LogFAQs > #957860255

Played through the entire game for the first time finally. Overall it's still overall a good game but man there's just a lot of flaws with it. Felt like a game that was pushed out a bit early to capitalize on the success of VII.

It felt like it was a game strung along with big major moments (and admittedly a lot of them are cool) but barely any of them are strung together well or stick around long enough to ever really mean anything or emotionally resonate. Things just sort of happen and then we move onto something else.

The party members are perhaps the biggest offender of this. They all maybe one major moment throughout the whole game and then just...sort of hang around and hope Squall likes them. The Junction system makes them all feel interchangeable party wise unless you focus on Limit Breaks (poor Selphie if you decide to do that). They don't contribute anything else to the story. Rinoa is the exception but story wise it seems like she should barely be in the party at all.

Of course there's the big plot twist that...they all went to the same orphanage...and they all forgot because of GF usage. Except for Irvine who was too awkward to say anything and thought nobody likes him which is pretty sad and weird. But it doesn't matter at all. This plot twist didn't even have to be in the game. It adds nothing and is barely even brought up. It gives some hesitation for Squall fighting Edea but like many other things in this game Edea just stops mattering after a certain point. The memory loss aspect isn't relevant to anything else.

Lots of things are like this. Seifer is a rival who does fuck all after disc 1. He basically disappears after disc 3. Laguna playable flashbacks seem to be building up to something major but they stop when the most interesting stuff is about to happen. My guess is Laguna was meant to have a bigger role and was originally going to fight with Squall when they accomplished Time Compression.

There's a fat rich blob man who causes a civil war in Garden who wasn't relevant before that scene and isn't relevant again. Squall leads the SeeDs for a single mission and him being the leader isn't relevant immediately afterwards. There's constant examples of this so it's quite funny.

But the art design is great. The direction of certain scenes are good. It's a mess but it's a fun one. Combat system is the same way but that's been discussed quite a lot.

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Kind Regards,
Darmik