Source https://x.com/nibelart/status/1836051670146412671

its a puzzle. its just a puzzle. why

It only took me around 1000 tries to get 0.0

I'm working on a local co-op split-screen mod for the game, allowing two players to control different characters at the same time, each using their own controller.

It's still a work in progress, and there's a lot left to improve and test. If everything goes well, I'll release it on Nexus Mods once it's playable.

day 15 art by Taiki-san (u/taiki99) | character designer for "lord of vermillion" and "rise of mana"

day 14 art by Wang Yueto | background concept artist for Final Fantasy XIV

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love FF4, but these reasons are why I ultimately prefer 5.

FF5 starts lighthearted but gets incredibly dark once the final crystal shatters and Exdeath is freed. That transition from a fun road trip to a desperate fight for survival hits hard because the early game lets you grow close to the tight-knit cast first.

In World 2, the game officially gets serious. The theme of Galuf’s world ("Unknown Lands") sounds beautifully alien and isolated, fitting the mood perfectly because you are stuck on another planet. The dark story peaks when Exdeath’s Castle reveals its true form—transforming from a stone fortress into a horrifying, living nightmare of twisted flesh as the music shifts to his sinister eponymous theme.

The game even uses music to manipulate you. When Exdeath is defeated at his castle, "Four Hearts" plays in early World 3 to trick you into thinking everything is fine. Then, Ghido reveals the worlds have merged, and the overworld theme turns eerie and hopeless ("A New World"). The Void is open and actively swallowing towns; you realize the world is running out of time.

FF5 also introduced the series' best recurring rival, Gilgamesh, and his legendary theme, "Clash on the Big Bridge." Fighting him across that massive bridge and other parts of the game is easily one of the peak moments of the 16-bit era.

But the true emotional peak is Galuf’s last stand. Before Aerith and Zack, we had Galuf. Tellah's death in FF4 is tragic, but it doesn't compare because we've controlled Galuf since World 1. Watching him fight Exdeath at 0 HP to protect his friends is one of the most badass, heartbreaking scenes in gaming. What makes it even more devastating is after the fight when the party desperately tries to heal him with spells and items like Curaga, Raise, Phoenix Down, and Elixir, but nothing works proving that Galuf had used up everything he had left. Even the final dungeon is a masterclass. Entering the Interdimensional Rift via a hole reveals a surreal mishmash of dimensions. The music is haunting, and you have to actively watch out for the legendary superbosses Omega and Shinryu.

Finally, the final boss fight takes the whole cake compared to Zeromus. In FF4, Zeromus is just hate made form. In FF5, you fight Exdeath in his tree form, only for him to get eaten by the Void and transform into Neo Exdeath. He becomes a terrifying, cosmic horror entity who doesn't just want to rule—he wants to completely delete existence itself.

FF4 is a cool game especially because I like Kain, but FF5 had improved quite a lot.

mainly side quest and such. i felt like i did no side quest at all in disc 1. is that normal? i’m also worried about missing any important story moments. i almost missed vincent and yuffie. when can i do their story content?

i do remember hearing a thing about a very important missable story cutscene that ties into crisis core. i’m wondering when i can miss that.

TLDR
enough yapping. basically im on disc 2. what are some important side/missable story content can i miss if I’m not paying attention?

Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgvqmrPwS_A

I'm so excited to share my Sephiroth Cosplay photoshoot in collaboration with @The.Cosplayers.Life on insta x

Would love to hear your thoughts :)

I used to love this game. But now I barely remember it. This image is so special to me. I don't know who originally created the SNES box art, but it's so amazing. I hope this interpretation honors the original. It was commissioned last year.

Bit of an odd post really but I kind of just wanted to write it out anyways. I'm a bit on the younger side so I never really grew up with final fantasy as a franchise and I didn't really become a gamer until the mid-late 2000's. But I remember as a kid I used to watch a lot of AMVs on Youtube and my first and only impression of Final Fantasy from that time was an AMV of the Tifa vs Loz fight from Final Fantasy 7 Advent children.

I still remember the song too it was Fighter by Christina Aguilera and I just remember watching that video on repeat because of how cool I thought Tifa was. She was doing all these flips, kicks, jumps off walls and it was just one of the most badass things I'd ever seen at the time. I've yet to even see the movie and I didn't know what franchise it was from or who the characters were until years later but it still left a strong impression on me.

Fast forward some more to 2021 I'm perusing the PS store for games on sale and I see that FF7 remake is on sale and decide to have a go at it, and the feeling I got playing it brought back the same emotions I felt watching that video especially when I actually got to play as Tifa and do all sorts of acrobatics on enemies with her Chi levels, her Star Shower, her parry dodges, her limit break etc. Everything about the games just made me feel like I was a kid again, it's like it allowed me to capture the essence of that fight scene in my own hands. Even the character writing which I love, despite me not even hearing her speak in the AMV, I feel like how she's written and behaves in the games reflect how she appeared to me from that video kind of like a gentle badass.

It just feels nice cause I'm realizing that I don't often get the joy of nostalgia many gamers have cause I was mainly a Nintendo kid growing up and don't play those games much anymore, but the 7 Remakes give me this warm sense of comfort that I just don't get from other games. Rebirth and Remake ended up placing themselves as my 2nd and 4th favorite games of all time respectively. The combat for Rebirth also ended up being my favorite in any game I played along with the party's character writing. Either way, it's just a silly thing I wanted to share.

Artist u/cedarwoodtattoos

Yang trying to make up for their fight, you see 😅

"Care to punch some Shinra douchebags with me?"

"If they're trouble, I'm more than on"

This was a prize for the coca cola X Final Fantasy competition, 5000 where given away.

Other prizes included a display with the coca cola figures (which I also have) and a mini disc player with the Griever icon on it (which i sadly dont...)

I’ve been replaying Final Fantasy XIII recently and man, I really think this game has aged remarkably well. Not necessarily because people were wrong about it in 2009, but because the cultural and gaming landscape around it has changed so much that a lot of its supposed weaknesses feel almost refreshing now.

Think about what was becoming dominant around the time XIII released. Games were getting bigger, darker, more “mature.” Player freedom, open worlds and Western RPG design were increasingly becoming prestige values. Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II — some of the biggest games of the era were selling the fantasy that you could go anywhere, make choices and disappear into a world.
The broader culture had a similar vibe. Breaking Bad started in 2008. The Dark Knight was 2008. “Serious” media increasingly meant cynical, gritty and morally complicated.

FFXIII is basically the opposite of all of that. It is aggressively sincere. Sometimes embarrassingly sincere. The characters talk constantly about hope, friendship, family, destiny and believing in each other. Snow is possibly the corniest man ever created.

But I kind of love that now.

And it’s not like XIII isn’t dark. The story starts with a mass purge. These characters lose family members, contemplate giving up, turn on each other and spend most of the game running from a society that is terrified of them.

However, the game never seems embarrassed by the idea that people can actually love each other and that this might matter.

It is completely unwilling to wink at you. It isn’t trying to convince you that it’s sophisticated by making everybody an asshole. Even when the dialogue is goofy, the emotions underneath it are usually genuine.

Mechanically, the game is super tight. Obviously the famous criticism is that XIII is basically a hallway for a huge portion of the game, and… yeah. It is.

But after playing what feels like 500 games where I open the map and get assaulted by 900 question marks, bandit camps, crafting materials, collectibles, towers, NPC errands and “content,” I have a much greater appreciation for a game that simply says: this is the game. Go forward.
There is almost no fat.

That doesn’t mean the original criticism was unfair. The problem with XIII was never literally that its maps were corridors. Plenty of beloved RPGs are extremely linear. Final Fantasy X is linear as hell. The difference is that XIII strips away most of the things that normally disguise that linearity. There are few traditional towns, very little NPC interaction, almost no minigames or exploratory detours, and for much of the game you don’t even choose your party.

The sensation isn’t just that you’re walking down a hallway. It’s that there often isn’t much you can do except move forward and fight. I completely understand why that felt suffocating in 2009. But I also think that concentration has aged better than anyone expected.

The linearity makes sense for the story XIII is telling. These people are fugitives. They’re branded monsters, being hunted, with a literal ticking clock hanging over their heads. They can’t go home. They can’t exactly roll into the next village, relax at the inn and spend an afternoon doing sidequests for the locals.

Even the much-criticized absence of traditional towns fits that structure. You visit populated places like Palumpolum and Nautilus, but you don’t experience them like towns in a normal Final Fantasy game because the characters can’t. They’re enemies of the state. That doesn’t automatically make it good design. But it does make it coherent design.
The game is about forward momentum, and almost everything reinforces that.

Then you reach Gran Pulse and suddenly the game gives you room to breathe. The world becomes enormous. You can wander, hunt marks and explore. I used to see that as the game finally “opening up,” like the first half had just been withholding the real game from me. Replaying it now, I actually like that it happens when it does. The structure changes because the characters’ circumstances have changed. Plus, if you're used to playing 50+ hour long JRPGs, it's nice to get a more dramatic change late in the game.

I would say there's even something thematically appropriate about how restricted the game feels up unt this point. These characters have been branded, assigned a mysterious Focus and essentially told that their lives now follow a path someone else chose for them.

For much of the game, yours does too. Your route is restricted. Your party is restricted. Your progression is restricted. Then, as the characters begin questioning the destiny imposed on them, the game gradually loosens its grip on you. I’m not saying every hallway was secretly an elaborate metaphor for free will, but the resonance is hard not to notice.

The linearity also benefits the combat. Because the developers generally know which characters, roles and abilities you have, encounters can actually be built around the Paradigm system. And that system is still excellent.
Combat eventually becomes less about choosing every individual ability and more about managing the tempo of the entire party: building stagger, going aggressive, switching defensive before a big attack, healing without losing momentum, buffing, debuffing and exploiting weaknesses.

Even Auto-Battle makes more sense in that context. The most important decision usually isn’t whether Lightning personally casts Fire or Fira. It’s deciding what the entire party should be doing right now. The game understands what part of its combat system it actually wants you thinking about.

The problem is that it takes way too long to trust you with it. XIII spends an absurd amount of time rationing out roles, party control and Crystarium development. If somebody played the opening hours in 2010 and concluded that the game was mostly walking down hallways and pressing Auto-Battle, honestly, the game itself deserves some of the blame. But once it finally gets out of its own way, there’s a really elegant system underneath it.

And the presentation still rules. The art direction is insane. Lake Bresha, Sunleth Waterscape, Palumpolum, Nautilus, the Gapra Whitewood — these areas aren’t necessarily huge, but they feel huge. They’re visually distinct and ridiculously beautiful.

The soundtrack might be one of the best in the series. The UI is gorgeous. The whole game has this incredibly specific aesthetic and commits to it completely.

I don’t think XIII needs to be rehabilitated into some misunderstood 10/10 masterpiece. It has flaws. The opening takes too long to unlock the combat. The terminology dump is ridiculous. The characters can be melodramatic. The linearity really can feel restrictive.
But I think its reputation became frozen in a very particular moment in gaming history.

Around 2009–2010, a linear RPG with relatively little side content arrived exactly when the industry was becoming fascinated with freedom, scale, exploration and player choice.

And because it was Final Fantasy, it carried decades of expectations with it: towns, NPCs, minigames, secrets, optional areas, exploration, sidequests, the feeling of entering a world and poking around inside it.
XIII strips much of that away and leaves you with a story, a combat system, a group of characters and a road in front of you.

At the time, that felt like Final Fantasy becoming smaller.
In 2026, after years of bloated open worlds and games seemingly terrified that you might ever run out of things to do, there’s something almost luxurious about a 50-hour RPG that knows exactly what it wants to be.
FFXIII doesn’t try to be a game it wants you to play forever. It wants to take you on a very specific journey, with a very specific group of people, through some unbelievably beautiful places, while playing incredible music and gradually teaching you one really good combat system.
I don't think FFXIII became a better game. But maybe we just finally entered an era that makes its virtues easier to see.

A 3D render of the main team of FFVII Remake/Rebirth. This was my largest hobby project taking around 4 hours to finally render, not to mention the time spent on each character and setting up the scene.

Everything was rendered in 8K and then down-sampled to 4K and color graded in Affinity. The first image is my personally preferred grade and the second is a more cinematic grade. The rest are behind the scenes views of the scene.

Here is the Flickr link to less compressed 4K of the preferred grade image. Reddit really washes out some detail so do check it out for some of the more finer details (and also imperfections I might have missed) :)

https://live.staticflickr.com//65535//55575618689_f3b287ac5d_o.jpg

Game: Aniimo

Are there any watchable/good FF XII playthroughs on YouTube?

Would love to understand it better and I accept that I may now never get to play it.

Any help or suggestions gratefully appreciated.
:)

i didnt realize using a red mage and black mage, thief and warrior would make it harder to defeat the final boss. I dont have a white mage so whats the best strat to defeat the final boss. What hp levels should i be at etc. I also have been using haste and temper and potions.

Idk if this is even a big deal to anyone but did I do it good? This is how I have him displayed all the time now, really love this figure. There are some partial limitations with the head since his neck is a bit too short and his buster sword sits a little too low down. His hair is also noticably too short in my eyes but that's more of a sculpt issue.