[Deano]

Originally Posted by Flux

All those minigames are horrible and nigh unplayable.

I disagree, I thought the akira-style motorcycle racing one was incredible, and Chocobo racing was good fun. Can't remember the others too well.

The story is thrown at you in huge, clunky chunks outside of the actual game, interrupting the flow. There is a strange paradox where the characters are portrayed highly realistic and serious in braindead fighting sequences, but turn into cute little caricatures whenever there's actual dramatic story to be told.

Most the cut-scenes are done with the game engine, it's just the FMV where they look different, but this never really bothered me, but perhaps you have a point here, as at the time the FMV was so ahead of anything else I was too busy with my mouth on the floor watching it to really care.

And you know all those wonderfully rendered, plentiful backgrounds that make you want to interact until your hands fall off? Well you CAN'T, because the backgrounds are as lifeless and dead as it gets. Interaction is practically zero, making for an unbelievable and dead world that convinces only as cardboard scenery for an uninteresting landscape.

Well no, you can only interact with things that matter, but what's the point of being able to play with a ton of things that do nothing? There's so much hidden stuff to find already in the game that to add in 2 or 3 red-herring interactive things to check in each scene would be madness.

The beginning of the game is very strong, but as soon as one enters the overworld for the first time, the game falls flat on its mouth: an overworld promises a high degree of non-linearity, but you are strained on a single path that forces you down an astoundingly linear game.

I always thought the overworld was amazingly realistic like that, you can see it all but at first you're constrained by where you can get on foot, then you get the car, the boat, the plane, and finally (if you're good) the Gold Chocobo. This way the map opens up to you slowly so as not to be utterly overwhelming, but enough to give you a choice of two or three destinations each time out.

The game is very unforgiving in its fighting system, and its system to win is ridiculous: you first have to die before you can win. During boss-fights, you'll most often die at first, just so you can learn how to defeat the enemy.

I only died on a few of the tougher bosses - you have to think on the fly and adapt to beat them first time, it's not easy but it's certaintly do-able with most bosses.

And the fighting system (and thus the game, because it's the most important thing in the rpg) is just one big treadmill of uninspired gameplay where you have to level up to meet stronger opponents, endlessly repeating itself. In some games it works (Diablo comes to mind), but when the battles themselves become boring hassles (that jump at you randomly to make things worse; making traversing the world a very jittery and frustrating experience indeed!), you know it's not going to be good. Do I HAVE to begin about those deucedly excessive summoning-animations, that could have been so easily made skippable?

I'll give you that, the random battles got annoying (at least there was the Enc-None materia towards the end of the game) and leveling up could be a pain. I much prefer the Chrono Cross system for both of these: Encounters are visible on-screen, and beating a boss automatically levels you up to a set level, so you never fall too far behind. And you can escape all boss battles to go level up a little if you're too weak.

I can see why you wouldn't like the game, but I loved the style, the story, the battle system, and the sheer depth of hidden stuff to discover. Hopefully I've explained why I do like it. It'd probably make my top 5 games of all time. If anyone's interested my number one is Planescape: Torment. Greatest game ever in my book.