That said, the FF series is starting to become average, especially when compared to Skies of Arcadia and the ilk. Final Fantasy is still using a system that was designed because of hardware limitations, now that they have the hardware to work freely, they still choose to bind themselves. FFXI looks to be a heavy departure and I hope it is good, but that won\'t stop it from bombing, now will it?
Truer words have never been spoken.
The FF series has definitely gone downhill and it\'s really starting to show it\'s age. You can modify the combat all you want, you can toy with it in a billion different ways, but if it still feels like Final Fantasy, then it\'s going to bother the hell out of me. When I started playing FFVI (III), I started seeing why RPG\'s were so great. The epic stories, the awesome chracters, the ability to directly enhance your characters through their actions and of course the strategy involved to winning battles such as dousing zombies with healing potions, or baking ice based enemies with fire. The possibilities were just so great.
Since FFVI, things have not changed. FFVII was a lot of what made FFVI great and that\'s probably why I enjoyed immensely. Once VIII came along, I started to see the things that made the series so redundant. It has a new magic system that was utterly horrendous, but again, the story was basically the same. Again, IX followed suit presenting more of the same with a new format for battle, yet a similar story washed out and refried for your pleasure. With X, things were like FFVII, but how can that be a good thing when VII was just essentially a rehash of VI? That makes a copy of a copy of a copy and that always means things are lost and things are gained, but the lost greatly outweighed the gain.
Maybe it\'s not just the FF series, but ever since FFIX, RPG\'s didn\'t appear to be an adventure in a new world any longer, they appeared to be a 50 hour romp where the outcome is certain and the story is clarevoyent from the first word of spoken dialogue. It\'s sad really, but RPG\'s are to the point with me where I see time wasted doing things over again with a facelift rather then seeing true innovation in the genre and Squaresoft is hugely responsible with that. It\'s sad really, but only the RPG\'s that look to partially change the genre in some way are becoming more and more appealing to me such as Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and Project Ego, both XBox titles.
