Flame me all you want, but I guess I don't get it.

I bought FFX Saturday night and it's is pretty close to the biggest waste of $50 I've had all year.

I played for about 30 minutes and was bored. 2 Minute cut scene, control character for 15 seconds, 2 minute cutscene, fight, cutscene, run down bridge, cut scene, fall in water, cut scene, etc, etc.

I was bored. I have no doubt that the game gets better and I get to control my character for more than 15 seconds at a time at some point, but it's too late. I gave up.

I thought the whole point of the beginning of a game was to grab your attention and make you want to play it, or hell even to be able to play it at all.

My take: Big disappointment.

But the good news is my roommate likes it.

-Naan

I'm 16 hours into it and the game is awesome. The battle system is great and the sphere grid for abilities is innovative. I like the fact that you can choose how to build each character. The storyline thus far is very good and not predictable. The characters have a lot of depth also. Unlike Squall in FF8, Tidus, the main character in FFX is likeable, albeit a little fruity and stupid.

Fruity and stupid? That reminds me a bit of...Squall!

Did anyone see today's poll at www.gamefaqs.com ?! The poll asks "Which is the best game in the Final Fantasy series?" FF7 has 13% more votes than FF6. I want to cry.

Sad, isn't it? FF7 was both a godsend for the future of RPGs (whether a good or bad godsend is up to debate) and a deathknell for the past at the same time. It brought RPGs out of the relative niche market it was in and into the mainstream. Sony and Square advertised it to death and everyone wanted it.

The truly sad thing is that some to most of the newer RPG players of today never played the FFs and other RPGs that came before FF7. Many of them think FF7 is the best RPG ever...how wrong they are.

But it's not their fault that they haven't played the past FF's. Like you said, FFVII is what brought it mainstream, so many of those players that were introduced to RPGs by FFVII don't really know about FFVI and the rest of the FF games.

I've never played a Final Fantasy game that was great in the first 30 minutes. They spend time at the beginning setting up the story. Its usuall a hour or two in when the game starts to really shine.

I thought the beginning of FF6 was pretty great. Watching the mystery character (Terra) and her military escort march through that snowy field with Terra's sad theme song playing the background was really nice. Just thinking about it makes me want to fire up a new game. The beginning of FF9 was OK too. It actually wan't great in anyway but the happy atmosphere of the first town made everything seem fun. If the whole game was like that it would have sucked but that was a pretty OK way to start things out IMO.

My heart will always be with FFVII!!! That game is one of my favorites!!

FFIX was the second best PSone FF game.


....and........well.......FFVIII........yeaaa, um that sucked.

My bro and I just beat the game (well he was doing most of the work, i was helping him out in some points).

**SPOILERS**

Being a long time FF fan....I pretty much agree with whats been said.
I've played every FF since the original, including FF2j and FF3j on the NES (with the exception of the Final Fantasy Legend gameboy series). My favorite is probably tied somewhere between FF6 and FF7. FF6 was truely a masterpiece with the music, innovative spell learning system with espers, deep characters and story. FF7 was the reason I bought my PSX and it really raised the level in terms of graphics for the series. I remember seeing the japanese commercial for the game during a commercial break on a Rurouni Kenshin tape I had at the time and was blown away, I could not believe that the battles looked like movie scenes. As much as a departure from the traditional FF standard as it was it still kept enough charm from the series in addition to the innovation that puts it high on my list. Plus it has one of the greatest characters of all time, Sephiroth!

No game will probably ever top the experience of FF6, but so far most of them have been pretty damn fun (yeah i've got to admit it, except VIII. Actually it might have been better if the lead role was someone else and you didn't have to use 4 minute long summons just to win regular battles, but still...). Its also good to see Square rereleasing their games in Anthology's. I really enjoyed the anthology makes of FFIV and FFVI. We need to make a petition or something to get Square to release a Seiken Densetsu Anthology pack with a remake of Final Fantasy Adventure, along with SNES The Secret of Mana, and the japan only Seiken Densetsu 3. That would rule!!

That's what everyone keeps telling me, but they already lost me. This was actually my first time playing a FF title, and like I said I was disappointed. It may be the greatest RPG ever created, but I can't get past their entirely counter-intuitive intro game to get to the good stuff.

It's probably going to end up on my shelf next to Planescape Torment as the best RPG's I've never played, because of what I consider horrible game design.

-Naan

Wow, Planescape Torment was so awesome. Anyway, having worked a lil bit on FFX I may be a little biased, but I think the game is great. Not the greatest I understand, I know there are quite a few flaws. But the graphics and presentation are what overwhelms me. If you complain that the action starts too slow and there's too much watching, well, all I can say is this is what RPG's are all about. They all start off slow because it's a story, the story needs to be laid out and presented to understand where you are going and why you are fighting. If you get bored with it at the beginning, then that's that. These RPG's aren't meant for you, try an action game. Doesn't mean the game was made poorly, just means you don't like it. Especially with Final Fantasy games, they are basically long movies where you can control the characters a little through the journey and take part in the battles. Which ultimately led to the ill-fated FF CG Movie. As for not being able to have much free will in the game, you will have total freedom at a later point in the game where you can go back to previous places to do certain things, mini-games, etc. From what I remember, most other FF games didn't have much you could do freely until you got near the end of the game. You always had only a few places you could possibly go or just one place you are meant to go.

V-ism is right... I am near the end of the game and i've been playing side-quests for about 15 hours now. There is alot of stuff to do.