a genuinely embarrassing effort

high graphical fidelity in service of a game with no nearly no art direction, a handful of decent character designs in a game with maybe two likable characters, music that soken i guess forgot to compose because nearly 90% of the soundtrack is “prelude but fucked up” and two battle themes that outstay their welcome 15 hours into this 60 hour game, incredibly uninteresting and poorly written sidequests, and a deeply terrible handling of women throughout the entire game.

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the slavery plot is atrocious and stupidly handled, but the ur-jrpg-story that replaces it isnt good, its just not as bad. the pacing of the story is also a complete mess, grinding to a halt regularly, and dumping hours of sidequests on you at random points.

every open area of the game is a complete void, with dead ends for sidequest battles and pick up points for unneeded crafting material and 2 gil at a time. even though every settlement looks identical, the open areas look decent enough, but are covered in cloudy skies or ugly pink light for most of the games runtime.

the npcs are so bland you’ll be baffled the entire game how the game is written as if you like any of these people, and by the time the game introduces its single decent character, he’s only around for probably 90 minutes of it.

many things could be said about the women of this game, from ridiculous hysterical caricatures, to ridiculous evil mother, to good wholesome mother, but the most offensive to me was the main “love interest”, who can’t even clear the final fantasy iv bar, and when she is told to remove herself from the plot she simply does. she will pray for the boys going to battle and cry when they perish.

my sole point of praise is the combat, which is fairly simple for most fights (even optional ones, as those are nearly always enemies you’re already familiar with) but almost always satisfying, even against waves of fodder. the summon boss fights are mostly fun too, the spectacle clearly the main focus of the game (to the detriment of the rest, clearly), but it usually hit for me. the titan fight is probably twice as long as it should’ve been but i liked the rest well enough.

less important than the rest but still worth mentioning, the gear in this game may as well be nonexistent. clive has about four stats and none of them really matter, but the game feels obligated to have gear and swords for you to pick up and craft, so every five minutes you have a new sword, before you even register what your current one looks like. as the only visual change you can make to clive, this is somewhat of a bummer (even if none of the swords look all that good), and it leads to regular moments where you’ll find a sword in a chest somewhere, do a sidequest chain, and then have a new better sword, maybe before you’ve even swung your current sword. there isn’t even a glamour function for it, despite the mmo fingerprints everywhere in this game.

all in all, the game just failed to work for me on nearly every level, it didn’t even feel like playing a final fantasy. playing this game really put the ff series into perspective to me, and i can only hope they never make one at all like this again.