Last game you finished, tell us about it

@Kostas
Form those I would play The longest journey it's one of my favorite games overall.

@Purpleblob
Dreamfall: Chapters third game in series was kickstarted little more than year ago.
 
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Having finished the adventure games I wanted to play, I'll move to something more RPGy(?) now. Meanwhile I'd like to find which other adventure games I ought to play (currently considering Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and The Longest Journey),any input from our resident adventure-nuts ?

Since I'm not a big fan of quirky humor in my games - I'd definitely go with Longest Journey.

I find it to be somewhat overrated - but the writing is still strong, and IIRC it's a pretty long game.

But I have lots of other adventure game recommendations ;)
 
The initial Longest Journey game is great although it took me about 2 years to finish it. I just kept stopping and starting when ever a good RPG came around. However, I always did manage to come back to the game. It too has a good story and a unique setting and while the range of interesting characters comes no where close to Grim Fandango, the lead protagonist is compelling.

The 1st sequel (Dreamfall) fell off the rails for me because they introduced a bunch of action elements to the game. Last years Kickstarter sequel was successful but I'll have to wait for word of mouth on that one (after it's released) to see if it's a successor to Longest Journey or the actiony Dreamfall .
 
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Just finished South Park: The Stick of Truth. Just 3 words to describe it...
Funniest
Game
Ever
 
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Tardis
Duh!

I thought you'll describe it with:
worth
every
penny
 
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Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
Just finished Bioshock Infinite for the second time. I see I've already written a review last year, so there's no need to go into detail again.

Suffice it to say that I still agree with my own 9.5/10 score, though I might have changed my mind about some of the finer points.

What I WILL say is that it's possibly better on the second playthrough, as you pick up on a lot of hints - and the game plays fair all the way through.

Still the best ending of all time.
 
Finished Burial at Sea Episode 1 - the DLC for Bioshock Infinite.

Quite good overall. Short, but sweet. 2.5-3 hours, but it's crammed with content and it's not just combat, combat, combat as I might have feared.

Interesting storyline as well, and I'm looking forward to Episode 2.
 
Finished War in the North recently. I enjoyed it - it's an action game, and almost entirely linear, and sports some very consolish design decisions (one single savegame, without any way to go back - and I thought Shadowrun was bad...) but it's decent fun if you enjoy the LOTR setting. The art direction is closely aligned to the movies, but you get to see a number of new locations. Some decent challenges too. Troll fights feel exactly as you remember them from the movies. Was a good game to play in short bursts after work, which is more or less what I am limited to these days, if I get to play at all...
 
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Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,508
Heroes of Might and Magic I

This game is much more of a traditional, old fashioned type of game than either a modern epic RPG or modern TBS game. This is because, like Pacman or Space Invaders, each screen offers you exactly the same scenario but just with increased difficulty rather than anything new to experience other than a differently shaped world. Even the Campaign option (which has 7 different stages) starts you off at each stage at level 1 with nothing carried over from the previous engagements, so the campaign is just 7 scenarios in a row rather than an actual campaign.

Like King's Bounty, you ride around the countryside on horseback collecting goodies which are lying on the ground or hidden in objects. These objects and paths might be protected by monsters which may increase in difficulty level depending on what they are protecting/blocking. You have a set distance you can trot each turn and if you choose to engage a group of monsters you are transported to a chess-board battle area where you take turns with the AI to kill each other's monsters. Defeating monsters provides exp which gets converted to attribute points on level-up. Some goodies can also provide stat increases.

Unlike King's Bounty, the environment isn't your focus. There are no NPCs with quests or conversation (no NPCs at all, in fact) and nothing engages you as a character. There is no quest exp. The only objective in every game (other than the still similar Campaign game) is to defeat between 1 and 3 other versions of you playing as AI adventurers. It is quite possible to play a scenario where you or the AI barely touch 90% of the environment's goodies before defeating each other to a win screen. In fact, in some screens, the goodies are more of a fool's distraction than actual goodies. No doubt this game has much more value as a multiplayer game than as a solo experience for a lot of scenarios.

Also unlike King's Bounty, you are in control of your castle and monster recruiting and this is where the builder aspect of the game is found. You require gold and resources to build Castles and buildings. There is only one castle upgrade so once a castle is built it is built. Like-wise, once you've built a recruitment house, it no longer requires upgrading, it's done. Like-wise, the utility buildings are the same. The only building which requires upgrading is the Mage Tower which provides your spells and restocks your spells if you run out, kind of tying better spells to higher levels.

The resources required to build facilities are found from different mines which are also often guarded by monsters and also, to a certain extent tied to character level. The Mage Tower and the better monster facilities require more exotic resources in higher quantities to build. The three best monsters require resources to produce. So, competing with the other heroes for these resources is a major factor of play in the early stages.

The Castles also produce Heroes (at a simple gold cost) and you are allowed a maximum of 8 Heroes in play (making the larger maps more tactical but, strangely, more relaxing and easier). It is likely that only two or three of your Heroes will ever be leveled to anything useful (other than spells). Your primary Hero will likely do most of the action. The objective of the game is to defeat all AI Heroes in combat screens and to eventually claim "All your Castles are belong to us".

The user interface is excellent and mostly self explanatory and only requires a mouse to use. The only little point of annoyance is that the button with a white-flag on it is NOT a surrender button (hence I never touched it for far too long) but is, actually, one of the game's most useful buttons to access a range of useful spells and artifact hunting options.

The graphics are really excellent. I was expecting a pixel-fest but instead got presented with the kind of graphics you wouldn't expect until a late 90s early 2000s game. There was nothing detrimental about the graphics at all and if a game was made today with the same graphics (at a reasonable price) I feel sure no-one would have any problems with them. The game is top-down and isometric and has no end of visual variety to keep your eyes happy. The fact that it looked so nice came as a very pleasant surprise to me.

A fun little game, the game looks a lot better than its content and, while you will get a lot of good times out of it for the first week or two (50 hours), anything more and it's going to be just like playing Pacman over and over, somewhat pointless other than for max-scoring addicts. Once you've figured out the routines and played each of the four classes a few times, your pretty much done with it, it has nothing much more to offer.

It's not an RPG because there's no questing and it's not a TBS game because the mechanics prevent any form of strategical management: you can't assign a Hero to guard a path because two (game) weeks later they are out of date and require new monsters, which means unblocking the path and going back to the Castle. You could assign Heroes to transport monsters to them, but with a limit of 8 Heroes this becomes quickly impractical. And, anyway, on most maps the enemy will just sail into your area and land a big army in an indefensible position anyway. The combat, goodies and stats are all random as well, heavy with luck factors, making defined decisions pretty much futile. The only real strategical element is the very basic 'highest numbers win' factor, though occasionally you can win a battle by reloading it and doing it slightly differently, suggesting that being a tad brighter than completely dumb is a factor.

So, yeah, lots of content but very little game. I feel the game would have been 10x better if the Campaign was akin to King's Bounty and the standard scenarios were simple multi-player random-maps. I also feel the game would be a lot better if boats were only usable in scenarios where everyone started on different islands as the boats really do render 'strategy' a massive lame duck in most scenarios. A good-looking little time filler in the old-school arcade style, lots of immediate addiction but, essentially, quite soulless and far too repetitive and 'small'.
 
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I got the M&M bundle that included all Heroes games, so I thought "I'll just play these games in succession to learn the story". Well, I started playing HoMM1 but stopped, it was their first game so there wasn't much lore there, and gameplay wise, it was improved in every aspect in HoMM2 and later, so decided to skip that one. It was a good game, but surpassed in all fronts by its successors.
 
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Yup, that's the one I bought and am doing the same, lol. I'm still looking forward to II and beyond :)
 
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I had bought it about 15 years ago or so in a pack containing HOMM I & II + all expansions …
I liked it very much.
 
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I'm going to put this under a spoiler since I disliked the game so much it's bound to turn into a rant:

Final Fantasy VI (on iOS)

A couple of disclaimers first to get out of the way. First, my previous exposure to JRPGs was limited to a few momentary glimpses of people playing Pokemon. Second, while this really was an old game (released 20 years ago) with the few brush-ups of the mobile re-release and its more or less full 2D design it didn't feel noticeably dated so none of my criticisms are directly affected by its age. In fact, since the game has all the markings of an EPIC(!) I assume it had a pretty high budget and a high profile when it was released.

Now, to the actual game. What a colossal waste of ~40 hours of my life. I only finished it due to sheer determination. The game could accurately be summed up as "Infantile Tedium". The second part could have been excused, even in this extreme manifestation, had the first not been true in such a literal sense. I can't even say that I had high expectations (but I sure wonder what is wrong with these people) I mainly played this before Chrono Trigger (which is rated by more competent crowds) to get used to the genre's conventions. Due to the reputation that Final Fantasys have I expected something catered to teenagers but in this case FF6 was clearly targeted at pre-teens.

Style - Characters - Story

I'm not saying the game is childish in the way that an action flick or an action game can be accused of being. Neither as opposed to the grim-dark trend in media. Neither as when speaking about something which is trying to be witty through fart jokes. No, this is in a very much literal sense.

The style, writing and behavior of characters are the biggest culprits of this. This is a game in which characters and NPCs, literally jump up and down at the slightest instance of happiness, giggle like schoolgirls, blush or pose-I'm cool-finger for the camera. You get constant breaking of the fourth wall for infantile humor as one of the characters is awkward about one of his romance attempts and winks or literally momentarily blushes for the camera. Physically painful cringe. The numerous party members are all so insultingly cliche that they are actually introduced through a few lines describing their particular stereotype. The protagonist is a CONFUSED™ moody girl that is so hopelessly whiny that she makes the worse Bioware whiner (see Carth, Alistar) seem as cool as Manny Calavera. Some of the members include a women protecting rebel with guilt issues, brash youth, stoic warriors who lost everything, aloof ex-enemies who really care and really all they could find in their cliche book without anything resembling a competent attempt to diverge from the stereotype or develop. Perfectly suitable to digest and identify with if you are in the right age-group. All those characters including the arch villain are dressed up and in fact look likedressed up 8 year olds (and act like 8ylds do in anime?).

The arch villain by the way, deserves his own distinction as the worst achievement when it comes video game characters. We're talking about an utterly terrible caricature that would make bad cartoons look good. Kefka, a clown-dressed 8 year old that literally jumps around the place due to his evilness, literally goes muahaha at every chance and literally talks to himself and reveals his plans (SPOILER ALERT destroy the world). This is a game where the player is (attempted) made to hate the bad guys through literally exposure to unicorn mistreatment. He's easily as bad as any video game villain I've seen and it's only made worse by all the exposure he gets. I honestly cannot comprehend how a grown person could suggest something like this.

The writing, when not simply used to complement the childish animations and the general pre-adolescent behaviour devolves into grandiose or melodramatic lines that would be bad in any context. Here are a few shining examples:
I knew about [insert hurting unicorns] Yet I did nothing , I'm no better than Kefka!
Men should not lust for power the have no means to control!
-I don't know how it feels to love someone.
-You will.
-But I want to know now.
-I can't help you. Those are answers you'll have to find out for yourself
My name is ultimate, I am both ancient and unrivaled. I do not bleed for I am but strength given form, feeble creatures of flesh, your time is nigh!!
As there is absolutely no development, build-up or suitable context around or behind them, they stick out like a sore thumb and merely provide a different type of ludicrousness. In the general abysmal treatment they appear to be mere tokens of failed seriousness. Even the dragons of this game look like drakes and are absurdly coloured in pink, purple, orange etc.


The story itself is not that terrible. It's still your textbook save the world from the evil empire fare but that's more acceptable. It does feature a BIG BETRAYAL™ an, a BAD GUY changing heart and an apocalyptic event but all that does is provide a turning point that suggests the game may graduate into adolescence which however never fully happens. Eventually childish features begin creeping back in and the annoying bits remain as bad as ever. The whole premise of the world changing event is the party falling into the most predictable and obvious trap witnessed. There's still complete lack of place in the forced sentimentality in absurd circumstances and the various cases of (suicidal) 5 year olds lecturing monsters amidst battles. They even threw a pedophilic joke in there! There's actually a sense of a wasted opportunity since the post apocalyptic premise provides a great platform for strong scenes but all you get is blatant icarus metaphors, symbolic doves, and the most possibly cliche realization by the protagonist (to continue fighting) delivered in the most possibly cliche way, all centering around the done to death magic is risky! theme and leading to thankfully not literally kumbaya singing.

Nevertheless, I think it's worth point out that there are in total about a handful of scenes featuring competent to decent drama. There's an attempted suicide, a heroic sacrifice (of a predictably stoic warrior) and even racist purges. Unfortunately they are thoroughly outnumbered (less than 5% of the scenes) and overshadowed by the general tone and quality.

Gameplay

If I spend the first 12-15 hours being shocked by how infantile FF6 was the rest was mainly spent being annoyed about how terrible its systems were and how the most mundane grinding was the main cornerstone of its gameplay alongside content so padded out I was almost impressed.

The game features 3 distinct "screens": exploring the world map, which is little more than moving around a 2D map from one location (town/cave) to another, exploration which involved strict 4 direction movement on tiles with some minimal interaction with NPCS (trading, quest advancing) and items (get goodie from container) and finally the battle screen in which about 80% of the time is spent.

What's interesting about the battle screen is that 2 of the 3 choices immediately (they are mostly buried under horrible nested UIs) available to player are about NOT actively fighting the battle. The options are [1] Attack [2]Fast-Forward (=autoexecute previous attacks) [3] Run Away. There is actually a good reason for that.

First, random battles are a constant annoyance that never stops. Anyone ever even slightly annoyed by the random battles occurring during seemingly harmless map movement in Fallout or Baldur's Gate will realize how negligible that was in comparison to FF6. I'm talking about every an average of 3 battles per half a minute of simple movement, one battle every ~7 tiles. All happening in almost all ingame locations and the world map. Over 80% of the battles are the party randomly running into some sort of monsters while simply walking from point A to point B. A true test of patience.

Second, the vast overwhelming majority of the fights are ridiculous easy. At worst, in some exceptions they are a test to the endurance of the party as fighting 10 random battles while moving through a room can get your HP or MP down. The game is, in general, quite easy. There is apart from the party selection, very little reason to diverge from a working tactic and for a turn-based game, the depth is appaling. I had a couple of boss fights where after setting the attacks of each party member in the initial round, I pressed Fast-Forward and the fight was so long-winded and easy that the iPad screen turned off during me watching the fight as I had gone one full minute without any clicks.

Therefore, there was really every reason to skip battles, at a marginal HP cost, most of the time and quickly go through them the rest of the time. The thing that the player spends the most time doing is actively encouraged to be avoided. Level ups were also pretty much blatant barely stat-boosting non-events which I found rather odd for an RPG.

The only case where skipping battles doesn't work is a few boss fights which brings mandatory grinding into the picture. A good 20% of my time with the game was spend on pure grinding, fighting random battles in order to get usually some levels to have enough HP to avoid being one-shotted by a boss. The fights themselves don't pose much challenge so it's all about going through the motions a number of times rather than any genuine difficulty. In fact after those (4) cases of grinding I was always surprised by how quickly the boss went down. A lot of time was obviously also wasted due to the (I guess technology-imposed) checkpoint system as boss encounters took much longer than needed.

The rest of the gameplay is ranges between mundane and formulaic. The few towns available are extremely similar, have no content aside from static containers or NPCs who speak the same line and have nothing to do apart from shopping/resting. There is no quest branching, side quests or choices at all. The game is littered however with useless levels, events and battles which serve only to prolong its length. One notable example of such an attempt are the battles that make absolutely no sense like the evidently retarded octopus that seems to frequent opera houses and high altitude caves and airship space. The minor one-off gameplay instances include true platformer-style hopping on chests, avoiding magical ceiling and grand tasks like informing soldiers that the war has ended through fighting a guy who was in the toilet.

As far as art assets go, since I'm not too big on either 16 bit art or anime style I found the music either overly dramatic or repetitive and the maps either boring or obscure and unclear.

Anything broader than the following would be factually wrong but amongst the 20+ games I've played over the past year (since finishing PS:T), most of which I've spammed this thread about, Final Fantasy 6 was, for me, by far the worst.
 
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I'm going to put this under a spoiler since I disliked the game so much it's bound to turn into a rant:

Final Fantasy VI (on iOS)

A couple of disclaimers first to get out of the way. First, my previous exposure to JRPGs was limited to a few momentary glimpses of people playing Pokemon. Second, while this really was an old game (released 20 years ago) with the few brush-ups of the mobile re-release and its more or less full 2D design it didn't feel noticeably dated so none of my criticisms are directly affected by its age. In fact, since the game has all the markings of an EPIC(!) I assume it had a pretty high budget and a high profile when it was released.

Now, to the actual game. What a colossal waste of ~40 hours of my life. I only finished it due to sheer determination. The game could accurately be summed up as "Infantile Tedium". The second part could have been excused, even in this extreme manifestation, had the first not been true in such a literal sense. I can't even say that I had high expectations (but I sure wonder what is wrong with these people) I mainly played this before Chrono Trigger (which is rated by more competent crowds) to get used to the genre's conventions. Due to the reputation that Final Fantasys have I expected something catered to teenagers but in this case FF6 was clearly targeted at pre-teens.

Style - Characters - Story

I'm not saying the game is childish in the way that an action flick or an action game can be accused of being. Neither as opposed to the grim-dark trend in media. Neither as when speaking about something which is trying to be witty through fart jokes. No, this is in a very much literal sense.

The style, writing and behavior of characters are the biggest culprits of this. This is a game in which characters and NPCs, literally jump up and down at the slightest instance of happiness, giggle like schoolgirls, blush or pose-I'm cool-finger for the camera. You get constant breaking of the fourth wall for infantile humor as one of the characters is awkward about one of his romance attempts and winks or literally momentarily blushes for the camera. Physically painful cringe. The numerous party members are all so insultingly cliche that they are actually introduced through a few lines describing their particular stereotype. The protagonist is a CONFUSED™ moody girl that is so hopelessly whiny that she makes the worse Bioware whiner (see Carth, Alistar) seem as cool as Manny Calavera. Some of the members include a women protecting rebel with guilt issues, brash youth, stoic warriors who lost everything, aloof ex-enemies who really care and really all they could find in their cliche book without anything resembling a competent attempt to diverge from the stereotype or develop. Perfectly suitable to digest and identify with if you are in the right age-group. All those characters including the arch villain are dressed up and in fact look likedressed up 8 year olds (and act like 8ylds do in anime?).

The arch villain by the way, deserves his own distinction as the worst achievement when it comes video game characters. We're talking about an utterly terrible caricature that would make bad cartoons look good. Kefka, a clown-dressed 8 year old that literally jumps around the place due to his evilness, literally goes muahaha at every chance and literally talks to himself and reveals his plans (SPOILER ALERT destroy the world). This is a game where the player is (attempted) made to hate the bad guys through literally exposure to unicorn mistreatment. He's easily as bad as any video game villain I've seen and it's only made worse by all the exposure he gets. I honestly cannot comprehend how a grown person could suggest something like this.

The writing, when not simply used to complement the childish animations and the general pre-adolescent behaviour devolves into grandiose or melodramatic lines that would be bad in any context. Here are a few shining examples:


As there is absolutely no development, build-up or suitable context around or behind them, they stick out like a sore thumb and merely provide a different type of ludicrousness. In the general abysmal treatment they appear to be mere tokens of failed seriousness. Even the dragons of this game look like drakes and are absurdly coloured in pink, purple, orange etc.


The story itself is not that terrible. It's still your textbook save the world from the evil empire fare but that's more acceptable. It does feature a BIG BETRAYAL™ an, a BAD GUY changing heart and an apocalyptic event but all that does is provide a turning point that suggests the game may graduate into adolescence which however never fully happens. Eventually childish features begin creeping back in and the annoying bits remain as bad as ever. The whole premise of the world changing event is the party falling into the most predictable and obvious trap witnessed. There's still complete lack of place in the forced sentimentality in absurd circumstances and the various cases of (suicidal) 5 year olds lecturing monsters amidst battles. They even threw a pedophilic joke in there! There's actually a sense of a wasted opportunity since the post apocalyptic premise provides a great platform for strong scenes but all you get is blatant icarus metaphors, symbolic doves, and the most possibly cliche realization by the protagonist (to continue fighting) delivered in the most possibly cliche way, all centering around the done to death magic is risky! theme and leading to thankfully not literally kumbaya singing.

Nevertheless, I think it's worth point out that there are in total about a handful of scenes featuring competent to decent drama. There's an attempted suicide, a heroic sacrifice (of a predictably stoic warrior) and even racist purges. Unfortunately they are thoroughly outnumbered (less than 5% of the scenes) and overshadowed by the general tone and quality.

Gameplay

If I spend the first 12-15 hours being shocked by how infantile FF6 was the rest was mainly spent being annoyed about how terrible its systems were and how the most mundane grinding was the main cornerstone of its gameplay alongside content so padded out I was almost impressed.

The game features 3 distinct "screens": exploring the world map, which is little more than moving around a 2D map from one location (town/cave) to another, exploration which involved strict 4 direction movement on tiles with some minimal interaction with NPCS (trading, quest advancing) and items (get goodie from container) and finally the battle screen in which about 80% of the time is spent.

What's interesting about the battle screen is that 2 of the 3 choices immediately (they are mostly buried under horrible nested UIs) available to player are about NOT actively fighting the battle. The options are [1] Attack [2]Fast-Forward (=autoexecute previous attacks) [3] Run Away. There is actually a good reason for that.

First, random battles are a constant annoyance that never stops. Anyone ever even slightly annoyed by the random battles occurring during seemingly harmless map movement in Fallout or Baldur's Gate will realize how negligible that was in comparison to FF6. I'm talking about every an average of 3 battles per half a minute of simple movement, one battle every ~7 tiles. All happening in almost all ingame locations and the world map. Over 80% of the battles are the party randomly running into some sort of monsters while simply walking from point A to point B. A true test of patience.

Second, the vast overwhelming majority of the fights are ridiculous easy. At worst, in some exceptions they are a test to the endurance of the party as fighting 10 random battles while moving through a room can get your HP or MP down. The game is, in general, quite easy. There is apart from the party selection, very little reason to diverge from a working tactic and for a turn-based game, the depth is appaling. I had a couple of boss fights where after setting the attacks of each party member in the initial round, I pressed Fast-Forward and the fight was so long-winded and easy that the iPad screen turned off during me watching the fight as I had gone one full minute without any clicks.

Therefore, there was really every reason to skip battles, at a marginal HP cost, most of the time and quickly go through them the rest of the time. The thing that the player spends the most time doing is actively encouraged to be avoided. Level ups were also pretty much blatant barely stat-boosting non-events which I found rather odd for an RPG.

The only case where skipping battles doesn't work is a few boss fights which brings mandatory grinding into the picture. A good 20% of my time with the game was spend on pure grinding, fighting random battles in order to get usually some levels to have enough HP to avoid being one-shotted by a boss. The fights themselves don't pose much challenge so it's all about going through the motions a number of times rather than any genuine difficulty. In fact after those (4) cases of grinding I was always surprised by how quickly the boss went down. A lot of time was obviously also wasted due to the (I guess technology-imposed) checkpoint system as boss encounters took much longer than needed.

The rest of the gameplay is ranges between mundane and formulaic. The few towns available are extremely similar, have no content aside from static containers or NPCs who speak the same line and have nothing to do apart from shopping/resting. There is no quest branching, side quests or choices at all. The game is littered however with useless levels, events and battles which serve only to prolong its length. One notable example of such an attempt are the battles that make absolutely no sense like the evidently retarded octopus that seems to frequent opera houses and high altitude caves and airship space. The minor one-off gameplay instances include true platformer-style hopping on chests, avoiding magical ceiling and grand tasks like informing soldiers that the war has ended through fighting a guy who was in the toilet.

As far as art assets go, since I'm not too big on either 16 bit art or anime style I found the music either overly dramatic or repetitive and the maps either boring or obscure and unclear.

Anything broader than the following would be factually wrong but amongst the 20+ games I've played over the past year (since finishing PS:T), most of which I've spammed this thread about, Final Fantasy 6 was, for me, by far the worst.
That was more a review of old style jRPGs than really FF6, specially the games made by Square-Enix. Having said that, Final Fantasy 9 is a game a really liked and Final Fantasy 10 was a lot better in everything, so don't diss jRPGs just for a bad game :)
 
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Why would anyone diss jRPGs because of some Final Fantasy game?
I adored Septerra Core (available on GOG) for example. And it's pretty much old jRPG style. However, unlike what he got in FF6 (didn't play it myself nor ever will), this doesn't exist in Septerra Core:
the most mundane grinding

Yes, mobs respawn endlessly - happens on every map revisit, but you rarely go on the same map twice unless you really want to grind. And also, if something will attack you, you see it on the screen "in the distance" so you can avoid it if you want, it doesn't appear out of nowhere.

But let's return to Square Enix. I'm disgusted with them more than with EA, more than with Ubi and I don't hide that fact. The main reason is not their jRPGs, going MMO with FF series or going phone. But the deliberate betrayal of FMA fans by making the worst anime2game products ever and killing the most promising franchise with that crap.
To be fair, Square Enix did some things right (DX:HR on PC, CR2 phonegame, and by some although I didn't play it yet TR reboot on PC), but those things are so rare I just can't forgive their numerous sins from the past.

Kostas, thanks for that review. Too bad SquareE won't read it, perhaps they'd rethink on their ideas what the fun is.
Luckily, there are so many new games out there today. Totally different from Square Enix' vision and obvious prejudices about gamers. There is no reason anymore to buy FF game just because there is nothing else to play.
 
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That was more a review of old style jRPGs than really FF6, specially the games made by Square-Enix. Having said that, Final Fantasy 9 is a game a really liked and Final Fantasy 10 was a lot better in everything, so don't diss jRPGs just for a bad game :)

Why would anyone diss jRPGs because of some Final Fantasy game?
I tried not to. Although I can imagine something slipping by me through the flowing hate.

A few more JRPGs are still on the menu, namely Chrono Trigger, one more FF(see how it goes) and Xenogears, in fact I'm now about 2 hours in Chrono Trigger and it functions exactly as Joxer describes Septerra Core here:
Yes, mobs respawn endlessly - happens on every map revisit, but you rarely go on the same map twice unless you really want to grind. And also, if something will attack you, you see it on the screen "in the distance" so you can avoid it if you want, it doesn't appear out of nowhere.

There's no overstating how much peace of mind this change has provided. Not to mention that (so far) CT has been an a strong improvement across ALL fronts.
 
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A few more JRPGs are still on the menu, namely Chrono Trigger, one more FF(see how it goes) and Xenogears, in fact I'm now about 2 hours in Chrono Trigger and it functions exactly as Joxer describes Septerra Core here:

I wouldn't bother with Xenogears. It's not a bad game, but it's obviously not for you. Same goes for any of the other FF games with the exception of perhaps FF XII. That one plays more like a Western MMO than a JRPG, and it doesn't contain random battles.
 
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Maybe 348756834634856 years ago it was an awsome piece of design.
Today JDR, today it is a bad game. We should check today's majority, not the majority back then when you had no other choice but to play Final Fantasy and the other same design clones.
 
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No, it's not, and I'm pretty sure today's majority would still agree. Or at least the people who enjoy that type of game to begin with. :)

If you don't like a certain style or genre, then you're probably not going to like a game from it regardless of how good it is. For example, I don't like sports games so I don't bother playing them. If you gave me the best soccer game ever made I probably still wouldn't rate it very high.

And there were plenty of other games to play besides those JRPGs back then. People played them because they wanted to not because they had no other choice.
 
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