Actually one of the best Final Fantasy games, up there with my favorite in the mainline series. The gameplay is excellent, requiring actual strategy & planning even in the random battles, but without feeling too taxing. The job system is great, and it's fun to find what combinations can work well together. The story is interesting, but this version of the game is marred by a terrible translation that's chock full of awkward wording, typos, and inconsistent names. I'll definitely revisit this on the PSP to see how its newer translation fares.

This game took me an outrageously long time to finish, not only because of the fact that it was split into two parts but also because it's actually a punishingly difficult RPG. The game expects excellent strategy when it comes to boss fights, along with a combination of preparedness and some improvisation. I enjoyed how the game made grinding somewhat obsolete, encouraging deeper exploration into its systems for success. The Dimengeon is a bit of a double edged sword--it's great to not have random battles interrupting, but the Dimengeon battles do take quite a long time to clear so it somewhat takes away from that advantage. Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot. Awesome music, interesting plot, challenging & engaging battles, and some unique gameplay twists.

This was my first experience playing through a relatively text heavy game in a language that I completely do not understand. The fact that the game has so many mechanics, but it was possible for me to basically mash one button throughout the entire story, says a lot about this game. However, I will say that it's an improvement over Utawarerumono: Zan in that it appears to have a lot more interesting concepts introduced, such as side missions, a hub area, a whole swath of mechanics which, if I understood them, would probably make the game more interesting because I could crank up the difficulty slider. I'll be trying this game again if it comes to the west.

Interesting that this one received so much praise back on its release. I remember hearing extremely high praise for it, and while it was an enjoyable game I wouldn't place it as highly as the acclaim it initially received. I liked how you could grow your stats through the game, but it's unfortunate that it was exclusively from finding characters, so it's entirely possible to be quite underpowered from not exploring with no way to rectify it. Definitely a higher quality licensed game, but not quite the stellar game I was expecting.

I wasn't as high on this one coming towards the end as I was the first game due to less intrigue driving the story (you really can't beat uncovering the mystery of what happened to the world), but this still holds up as an excellent game. The satisfying loop of destroying machines is still there to ground the game, and it builds on the lore in some interesting ways that also leave things open for future games. I'm excited to see where they take this world, I'll be on board for any and all sequels.