Posted 15 January 2008 - 10:33 AM
The characters were all lifeless, and the extremely linear progression of locations left the whole thing feeling a bit disjointed for me. It just felt like they had all this better technology at their hands and the ability to have voices instead of text, and they blew it by spending all their time on the pretty graphics and (lacklustre, particularly in Yuna's case) voice acting instead of actual storytelling and characterization. The 'sphere grid' approach was meh, There were bits about it that I didn't mind and others that I really didn't like very much. They tried something different, so I'm not faulting that too heavily.
If you can look past the outdated graphics, I found something like FFVI to be much more enjoyable. VII was a lot of fun too (although naturally a bit overhyped), VIII was a pretty big letdown in most areas but for me at least still seemed fun, IX was a return to the roots of the series and is a really, really underappreciated game compared with the others.