Rating's essentially meaningless, as the first two discs or so are peak Final Fantasy, and the back half sadly plummets into the convoluted nonsense that turns me off most JRPGs. What makes this franchise special is the way that gameplay is so often weaved into storytelling - there's narrative tension, for instance, in how this game introduces all its characters (from lowly thieves to high royalty - the Shakespearean aspirations couldn't be clearer), brings them together into a party - then uses big events like "the destruction of a city" to split them apart, jump through time, tell an episodic story through environment and NPC dialogue. The ATE system is amazing - being able to choose between lovely little scenes that deepen the characters and world without shouldering the burden of being "necessary" to the narrative makes them all the more impactful. And the characters are so vivid - Vivi and Steiner, in particular, are cartoonish types that deepen without betraying their established essence - the theatrical performances that bookend the narrative couldn't be more perfect for a game so adept at small-scale dramas.

So why do we have to travel between dimensions and defeat God? Again? Final Fantasy VII earned its planet-sized ambition, but it doesn't fit here - once you get to freely choose your party and the dull villains (never the best part of these games) take centre stage, all the air goes out of the balloon. It doesn't help that the game has virtually no interest in the fundamentals of the genre - battles are perfunctory (and incessant), the card game is stupider than ever, the side quests mostly involving catching frogs, etc etc. Perhaps VII's success trapped the company into catering to expectations, but I wish it hadn't. There's such mastery in its visual storytelling, tone, music - even translation this time around - that I wish it played to its strengths throughout.