The game that people still say is the greatest RPG ever made because they played it as a kid before their parents got divorced.

I may sound dismissive of it and I do understand completely how impressive and impactful this game was for the time, but there are definitely aspects of this game that frequently get glossed over when people talk about it that bring it down quite a bit. To start with the thing that bothered me the most but is also the most me problem, the random encounters. I don't really like random encounters but in general I can deal with them, but they felt too frequent and oddly placed. There were multiple times where I really felt like they interrupted the flow of the story and it took the wind out of my sails a few times. The next thing to talk about are the minigames, which are almost universally awful. I can't think of one of them that didn't just feel bad to engage with. With a lot of this game you can really tell it was their first 3D game and most of the time that's not a problem, but with these it just kills the mood. The final two things I have to mention are both small but incredibly annoying things that could have easily been avoided. The first is the fact that the scene explaining what happened to Zack is missable with nothing leading you back to it. What happens in that cutscene is incredibly important and if you don't stumble across it that's a whole plotline that will never be resolved. The final thing I want to bitch about for a second is the final boss. Sephiroth is really cool and I mostly didn't mind the fight, but Super Nova made me so upset it genuinely killed any enthusiasm I had about it.

Seeing this through for myself for the first time was a lot of fun and I don't regret it at all. I absolutely agree that this game is amazing. Sadly, those few things made it so in my eyes this could never be the masterpiece it is to a lot of people. I also didn't play it when I was an impressionable child who hadn't had all that shit happen to them yet.