Game Flamer!

[Amgard]

Oooh! Let me do mine!

Final Fantasy Series

Final Fantasy 1:

I don't critisize this game because it WAS one of the first real console RPGs. It had a number of incredibly annoyances (High encounter rate, useless classes, unable to auto re-target) but compared to other RPGs of it's time, it had them all floored in every quality. 5/10 (Early RPGs sucked anyhoo)

Final Fantasy 2j

Square took a step forward and fell on their ass. Music improved heavily, plot was a heavier point, but the whole battle system sucked monkey ass. The more you use something, the better it gets. In practice, I've gotten finalboss worthy in about 2 hours within starting. I then killed the final boss in 1 hit. 2/10 (Sucked ass)

Final Fantasy 3j

Square slopes downwards into oblivion. This game features some improvements in music, system (auto re-targetting!), but the class system was horrible. Instead of a group of equally-useful classes, only one or two per "tier" (Yes, tiers) were any good, and in the end, Ninja and Sage were designed AND worked out to throw the others out of the water. Oh yeah, it was too easy. 3/10 (Just like it's number)

Final Fantasy 4:

Square makes a save! This is probably the best FF for many reasons. One: The score kicks ass, they totally beefed it up and it contains 16 channels (One of the first SNES games to do that). Two: Good characters. The reason most FFs suck is because all characters are the same. In FF4, Cecil is your light-healer/heavy-fighter, Rydia is your offensive caster, Edge is your jack-of-all-trades, and Edward is a candy-ass bard. This actually forces the players to use their limited character selections and have some creativity (Of course this breaks down in the end with the SlashSlash/Slash/Jump/Nuke/White spamming). The early parts of the game kicked major ass. Anything after the Tower of Zot was bad. 7/10 (Lucky seven)

Final Fantasy 5

It wasn't neccesarily a bad game. I liked it for reasons beyond what the programmers intended (I do S/SCCs). The class system was better than FF3s and the graphics/music were decent. Biggest problem is that the plot SUCKED. Yes it did. 5/10

Final Fantasy 6

Below average in every category, except graphics. It finally gave up some 16x32 field sprites, which were nice to look at. The plot was slow and very choppy (especially in the second half). The system was broken and characters were too similar (saved by Special powers) and it was far too overrated. Boring too. Broken as hell, since you can get everyone to cast Ultimax4 for 4mp total. 3/10

Final Fantasy 7:

The object of my hate. This shit is waaaay tooooo overrated. Characters were worse than one dimensional, the plot involved a pretty-boy killing big snakes for shits and giggles, and the game had boobs for once. Wow, like that's revolutionary. The system took 30 steps back from FF6, so now all characters are the same minus limit breaks, except for Aeris, she's worse than everyone else. Knights of the Round x8 = GG Seph. 1/10 (This shit should be burned)

Final Fantasy 8

Gameplay wise, it took more steps back. Now we're in the pre-RPG era. Music got better, but the characters and plot got worse. It's a love story between a guy who probably owns a net blog and a psychotic neo-nazi feminist who opposes our good and just Prez and his crazy sidekick witch. Squall is so horribly awkward it's a suprise he's not curled up in a ball half the time writing poetry or crying. Everyone can be ridiculously strong in an hour, game is horrible, nuff said. 2/10 (It had some moments as opposed to 7)

Final Fantasy 9:

This game actually worked on it's plot for the first two discs. It was pretty good, the system went back to roots remniscent of FF4. Only problem was the characters. None of them, sans Steiner and Amarant, were really good at what they did. Vivi was outclassed by Steiner and his Magic Swords (Though you needed Vivi to do it, I just let Vivi use my potions). Garnet was outclassed by Eiko who outclassed Garnet (Aka. They were both useless). Freya was weak and had horrible skills, Quina....was the worst idea for a character ever. But I suppose the setup isn't so bad when the villain is a transvestite. Square took the pretty-boy thing too far. 4/10 (Wasn't made by the same designer as 7 or 8, says something, eh?)

Final Fantasy 10:

The best 3D FF. It's plot was actually interesting, the characters still had their autonomy, but could be switched for interesting play. I say Tidus looks like Meg Ryan and a Male Porn star got together one night. Voice acting wasn't bad, but not great. The introduction of voices gave you the feel that they had some depth. Auron wasn't that cool, Yuna was a hag. Otherwise, the game was WAAAAY too linear for an RPG. All in all, it's a save. 6/10 (Take that!)

Final Fantasy 10-2:

Everlasting proof Square are a bunch of whores. This fap-fest of young women sold on an already popular name AND as a sequel to a big-name game made it like a trust-fund child with a hot mom. Voice-acting took a major hit and the plot a couple miles backwards. Gameplay was terrible and it was made worse by 20-second transformations. Worst of all, that pesky Tidus kid didn't stay dead. Boring game. 3/10

Final Fantasy 11:

Possibly the worst MMORPG (and MMORPGs suck anyway) made. Square did it for the money. If they were nominated "biggest money-grabbing assholes" of the year award, they'd beat out Enron big time. 0/10 (Pay money to play in a server in ADDITION to the fee for a new character AND a monthly charge?!)

Secret of Mana Series

Secret of Mana:

Kicked ass, need I say more? Alright, it's the best action RPG ever, made only better by great customization. Plot kind of sucked. 9/10 (OH NOES! GOBLINS ARE BOILING ME!)

Secret of Mana 2:

Better than SoM in every way but the class system, which made sure most end classes sucked. Otherwise, it was a good investment. 10/10

Chrono Series

Chrono Trigger:

Fun game. It's the recipe for perfection: Innovative battle system, time-travelling nonsense, a mute hero, dual/triple-techs (favorite part) and a good storyline. Too bad it was boring in MANY places. Sorry, but it really was. Otherwise, good game. Magus sucked as a party member, yes he did. 8/10

Chrono Cross:

I couldn't even tell it was a Chrono game if I didn't look at the title. Whole different (worse) system, annoyingly complicated (not deep, deep is bullshit. This is complicated intentionally so no one will figure out it sucks). This game is proof characters are not needed over 12. 50 was overkill, especially when they're the same in many areas (I always just used Karsh, Glenn, Magu- I mean Guille and Serge/Lynx). Oh right, and I don't care what the hell "contengincy plan" means, it doesn't make the plot cool. Oh right, and it had nothing to do with the original game or it's characters minus Lucca getting killed (which I "furiously" tried to stop...*yawn) and Robo being jammed into a computer to be left for all eternity like the dumbass he is. 1/10 (pure ass)

[Excell]

I have totally lost all respect for you.

And Guile isn't Magus.

[Otaku No Anime]

Legend of Mana wasn't very good...

Well, we all have different tastes, don't we?

[EmperorJeramyu]

I must do the populat thing:

Final Fantasy 1:
Gameplay wise, this game is the rock-bottom. Gets a point for the significance. 2/10.

Final Fantasy 2j:
This one actually had cohesive characters and plot, but I can't say I really got into it. 4/10

Final Fantasy 3j:
I like how fluidly the battle system flows here. Otherwise, the plot makes no sense, and the characters are generic. 5/10

Final Fantasy 4:
Great game. Battle graphics ruled. Got kinda hard for me at points, but the plot was nice, and the length was great too. 7/10

Final Fantasy 5:
Meh... This will always be my favorite. I can honestly say this was the first FF I really got into. Great gameplay system, the plot was... decent, and some of the best music of the series. Something just draws me to this one. 9/10

Final Fantasy 6:
As an RPG, it's pretty good. The gameplay is brilliant, the plot, less so. However, the non-linearity of the second half isn't to my liking. This was the first FF I played for extended periods, though I didn't get into it as much as FF5. 8/10

Final Fantasy 7:
I don't mind the game, as much as I mind what it's become. People merely seem to like the characters for their swords and hairstyles. This game is quite cinematically brilliant, and the battle system is fun to watch (summons: get some popcorn). The materia bit flowed well, and the plot held its own decently. I can say I had fun with this. 9/10

Final Fantasy 8:
I'm not even going to bother.

Final Fantasy 9:
Now this was a pleasant suprise. I didn't get TOO far into this, but I loved every single second of what I did play. Comical, unique, and back to the middle-age style. 9/10.

Final Fantasy 10:
Square tried way too hard. WAAAY too hard. The characters are total dipshits, and the gameplay wasn't revolutionary at all. The plot was overdone too. But Sin destroying the big city place, and the resulting stuff was pretty to look at. [6/10]

Final Fantasy 10-2
At another forum I go to, this game bears the nickname "Yuna's hotpants adventure".

Final Fantasy 11
I haven't played this one. I've heard interesting things about the installation time, though.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicals
This game is ok, but pretty annoying. Not very fun either. Ok, so it's not ok. 4/10.

---Mana---

Final Fantasy Adventure:
(Yes, this is actually the first game in the series). Pretty damn good for a gameboy game. 7/10

Secret of Mana:
Overrated IMO. I played through the entire game. Combat got... rediculous at about the underwater fortress place. The characters seemed far too indifferent to everything. Plus the ending was dumb. 6/10.

Secret of Mana 2/Seiken Densetsu 3:
I never got into this one, but it seemed cool. I found the bosses too hard. People tell me I just suck. 7/10

Legend of Mana:
Dunno.

Sword of Mana:
Now THIS is how a remake should be! Wonderful graphics, great remastering of the soundtrack, memorable bosses, great combat. I really liked playing this game. And Shadow Knight has the most badass design ever.

---Chrono---

Chrono Trigger
Yeah, ok, it's good. Great graphics, great battle system, great music. I found it pretty boring, though. 8/10.

Chrono Cross
One of my friends tried to convice me to play this. I refused. Sounds like I did the right thing.

-------

Overall, Square's games are decent. They just aren't horribly interesting, and some of them try too hard. Square games that I would consider giving 10/10s for would either be the obscure "Live A Live", "Front Mission", "Rudra No Hihou", and "Romancing SaGa 3". Super Mario RPG also, I guess.

[Teenr0cker]

Let me restate it right here and now: If I gave a crap and wanted any of the ff7-ffx2 games, I would've taken the time to buy a ps2...which I didn't.....the other ones are alright, I'm not too picky...

[Excell]

FF7, 8 and 9 are on PS1......along with Tactics and a bunch of those other games including CC.

Jera, CC is actually a decent game if you ignore it being a sequel to CT. I enjoy playing it as most other people do. It also has probably the most amazing music in any PS RPG....rivaling or even outdoing Xenogears.

[DSOK]

I said that a lot of what Square produced was crap, but I have some very different ideas about which ones those were. (This list only includes games that I've played a lot of; most of the really crappy ones, I gave up too soon to be able to gives a proper critique.)

Final Fantasy:
This game was awesome. A lot of you may be too young to have beaten it when it first came out; looking back, it might seem passe, but at the time, it was considered amazing. Really the only console RPG that preceded it was Dragon Warrior, and Final Fantasy blew Dragon Warrior (and indeed Dragon Warrior 2) out of the water. The airship was incredibly cool. (Why do you think every subsequent game has one?) 8/10

Final Fantasy 2 (J):
I just couldn't get into this game. The advancement system was ridiculous, and my characters were never powerful enough to face the bosses unless I spent eggregious amounts of time building them up. Thus far, I haven't even managed to finish it. 2/10

Final Fantasy 2 (US):
I got really sick really fast of the people fake dying all the time; it was so obvious that they would all come back. The story made no real impression on me, except that, for no good reason, there are giant robots (cliche #54). The graphics were pretty good though. 4/10

Final Fantasy 5 (J):
I never really liked the crystals; the motif just didn't do it for me. The plot was good, if a bit contrived, but the job system I can only just barely stand. So many of the jobs are utterly worthless, they just seem like a waste of time. Plus, many are downright nonsensical. (The special ability of the Samurai is to shower the enemy with gold, somehow hurting them?) 4/10

Final Fantasy 3 (US):
It seems that everybody likes this game, and I'm no exception, but this looses major points for being one of the buggiest games ever released. At least you can play it fully now without Relm sketching the game into oblivion (which happened to me on the SNES), but there are a lot of other bugs that still detract from my enjoyment. (I actually wonder why they didn't fix some of them, specifically the evasion and vanish/doom bugs, for the Playstation release.) 7/10

Final Fantasy 7:
This is good, but, I think, overrated. The graphics impressed a lot of people, including myself, when it came out. But I hear a lot of people talking about how amazing this game was, and how nothing produced since can compare. (More people have been obsessed with resurrecting Aeris than anything else in any other console RPG.) The story had a lot of good elements, but most the characters were sub-par, and none of the vaunted minigames really did much for me. 6/10

Final Fantasy 8:
A lot of people really tear into this game, and I think that's unfair. With this game, Square really tried to come up with something that avoided the stupid cliches of electronic RPGs. (You don't find chests with money and items; you don't break into people's houses; the technological levels in different places are reasonably consistent; the monsters don't vary widely in power in different areas.) The solutions they used weren't always that great, but I don't think they were generally any worse than the usual contrivances. Finally, both the love story and the graphics were beautifully executed. So what is it people hate about this game? 8/10

Final Fantasy 9:
This is utter crap. The characters are wooden; the retro graphics with the big heads are beyond idiotic; the plot is essentially nonexistent, just being a series of disconnected quests. (The game was advertised as the one that would bring back the crystals. Yet the plotting was so incoherent that I realized two-thirds of the way into the game that I had no idea where the crystals were in the game, much less what role they were playing in the story.) The chocobo games and the adorable black mages were the only things that kept me playing. 1/10

Final Fantasy 10:
I thought this game made a lot of great strides toward making the gameplay more reasonable; the ability to switch characters seamlessly during battle was a big plus. I also liked that they gave much more depth to the summoning system. The voice actors were not generally what they could have been, but I thought the characters themselves were quite well-developed and all of them reasonable. Some of the graphics sequences were astonishing, and I only wish there had been more of them. 8/10

Secret of Mana:
This is another one I think is overrated. The combat tends to be either ridiculously easy or insanely difficult, and you never know which one is coming up. The plot is OK, but it's nothing inspired, and the characters are pretty flat. The reuse of most of the bosses also annoyed me. Still, it was fun to play for a fair while. 5/10

Seiken Densetsu 3:
I tried playing this, but eventually I gave up. The story was alternatively ridiculous convoluted or so stupidly simple that I could think up much better ideas for how to deal with the situations than the characters in the game seemed to be able to. The bosses were insane to beat, so I gave up somewhere in the middle. 1/10

Chrono Trigger:
Everybody likes this one. I like it especially for the plot, with all its confusions, ambiguities, and mysteries, some of which are never resolved. 10/10

Chrono Cross:
This is another game that I think get unfairly denegrated. It wasn't as good as Chrono Trigger, but that might be expecting too much. I liked the novel combat and element system; early in the game, it really forced you to work if you wanted to use magic effectively. Moreover, I though the graphics and music were beautiful. A lot of people don't like Chrono Cross, because it wasn't what they'd expected in a sequel. I, however, think that it was the only kind of sequel that could do justice to the complexities of the first game. "The Further Adventures of Chrono," however good the gameplay, would be a letdown, because it couldn't have the same mystery about it that Chrono Trigger had. (This reminds me of a similar decision about a sequel in fantasy literature. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wrote The Tombs of Atuan from a completely different viewpoint than A Wizard of Earthsea. The connections between the two only begin to appear halfway through the second book.) 8/10

[Amgard]

Well I tore into FF8 because the system is broken and hashed, the plot would've been fine hadn't the fighting been a complete joke and Squall not a clone of Cloud with more angst.

And CC because the plot was kind of ridiculous, too many un needed chars. Plus it got easy-easy-easy if you got the GrandDream and double Einlanzers (X-Strike)

[TeppicTheBloodLyn]

Final Fantasy 7:

The object of my hate. This shit is waaaay tooooo overrated.

...ALL HAIL AMGARD!!!

[Dr. Casey]

Final Fantasy:Really the only console RPG that preceded it was Dragon Warrior

Eh, Phantasy Star was important too.

Jeramyu wins for having the overall best taste.

[Telephalsion]

well i hate the fact that everyone compares the games to eachother, if only one of the ff series had existed they would have gotten better scores

oh well. I've played every final fantasy except x-2, but i've only finished a few.

final fantasy 5:
The job system is the greatest, I'm angry about square not using it in more games. But the story wasn't really over the top, if i had played for hours ina strreak and then died i didn't look forwar to have to see the cutscenes again.

final fantasy on gameboy, i've only finished the one where you travel in time and get a cool black spaceship with cannons.
the other three I haven't bothered with.

final fantasy 7: I loved this game when iut first came out, and ofcourse it was cool at the time, it got uglier as time passed but it's kind of nostalgic. I tried vainfully to defeat all the weapons.

Final Fantasy 9, my brother beat this game, i didn't play through the last dungeon, i saw him beat the final boss and then the ending scene. but i played everything untill then. That game sucked, the characters were stupid, it's as if they actually tried to make the ugliest most repulsive characters possible, just look at Quina or whatever that overgrown frog was called.

There thats the final fantasy games I've BEATEN, i've gotten to like the last dungeon on the others.

ff 1: never really got past the swamp.

ff 3: Was about to beat kefka, but didn't and the save file got erased.

ff 4 easytype/hardtype: got stuck at the moon where the fecking behemoths and death-eye's tore me up.

ff 8: got to the big alien spaceship but had no clue on how to board it.

ff 10: just where you are supposed to shoot down sin with the ship, and if you can't make it on time he fires deathray and instant game over.

ff 11: well i've played it... for my brother.

chrono trigger, didn't beat the evil alien with the two pod-things in the underground or whatever.

[Impossible]

I've only read Amgard's now, but I'll look at the others later. I hope he wasn't the only one to point out how shitty and overrated FF7 is. I actually thought 9 was the best PS1 one for some reason, although I didn't like sny of them a lot.

AND DON'T EVER CALL SD3 SOM2!!! IT'S SO ANNOYING!!!

Edit: Jeramyu, what you said about SwoM was cetainly true, but the entire game falls apart from one or two major flaws. I hate it when a good idea gets executed poorly...

[TeppicTheBloodLyn]

ff9= good. ff7=shit

[Berserker]

I like ff7 much more than the 9 (at least the system of the 7 involves a little bit of thinking and not just levelling up).

FF8's system was way too boring, but the game wasn't so bad. Xenogears would have been the best rpg ever, if not for the infamous 2nd CD.

I've started playing FF6 various times, but after a bit some kind of evil force prevents me to play it, and when I remember about it i've just forgotten everything and i have to restart...

Seiken Densomething 3 was really cool, maybe the best rpg for SNES

Tales of Phantasia WOULD be the best rpg for snes if it weren't for its damned encounters every 2 or 3 steps

Crono Trigger was good, but I still don't understand why everyone worship it so much.

I started playing dragon quest 5 and 6, and it's enough for me to say that I hate them.

FF10 was so-so, but I wouldn't play 10/2 even if it were free. Maybe if someone paid me for it, but it won't happen.


Anyway, a kind of game I really hate with all my heart (since this topic IS about game flaming, after all) is the 1st person shooter where you are the Good Soldier that fights (for no reason at all) against the Bad Guys (preferibly from Middle East) that do Evil Things (for no reason at all) like Create Viruses or.... well, just that usually.
I understand that kind of game doesn't need a great story, but I can't play something that hasn't the tiniest atmosphere, especially after that Max Payne demostrated that a game can be fun AND have some personality.

[Impossible]

Seiken Densetsu. Den-set-su. It's NOT THAT HARD.