia is finally defeated once and for all and flees back to Squall’s childhood home to pass along her powers before she expires. The constant reminders that Squall has a promise to keep are enough proof of where in his timeline that his adventure in Palamecia takes place.

The Sleeping Lion is a decent enough tribute to Final Fantasy VIII, it even evokes the same feeling of playing the original by somewhat recreating the original FMV, except Squall is fighting Ultimecia instead of Seifer. The first chapter also basically retraces the steps of the first few hours of the original game, and the final scene of the crossover, where the Warrior of Light wakes up, mimics the beginning of disc two to some extent.

And oh, the music! Final Fantasy VIII has one of my favourite soundtracks in the entire series, and most of the best tracks from the game are used in The Sleeping Lion. Granted, “Maybe I’m A Lion” is overused a bit much, which leads me to believe that maybe the team that worked on the crossover misinterpreted the song a little bit. I would hope that Nobuo Uematsu had at least some say in how his music was used, but I suspect that he did not.

In my own journey through Mobius, I found myself constantly jumping around the timeline. The Final Fantasy X crossover seems to take place early in the Warrior of Light’s journey, given that he’s alone when he meets Tidus, but the Final Fantasy VIII crossover takes place during the Warrior of Despair storyline, at a point where he keeps the company of several allies, many of whom he meets in this second storyline. I feel like the presence of Sarah and lack of Garland’s presence in The Sleeping Lion is a spoiler of some sort.

Jumping around in the chronology of Palamecia like I did, I found myself acquiring power unevenly. I was able to bring Squall’s sword back with me into chapter seven and after muscling my way past the wall I was stopped at, the rest of the chapter was a breeze. A very, very long, monsoon of a breeze.

In comparison, The Sleeping Lion took a couple days to play through several chapters that had been released in two parts each, so six chapters, I guess. Two days to see the entirety of Squall’s battle against Ultimecia in Palamecia. The game’s events, or at the very least The Sleeping Lion, were created to be played through without too much fuss. They even incorporate the original game’s Draw system in such a way to allow players to get through the event without hitting very many walls. Other than a few frustrating fights where the developers really wanted to make sure no one skipped a boss’s mechanics and thus they used Garland’s strategy of becoming immune to damage at specific percentages, The Sleeping Lion was balanced entirely by the Draw system. Spells are drawn from enemies during this scenario and then you can use them against the enemies you drew them from. Unlike many games in the series, most enemies don’t absorb their own element, they just resist it. Certain enemies do absorb their element, but those are few and far between.

The spells drawn from enemies are super powerful, possibly even more powerful than even the crutch card I was using to get through the main story. Even that card saw exceedingly limited use during The Sleeping Lion, due to how under-powered it was in comparison to the enemies and the spells required to defeat them. And thus, the event took a relatively short time to beat, and awarded me a sword that was better than what I was using before.

I took the sword from The Sleeping Lion with me to finally get past the wall in chapter seven. Well, that and some more powerful crutch cards were offered to me for rent again, so I was able to defeat the earth-elemental enemies and move on. The rest of the chapter was a grind, mainly consisting of running around a group of nodes and fighting bosses until I’d accumulated a set amount of the world’s hope in order to make it to the next area. After each group of bosses were defeated and each lock was opened, the game took me back to re-live a portion of my journey, presumably showing me scenes from the first four chapters. The map that contained these memories was made up of different landmarks from the first four chapters, and oddly enough, this same map was reused in The Sleeping Lion to represent the world of Palamecia under the effects of time compression.

I say “presumably” showing me scenes from the first four chapters, because Meia shows up in some of them and I definitely remember she isn’t around until chapter six. Unfortunately, if there is some reason that she suddenly appears in the Warrior of Light’s memories, I missed it because I skipped chapter six, given that was an option. It is a little strange having the Warrior and Meia interacting like they’re long-time traveling companions at the start of chapter seven, but it’s also a little odd having the Warrior and Sarah refer to each other as brother and sister in The Sleeping Lion, when way back in chapter three, Sarah was trying to entice the Warrior into her bed. I feel like I’m missing key context there, and if they were going for a Star Wars reference, it falls a little flat. Luke and Leia didn’t realize they were related in A New Hope, but all that happened was that Leia kissed Luke out of spite against Han, not out of affection for Luke, and the two don’t share a bed later, nor does she come on to him after that. The only acknowledgement the series made of the moment they shared came in Return of the Jedi when Han shows he’s willing to step aside so Leia can be with Luke, but by then, Leia’s figured out that Luke is her brother.

This is only a minor obstacle and doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the game. I definitely acknowledge that I’ve been experiencing events out of order, and that this is what happens when you’re trying to see as much as possible before the game disappears for good.

As I said before, chapter seven ends with a boss fight against Garland. A very, very tough boss fight against Garland, one that I suspect was overtuned on purpose. This is still a free-to-play game, and making the player waste Phoenix Down is a good way to get them to buy Magicite in order to acquire more Phoenix Down and get through it. I also suspect that when the chapter was released, players must’ve had a bit more experience with the game than myself at that point and would’ve had a much easier time as a result. My dumb self, who hadn’t even been playing the game for a full month, basically threw Phoenix Down at the problem until I finally got through it. It doesn’t help that Garland resists damage to his break gauge and becomes immune to damage when he’s got a sliver of health left, twice, whereupon he restores himself to full health both times before finally allowing himself to be defeated for good.

Chapter seven required quite a bit of busywork, but then the developers had incentive for the main chapters to last as long as possible. Not only were they trying to use up the player’s Stamina – but not be as blatant about it as they were in chapter three – they were also trying to keep people playing the game for as long as possible. I mean, that said, the game will bring up a pop-up every two hours reminding players to take a break for their health. Occasionally, if you click the box closed, the game will bring up a second dialogue box with a sterner message that needs to be clicked off if you want to continue. Once, the game even gave me a third dialogue box that basically forced me to quit the game, “for my health.”

You can just turn the game back on once it’s off, the nanny timer resets when you leave the game and doesn’t keep track of how long you left. I appreciate that the timer’s there, but when you’re trying to binge a game like Mobius in order to write about it for a blog, the timer just gets in the way.

You can usually tell when someone’s trying to rush through a game in order to write about it on a set schedule, they’ll complain about various aspects of it that they feel add nothing to the game but needless padding. Chapter seven legitimately feels like it has needless padding, forcing players to accumulate the Light of Hope before they can continue and then recycling earlier portions of the game to add to its length. Chapter seven also very blatantly plays upon emotion to get the player to continue… and I think the player is definitely supposed to notice. The whole world is cheering for you and the game goes to great lengths to show you this.

Something which frustrates me about the structure of the game is that most of the time, the Warrior of Light’s interactions with Vox end up going around and around in logical circles until I don’t know what to think. In fact, that’s what generally happens every time the prophecy is brought up in dialogue. One thing I definitely won’t miss now that I can play other games again is having the characters all second guessing and third guessing what they’re supposed to do in every damn cutscene as if they’re playing four-dimensional chess and trying to think seven moves ahead, trying to figure out what the motivation of Vox is, and wondering at the motivation of Palamecia to even create a cycle like this.

Apparently the planet itself is also directing events, which potentially turns this story into a man vs. world struggle. Does the Warrior of Light continue along the path the prophecy laid out for him or does he defy the prophecy, and which of these choices would be best for the world? I’m not sure I’m fond of the writing in Mobius, with the characters having a very ambiguous goal to follow and not knowing if they’re even going about it the right way. When it comes to these games, I prefer having a clear enemy to fight and to actually be fighting them. Rather than making it ambiguous whether or not you even should fight, the ambiguity I prefer is whether or not the villain is all that villainous. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers is an excellent example of this, where Emet-Selch explains the history of their world and shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, although the Ascians still need to be stopped, their intentions are a bit more noble than everyone first thought, even if they’re still misguided in their approach. In fact, the entire history of Final Fantasy XIV is full of villains who you can sympathize with. No one knew when playing Stormblood that we’d all be crying for Yotsuyu a year later.

With how the Warrior of Light storyline is written, it certainly feels like the game is setting up as the villain either the disembodied voice Vox, or the planet itself. Chaos gets to be the mid-boss, considering he’s the one waiting for me at the end of the first half of the game. And speaking of, chapter eight consists of a kind of labyrinth that requires you to fight bosses in one section of the dungeon, then warp to another section of the dungeon and use the items those bosses dropped to unlock the way to more bosses and to keep doing this until all four sections are complete. This is actually much better than the busywork you have to do in chapter seven. Once all four sections are completed, all four of Chaos’s generals are defeated. I like that Mobius continues to reference the very first game in the series by making these generals the same Four Fiends that you fought way back in 1987. Or 1990, if you lived in North America.

The Four Fiends each drop their own items that unlock the way forward towards the final labyrinth and then beyond this labyrinth is the final showdown-

And now I know what Square-Enix had planned for the last moments of Mobius. Nothing. As soon as the clock struck one in the morning on the Pacific Coast on June 30, the game just stopped.

 

Next: Stay tuned…