Copied from the review. This should give everyone an idea about whether the reviewer was ever going to give the title a fair shake or not. He clearly went in thinking "if it's like Final Fantasy i'm marking it down for copying. If its not like Final Fantasy, im marking it down for not being like Final Fantasy."
The source? Final Fantasy VII through XII. The game is a checklist of things you've seen and done before. For example, the areas in the game traverse locations that are reminiscent of things like the prison in FFVIII, the enormous defensive gun, Mako production facilities, snowfields, mining areas (and a lot more) from VII, the opulent cities and streets of XII, and the characters run the gamut of generica.
Such traditional development is a problem for two reasons. One, it keeps happening and players keep buying into it, which means that it'll continue. Two, every time I have to play as a stoic lead character with no past who is out to save a dying world, it makes me want to cut someone – and it just might happen. It gets to the point where you can start picking the twists just by looking at the character design. That's bad. By the time the loveable rogue meets the rambunctious princess and they start to fall for each other, you'll either reach for your copy of Final Fantasy IX or go all gooey because you've never played an RPG before.
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