All World Final Fantasy, more commonly referred to by its abbreviation AWFF, is a website and popular forum created in 2002, revolving around the Final Fantasy game series and, to a lesser extent, Square-Enix in general. Despite the inclusion of a site (which included reviews and fan-works), the forums were the main attraction, eventually becoming the focus of the site before the SquareSound merge in 2007.

History

Version 1.1

Originally created in July 2002, Version 1.1 had a fairly simple layout and a small array of content for the mainstream Final Fantasy games around at the time. FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX were covered with each section having content consisting of sprites, walkthroughs and MIDI files. At the time of the sites conception, there were no real forums in place and the site was hosted at Angelfire. The forums used were hosted at tiger-lust.net, the domain of a friend called Kanitha, and they were known as the "Prince Lefty Forums". These forums did not last very long though and during this time various forum moves took place.

During this time though, not many updates were performed on the site and the content didn't grow by any massive proportions. Prince Lefty was frank about this, and in October 2002 he stated that the situation would hopefully change in the near future with the possibility of an actual domain name being purchased and more consistent updates being performed on the site to keep viewers coming back.<br/><br/>

Version 1.2 - AWFF.com

Prince Lefty decided that with the new year (2003) a new outlook for the site would be a good idea. Mephista, a user on the website, then helped assist Prince Lefty with the site after the two developed a friendship on the forums. From this point on, the site then took on a more adventurous approach than the previous installment.

Having previously focused on light media, the new site was a pioneer in its field and offered large media downloads for all games in the Final Fantasy series. Such downloads included FMV for various games from a variety of scenes including introduction sequences as well as selected MP3s from the featured games.

During this time, the forums were also properly established as the official AWFF forums and they were hosted as part of the main website. Although they started off slowly, around 6 months after their initial conception they started to increase in size and activity.<br/><br/>

Version 2

With Mephista now having a bigger influence over site affairs, it was time to take the site to the next level. Bowser Madius was recruited to come up with a new design for the website that reflected the intended demographic on a mature and professional looking level. This was achieved with good success and with this impressive design in place, the site direction then needed to be established. It was decided that the site needed to become more specific about it's goals and due to this, most of the "general media" approach was dropped. The site then began to focus mainly on the imagery of the Final Fantasy series, featuring wallpapers, concept art and sprites amongst other artistic mediums. All of the games from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy XII were featured on the site.

This proved to be a huge success and with the ever increasingly active community, AWFF became a big force in the world of Final Fantasy websites with it amassing over 2 million hits <ref name="hitcount"> </ref>. However, after a while interest in the website from it's staff and owners begane to wain and gradually the site started to decline. This prompted Mephista to leave and be replaced by Nanaki who then ran the site alongside an increasingly inactive Prince Lefty. This was only temporary and things returned to the way they were a few months later with Nanaki leaving the site.

Thus, the question was posed to the community about what should happen to the site. An open discussion thread was created where alternatives were discussed and the overall decision from the community was to start the whole site again from scratch. So around August 2005, the website was closed to the public and work was started on the new design and direction by Mephista, Prince Lefty and Darkye.

Version 3?

Version 3 was being built by Mephista, Prince Lefty and Darkye. It was planned to be a very interactive site, with user content being the driving force behind the site. However, shortly after the production of the site began, Darkye left. A forum was launched though which was meant to reflect the new direction of the site, but this was ultimately closed after a few months due to the forum being hacked and hosting issues.

Forums

Will be edited later.

Current State

Currently Active. More on this later.

External links

http://www.squaresound.com

http://www.awff.com

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.awff.com/forums (Archive of forums February 7, 2003-February 6, 2006)

References