jaga420

Now, it's been a while since I've played so I can't give a fair score; hence the middle score. However, free to play games generally don't change much over the years. The game had its charms. I loved how you could create music and play it in front of crowds. The player character system was definitely interesting; over the time you play your character gradually gets older (you can get a rebirth so you have the same skills but are younger, but that costs irl cash). Your skills are different too, you use them often in order to level them up instead of buying skills or something similar. I loved the graphics, I'm not one for "realistic" graphics because realism is something impossible to attain for gameplay graphics. So, I generally like more cartoonish graphics better because they can turn out exactly how the designers intended them to. Now for the bad side: the combat system was terrible. When every action, even defending yourself or attacking, has a cast time bar, you know something is wrong. I'm not saying it's unmanageable or impossible to get used to, but it's generally a bad idea. I'd rather have turn-based or active battles. Hell, even the ATB system from Final Fantasy is better. Keep in mind, I haven't played in a year or two, so I don't know if they've fixed the combat system or not. But hey, there's my thoughts on the game.

I adore the storyline, and the graphics were a huge improvement over FF7. Honestly, FF7 gets overrated so often that FF8 falls in its shadow. It's very unfortunate. The battle system is great, but the music can get repetitive at times. My major complaint about FF8, however, is the junction system. Parts of it are good, such as the idea of having the GFs (summons) give you different abilities. What I don't like about it is how you get magic abilities by drawing it from enemies to a max of 100. It can take a very long time to get the magic you want or need. That's not the worst of it: you can change your stats by equipping your magic to each stat. This makes things overly complicated, and makes it so that using magic WEAKENS YOU. It annoys me heavily because I'm usually a pretty heavy magic user. Even more annoying than that is that the last 3 bosses in the game have the ability to deplete one magic spell to 0, which absolutely cripples you. Of course, I also like it in a way because it gives some added difficulty to the last boss even if you're level 100. Which brings me to my favorite part of the game: the enemies scale to your level for once! They really need to do that with more final fantasy games.

I absolutely loved the graphics and the gameplay. The story was detestable at best. It has a good base but it has way too many cheesy moments and doesn't make much sense unless you read all the data logs. It only had one cutscene that wasn't cheesy and had meaning (with Sazh and Vanille just before he gets his summon) The music was great and went well with the battles and environment, but I miss Uematsu's work The game was linear, but so was God of War. The voices are the worst part. Vanille's is the worst of the worst, with many of her sound effects sounding more like orgasms than pain. I would have liked an option of changing the voices to the japanese versions and having english subtitles. Overall, a huge disappointment but still worth a rent.

I liked the game ok the first time, but after playing it again I really noticed... They were just trying to hard to make an epic game, and I don't feel like they did a good job of it. Ocarina of Time was an accidental hit if you really think about it; they weren't trying to create a great game, they were just experimenting with giving the Legend of Zelda series 3d graphics, and they just had fun with the rest. It also had a good story and a sort of hidden message about the loss of innocence with age. Twilight Princess is not Ocarina of Time. Twilight Princess basically attempts to add the darker two-world tone of A Link to the Past to Ocarina of Time. I won't go into specifics to prevent spoilers, but the bottom line is that they were just trying too hard. It had too many cheesy moments.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]