Hey, I'm not even someone who focuses on graphics that much: I've always been behind the technical curve, so I learned not to be bothered that, say, the PS1's Soul Reaver looked significantly worse than the Dreamcast version. Furthermore, the graphics criticisms that apply to these games have almost nothing to do with tech.Ranylyn said:
I'm just saying that if we look at it from an objective critical perspective, the color palette of FFII is outright strange and hasn't aged well, and FFV made virtually zero improvements over the basically "NES on the SNES" look of FFV. On a personal note, it burns my eyes. No, that's not a joke or a random insult, looking at FFV actually hurts my eyes.
1) I don't think you're getting the joke, that being "It's so bad you can tell from the screenshots!" (The joke being that, no, of course you can't do that, not in general, but on these games that shit just bleeds through the screenshots. No, if I was looking at a screenshot of FFII of FFV, I wouldn't be able to tell you that they were going to be bad, unless, of course, we were looking at dialogue.)
2)FFIV was the first story-based FF to get it right. I gets a free pass because it barely tried. III gets a pass because it didn't try at all. II does not. It's a less interesting version of Star Wars: Episode IV with wooden characters, who have next to zero development, not to mention Guy, the caveman. Also his name is Guy. (I liked Tales of the Abyss as much as the last person but seriously Namco, you named the dude "Guy".)
V had a plot that veered wildly between the whimsical and the outright unbearably stupid, but no, gameplay did not make up for it. It makes the mistake like a lot of these games to wait to introduce major elements, making the game either boring FFXIII) or hard (FFV) for a significant amount of time. In addition, the game goes from being absurdly difficult (for all of the wrong reasons, more later) until you can get the jobs, and then it becomes hillariously broken faster than you can say "100 Small Guns skill in Fallout 3!". On top of that, the game has an encounter rate so absurdly high that it's really easy, frankly, to forget where you're going, and without even having difficult regular battles, becomes difficult because these battles will quickly eat away at your restoratives while you try to make your way to the boss, who often IS absurdly difficult! And of course, let's be reminded that with the shitty plot, the player can't even be said to be fighting for anything (I think good JRPG structure is that the plot actually motivates the player to play).
X has a good battle system. The bosses are also occasionally interesting. And it has a kicking soundtrack, if you exclude half of the boring town music and the MAIN BOSS BATTLE THEME (seriously, what the fuck.)Too bad it has the absolute worst writing, characters, character development (yeah, I'm counting those seperately), villian, and NPC's that I've pretty much ever seen in a JRPG. At least with FFV you felt like they might be in on the joke sometimes ("Let's fight like men! And women! And men who dress like women!"), but FFX plays itself completely straight as it veers from one incredibly annoying character's development to the next and has the most retarded plot events and largtest plot holes in the entire series. Seriously, they talk under water. Being able to breathe long enough to play that stupid game (oh, yeah, did I mention Blitzball is a crime against nature?), btu they can TALK?! THIS IS STUPID!!! Seriously, I could go on, and on, but Spoony did it for me, and he didn't hit up some of the worst stuff. Like the fact that the main character is a fucking ghost! Yet he can hold a sword! And so is Auron! And so is the main villain for half the fucking game!
