Article 100 - Chrono Trigger

Let the epic, begin

So it's the 100th article of the blog and I thought I'd go and look at what I feel is on the best RPGs of all time and nay, best games of all time. Yes, I believe this game should be in anyone's Top20 list, likely in my own Top5. The problem with such lists is that they always swing and sway but I'd place Chrono Trigger there any day. Here's why.

Looks lovely and happy, that never is going to last long is it...

Let's get the basics out of the way first. You play as Chrono and his band of friends that he picks up from around time and space, sort of like a kid Doctor Who and you find out that when you try to use a teleporter at the local fair, some girl's pendant sets off a temporal flux and you're flung back in time 400 years to where you realise that some asshat has bollocksed up the timeline by mistakenly assuming that the girl who has gone with you, is the queen of that time period. This causes a huge bullshit session of the girl you're with being unwritten from time as the queen of that time is your friend's ancestor.

We don't really know Flea's gender, we don't care either, kill it.

All this is carefully explained with monsters and images by the way in such a way most kids could get this, really playing to the mass audience with aspects of consequence and causality. To which you and another friend and a man-sized frog (keep with me) go and rescue the real queen to set the timeline right again. This is just the first hour or so of the game.

Batter up, it bashing time.

Eventually your rag-time friends from across time spanning back to the age of man vs. dinosaurs (don't think too hard on this) to the future where the apocalypse has had an apocalypse (Yes, Blood Dragon, well done), you're left to hop back and forth through time, fixing the problems as you go and solving things in a sort of Dr Who meets Back to the Future in order to try and stop the world ending in 1999 (You start in 1000), while the future in 2300 is bleak and shitty.

Looks nice and friendly.

Each time period represents issues within our own history. 65 mil BC is our dino era with mankind learning basic language skills and fighting T-Rex's as often as one lights up a cigarette in a sort of "evolution represented by one big punch up" race between dinos and apes. 23,000bc has the segregation system in place of the underlings represented by non-magical users and the uber-class of magical users which also seem to cause most of the problems in this game. 600ad is your usual might and magic era, expect knights, maidens, talking frogs and an out of place magic user. 1000 ad is pseudo steam punk pleasant modern day, 1999 is just one event, the end of the world and the game's final boss and 2300ad is the bleak future of starvation, dying, disease and lots of robots and mutants. There's also the end of time populated by one old dude, a god of war and a streetlamp straight from some old 1960s film-noir.

5v3, no contest.

It's varied, it's memorable and it approaches the time travel aspect in a rather interesting way. Initially you'll be hopping through gates from one time period to another until you get to a point where you get the "Fly around the main map and time hop when I want" but until then it's fairly rail-roaded. The more interesting aspect taken into account is that nearly EVERYTHING you do has an impact later in the game. Even the first area, where you're walking around with the new girl, all of your actions can bite you in the arse 4-5 hours after they've happened. Summarised in such a way that you realise that 'yes, doing that in game would make me look like a total prick' in one of the biggest parodies of the genre before accepting it wholeheartedly in the next breath.

Large zombie skeleton things, not quite what you expect to see in 600AD

As you progress through the game you'll end up solving quests and puzzles that require thinking in time zones. Need a forest now? Go build it back a few hundred years ago. Mum's a cripple? Go back and save her from the accident she had.

The Epoch, a time machine unless you named it something else. I called it Dave.

Aside from this, the game has over 10 endings and variations all depending upon when and how you fight the final boss. The variations depend on whether you completed the big missions to improve things while the actual endings are all about at what point in the game you decide to destroy the giant flea from space that screws up time, Lavos. Some endings are done purely for laughs, while others take a serious "Here's the consequences of your actions deal".

Either everyone got tired, or you screwed up.

As a game, it's an RPG so you've your chars and their experience, stats automatically are designated on levelling up but you can also boost them with items if you can find them. You'll get a weapon, helmet, armour and accessory for each character (some can't be adjusted, but usually you can) with greater armours and weapons throughout the game and some coming from some very convoluted missions. So a lot of the personalisation with the characters is gone as you can't focus their talents and are just told "You levelled up, here's a spell that makes an enemy's arse explode" while fighting in a zone of monsters with no buttocks, or something similar...

This only goes to show how BADLY you messed the game up.

Combat takes the guise of mostly scripted events, even the location and placing of characters is pre-determined while some of the attacks and techniques you can use are 'area of effect' or 'line of sight' and characters are kept stationary except when attacking. There is no "random" battle, monsters you fight in a zone/area will be there each time you go through that zone/area, giving you a chance to be ambushed just the first time you go through (or if you forget) while other fights are entirely of the "walk into them and kick arse" type. You can often prepare for a fight with the right items and checking health/mana levels.

Oddly enough, you see this in all points in time, can fight it all points too.

Each fight gives you the choice to attack with the weapon, use a technique or combo technique if multiple compatible characters have the right moves available i.e. Froggy and Chrono can perform an X-attack, while Froggy and Marle do a different attack with different results and impacts, some techs can be done by all 3 working together. However later in the game, individual chars tend to be able to just hit high on their own anyway. Chars can also use an item instead and at the start of the game these will likely be essential to recover health and such.

Magic and technology, looks friendly with that blue-hue trim over the planet.

Enemies run the variation of being standard, high-def low-magic, high-magic low-def, switchers and puzzles where you have to do one thing, then another, then another to kill them. Bosses are almost all puzzles, particularly the final boss when you realise just what actually IS the real core of the boss. Other bosses need to be destroyed in order of parts, or have weaknesses initiated by magical impacts. Magus being a key one as he'll fight with magic and changes immunities every other turn or so. Puzzles of such degree that even when playing through in the New Game+ modes, you'll STILL have to be careful. Yes you can hit harder than GOD and already killed monsters and enemies that transcend time and space, but that robot dragon will only die when you hit it in the RIGHT ORDER.

Yep, riding dinos. How else do you get around?

There's a lot to do in this game, puzzles, quests, missions, so many things one can miss and WILL miss even after many years of playing (I've still not seen ALL the possible endings, most of them however), questions to ask yourself such as "Do I take the item now, or wait 400 years and take it later?" "Do I give it for free or make him pay? What's the knock-on implications for this?" "Do I really want to save a crippled mother's legs?" Some very hard questions one has to ask oneself.

The game has some truly inspired graphics and interior decor.

As a story, the pacing is fairly solid up until the final session when the last few dungeons are just a long slog of "Oh this guy again, ok let's hit him with attack A C B... and again a few rooms later... and again... here's his powered up form so let's... just... do... the same thing again..." While the missions and questions to improve the world before you fight the final boss add a little extra element of thought and impact rarely seen in games at that time. It gets complicated after a while but never so much that it becomes unfathomable and new elements are introduced gradually rather than being tossed in.

This enemy cannot die. You can re-fight it again and again and again. Why didn't they send this into battle instead?

Some parts of the game are poorly thought out however, one in particular is where your band is kidnapped and held hostage and while attempting a daring escape, need to recover their weapons, items, armour and gold, of which some can be left behind and lost forever. Also, if all three of your party fight with weapons, you'll HAVE to stealth it around the level and getting caught puts you right back where you started making it a sort of Spy By Trial And Improvement type of deal. Other parts include mandatory repetitive battles that serve no real purpose other than to pad the gameplay out, of which there's a lot of it already while other parts of the game.

Nope, not dead yet, in fact it's only just begun.

The music within the game really adds to the atmosphere and ambience created in tandem with the artwork and graphics. Every piece of music is not only distinguishably different, but either increases a sombre mood, enhances an adrenaline rush of a boss fight, or more epic boss fight, or highlights the joviality of a scene punctuated by the more light-hearted and flittery scores of music composed for use in this game.

The final boss, but which part is the REAL thing? Hint: Not the big thing.

With regards to the graphics, everything looks stunning, from the spell effects to the time travel warps, to the characters themselves and the detail and attention on the backgrounds is mind-blowing to see from the logs of wood on houses to the slates and cobbles in the streets. Even the smallest time zone, the end of time, is lavished upon in detail and gloom adding a real impact that this is all that's left once time itself has finished. An old man by some cobbled streets with a single lamppost almost out of Victorian era industrial revolution times.

Grim, bleak, mortifying. Detroit never looked so good.

Does it have replay factor, yes by the bucket-load. With each completion players can run through again on New Game+ giving them the chance to play in a different manner, try different things and gain items they couldn't have done the first time through because of the "This OR That" choices that had to be made. Try to win the trial by jury, complete or fail to complete specific quests, save people or condemn them and see what the impacts are upon the game's world. With also over 10 different endings including the "I beat the game by myself as one character because I took the second teleporter right at the start" which, while difficult, isn't impossible and certainly feels great when fighting the last boss through time and space SOLO. (Yes... yes I have, thank you for asking).

Well he IS the God of War.

It's bright, it's bold, it's different and done very well and remains a game I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't played it before and especially in this day and age where it can be found on handhelds and mobile devices. Pick it up, have a taste of how it should be done right and realise that few games will compare even closely to this one.

PSX Final Fantasy 7

Whether I get any backlash over this or not all depends upon the irate fan base that seems to worship this game above and beyond all games as, and I quote "It's da bestest game evar!" You can add your own childish voice to that line however you wish. While I'm open to admit that it's a game, it is ground breaking in its own ways and certainly seemed to open up the Japanese RPG genre to a lot of people around the world. It is by no means a game that should be held in such high regard as the "OMG #1 GAME!!11!!" as often touted by many idiots that rightly deserve to be shown some 8 bit classics or just need to get out a little more often and talk with real people.

Final Fantasy 7; even I have to admit to having a huge interest in the game when I first saw it advertised with the 3D models showing combat in based around turn/time based ordering, menu based attack systems and realising that it alone would require strategy rather than most games at the time having the need to hammer a button, repeatedly, to beat boss x, y and z before getting a credits screen.

The plot is enormous for the time. First runs often taking 60+ hours to get through (assuming you have the patience) which pales into some games today having over 120 hours of game play (padded by HUGE expanses of sitting around doing sweet fuck all...). You assume the role of "Cloud" a spiky headed hairdo of a caucasian with an improbably big sword compensating for a lack of trouser filling. You get to follow cloud through futuristic/fantasy setting from being a terrorist (you tell me blowing up stuff and killing innocents doesn't make you one and I'll point to 2 former towers) to leading a renegade terrorist group into overthrowing a company executive that runs most of the planet, escaping said capital city into an open world filled with towns, villages, ports, all with their own issues and difficulties while following one silver haired man with a big sword (more trouser department issues) and stopping him from destroying the planet because he believes himself to be descended from higher beings and being told he was an experiment set off the emo trip of destruction. Sadly they all look like dolls in shop and any attempt to express emotion is met with the same gormless facial expression.

In a nut shell; There's a lot more going on than just this with motor bike races, double crosses, killing off main characters (not a first in any game nor any Final Fantasy game for that matter either...) developing character and plot (except around Cloud who remains as confused and sword stabby as always just with a little more purpose and a better understanding of his history, that nobody really bothered to tell us about and we just wish he'd tone down the hair-gel!) Racing and breeding of large birds, submarines, Command & Conquer strategy moments, huge monsters, big fights, large annoying bosses and level grinding like a bastard.

Can't beat that boss on level 10? Run around like a retard for 20 minutes, fighting every little random (yes it's random encounter time or as I like to phrase it "computer says fuck you" time) encounter until you come back and can kill the boss just by waving your hairstyle at it or staring really hard.

I could go into every little intricacy of plot but the line "Guy joins terrorists and then realises greater threat, has to save the world" does it perfectly, maybe adding "p.s. Flashy effects ahead"

Cloud isn't alone, at any time he will have up to 2 other people directly with him and will be fighting alongside him which will be intermittently determined by the game when someone plot focused is forced into the view and you HAVE to take along the one character you didn't level up and play with because they looked/sounded/were shit or you'd already invested 20 hours in someone else and now forced to play with another character is just a waste of your time and preferences. Each of these chars will join, take over the story, and then take a back seat while you pick the 2 chars you really want with you the whole time based on usually just "I like the look".

You've the big angry black guy stereo type that swears a lot, the big titted love interest with the world's strongest lower back, the dainty intelligent girl that is better with spells than anything else and gets killed for being dull and to remove the pointlessly forced love triangle bullshit, an old guy with a hatred for most things thanks to losing his dreams, a talking cat stuffed toy comic relief character with just as comical special moves, a talking lion/dog/tiger thing that acts mysterious and speaks in an aloof fashion to make it seem he is more interesting than he really is. Completing the ensemble are the bonus characters of a mopey man with even more of a depressing story to his grief than the main characters and a token young girl ninja with more leg on show than KFC at peak hours who is playing the ditzy-but-determined clueless kid.

It's all much of a similarity that you can't find in your usual anime shows and about as complex in narrative as you'd expect.

The story ambles along at the rate at which you play and succeed. Pointless back stories and histories can even involve their own fights which pads the time you're spending and making absolutely zero progress. Getting into a fight in a back-story is one of the most ridiculous wastes of time I've seen, even if to show off one character that will be the last boss. WE KNOW he's meant to be tough, just do a flashy FMV of it instead. Back stories have the characters being forced to run around locations and talk to characters or go to locations until the right ones are done in the right order to progress plot and get the fuck on with the main story.

My gripe aside however...

Foreshadowing is used in varying degrees where some new char might show up, then be fought moments later, while the bigger opponents are given more time to be evil then offed in over the top battles. Sometimes a boss comes out of nowhere and it's a case of "yep... lets fight it" including the ones that talk to you about what's going on. Plot points can be entirely over looked at times and knowing where to go next simply becomes the point of just looking at the map and seeing which location you've not been to lately or haven't been to at all.

Combat is the usual affair for the game making up the majority of the game's structure when it's not reading text, missing some Japanese cultural jokes and watching long videos of nothing happening. It's the usual turn based system picking to fight, cast magic, summon attacks, use items, run off or other extra commands based around whichever coloured ball you pick up and put in your characters inventory.

Magic and extra functions are determined by small coloured balls you assign to a weapon or armour item. Green ones being magical spells, blue ones boost green effects from elemental inclusion to attack lots/multiple times, yellow ones give bonus commands like morphing and power attacks, red ones summon powerful creatures capable of high damage until you reach the later stages of the game when your standard attack out classes them (except for ONE summon... that takes far too long to cast), and purple balls that change stats like health and magic/mana or permit things like countering, more passive abilities.

There's a fairly complex mechanic behind this system where you can pair up some balls to get attacks that drain health from the enemy at the same time, or attack when you die which can resurrect the dead character, counter attacking with summons or spells or boosting the power of various attacks and defences. You slowly get drawn into it with the few spells like cure and lightning attacks, the more you use them, the more exp they gain and the more power spells become opened to you. Bonus points for getting maxed out EXP on the coloured balls and getting the master ones that give you everything, which you already HAVE! Another redundant reward.

The game has a plethora of items and weapons to throw at you with various effects, each char has their own weapon types, various armours and bangles are worn by all or specific to gender/race. Combined with the colour ball mechanic allows for pairing balls, multiplied exp growth for the balls and such. (Yes it's called materia, I'm using balls). Where you can put your most powerful balls together to get different effects, ball pairing was never so calculatingly fun (...no). By the end of the game you'll have so many that you'll be longing for an Optimal function and at one point your carefully collected and planned ball set will be taken away and mixed up and you're left feeling the game has fucked with you once again and you'll never get the combination back that you had before. All of your hard, progressive work, undone again.

Doesn't help that the under aged ninja kid steals all your balls in a side-quest that involves a guy you had to cross-dress for earlier in the game and if done right, lusts for Cloud more than BiggyTits and DeadByDisc1Girl.

Though despite this, it's possible to get through the game with the basic spells and attacks with a few items to help out. The only challenges that could present are the creatures that require a specific tactic (i.e. they nullify all attacks, or need potions to unlock their vulnerable sides... like that ever made sense) in order to progress further. With enough grinding of levels and stats, most bosses and enemies will fall after hitting them enough times.

There's some lengthy side quests you have to undertake if you want the more powerful "I AM GOD" abilities and spells that take up more time to cast them just to show off something before the bigger numbers land on the screen indicating strength and damage. But really the battles and the plot are two different games and the jumps from one to another all serve as a distraction from the alternative. When you're fighting you want progression, when you're progressing plot, you'd rather be fighting.

The biggest grievance though is the "finding yourself" segment of the plot, it can take over 45minutes of walking around and trying to activate the objects in the room just to unlock more videos and more text showing something that could have been fixed very quickly in just one scene without the unnecessary egg hunt for the trigger to move the game onwards.

For the hardcore, there's bonus bosses to fight, breeding racing birds and seeking the elite one to get the ultimate unlocks, bonus characters with their own storylines or the self imposed runs of "items only" for the truly depraved and self-depreciating individual. Though the game is already long enough as it is. As such it suffers the "rush it at the end" approach where the final parts of the game are just a long slog through the last dungeon filled with the toughest things so far that still die too quickly for your army-slaughtering, over-powered, warriors, to then kill the last few bosses and get the credit sequence. You just want it over by then but the game is forcing you to play it out a bit longer.

Dying in the game is the end and you'll have to go back to the last save point. If you've not saved in a while and you're surprised by a bonus enemy or secret boss without warning, you're going to be doing a LOT of backtracking to get there for round 2, or just quit the game and look it up online.

Graphically the game switches in and out of super cute deformed characters when in the over world, to pseudo anime style in battles while the FMVs switch up from one to the other with the more detailed and higher polygon graphics turning up towards the end of the game. Compare the first videos with the very basic looking models in FMVs to the last video of Cloud before the final fight and see the huge difference in styles. The lack of consistency makes me wonder just how many changes were made throughout the game. The fights themselves take the opportunity to showcase just how overboard they can go with the engine with 3D shifts and pan shots of the combatants, close-ups and zooms for attacks and power moves like they're going out of fashion in a pre-graduates media project, though you can appreciate that given the time, they likely felt that HAD to over sell it from the sprite based combat they'd had previously.

Music and sounds are rather lacklustre until the more epic pieces kick in, sound effects often sound muted and grainy and lack the impact of better quality audio that was available at the time and thankfully, no voice actors means I can imagine the large angry black man having a high pitched squeaky voice while the cute big titted girl sounds like an 80-a-day chain-smoker. I like having the choice to perceive the annoying how I choose and thankfully not with some overly cute, childish voice that fits an 8 year old kid. Having to imagine her say "I love you" while wheezing and hacking up carcinogenic lumps of her lungs, was far more entertaining them most of this game.

Nostalgia however is the biggest problem. Too many people are putting this game up as a 'wonder of gaming' all the world over and while it does have its charm and appeal, the flaws in the game are becoming more and more apparent as time goes on. No it's not because the graphics have changed, the same story is still there but it's done and done better before and since this game.

Going on a date with the only other guy in the party is still funny though.

There's a lot more going on beneath the surface but you'll need some very in depth guides and FAQs to get to them and in ways that most people will never find nor bother to find. Only once did I manage to get Cloud to go on a date with someone other than Aeris and while it wasn't intentional, certainly was amusing, though I was called out for being a liar at school until years later when it was discovered not only that it could be done but HOW to do it too. It's all about choices, I just happened to make the right ones.

Replay factor... likely most people will play this once or twice, once to just experience the game and generic story and a second time (if they didn't do this already), to get all the things they missed like the super powerful summons and spells, easily missed items by accidentally completing a dungeon too soon and so on. Or the really odd items you can miss by not having character X with the team at time Y armed with item Z for a one-off chance to find something. That "fair" way of missing something you'd never have had otherwise nor would know to look, or even care, without a guide.

Of course having a character that has a special attack called Game Over, is always fun. As it does exactly that. Game Over, no recovery, no escape. What fun THAT is after 3 hours without saving... I seriously would love to be in on that meeting "Let's put in a move that either kills the opponent flawlessly or if they fuck up the timing, kills the players" and gob-smacking every bastard who said "YES" to that proposal.

To give it credit, the game did usher in and make more accessible the Japanese style RPGs to a new generation of console and open up the genre to even more people than the hardcore RPG players, but it could have it done it in a much better and more enjoyable way.

Now it's time for me to gel my hair up and grab a sword, I've a giant chicken to rescue. And yes, Cait-Sith dying was more touching for me than Aeris.

SNES Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

Here's where I get into a little grey area known as "Twatty Fan base". That wonderful little area games tend to fall into where some fans of a series will disown the game and label it "A Gaiden Game" or "A non-canon game" or will disregard it as being part of a series because it's "too different" or "not the same kind of game". This is why I turn around and simply ignore these pricks because it's quite simply, a game. These people need to stop being whiny little fucks and either enjoy the game for what it is rather than what it's supposedly not being.

"It's not part of the series" So fucking what? It's still a game, it's still released with that title whether you agree with it or not for whichever little bullshit excuse you can muster up even if it's "Executive meddling" doesn't detract from the game itself, look at it for what it is rather than what it is part of.

"It's too different" No... shit... It has to be different otherwise you're playing the same game as before and then it becomes "It's too similar!” Your on-the-fence little position only shows you're whining but not with a specific reason other than it wasn't the game you wanted it to be. Tough shit, now grow a pair so I can kick them up through your body and have them blast out of your shit-spouting mouth.

But enough of my social commentary on these elitist pricks, there's a game here to see. Not the game many people wanted or many fans of the Final Fantasy series want to acknowledge but a game nonetheless. Sometimes I prefer when a game doesn't have the same fans as the others in the series because sometimes, those fans are annoying idiotic people, and I've no time for those people.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest... Now begins the internal debate of whether to compare it to other games in the series. I shall not. I shall rate this game on its own merits rather than what it does better or worse than other games. I'm not going to add fuel to the fire by saying inane shit like "Yeah but Final Fantasy 1 did this and Final Fantasy 4 did this blahablahabjahjdahailovecockblahahla" like some pissy little ingrate.

FFMQ is an RPG with a wide audience as its target. The story is fairly simple and throws you into the middle of it. Your hometown is under attack, being destroyed and you leap to safety before you're attacked by a monster. (A fight you can lose... as I found out on my first go when it hit me with a critical attack and killed me outright, seems the AI plays fair, in that it can do what I can do with lucky rolls). Upon killing the monster an old man fills you in on the events and tells you that to save the world from suffering the same fate, you'll have to restore the balance of 4 crystals (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water but thankfully not Heart...Go Planet!) and restore the world to order AND stop a doomsday prophecy.

All before you realise your home town is gone and in a sniff of grief, off you go.

You control your character by the main compass points of movement, North, South, West and East and jumping for the occasional puzzle while on the maps that navigate the world and within towns, cities and dungeons. Battling is done with a menu system similar to turn based combat where you and sometimes an AI partner, will take on up to three enemies in combat where you can select a weapon with which to smack them in the gob, cast magic, defend, use an item or run off (if you can).

As a character, you level up with experience earned from beating the shit out of monsters. Some monsters are weak to various attacks and weapons, some are strong from other attacks and weapons but all are rather well illustrated and show various stages of damage to let you know how badly you've been beating on them. Particularly evident with bosses that have 4-5 different frames of animation for showing the kicking they've taken.

Progressing through the levels and towns, you'll be able to buy and find bigger and better weapons, armours from people or inside hidden chests, sometimes in out of the way places or shown behind locked doors you'll have to come back for later.

Enemies are shown on the world map as either battlefields where you can fight up to 10 enemies (or more if you know how to glitch it) or icons that depict the main enemy, walking into these enemies will trigger the fight, giving you the chance to check and prepare for the enemy and cure ailments like being blinded, which drops your accuracy in combat. Spells have maximum casting for each spell and are replenished when using seeds, the higher the level your character is, the more of each spell they can use... assuming they've found the particular spell. Most spells hit one enemy or can hit them all for a slightly weaker attack, some spells just hit everyone anyway in a more "meh, slap them all" kind of attack.

In this RPG, your most powerful weapons are already available assuming you've found them, ranging from swords, axes, bombs and claws, which can cause status changes in enemies including instant death but by the time you're using that one hit tends to kill the enemies anyway. Armours follow the same suit; your most powerful will be automatically equipped for you to save grief.

During the game you'll encounter various allies that will team up with your character for a while, the AI can be used for them to fight as they'd prefer or you can take over and use their attacks and spells for yourself. All depending upon how you'd like to fight or whether you feel the AI isn't focusing upon the enemies in ways you'd prefer. Essentially they offer the very useful helping hand against the new areas with the new tougher monsters.

It can take around 13 hours on a serious run through of the game.

Story wise, the game jumps and shifts from trying to take itself seriously in building up a situation with someone suffering from something, a monster being the cause and giving credence to the idea that battling the evil monster will save the innocent sufferers. Which does pay off well in some cases but then is destroyed when in one particular event, the heroes fight their way to the top of a mountain where they think the winds are being used to attack a town, meet the main monster and this little exchange takes place.

"So you're the one causing these problems!"

"Nope, it's boss X"

And they fight anyway. All the suspense, build up and it falls down to "Nope, it's that guy" leaving you to think that you'll just head over there to kick his arse as well. Some bosses will take the time to talk to you about how futile what you're doing is, others are just bigger, tougher creatures that are more than happy to get into a slap fight with the main character (and comrade, if you have them, usually you do). The downside to this is that unless you're paying attention to the ONE LINE of information telling you what to do, you can end up not knowing where to go next as the character you just spoke to now reverts to a loop of "Good luck" "I have faith in you" or "Come back later for a good time, bring money" though I might have imagined that last one.

The music within the game is beyond good, at times close to being a shining example of the SNES's audio capabilities while fight music and boss music have their own epic qualities and each one enriches the experience, while music in the fire town is significantly more upbeat to get the shoulders bobbing along with the tunes.

The game moves along at a steady pace though in some of the latter dungeons you need to start thinking in 3 dimensions with floors over floors being an issue, which can be a little jarring at first just to hit switches to trap a boss between floors then you can fight him and likely have your arse handed to you on a silver platter, which begs the question, why have him running away if he's that powerful in the first place? The last few dungeons of the game lose their linearity that the earlier ones had and you're left feeling that you're running in circles looking for the one exit you've not tried just to get the hell on with the next bit of the story. Levelling becomes moot once you're around level 30 with only the final dungeon and the revamp bosses and MAYBE the final boss being a challenge (if you know the glitch... great)

Some dungeons have puzzles beyond just "Walk up to enemy, fight, walk up to boss, fight" in that there's sliding block puzzles, jumping puzzles and later in the game, hook shot puzzles that come right out of a Zelda game with working out how to manoeuvre around the dungeon, grabbing all the treasures and then getting to the boss being a different take than the earlier puzzles of the aforementioned "fight boss, lose, try again", speaking of which, dying in the game lets you refight the same fight at the stats you had at the start of the fight while ending a fight with one of your party dead, the other not, brings the other person back on 1 health point rather than requiring you to get them resurrected in some obscure manner.

To coin a meme, Simple Game Is Simple. A lot of other RPGs (not just Final Fantasy games...) have more complex fighting mechanics, more complex plotlines and more developed characters but on the flip side it's a wonderful step into the RPG era, I know some people are going to whine "It's made that way for certain audiences" and my answer to that is that the game does its job VERY well. It is exactly the kind of game to get people into more evolved RPGs who may have only known platform games or top-down adventure games like Zelda. It gets the mind starting to think on things rather than throwing them in the deep end on an RPG that will only be accessible to people who already know the types of games or are Mensa champions, which is hardly a fun way to spend time playing a game.

Personally, I like the game. It's got this quaint little charm that I find endears me to the game itself and yes, people will draw comparisons to expel the game as a Final Fantasy game because it doesn't fit in with their view of what a Final Fantasy game should be, or slate it for being too simple while not realising that's the POINT of this game, to be simple, to readily accessible to all involved and to encourage people into playing a game type they might not have tried before.

Completitionists might have to resort to a guide to make sure they get every single little treasure as some are really well tucked away, purists will bitch and moan about how this game shouldn't be a Final Fantasy game though it's written on the box and the screen, has a battle system in line with the series and uses the 4 elements as a plot point like almost the whole series does, while people like me who can appreciate a nice fun game will likely enjoy a while with the game exploring RPG mechanics and getting a taste, like I did when I was kid, for something new. While today I still play this game just for the enjoyment of playing it.

In closing, fuck fan-boys for ruining the reputations of good games solely because they don't like them. Oh and try this game out if you get the change.