Fantasian

[Basshead]

You said nothing of gameplay, which should come before anything...

I've said plenty about how I admired the combat system and other gameplay mechanics in earlier posts. Go read them if you want to bother. I like the flexibility of the skill trees and how each character has multiple different ways to play their particular class. Being able to switch out skills for specific encounters is similar in flexibility to the materia system but better. I liked how the game handled random encounters. Equipment can have a significant impact on your builds. There are many bosses that are challenging and require you to change up your party and skills to properly overcome them. The spells themselves can be aimed, with some abilities having the ability to hit all enemies in a line that you can even curve, others are area of effect. All these things are smart and fun variations that enhance the formula of the old square soft jrpgs. I also enjoyed how random encounters can be captured like Pokémon so that you can fight like 20 at once, instead of the old way of having 10 combat encounters with 2 enemies. It improves the flow, helps with stealing, and enables you to steamroll the random mooks en masse when you become more powerful.

 

[Sergio]

Sakaguchi and Uematsu dropped the ball on this one. I found narrative to be mid at best, art direction really weird (protagonist is basically a failed YorHa cosplayer), and the best part about music is that you can enable combat tracks from Final Fantasy games that are actually good. I have mixed feelings about the game's approach to random battles; storing them is a cool idea on paper, but then you end up having to fight a very long battle with dozens of respawning mobs, while constantly spamming the same AoE attacks. It's tiring and negatively affects pacing. Simply lowering random encounter rate would be a good fix.

There is, however, one thing that this game excels at - boss battles, especially in the second part. I love how much strategy and preparation they require. Seriously this game is worth it just for the guilty pleasure of fighting some bosses on hard difficulty.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Sakaguchi can be a hit or miss in regard to story. Sometimes in 1 game it's very uneven. I love ff 10's story, but sometimes it kinda became nonsensical by the end, in typical japanese way of presenting high concept without solid grasp of the actual philosophy, or idea, but when his story beats or character hits, it hits. Vivi from ff 9 is my first ever existensial crisis, etc