/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3754035
Yup. No doubt. The Japanese are a different bunch, that's for sure.

The crystal fetishism is only interesting to me because after FF4 things seem to head for a while in this increasingly technological dimension and away from high fantasy. Both FF6 and FF7 deal with disaster motifs and technology in this way, and I kind of feel like the airship armada and the crystals and the moon men and so on were beginning to look into the always-interesting fantasy/technology relationship. Dragon Quest never went in for high-concept worldbuilding the way FF did, and FF settings aren't expressly science fiction in the way Phantasy Star is (these being the JRPGs I have the most familiarity with, so pardon my somewhat limited frame of reference)...but the FF games were always in that weird place in between, with 'espers' and crystals and airships and so on. And now of course FFXV has you being in the 1%. It seems to get less fantastic as things go on. I'm okay with that.

But in general that other stuff is what I like, or partly. DQ is super-conservative by nature, and the big evil in the Phantasy Star games is repeatedly 'Dark Force' - a giant evil libidinal evil thing sealed away in a box. FF is always in this process of trying to figure out what it's all about, which is why it gets into technology, these different settings, and so on. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Their idea of what constitutes 'fantasy' is pretty far removed from Tolkien and a lot closer to Michael Moorcock.

>tfw Amano-Moorcock tag team fuck yes

But I agree, some of those things are off the charts. These fucking things always seemed incredibly weird. "Brainpan?" "1000 Needles?" These things creeped me out.