BOTTOM 192 — Week 3 — Poll 5

[This Old Neon]

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

[Niahak]

I don't think I can vote against either of these. I like them both a lot. I think they should both advance.

[Kong Wen]

Aw hot damn, this is an insane match-up for the bottom 192. I would expect to see this in like the top 64.

Let me try to rationalize my way into a vote here.

FF7 is a big, good game that gets a lot of attention for helping to make RPGs (too) commercially popular in the west. But it's also a garbled gibberish game with a clunky plot. It has benefitted a GREAT DEAL from being cleaned up and polished and sanitized over the intervening decades by sequels, spin-offs, movies, and remakes, but using external stuff to improve a universe or oeuvre around a work doesn't inherently improve the original work itself.

FF7 is fun, but a lot of its gaps have been paved over by decades of fan lore, and it's hard to scrape that paving back out of our mind-holes to evaluate this on its own.

FF Tactics on the other hand is a game that pretty much every subsequent tactical RPG has self-consciously tried to emulate and recapture. It's the Chrono Trigger of tactical RPGs. Entire generations of new tactical RPGs pitched themselves as hearkening back to Final Fantasy Tactics! It's still happening now. There are gacha games being shit out to market (Sword of Convallaria) that have whole communities of gambling-addicted phone gamers screaming "looks like Final Fantasy Tactics!" It definitely wasn't even the first of its kind (adult-oriented political war story in a 3Dish grid) (hello Tactics Ogre), but it was the best.

All that said, FFT has its own problems. One is that the original translation, which I had no problem with, is opaque. This doesn't help the complicated twists and turns of its interconnected political storyline come together in the most understandable way for some people (I had no problem with it).

One thing that some people point out as a problem but which isn't a problem and is in fact a deliberate design decision is that it's easy to "break" the game with OP combos. Yes. The job system is a sandbox, and you're allowed to be powerful, or you're allowed to role-play, or you're allowed to limit yourself, and you have the tools to do that built into the very system of the game. Yes, TG Cid is powerful: he's a living legend in the context of the game. For people who have always said "I wish we could play as Golbez" or "I wish we could play as Leo" or "I wish we could play as any of the legendary hero characters in this game instead of them being dumb NPCs", here is that opportunity. And if you don't like having a strong unit on your team, you can bench him! You have that option! I've done many play-throughs where I only use hired/created characters and bench every story unit.

My vote goes to FFT. There are better main-series FFs than FF7. Hell, there are better FF7s than FF7 at this point. But there are no better FFTs than FFT.