Day 11 - Dream Party of Four
Tank - Warrior of Light from FFXIV as a Dark Knight; easily the series' best interpretation of one of the most cliched tanking archtypes in gaming history
Healer/Buffer - Aerith
Magic DPS - Rinoa, for Meteor Wing (infinite Meteor spam)
Physical DPS - Raubahn (from FFXIV), he's at the Warror of Light's skill level even after losing an arm, and before that he was a duel wielder...
Day 12 - Final Fantasy Crush
Not applicable
Day 13 - Favorite Mini-Game
Triple Triad all the way... and I was the kind of person who went out of their way to spread every rule set except Random...
Day 14 - Favorite Quote (and Why)
"To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom—it is indolence." --Louisoix Leveilleur (FFXIV)
This quote sums up why most of the people in... basically the majority of Final Fantasy games go out and participate in the story of the game. It also gives a good answer to why people try to help people even if they are not assured to succeed in doing so. The ironic part is that the person saying this comes from a city-state of isolationist researchers who decided long ago that their role was to record history, but not participate in history. The quote is why the speaker is leaving his own city-states to go help out an Alliance of city-states that have a history of bickering among each other to fight off an invading empire.
"I slaughter a gang of Qiqirn bandits for your precious goods and this is the thanks I receive!?
You spineless sack of shite. I kill your enemies. I fetch your things. I do what you people can't or won't do yourselves.
You're helpless. Weak. All you do is want and need.
I should've left you all to drown in Leviathan's tidal wave. At least then I would've been spared your constant bloody whining.
Do not speak to me of this ever again." --Fray (Warrior of Light's Darkside)
I really like how well the frustration comes through in this quote. Especially as it's in response to something that is almost inseparable from any open-world video-game: the fetch-quest.
If there's one thing FFXIV does very, very well, it is how it portrays how draining being in the role of a hero can be on the hero. And we aren't talking about a reluctant hero archtype either. In the Main Story of FFXIV, the Warrior of Light is always shown as wanting to help people. However, that does take a toll on them and they do lose a lot in doing that. Instead of putting that kind of stuff in the Main Story though (so people do have some freedom RPing as their character), dealing with being a Hero gets put in the Dark Knight job quests. Which is proabably the best quest-line in FFXIV outside of the Main Story quests. The result is that FFXIV's Dark Knight is probably the least cliched take on the Dark Knight archetype FF has ever done. For starters, it deals more with the problem of helping people to the point the Hero is ignoring their own needs/wants and how a Hero deals (or doesn't rather) with survivor's guilt...
Day 15 - Most Disappointing Game
FFXIII does not count because I knew what I was signing up for when I started playing it... FFXV doesn't count either because I've decided not to play it given what I know about the plot...
FFIX, I guess. First of all, I am not saying that because of the story. The story was fine. The gameplay though... yikes... The ATB system for FFIX is as slow as molasses. It just never feels like it gets fast the way FFVII and FFVIII's ATB felt. It also feels like a step backwards in how rigid the character archetypes are. And how you can have four players out instead of three. I always felt like one of the characters was a fourth wheel in my party synergy. The Limit Break Trance system was also very difficult to get a grasp on since it did different things for different characters.
And then there's Tetra Master which was like... two steps backwards from Triple Triad or even the Gold Saucer. Both Triple Triad and the Gold Saucer rewarded items that were useful for your characters (even if Triple Triad was utterly broken in how you could abuse it or how the Gold Saucer just gave random stuff that could sometimes be frustrating to get). Point being, doing Triple Triad and the Gold Saucer at least impacted your character in some way. Tetra Master has no benefit to you characters except as being a time-waster that isn't the slow ATB.
So yeah... let's just say that I was happy to play FFIX so that I could know I would never play it again because I couldn't stand how long it took to do anything in it.
Day 16 - What Three Things Would I Change
I'm going to limit this to games I have played...
The first two are from FFXIII.
The first one would be how FFXIII's leveling system is capped by your progression though the story. This is to the point that the final tier of the leveling system isn't unlocked until after the final boss is beaten. I would unlock the entire thing so that you could see how everyone would level up from the start of the game and could level up all they wanted no matter where they were in the story. Out of all the problems with FFXIII, this is the thing that bothered me the most about it.
The second one is FFXIII's pacing. I actually think FFXIII being so linear where it is makes perfect sense for what type of story is being told and where the characters are. However, the game spends way too much time on those first few chapters. Several of the first couple of chapters could be cutscenes, and the game wouldn't lose anything. That would free up space for the latter part of the game that isn't linear so that more story time could be spent exploring places and the like (and maybe give Grand Pulse more story significance instead of being an excuse to see where Fang and Vanille grew up).
The third thing is that for the more recent single-player Final Fantasy games in general... I wish the story-writers would get it through their heads that True Art Is Not Angsty (or at least does not have to be angsty all the time). You do not need a tragedy to happen at the end of a story for the story itself to have weight. A true "happy ending" where none of the main player characters die can actually work (and did work for much of the earlier games in the series). It's just that the rest of the story needs to have something that the players can get invested in. And it's hard to get invested in anything (or anyone) when it's a forgone conclusion that someone will end up dying at the end so the rest of characters a happy ending.
I feel like I need to say that I'm specifically talking about someone dying at the end of the game. Characters dying at the beginning or in the middle of the game feels emotionally different and their deaths are a lot more varied in their reasons for death and impact on the plot. A lot of those kinds of deaths do not directly result in (or are not a direct result of) the rest of the characters getting a happy ending. Aerith's death would be a good example as she had already cast Holy by the time she died and even if she was alive, it probably wouldn't have changed how the game ended in any major way.
. Captures the character and mood well in its various usages.