<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>(I'm about 16 hours into the game.)
I liked the story in FFT. It wasn't a literary achievement and it was certainly convoluted, but it worked. It added drama to the game, it was compelling, it gave battles more weight, and a few times, I even found it touching. In FFTA, all I get is some stuff about this not being the real world - but they go over the same points, it seems, multiple times. The story doesn't compell me to continue on - which, I think, is the one thing that all RPG stories should do. If they don't compell you to continue playing the game, they have failed.
The class system in FFTA is broad, as opposed to FFT's, which was deep. (I don't mean "deep" as in "Woah, man, that's deep," but as in the class tree itself.) A deep class hierarchy lends itself better to how I like to play: I pick my six characters, and pretty much exclusively use them for the rest of the game. Along the way, I progress down the class tree to where I want each player to go. I prefer that to FFTA, where my six characters now have access to pretty much all of the classes they will ever have.
FFT was challenging. Now, I'm not a videogame masochist. My day job (grad student) is hard, one of my other hobbies is hard (lifting and running), and I like to read books that I feel I get some intellectual gain from. When I play videogames, I want them to be fun. Generally, that means I want them to lean to the easy side, not hard. But in FFTA, I almost never feel like I might lose. I always viewed FFT as Final Fantasy chess. So if I don't feel like I might lose, I'm just going through the motions. It's boring. I don't want it to be insanely hard, but it should be more challenging than this.
And in other respects, my complaint is that it's too much like FFT. How the battles are played out, that is. The above mentioned stuff was changed, but then nothing was really added to how the battles work. So I feel like I'm playing a watered down version of FFT. When I think about it, I think I'd have more fun playing FFT again, or some other game I've been meaning to replay.
Am I the only one here?</div>
I liked the story in FFT. It wasn't a literary achievement and it was certainly convoluted, but it worked. It added drama to the game, it was compelling, it gave battles more weight, and a few times, I even found it touching. In FFTA, all I get is some stuff about this not being the real world - but they go over the same points, it seems, multiple times. The story doesn't compell me to continue on - which, I think, is the one thing that all RPG stories should do. If they don't compell you to continue playing the game, they have failed.
The class system in FFTA is broad, as opposed to FFT's, which was deep. (I don't mean "deep" as in "Woah, man, that's deep," but as in the class tree itself.) A deep class hierarchy lends itself better to how I like to play: I pick my six characters, and pretty much exclusively use them for the rest of the game. Along the way, I progress down the class tree to where I want each player to go. I prefer that to FFTA, where my six characters now have access to pretty much all of the classes they will ever have.
FFT was challenging. Now, I'm not a videogame masochist. My day job (grad student) is hard, one of my other hobbies is hard (lifting and running), and I like to read books that I feel I get some intellectual gain from. When I play videogames, I want them to be fun. Generally, that means I want them to lean to the easy side, not hard. But in FFTA, I almost never feel like I might lose. I always viewed FFT as Final Fantasy chess. So if I don't feel like I might lose, I'm just going through the motions. It's boring. I don't want it to be insanely hard, but it should be more challenging than this.
And in other respects, my complaint is that it's too much like FFT. How the battles are played out, that is. The above mentioned stuff was changed, but then nothing was really added to how the battles work. So I feel like I'm playing a watered down version of FFT. When I think about it, I think I'd have more fun playing FFT again, or some other game I've been meaning to replay.
Am I the only one here?</div>
