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LOL it occurs to me that someone casually seeing just these two posts might assume we had some personality conflicts going on in here.
The skiiing minigame was awesome. Better than most of the contemporary PS1 snowboarding games. But don't hold your breath on that re-release. Square-Enix still hasn't fully learned its lesson from FFXV that it needs to focus on making good games rather than profitable graphics engines.
I like the gambit system, I like the politics. I just don't think that should have been in a main, numbered entry in the series. Square-Enix just seems more and more intent these days on letting the game play itself, and that's not what Final Fantasy is about. Final Fantasy is about Wizardry meets Dragon Quest. It's about strategizing your combination of spells and attacks with each of the characters.
I did at least like the setting and story. That felt like Final Fantasy.
I have a love-hate relationship with it. The leveling system is neat in theory, but broken in execution. Part of the charm of a FF game to me is that you can go to the old areas of the world map and brush aside the random encounters like they're flies.
I really like V. I think it's the weakest one of the SNES era, but it has a very unique feel for the series. It's more focused on having fun than on spinning melodrama, and it gives you a crazy variety of transportation options. I think that part of its charm is also that when I first played it, it hadn't been released in North America yet. So it was this exotic, forbidden fruit that Japan thought Americans were too dumb to enjoy.
Well, they changed so much with Episode II that it turned off a lot of people who would have enjoyed III. Nintendo bought out the company, and they've been making the Xenoblade Chronicles games, which are pretty good, but they suffer from being collect-a-thons where you get so distracted in the sidequests that you forget what's going on in the main story. I think Xenosaga would look FANTASTIC if they ported it to the 3DS.
Try Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It's not award-winning by any means; Enix always was a mediocre second fiddle to Square. However, these days it's the closest you can get to the classic Final Fantasy experience besides Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, which you should also check out. Blue Dragon is basically FFV meets Chrono Trigger, and Lost Odyssey is FFVI meets FFX. Both games are made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of FF. Another game his offshoot company made The Last Story, which is a strategy action RPG feels a lot like some of the side series that defined Squaresoft through the golden years of the PlayStation. It's not Final Fantasy, but it IS a quality game.
Art design, mostly. And the puzzle of the boss creatures. But yeah, I wish there were more than that.
