[Ginkasa]

The newer releases of the game have "boosters" that really helps make going through much quicker. You can speed up the gameplay, turn off random battles, and keep your team's health at 100% and fill their Limit Breaks/Trance/Overdrives, etc. I haven't kept these things on the whole time, but it has helped cut down on grinding and some of the minigames. Chocobo Racing in VII is a lot quicker at 3x speed, for example.

I also haven't really had much else to do. With the COVID situation we aren't getting out, so we're just kind of chilling at home. I play Final Fantasy, the wife plays Animal Crossing, the kids play Animal Crossing or Mario Party or we also got the Clubhouse Games.

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Speaking of moving quickly, I'm now on X. VIII goes by very quickly when the game itself encourages you to bypass random battles. Drawing would usually take in that time space, but at 3x speed and turning on invincibility I was easily able to nab 100x of each spell without a sweat. Stats at near max and enemies at low levels and I breezed through.

IX took me a little bit longer. I beat VIII right after my last post and IX only yesterday, so a little over a week for IX. IX has always been one of my favorites. It just overflows with character in everything. There's clearly a lot of love put into that game. If I have a complaint about IX, its that taking time to learn each ability from weapons kind of holds you back from using new equipment. Its fine if things flowed along well, but I feel like you get new weapons with new abilities at a much quicker pace then you learn abilities. You could just skip abilities, but that feels wrong. Small complaint, but its there.

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Having reached X, I was thinking again about the structure of the series. I feel confident you can clearly define an era of the series from I-V and VI-IX can also definitely be group together in the same way. Its harder to say whether X should be included in that group, or lumped in with XI-XV (or some other way.

X was a big departure for the series ditching the traditional level up system (for the first time since II) in lieu of using the new Sphere Grid system. It also ditches the ATB system introduced way back in IV for the first time and introduces the one-time only CTB system (with that said, the CTB system in a lot of ways feels like the ATB system, just instead of waiting for bars to fill it just figures out ahead of time whose turn would go when). With that, it would be easy to mark this as the start of the modern era. Moving forward from here, its a lot harder to draw a clear line of progression in each game as the series moves from single player to MMO and back and again and different gameplay systems are introduced and dropped with each iteration. You also have a lot more sequels and spin-offs than before (again, something introduced with X).

With that said, X also just feels a lot more like a classic Final Fantasy game than anything that came after. Maybe its the random, turn based battles. Maybe its the characters have clearly defined roles (if not necessarily evoking the old job system as clearly as IX did). I also have to consider that maybe I think of it this way only because it was the most recent game that had been released when I first really dived into the series. Final Fantasy was, in its entirety, I-X when I first really experienced the series as a whole and I have to admit that this experience may bias me into demarcating the series into X and before and then later.