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That brief period in the late 90s when Final Fantasy was a turbo-normalfag series is strange to look back on. Just a few years later in the 2000s, it would all become viewed as "gay nerd shit", and it's been that way ever since, but on the PS1 everybody was playing these games. What caused this small window of time when JRPGs were so mainstream?
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>>3626227
What in the fuck are you talking about? FF was normaltard bait from the beginning and still is. Most of its current fanbase is inner city blacks and spics.
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>>3626230
Nah, not anymore and not for a long time has it been that way. If you were still playing Final Fantasy in 2004 rather than Halo, GTA or sports games, you would be called a "faggot". It's just weird how quick things changed.
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>>3626227
This is called selection bias. Not everyone even had a PS1, the thing is that Nintendo abandoned jRPGs and all the jRPG fans jumped ship to PS1, creating a situation where many PS1 owners were jRPG lovers.
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>>3626233
FF7 was the 2nd best selling game on the PS1. FF8 was the 4th best selling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStation_video_games

It's undeniable Final Fantasy was a GTA or CoD-tier series in terms of popularity in the late 90s, but it has never ascended to that peak ever since (nor has any other JRPG)
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>>3626227
7
>cool guy big sword motorcycle
9
>gay monkey kid
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>>3626236
>10 million
This is not GTA or CoD level.
FF6 sold 3.5 mil and wasn't nearly as heavily marketed. More people were getting into games.
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Was Final Fantasy ever "mainstream popular" or did it just capture the heart of every nerd who owned a PS1? Or is it like modern Sony cinematic games where normies bought it for the graphics and spectacle and didn't fully give a damn about the characters or plot or whatever
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>>3626232
>Nah, not anymore
Yes, specifically right now. You are in denial. FF is the DBZ of RPGs. Only the brownest of third worlders like it. Those are normalfags.
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>>3626252
It's on a spectrum
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>>3626227
>That brief period in the late 90s when Final Fantasy was a turbo-normalfag series
It wasn't. This didn't happen. Normalfags weren't playing video games in the 90s--especially not JRPGs.

>>3626252
Some normies got into it because they thought the gritty looking game about the cool guy with the big sword would be fun to play when they were sick of Madden '98 and NBA Jam, but it never really found footing there. Anyone who remembers it being "crazy popular" in the late 90s was either not alive then, or simply has a skewed perspective because they themselves only ever hung around people who also liked video games. The average normie had no fucking clue what a "Final Fantasy" was.
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>>3626890
>Normalfags weren't playing video games
define normalfag
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>>3626236
Wow, everything made around the turn of the millennium is trash

>Harry Potter
>Sponge Bob
>Yu-Gi-Oh

With few exceptions everything made during and after 1999 is garbage
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>>3626227
It was pretty popular among normies. TV shows parodied the effeminate anime guy with the huge sword.

It was completely different, combined the modern politics of that era with fantasy story telling
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>>3626973
>It was completely different, combined the modern politics of that era with fantasy story telling
This is not different. Captain Planet, Pirates of Dark Water. FF7 was trite and behind the times, as all Japanese media is.
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>>3626230
This, its a console pleb favorite franchise and will always be that.
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>>3626227
>but on the PS1 everybody was playing these games. What caused this small window of time when JRPGs were so mainstream?
A lot of people who hadn’t played any FF before got a PlayStation + FF7 for Christmas that year.
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>>3626250
>This is not GTA or CoD level.
GTA came out the same year as FF7 and sold millions of units fewer than FF7 did. The series didn’t start outselling FF7 until GTA3 which was years later. Same with COD, COD came out like six years later and still sold millions of copies less than FF7. This is some seriously anachronistic projection, like you’re thinking of how those series would later perform in the late 2000s.
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>>3627269
No shit, those games weren't hits from the beginning, so I thought you were using the comparison anachronistically. Holy wikipedia warrior...
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>>3627436
I’m not the anon you were replying to, but perhaps I misread your point, and I should’ve been telling the anon you were replying to that he was anachronistically projecting.
>t. played ff7, gta1, and cod1 in the respective years they came out
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>>3626230
or trans if you're into FFIV
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>>3626227
Part of the reason it was such a hit were

>PSX was the new cool system
Thje N64 wasent as dominating over the industry as the SNES and the PSX took over the market. Much of its success was marketing grim and gritty 90s stuff like Twisted Meta; Loaded and soon FF7 which was portrayed more as a cyberpunk epic than your dads D&D game. They said shit and damn in it and and said what NintenDONT

>Timing of trends
Platformers had died off 3-D was big and the Fighting game craze had finally run its course with only Tekken 3 standing out and SF3 dissapointing filthy casuals. The market was open for new things and RPGs had been gaining momentum a while. Hell even FF3/6 got TV ads on networks back when most people had one of the 4 channels so it was kind of primed for an explosion

>It wss braindead easy and stupid
You didnt NEED an explanation for why Sephiorth went crazy and knew where the McGuffin rock to destroy the world was at you just need a BIG FMV CUTSCENE to entertain the normies. Why do you stop Shinra from blowing up the Meteor with the Big Materia other than new cut-scene rocks? Who cares its the next level normie. Can you beat the game by walking forward and choosing attack over and over again? YOU BET YOU CAN! The characters are 99% interchangable especially once Aeris dies and shes the only one thats meant to work as a caster. Dont question the ending where you get shown nothing but a dead city/ It doesnt matter you werent attached to the characters like TitsMcTits Mr.T and the talking dog that never talks after Cosmo Canyon

It also didnt stay as popular because the Normies were confused why FF8 wasent more of FF7 why FF9 wasnt grim and gritty and only FFX was the last major hit they had
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>>3626240
This post sums it all up
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>>3626227
playing vidya was never a normalfag thing in the 90s.
>>3626973
in what universe did this happen? the one in your mind?
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>>3626913
Someone over the age of 18 with a job who pays taxes and visits family around the holidays without sitting quietly in the corner by himself, eating cheetos off of a paper plate.
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>>3626973
>TV shows parodied the effeminate anime guy with the huge sword.
No. That wasn't a thing until the outcasts who grew up with FF7 got old enough to actually make cartoons. We're slowly losing history to this sort of revisionism. You're probably one of those idiots who think kids' rooms in the 90s looked like picrel.

Only greasy nerd children knew what the fuck Final Fantasy was in the 90s. Parodies of Japanese culture were still 99.9% Godzilla and Speed Racer. Maybe Sailor Moon/Dragonball/Pokemon, if you had someone on the production team that wasn't a total normie.
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>>3626227
That wasn't really the case, though. It was more a side effect of PS1 attracting both niche weebs and mainstream shit like sports fans. Some crossover happened.
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>>3628620
>Maybe Sailor Moon/Dragonball/Pokemon, if you had someone on the production team that wasn't a total normie.
And even then, Pokemon was only parodied because it was a world-wide pop-culture phenomenon. It was all over American news. Final Fantasy never even began to approach that level of recognition and never will.
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>>3628620
>>3628642
Yes and no. The PSX was the top system on earth and FF7 was its headline game. It wasent intended that way but it happened. It was popular on that kind of level actually similar to DBZ as a tier below Pokemon beating morning news in TV ratings. Its also why so many parodies of Cloud are mixed up with Link to kind pad it out since it isnt as big as it once was
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>>3626227
>What caused this small window of time when JRPGs were so mainstream?
Billions on marketing
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FFVIII was on Charlies Angels in the 2000s.
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>>3626227
That movie really tainted the brand. I remember being disappointed it was some dry sci-fi slop instead of you know an actual Fantasy game.
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>>3628620
Your whole childhood influenced by corporate media products. Amazing.
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>>3626227
FFVI is better that VII, by a large margin
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>>3628849
>Its also why so many parodies of Cloud are mixed up with Link to kind pad it out
Okay, but my point is that those parodies weren't happening back in the late 90s like retard OP thinks they were. FF7 was popular, but it never left the gaming sphere the way Mario or Pokemon did. Even Zelda only got two notable cartoon references/parodies during this supposed peak-popularity era, one of them was extremely subtle, and they were both ostensibly made by the same, singular guy.

>>3634365
Judging by how poor your reading comprehension skills are, you're still in the prime of your childhood. Enjoy it, friend.
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>>3635590
>Even Zelda only got two notable cartoon references/parodies during this supposed peak-popularity era, one of them was extremely subtle, and they were both ostensibly made by the same, singular guy.
i don't remember zelda getting any cartoon references back in the 90s. First thing I can think of is Drawn Together, and while some aspects of Xandir are taken from Link, he's moreso a parody of effeminate elven stereotypes in general, which Link never really was until AFTER Drawn Together aired. i do remember they straight up copy-pasta'd Zelda's design for his "girlfriend" though.
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>>3636650
>i don't remember zelda getting any cartoon references back in the 90s.
My bad, they were actually both a bit later. Powerpuff Girls did an extremely obvious one in 2000. The other reference was in an episode of Samurai Jack (Jack is in a temple and pushes a statue on top of a switch with a crescent moon symbol to unlock a door), which was around 2003, but both shows were products of Genndy Tartakovsky, so I always assumed it was his doing.
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>>3626236
This is exactly the reason why SE shouldn't have chased that VII high and switched things up.
Instead they locked into decline.
The most out there thing they did was gamble on an MMO by Ishii/Kato and give Matsuno his own mainline game; ya win some, ya lose some.
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>>3626236
RPGs were hit hard by the need for new games to have HD graphics. Before that, a FF could be made every other year and dev costs were low enough that devs could take more risks with high production value games.
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I did it niggas
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>>3626227
I was born in 1996, I remember renting Ephemeral fantasia in like 2003 from Blockbuster and playing Suikoden IV on a demo disc in 2004. Shadow hearts in 2005. Phantasy star universe in 2006. Rouge Galaxy in 2007. I remember being the only kid at school that knew these games even fucking existed.

The other kids and Adult Normies suck, When they walked into gamestop and blockbuster and saw the autistic cover art they just cringed and said "Nigga where halo at?" Typically, The most jap any normie gets is metal gear solid or pokemon.
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>>3638773
>Nigga where halo at
Based
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>>3638773
I was going to say that you’re supposed to grow out of jrpgs once you’re not a child anymore but I guess you were a literal child then so you get a pass, anon.
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>>3638794
I mostly grew out of JRPG's during High school, However I have started playing legends of dragoon on emulator. Old school Jrpg's mog the west in terms of storytelling and immersion, Every game is the hero's journey and ultimate SOVLful male fantasy. Honestly, It kind of pisses me off that these games are so obscure and only hyper autistic millennials that were social outcast played this shit. This stuff was kino and the games were literally encrypted gnostic masonic bullshit. Oh and good luck finding a woman that has heard the word "Grandia" or "Xenogears". The only reason my sister knows about these games is because I played them, and she tells me that whenever she goes to a game store and mentions suikoden or even kingdom hearts 1, All the incels and nerds start getting crushes on her because an autistic girl that actually plays old rpg's is mind bogglingly rare. Technically, I guess since I was born on the cusp of generation, I'm a zillenial I simply cannot relate to the ramen noodle hair zoomer video game genshin fag generation with what I've been exposed to. Yeah, Sure I was a child back then but I remember the "atmosphere" of the early 2000's just as alot older millennials remember the "atmosphere" of when link to the past was released in the 90's. It was a whole different world compared to now.
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>>3626227
Grand Turisimo 1 and 2 were the undisputed coolest PSX games. Despite being nerd games, car nerdery wasn't recognized as nerdery at the time so there was no stigma against it. It was just kids being too young or too poor for real cars and imagining they owned their in-game collection instead. Tekken 3 was also huge, and nobody gave a fuck about frame data or any FGC stuff. People would button mash as Eddy and think it was the coolest shit ever. Final Fantasy VII was second-tier, down with games like Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid. It was mainstream, mostly on the strength of its FMV, but the true chads wouldn't touch it.



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