Return to its Roots?

[Locke4God]

(minor minor spoilers)

I'm not going to bash this game, but I did think it was underwhelming. Of the recent games from VI through XII, I rate it the worst of those. I do put it slightly ahead of IV, and all of the other early games.

The main reason I point to, to illustrate its shortcoming is the scene in Regent Cid's Throne room. If you go into there and check out the line of Cid statues along the wall, you would expect that they would relate to the Cid's of earlier games. In fact they're even labled Cid III, Cid VI, and so on, and even go so far as to tell you what each one is holding. So you might think they'd be holding an item relative to the game they appeared it, but no. One of them has a harp. There wasn't one Cid who had a harp. So I wonder what the point was of including these statues, including text to explain them, but in a game that's suppose to reference it's own history, they would fail to actually provide a link to it? It was just puzzeling, and while not a big deal, for me was indicative of the whole game.

Now that being said, there were a lot of pluses. I thought the Eidelon count, the way you acquired them, esspecially Ramuh, and the videos displaying them were great.

I thought the battle system was very good. A lot of specialty characters that were fun to use, and the process of attaching tokens to the weapons to learn abilities was nice.

Even some of the side events were good, like the Moogle Mail which was a blast to follow and keep track of, and Chocobo Treasure Hunt. And the Active Time Events were quite and enjoyable distraction.

Again on the Characters though, I thought some were high and some were low. IX's versions were very useful and fun. Vivi was the best, and both Zidane and Garnet were enjoyable leads. The Knight was fun, but I'm on the fence with him as he was a bit of a blockhead for so long. And I did enjoy the use of temporary characters which had been missing since Final Fantasy VI, where I loved using such a large cast.

Games like IV, VI, VII, & X had far better characters. In IX, the Rat Lady, Quina, the big Red-headed dude, and the little girl summoner at the end, were all toss in characters. None of them really mattered that much to the larger story, and the Red-Headed dude esspecially was introduced with a lot of haste that made little sense. I'm not really even sure why Quina was there, although again she was fun. Compare that to VII, where every character mattered, or VI where all 14 characters mattered.

Also on the down side, the game was too linear for far too long. I was on disk 3, before I really got to do what I wanted, about 60 hours in. And the side games in between were few and far between. Jumping rope 1000 times, and bidding on potions at the auction house, just weren't all that stimulating when compared to breeding & racing chocobos in VII, or drafting Blitzball players in X. Maybe you liked those, and maybe you didn't, but they were involving none-the-less.

I found the reveal of what was really going on to be very intriquing, however it was a rushed explanation in the final few hours of the game, and I could never quite figure out what value there had been in delaying the answer for so long. I think I would have enjoyed the answer much better if I had gotten at least a strong hint to it way earlier in the game. As it was, most of the main enemies were dead and gone, and I'd never found out why I was even fighting them.

But the game did have a fun environment. It was brighter and more cheerful than several of its predecessors, and I did enjoy the return to castles and low technology, if only for awhile.

The game sits above Final Fantasy's I, II, V, and IV, in that order for me, and is what I would consider par for the course for a very esteemed franchise. For me I'd spend my money and time on VI, VII, VIII, X, and XII much quicker.