well... the voice acting is really good?

i'm always interested in those games that seem to be really going for something and kind of fall on their ass halfway through, so you'd think i'd be into this one. but in the end, it's just the second weakest final fantasy for me.

if i had to pinpoint what went wrong, i'd say that it has the same sidequest structure as ff tactics advance 2, where there's a million of them and they constitute most of the game -- there's no reason to go to like half of this game's zones if you're not chasing hunts -- but in a story that wants to have much bigger stakes and a much more serious tone and so accommodates this kind of low-stakes distracted gameplay much less. so your final experience is likely to be that you either gave up on the sidequests, or you really powered through them and then the main plot is this weirdly paced afterthought that you come back to after 100 hours, having forgotten who any of these characters were.

it's too bad! i love balthier, i love fran, and then i guess the others are there too. that's another problem, actually -- ashe's motivation and internal turmoil were just completely unrelatable to me. the intro makes it clear that her marriage to that guy was one of political convenience, and from how she keeps following his ghost around, we're clearly meant to take that sometime in the interim, she came to love him -- but we never see the coming to love him part, and it's hard to just take it on faith. we see a lot of stuff about the imperials and their royal family and politics -- and then in the end it just kind of doesn't matter, like most of the politicking in ff tactics. venat and all the other spooky proto-ascians are cool -- but there's like zero time in the plot spent on who they are and what they want, so they feel like a half-developed idea (and god bless the ff14 team for running with it and turning it into something wonderful).

plus, gambits suck and are a gigantic downgrade from ffx's combat. everyone in the business wanted to turn everything into an mmo for a while bc mmos were making the big dollars, and here it just results in a dull and annoying system where characters have no mechanical identity and most of your gameplay time is spent yelling at cooldowns to go faster.

i will say this, though: this version of ivalice is very beautiful and full of life, and it's overall still like a million times better than xv.

this is the only one i've played so far, and i think it's pretty good. it really lays bare what's obvious but not openly said in the other ones -- kojima is just a huge film nerd and he's putting every cold war spy movie and every action flick in a pot and stirring. the enemy midboss squad are equally james bond villain henchmen and mega man boss concepts, you can phone up your handlers at base and just have a funny conversation about godzilla or several dozen other popular movies, etc.

as far as ideas and characters go i don't think it should be treated too seriously. of course we still have the eternal mgs theme of looming nuclear war and that never gets less serious, but all this stuff about the boss's sacred and sacrificial motherhood that must be killed in order for the modern cold-war-and-after world order to take shape -- i don't really know what i think about it. some days i'm like "oh kojima is being weird about women again" and some days i'm like "yeah but in this one it kind of works if i tilt my head". don't really have a strong feeling about it. i think it's style over substance, basically, and kind of fumbles over what it's trying to say because the deeper ideas beyond the obviously true "war bad" are not that well-examined -- but again, this is sort of appropriate for an action movie? and also, i say obviously true, but a lot of games don't even get that far?

mgs is in this weird place where it's thoroughly historically literate, and very seriously anti-war, but also incredibly silly and very much a love letter to its hollywood inspirations. i think 2 will end up being the one that stood the test of time the best but i quite like this one too

i think 3's existence is wholly justified by that vista just before the last boss and the section at the beginning of ringed city, where a bunch of locations from the series are piled on top of one another and squashed together in one gigantic trash heap, looked over by uncanny and disturbing tree angels that wouldn't be out of place in berserk. it's the same type of sublime imagery as ash lake but from the complete opposite direction: instead of an incomprehensibly majestic and pristine primordial state, it's the immense, infinite landfill at the end of the world -- and specifically, the end of this fictional world, which has already said all it's needed to say and its further existence is only to sell increasingly boring copies of itself. it's already mocking the demon's souls remake before that even existed. i think other aspects, like the presence of "the painted world", also support this kind of interpretation if you want to really get into it.

there's a ton of willful misreading of this series around, because some people built successful youtube brands out of it, and their kind of reading is exactly like digging through the trash for loot and not looking at the angels overhead.

anyway as a "game" that people "play" it's like, fine or whatever. the formula's pretty exhausted at this point and it's a good thing they moved on to bloodborne and sekiro and elden ring to try new stuff.