These are my thoughts. The game as a game was very very good. The graphics for a PS2 game were stunning, best I'd ever seen on the console. Story wasn't to bogged down but needed improvement. And it was worth my £30. I enjoyed it, a lot.
But...the issues I had with it was this, to me, it just didn't feel as Final Fantasy as I would have liked, i had to remind myself I was playing a FF game. I mean a couple of points below to highlight this.
1) I know so many people complain about random battles but if you don't/didn't like random battles, why were you playing an FF game to start with. Random battles have been part of it since I can remember. But because of the lack of them I found it easy to prepare for battle, I just walked accros the battle field and when a shield ran out or haste, I'd just cast it before a fight even arrived.
2) Might seem not very important to many but fixed cameras. I liked the prerendered scenes of 7-9 and the fixed camera of 10, ignoring 7 and it's online only bullcrap. From behind like in FFXII didn't feel as 'nice'.
3) Summons, I know they were Tactics summons and that's all well and good but I wasn't wanting to play tactics, I wanted Final Fantasy.
Other then those other issues were that it Took forever to level up IF you didn't focus of 3 characters and used them all, even with the Double EXP item attached. I mean first play through too me ages and most of it was spent wandering around purposely fighting things. Gambit system made the game so it played itself...I would have liked to play it personally so tried to tell them what to do at all times.
Redeeming feature was the hunting sidequest but even that and depending on the enemy would just take forever. Some had rediculous amounts of health, far greater then the main bosses and it could take me hours to beat them, just standing and waiting for them to die as my characters just threw attack after attack on autopilot.
Oh and the early bosses were REALLY hard and the final bosses i waslked through...found that odd.
Over all though, still a great game.
Hmm, pie.
