FFVI - Loved the dialogue, gameplay, and setting. And it had, by far, the best music of any of the FFs. My favourite part of most Final Fantasy games is near the end of the game where you have the airship and can fly around looking for all the secrets and the like. The entire second half of this game was like that *and *a chunk of the first half was. Awesome. Liked that the characters all had their own unique abilities, a facet that most later FFs dropped or at least reduced. It isn’t without it’s downsides though. There basically was no leveling system to speak of and the minor control you got over your character’s stats from espers had little real effect on gameplay unless you were ridiculously careful to maximize your opportunities to use it. A difference of 100 Vigour(Strength in the GBA version) would do nearly nothing due to poorly devised damage formulas. And the ability to learn any and all magic with any character, and the fact that magic was much more potent then nearly everything else, reduced the awesomeness of the character’s natural abilities. Still it’s easily one of my favourites. And probably the top tier of the core series.
FFT - Absolutely fantastic level up system. Great, if slow at times, battle system. One of the best stories, though poor dialogue/translation. I’ve heard the psp version was better translated but i don’t have a psp. Some of the best spritework i’ve ever seen, though i’ve heard the psp version replaces some of the delightful sprite animated cut scenes with anime, pity that. It’s music wasn’t stellar but wasn’t bad and had a few memorable pieces. It’s only real flaws are class balance, some bugginess, and secrets that would be nigh impossible to find without consulting faqs. It’s tied for my favourite with FFVI.
FFX - Great battle system, best in the series. I find it odd that the game with a turn based system ends up being the one where the battles generally go fastest but there you have it. The level up system was alright. Probably second to Tactics for best of the lot. It’s music was largely forgettable outside of the Hymn of the Faith which was grossly overused. The cut scenes were it’s main problem. Long, unskippable, emo, terrible terrible voice acting. I’ve read that many of the problems come from the localization team trying to make the english dialogue match the japanese lip movements which is just *staggeringly *moronic if true. But even if it didn’t have the pointless long pauses between words from Yuna, or “you know?” being appended to the end of half of everyone’s sentences, or the numerous other translation foibles, we’d still be left with the clumsy foreshadowing, stupid characters, and a pathetically desperate attempt to imbue the characters with cool. Still despite those flaws the battle and level up systems save it. And the monster hunter game was quite fun as well, though it was a fair bit more tedious to get 10 of everything that it should have been. They ought to have made it so that the more you capture of one type of monster the less you encounter it proportionately to the other monster types in the area. But it was always a hoot to go back the the monster guy and see what he’d cooked up for you to fight. The rest of the minigames however typically fell between frustrating(chocobo dodgers) and torturous(lightning dodging) or just plain boring(remium temple chocobo race). The inability to explore with the airship was a blow against the game as well. Entering coordinates/secret words is just much less fun then flying around until you see some cave and then landing to explore it.
FFVII - Decent but hideously overrated. The materia system is often lauded but isn’t really very good. It only creates the illusion of choice. Throughout most of the game you have enough slots to equip very nearly all the unique types of materia you find, so theres really no choice you just slop it all in. While you can choose which character gets what it’s of little consequence since the characters aren’t dissimilar enough for any one decision to be significantly better then the rest. There is some interesting things to do with the blue materia, such as elemental, but you don’t get enough of those to make it really fun to play with until right at the end of the game. The materia also takes way too long to level up. And you’re not going to get enough of the good materia to make any really nifty combos without mastering several of them. The graphics were abysmal to the point where it was often difficult to actually interpret what that odd bunch of boxes was supposed to represent. The story was alright, if poorly delivered. The music was mostly average with a few exceptional pieces. The chocobo breeding was fun but could have used some in game hints on how to breed the different colours.
Well those are the top few, i want to write about a few of the others but i’ll be more succinct.
FFV - A forgettable blend of the things i like in 6 & tactics that completely misses the mark of being great despite having great facets.
FFVIII - Interesting but flawed stat/level up system. Boring story, overlong cut scenes, annoying camera angles and bad level design. Fun, but shallow, card game. Nice that it had an effect on the game around it through card distilling.
FFIV - An overall boring story with flat characters and gameplay no different then any of the other early FFs or RPGs in general. The dialogue often read like crib notes.
FFXII - What… what were they thinking? A single player MMORPG? Why? Just why?
FFIX - I’ve played the entire game though and all i remember is 1: learning skills from items is moronic. 2: the card minigame was way worse then the previous game’s.
