Douche McCallister wrote:

taterfyrings wrote: I think the game had a lot of potential, however some really poor design choices (like the terrible materia-system who makes every character interchangeable) What's the difference between the Materia system and the Esper system?

The difference is that in FFVI you have to invest in your characters, which makes the choices you make much more important and interesting. So for example, you have to decide who to learn white magic, who to learn black magic etc, which actually put a bit of strategy in the game. Of course, this does not matter if you over-level to much (which is unfortunately easy to do in an amazing game like FFVI), but if you play it normally, the choices will matter in a completely different way than in FFVII. Also, the fact that you have to form three parties in the last dungeons (and two parties several times through the game) means that you have to be even more careful with who you choose to use during the quest, and who you choose to learn things. Quite simply, Final Fantasy VI has a lot of strategy going for it, while FFVII barely has anything, which makes the gameplay of FFVI wastly superior in my opinion.

However, even though I think Final Fantasy VII is extremely overrated, I still find it a good game, and especially the start of the game (in Midgar) was extremely satisfying to play. To bad it collapses somewhat when you enter the world map.

Douche McCallister wrote:

taterfyrings wrote: The difference is that in FFVI you have to invest in your characters, which makes the choices you make much more important and interesting. So for example, you have to decide who to learn white magic, who to learn black magic etc, which actually put a bit of strategy in the game. Turning this into a pissing contest for a second... Decide who learns White and Black magic? I can't remember an extended period of time where my characters didn't have the same exact spells. In FFVII you go through about all 3 discs before anyone in your party has the same spell as someone else. Final Fantasy VI; 3 group solution - Team 1 Equip Offering and Genji Glove on someone with the Atma and Illumina/Ragnorock Team 2 Equip Fastest person with Gem Box and X-Magic; cast Ultima Team 3 Have Sabin use Bum Rush, have Gogo mimic.

Yeah, this is the kind of advanced tactics you have if you know the game well, which can break every rpg out there. However, if you play the game normally for the first or second time, you will carefully decide which esper to equip to which member, and who to bring, because it clearly matters, and it is important to level up all the characters since you have to use at least 12 of them at various points in the game. In Final Fantasy 7 you play with three characters for the whole game, as the game never really gives you any incentive to change it up (except when a certain person dies), and if you want to change around, you just change all the materia which all the skills are tied to - which makes any real strategy completely pointless IMO.

Morrowind is awesome. Also:

GPFontaine wrote:

I solved the Esper/sword debacle. I chose to not make the choice. Ever. My cart game has everyone with every spell at level 99 with maxed out stats based on Esper choices during level ups. Yet no fucking Ragnorock. People wonder why I like FFIV better than FFVI... perhaps I enjoy a little bit of fucking structure in my characters so that my god damn OCD doesn't destroy days of my life.

Every rpg gets fucked if you level to much, that is nothing special with FFVI. Also, FFIV offers almost no customization, making the "rpg"-label almost strange IMO. Still a great game and my second favorite in the series, but the gameplay is not where it shines imo. And the difficulty of the western version was ridiculous.