Hello Again.

So, I have (slowly) been continuing to play through the Final Fantasy games, even though I haven't updated this blog. To be honest, I was planning on abandoning this blog-- why bother with doing all of this writing for something no one is going to read anyway? But my spouse and a few friends started to express their disappointment with that. Plus, it might still be a fun thing to look back on in the future.

Trying to restart this during the 2020 pandemic lockdown seemed like a good idea at the time, but turns out it was also an incredibly stressful and depressing year, and I'm not blaming myself too much for dropping off of it. Following the pandemic, A BUNCH of other life-stuff happened that I won't go into detail about, but I do feel like I'm in a good place right now to actually do this.

I'm also trying not to cringe too hard at my old writing. I know this is impossible. I know it's not perfect. But I'm going to resist the urges to delete old posts or re-write stuff (especially because I did manage to record things down while I was still ignorant about many aspects of the series, and that's not something I can replicate.)

All that said, I've still managed to maintain much of that ignorance of the series. Whenever I'm watching stuff about JRPGs I skip parts that discuss anything in the Final Fantasy series (which means that, yes, I end up skipping a ton of content), I've also skipped large parts and entire episodes of the Retronauts podcast in my attempt to remain in the dark. Honestly, that's probably the biggest reason I've gotten back into this project-- I can't keep trying to avoid spoilers for a 40-year-old game series forever! And there's a bunch of DesignDoc episodes about JRPG mechanics I want to watch!

I'm going to be updating the Rules a little bit; mostly I'll be adding in where I'm going to play FFII, III, and V, and adjusting the "original hardware" bit. We have all of the physical PSX copies of FFVII, FFVIII, and FFIX, but I have no idea if those discs are fully functional. It looks like I might be able to dump the iso from each disk and compare them against a valid checksum, so I might go that route. I'm not planning on buying additional copies of the games (especially not in today's retro market) if it turns out they don't pass the test, I'll find some other avenue to play them.

As far as streaming goes, not sure if I will stream the games on Twitch in the future. I'm not currently, because it adds a little bit more friction to simply playing the game and makes it a little less likely I'll be able to follow through.

Now, most importantly, about the games: I picked up my save from the previous blog post and finished FF1 at the start of last year. I'll post a retrospective on that sometime soon. I then started Final Fantasy IV (aka Final Fantasy II on the SNES), got about 75% through it, and then springtime happened and I got pulled into a bunch of house and yard improvement projects and other stuff. I picked FFIV back up and finished it earlier this month, and I'll be posting a retrospective on that as well. I have now started Final Fantasy VI (aka Final Fantasy III on the SNES) and I am actually taking notes on each playthrough so I can actually follow through on this promise and project I started 8 years ago.

I hope to see you along for the ride!