Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon
A brilliantly realised world and characters, amazing soundtrack and nothing but feels all through the game.
But bloody hell its borderline unplayable. The motion controls are nasty, the slow down is insane, theres no lock on and camera control is crap, plus movement feels clunky as hell.
It should have been a movie or short series. It needs a remake so bad because it was such a special story.
Geeze. There was a time I really wanted that game. I forgot all about it. I'm surprised anyone even remembers it exists. Of course, it may not have ever gotten as far as NA after all.
Yeah, the last couple of Final Fantasy games take the cake for promising/interesting story, poor gameplay. I was able to stomach the story of XIII even though it's written by forth grade literature flunkies. I actually thought it was an interesting situation and while the characters themselves were inane with the exception of Vanille (the archetype I'm usually the least fond of) I thought their interpersonal relations and their relation in regards to the situation they were in made for a rather engaging drama.
Now XII has an excellent story. One of those "I can't believe it's not Hollywood" stories (back when hollywood could still write worth a damn on a good day.) It's got a remarkably gripping political intrigue drama, fascinating characters (except vann because f- that ****) and a really well plotted narrative and Ivalice is one of my all time favorite underrated fantasy settings.
But great Hylia's balls was that game a sordid grind. Take everything you know about the JRPG grind and crank it to 11 multiplied by two and that's what FFXII feels like. Infuriatingly enough, one simple thing that should have been a no brainer to begin with would have made the whole game tolerable- which is to break up their god awful license board for character progression into Jobs you can assign each character just like the Tactics games are known for! And lo behold that's what they did and Japan's been holding onto the playable version of the only
good Final Fantasy game post VI worth playing until just recently.
Interestingly enough, the gameplay problems of FFXIII are to me almost entirely to do with that games ball crushing linearity. The battle system is... unique. And the paradigm character progression system is trite. But if you just open the game up and allow players to explore then there's more to do than fight > cutscene > fight > cutscene > repeat. And that's why I actually like XIII-2. Yeah, I like it. I like the story. I enjoy the characters well enough. I dig the fantasy. And it's fun to play because you can run around and explore freely.