Another nerdy rant post, this time as a sweeping opinionated overview on Square-Enix (but mostly Square). After writing this I realize that I play too many games for my own good... and this is only a subset of the games I'm into. I should invest more in other hobbies. But this is for you, Ryan. >_>
I think the person I've talked to the most on this to some extent is James- who hates on Square most of the time, but with good reason. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the company myself - they've made so many games I've liked in the past, but the direction in which they've gone over the past decade has been upsetting and to the point where seeing their brand associated with a game is enough to turn me off of a game nowadays. Not going to comment on the FF14 fiasco from earlier this (or was it last?) year, other than it's a fairly typical example of what I don't like about them nowadays.
I'll admit, though, I haven't really played any of Sqenix's newer games past FF12 (other than ports of older games: Chrono Trigger DS, Front Mission DS, and Tactics Ogre PSP), so I can't fairly comment on those. The World Ends With You is next on my to-play list, though, considering all of the good things I've heard about the gameplay. That and Dragon Quest IV/V on the Enix side sometime.
on sq-enix's teams/divisions
It's pretty easy to lump all of Square-Enix as a whole as one sucky entity, but this list of the division of the company's production teams actually provides an informative context into why some of their games turn out the way they do vs. others. I guess this holds true with any company- that following the particular people/teams within the company who work on any given product will tell you more about how the game will likely turn out vs. just knowing the company name itself.
As an example: there were rumors going around a few months ago that Hiroyuki Ito would be directing FF15. If those ever actually turn out to be true, then I would most likely buy that game even though I skipped 13/14, because - well, all of the games that guy was responsible for (directed and designed FF6, 9, 12; designed Tactics and 5) rank among my favorites in the entire series and are rated well. That guy knows how to make good, interesting games.
Just going off the team list also, it makes more sense to me now how similar Xenogears and Chrono Cross are in some respects (such as the gameplay, and sucking at plot exposition lol), in spite of the fact that they're different series. Also, how the two recent big KH games (birth by sleep and dream drop distance) seem to have been different in a good sense gameplay-wise relative to the other games in the series - they were worked on by a different team altogether, the Parasite Eve group (although still with the touch [or stain if you see it that way] of Nomura on it).
The series I go through below are listed by the director I associate most with them, just for reference's sake. Square may have faulty priorities as a whole company, but in terms of individual talent, it's been fairly diverse.
on chrono cross in relation to chrono trigger - kato:
not going to comment on trigger itself because it's my favorite game of all time. enough said.
cross is a beautiful game for the setting and music alone (and I enjoyed the battle system, even though it was no trigger) - it's enough to appeal even to people who've never played the game before; I've heard johny play midis of the songs from this game, and one of the violinists who reproduces some of the songs on youtube had never played the game before either.
because of that, it's still one of my favorite games of all time. lots of good memories.
but it had a number of glaring flaws:
1. getting carried away with having too many party members (40+). it got to the point where they cut out magus because of it... in a game that revolved around the fate of his sister. priorities much? (the retcon that trigger ds introduced made it even worse. smh.)
2. horrific end-game pacing. they explained half of the game's plot in one long paragraph exposition right before the final boss. telling is rarely better than showing in a game, or any medium for that matter.
3. marketing itself as THE sequel to trigger, when it really is more of a side-quel. as in, it only resolves a subplot from trigger, schala's fate, and not the event that would be more important to anyone in trigger that wasn't magus - the fall of guardia after trigger's ending.
seriously, both kid and the fall of guardia were introduced at the same time in anticipation of cross's release, and only one was addressed in cross... because guardia has nothing to do with cross, according to one of kato's interviews. then why call cross THE sequel to trigger?
4. that, and the manner in which cross treats the main characters of trigger that do appear in some form is offensive to anyone who was a fan of the original cast- it pretty much shits all over them. even though cross is one of my favorite games because of what it did well, I simultaneously hate it because of this.
- This all said, I have been waiting for more than a decade for another Chrono game (that addresses the fall of guardia) to come out. But part of me is afraid that even if it did though, Square as it is currently would probably ruin it in some way.
- That, and Kato shouldn't be working on it by himself, if the additions to the ds version of trigger are any indicator. He needs someone else to hold him back and keep him accountable (horii from dragon quest probably), because the writing/exposition for the extra endings of trigger ds was in some respects worse than the worst aspects of cross. Magus's lines in particular made me cringe.
on the xeno-games (xenogears, xenosaga, xenoblade) - takahashi:
I know that technically only the first game is made by Square (Monolith Soft released the latter two) and they technically have no relation to each other story-wise, but they're all connected in having been directed by the same person (Tetsuya Takahashi) and share very similar themes.
- I think Gears has the best (or most interesting) story of the three, while Blade is the best actual game of the three. Saga got weighed down by being cut in half (it was supposed to be a 6-game series but only 3 were made) and by the dismissal of Soraya Saga from the staff of the second game onwards. I still don't understand why, because her contributions were part of what made the first game interesting in spite of the tedious gameplay.
- when people talk about what the "best story of all time" in a game is, especially on sites with a large JRPG audience, Gears is the game that people usually mention first. It does have a more legitimate claim to that title compared with any of the FF games for that matter, but imo it doesn't really compare as well with some of the better stories or writing seen in WRPGs, my western bias aside. It suffers a bit from having almost the entire second disc being a tell-not-show affair (you literally have the main characters telling you the story from a chair like a storyteller), which results in it feeling a lot less subtle and more preachy - and a lot of the philosophical and biblical themes are used rather explicitly, almost to the point of name dropping (Cain kills Abel??? who would've thought. lol.). Also, Gears is a bad example of how to approach story in games, consisting almost entirely of long, drawn out, text dump cutscenes. It's not really a game anymore by that point and more like watching a novel with random gameplay segments.
- Saga has worse gameplay than Gears overall, except for the third game. Story suffers from some of the same issues- too many cutscenes- and in addition, episode 2 was watered down and cut a lot, which alienated both the series' original audience and any new fans it was trying to attract. Episode 3 was the best overall game, but I'm somewhat apathetic about the way the events turned out. The backstory of the series wound up being more interesting than the actual story itself, and Shion and Kevin were just really unlikeable in the last game even though the story revolved around them.
- Blade was one of the best JRPGs I've played in the last... 5 years maybe. It felt like it did everything that FF12 tried to do, but better - an expansive and unique setting (human and mech-based societies living on top of two dormant, formerly warring giants), more engaging gameplay, and a decent story that shared some of the same themes with Xenogears, but without all the unnecessary pseudo-philosophical babble or excessive plot complexity. Takahashi finally figured out how to make a game right for once. That said, my one major complaint about it as a game was that it had fetch quests. Like 300 of them (but really, fetch quests in any game are annoying). Chrono Trigger (prior to the DS version with the stupid sanctum quest) is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that actually did sidequests right - making them actually relevant to the progression of the game in some form.
on kingdom hearts - nomura:
I used to be obsessed with kingdom hearts. Prior to KH2 coming out, I'd check the gamefaqs forums pretty much everyday, literally (I still have 1500+ karma on that site... you gain 1 everyday you have an active forum post), and was sort of like a walking encyclopedia of all things known up to that point about the series... prior to it actually becoming a series. This was back when only the first game existed, and we didn't know whether or not they would make a sequel, and all we had to go off of was the secret videos from KH1 and Final Mix. I lost count of how many times I rewatched Deep Dive, because it was that awesome.
I've been somewhat disillusioned with the series ever since KH2 though. I think I replayed the first game 3 or 4 times, and even played Chain of Memories twice (once in Japanese before I learned Japanese >_>, and once in English). I haven't really touched KH2 since high school though, except for a couple of times in college to replay some old boss battles and that one season freshman year when Nick and I were helping Evelyn beat/farm level 99 Organization member boss battles in Final Mix. But the point being, KH wound up being more about the gameplay for me than the story in the long run, which is unusual for me since I'm almost always a story guy in every other game I've played. Looking at the way the story of the series has turned out since 2, I'm not surprised - it's way too needlessly convoluted and full of itself.
I haven't actually played a game in the series since KH2 - although I might consider Birth By Sleep later though, just for the gameplay. But I still read up on the later KH games just cause - like Naruto, it was big enough at that time of my life that I just want to see the ending now.
to sum up the issues I had with KH2 (which in some ways anticipate what I would dislike about later games):
1. the story took itself too seriously. One of the joys of the first game was how light-hearted it was overall - and even when it got serious around Hallow Bastion, it was still simple and didn't get too caught up in itself. in contrast, hearing Mansex- I mean Xemnas (what else would you expect after knowing that Xemnas is an anagram?) rant about wanting a heart because he doesn't have any feelings was the epitome of making much ado about nothing, literally.
2. they made the Organization consist of 13 members just for the sake of it being 13. It's ironic that the guys that showed up in the interquel GBA game had more development than the guys in the flagship game of the series. The KH2 antagonists barely say anything between the time when you meet them and the time when they die. They barely even interact with each other, in this game. Don't get me started about the later Final Mix or the spinoff games.
3. Sora's motivation for fighting the bad guy in this game is literally because a wizard told him to. It happens right after the prologue. It's annoying how much praise the entire series heaps on him considering how dumb he is.
4. designing the opening in such a way that a spinoff/side-game (Chain of Memories) on a completely different system is actually necessary to understand it. If you only played the first game, the last thing you saw was Sora running off into the distance along some path - and then KH2 starts with him sleeping inside a pod with no explanation, and he barely stops to wonder why. huh?
5. this leads into another problem that the previous games of the series had also - random stuff happens in the game without any explanation that would otherwise break the internal logic of the series. Like Riku pulling a keyblade out of his ass to give to Kairi, even though the first game had this thing about how rare the keyblade was and how only a handful of people could wield one. I know it gets explained later in a different game, but really, delegating something that breaks the suspension of disbelief to later games is not good storytelling.
6. Likewise, having to explain basic plot information after the game in an interview (which your average player won't have access to) or in a revised game (Final Mix) that never gets released outside of Japan is not good storytelling. I used to obsess over getting KH info from these sources, but I realized after some time that most people would probably never see any of this information, which kinda defeats the purpose of having a cohesive story in the first place. It makes it seem like they just tried to churn out a half-assed game first, then finish it and re-release it later for even more profit.
7. James always makes fun of how emo Roxas is, and he has a point. "What are friends? What are feelings?" There's nothing deep about that, especially in the manner in which the game handles it. The same could be said about how this game treats "light" and "darkness" and the "in-between" though.
8. another complaint James brought up - reaction commands pretty much just add the triangle button to the button mashing gameplay scheme and are mostly there for adding flashy looking attacks. they don't actually contribute anything new to the gameplay.
9. This carries over from Chain of Memories, but the game doesn't give any explanation for the black coats except in the journal. Especially for why Mickey wears one - and he just rips it off later on like it was nothing. And several games later (dream drop distance), the villains are STILL wearing black coats. Really? They couldn't come up with anything different?
10. The whole concept of Roxas and Namine being Sora and Kairi's bodies separated from their hearts doesn't really make sense - because where did Sora and Kairi's current bodies come from, then? From thin air?
11. (aside) - the above makes for another unintentionally amusing setup that comes up in parodies as much as the mansex meme, and I saw this in a parody webcomic before: "Come on, we're technically the same person anyway. It'll be just like masturbation!" -_-
In retrospect I was mostly a big fan of the KH series for what it could've been, and not for what it wound up becoming. Deep Dive made the series feel like it could've been amazing and a major jump forward from what the first game was - like how the whole idea of the Nobody being in-between was a clever twist on the Light vs. Darkness theme of the first game. But then they overdid that idea until it literally amounted to nothing much.
That aside - being Nomura's brainchild, the KH series exemplifies almost everything I dislike about Nomura's work and the influence he's had on the direction of FF in the 7->8->10->13 sequence (although Kitase is partly responsible there also):
- the overemphasis of flashy style over substance
- too many zippers and belts (just look at his concept art.)
- a ton of pretty-boy (bishounen) characters with increasingly repetitive/similar looking designs
- talking in cutscenes about abstract subjects that don't really mean... anything (light, darkness, friends, feelings, nobody, hearts, and so on)
- overdramatic action (the cutscene that shows the final boss being defeated after you defeat it was ten minutes longer than it needed to be)
- too many side games/media (see also the compilation of 7 and whatever that 13 project is called) and barely any news on the main games in the series (kh3? that ff7 remake? ff vs.13?)
- a tendency to leave basic plot info unexplained until a "Nomura interview" or a Japan-only international version/final mix release.
on final fantasy (the ones I've played, anyway) - sakaguchi, kitase, ito, and toriyama (+ matsuno kinda),
in order of personal preference:
ff9 > ff-tactics > ff6 > ff7 > ff4 = ff12 > ff10 > ff8 > ff10-2
- ff9(ito) is my favorite. partly because of nostalgic reasons (it was my first ff game, before I knew what ff actually was.), but also because I loved the fairy tale-like fantasy setting/atmosphere, and the cg's, the ability to switch perspectives between your party members after they'd split up, and the scenic presentation (there's an analysis on reddit of ff9's visuals, and it's interesting... how the series has degraded since)
yes, the final boss came out of nowhere, the last disk and a half was kind of a mess, zidane/kuja are among my least favorite ff characters, and the battle theme was repetitively annoying... but everything else about this game, I love. I think setting/atmosphere has a much bigger impact on how I appreciate games than I give it credit for.
- tactics(matsuno/ito) is the only non-numbered game I'm including on this list because it is that good. love the politically inspired plot (based off the war of the roses) and the development of delita in particular. and it technically is related to 12, although you could say that about the other ivalice alliance games I didn't include. but I don't care as much about the rest of the spinoffs.)
- 6(kitase and ito) is the best example of the classic 2D ff game. kefka is my favorite villain in the series, and if I were to exclude nostalgia and focus solely on gameplay aspects I would say this game is actually better than 9 and tactics as a game itself.
- 7(kitase) is overrated of course (but so is almost every ff game to some extent), but the original game itself (if you don't mind the blocky graphics) is actually pretty good and memorable. I actually like most of the cast in the game outside of cloud and sephiroth as well. the gold saucer date sequence is one of my favorite moments in an ff game - I usually wound up with aerith getting mad and beating up a bunch of dudes lol. cloud x barret is also classic haha.
- 4(sakaguchi) is classic for being the game in the series that took the story to the next level and actually focused on it, and also introducing atb. I just didn't like so much the fact that most of the cast came and went based on story reasons - I preferred having the ability to choose the characters in my party as was the norm in later games.
- 12(ito [and matsuno prior to leaving]) is another game for which I love the setting... I just didn't like how impersonal it felt at times due to being less focused on the characters. It would've been a lot better if they'd kept basch as the main character as originally intended, because vaan (and penelo) really had no purpose for being in the game other than "to tag along" and partly contributed to why it felt so unfocused. and honestly, the gameplay isn't as fun as atb - it's either too automatic (if you use gambits) or too frustrating (if you don't). it would've been better with an sequel to 10-2's system or even what 13 used.
- 10(toriyama) was like playing an entertaining big name movie, which is both a good and bad thing in a sense. The overall story was entertaining, but I hated Tidus and thought Yuna was meh. Sphere grid system made the game too easy. the overhead map/airship system made logistical sense, even though I really miss walking around the overhead map ever since this game.
- 8(kitase) was still fun to play and had probably the best of uematsu's soundtracks, but I didn't like any of the characters and the love story was a little too obnoxious for me. and the witch + orphanage backstory felt forced and unnatural. laguna's sequences were more interesting than squall's. (julia's theme!)
- 10-2(toriyama) - you can tell by the complete change in tone between 10 and this game that Square really made this just to cash in on the cheap sequel business. the gameplay was more fun , I'll admit, but the story was trashy and an insult to its predecessor. way too much fanservice.
- I have no interest in playing 13 or 13-2. It's a continued movement in the 7->compilation of 7 and 10->10-2 direction, by the same team, that I wasn't liking to begin with: mostly style/catering to the lowest common denominator, and little substance, and focusing on churning out games in the same series for profit.
- 1-3 don't really interest me in that they predate 4, and hence don't really focus much on a story. I intend to finish 5 sometime.... in the distant future.
- 11 and 14 are mmorpgs, and are excluded by default because I don't play those.
If you're looking for the next game to play that follows in FF's footsteps, it would probably be better to follow whatever games Hironobu Sakaguchi (the creator of FF) has been making since he left the series. Most recently, that would be The Last Story (whose title is even a spinoff of Final Fantasy, heh).
on the ivalice alliance/ogre series - matsuno:
Matsuno has a bit of a limited output, but most of the games he's headed have been interesting in their politically themed and more morally ambiguous storylines. FF12 (which he eventually left for health reasons) and FF tactics I mentioned earlier in the FF section, but vagrant story, ogre battle, and tactics ogre have pretty good stories and settings too. It's too bad (or good?) he left square already, though.
Part of what I love about the atmosphere in these games comes also from Sakimoto's music. Sakimoto is the composer to Matsuno's games just as Uematsu is to Sakaguchi's and Mitsuda is to Kato's/Takahashi's. Sakimoto does a lot of orchestral sounding music that does a good job of evoking the medieval-fantasy kind of atmosphere found in Matsuno's Ivalice and Ogre games. I think my favorite soundtrack so far would be Vargant Story's, even though the gameplay for that game doesn't appeal to me so much.
tactics ogre vs. ff tactics:
I'm still playing through tactics ogre right now, so I can't really comment on how good it is by the end yet... but a little more than halfway through the game, I'd have to say:
- TO seems to be more morally ambiguous. FFT devolved in its second half into a supernatural battle against demons from another realm, which pretty much overshadowed the political story by the end of the game, and even prior to that Ramza functioned mostly as a good-guy foil to Delita even though Ramza was supposed to be the main character. (that, or Ramza was just so much better than Delita? I guess I just found Delita to be more interesting considering he was the anti-hero, and not in an emo-annoying way like freaking Sasuke or Riku)
TO on the other hand has three branching routes midway through the game (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaos), and even though Lawful sounds like the generically good route... it actually isn't. I've found myself disagreeing with "lawful" Denam a lot in his decisions, as he generally follows an ends justify the means methodology for the sake of unifying the oppressed. and I disagree with Catiua and Vyce even more (even though they too disagree with Denam), although not to the point of totally disliking them. I've heard the Chaos route functions more like a typical JRPG plot though.
- That said... while the main story is a little more unique, it doesn't feel quite as memorable so far. There's still a few scenes from FFT that really stick out to me in my head, but thus far (near the end of the 3rd quarter of the game) in TO, there hasn't been anything that's happened that I really find memorable. It's not so much the events being boring as it is the overall cast having less unique or interesting characterization, so that when the plot actually happens to them, their reactions feel.... flat.
I guess another way to put it is that a lot of the characters seem to have stock/simplistic personalities that are defined simply by what attitude they have towards the war. It's like everyone just has to choose a side, and once they're on that side, all they do is root for it. That's all the characters are for - to represent a side. Even when there's internal conflict. It feels harder to relate to them on a personal level since all they do is talk about what kingdom or alliance they're for, and if it happens to conflict with yours... then you kill them. Almost every time.
Granted, FFT suffered from this too, but at least certain characters like Delita and Ovelia and Wygraf stood out from the rest of the cast because their characterization was a bit more lively and distinct. They actually do and say things that would evoke a reaction out of me, whereas I found myself not caring as much when TO's characters would say stuff. And their sprites in battle (well okay, Ovelia didn't fight) had unique abilities that made them stand out even more, whereas the unique characters that have joined my party so far in TO don't have anything special other than having slightly higher stats than generic characters. That doesn't convey a whole lot about them individually. I might be affected by having played FFT first, though, cause aside from that the battles and setting are very similar to each other, so it's harder for me to be impressed a second time.
- TO is a harder game. You don't have a unit as cheap as Orlandu the Holy Swordsman, or a black mage with the calculator ability (0 mp cost with the potential to hit every single unit on the battlefield) or all female units with that auto-life+regen+holy element absorbing ribbon or Ramza as a dual-fisted monk with hamedo (counterattack before anyone attacks you twice = enemies die the moment they try to attack you) and so on. and the enemies in both story and random battles scale in level with your party, which means each battle's difficulty level stays fairly consistent.
- I actually had a harder time discerning what the different classes were good for because they aren't as obvious and clearcut as FF's classes are... although FF's classes are fairly standard throughout the series anyway. The game is still somewhat imbalanced, as crossbows and bows are are better than the majority of the weapons in this game, but I've heard magic becomes a lot more prominent over physical attacks in the end-game. This kind of a gameplay-schematic-changer isn't something I would've expected from FFT.
- As far as Tactics Advance goes, it's a lot more childish relative to the other tactics games so I don't consider it in the same level. The whole obsession with the world inside the book is very much framed as a child's delusion to begin with. It just isn't as interesting when compared with FFT or Tactics Ogre. That, and I hated the judge system.
on front mission - tsuchida
It's too bad that the Front Mission team is now defunct - they were one of the better teams in the company even while everything outside of them was going downhill. Front Mission is pretty much what happens when you take the strategy RPG genre (see the tactics series from above, advance wars, fire emblem, etc.) and apply it entirely to Gundams/mech units (wanzers). The series has an interesting political story (taking place in a future version of Earth 80 years from now) that spans across all of its games, in addition to each game's individual conflict of focus. It's the most realistic game series- if you can imagine our armies developing giant mechs, anyway- out of all of Square's original series, and I was quite surprised to find out that it was a Square series to begin with.
I played through the first game in the series on the ds a couple of years ago, and while it bore the hallmarks of the original snes era it was made in (older looking graphics and sprites; the gameplay is heavily biased in favor of missile units and sucks for melee ones) the game was surprisingly well developed for its time. I loved the ability to customize and modify each wanzer by its individual parts, which is a mainstay for the entire series. The second campaign that you play through was an add-on from the ps1 version of the game, and has a more developed plot in anticipation of Front Mission 5.
I'm actually primarily playing through this series in anticipation of FM5, because the fifth game is supposed to be the culmination of all of the other games in the series, as its main characters were in development prior to the first game. And the game sweeps across the time periods of all of the previous games in the series from the perspective of one of the characters. This series had that much foresight put into it. I love seeing this level of planning.
It's a shame that the two best games in the series (both 2 and 5) were never released officially in English, though. The first game didn't come over here until more than a decade after its release in the form of its ds port; prior to that, the third game had a shoddy localization; and the fourth was barely advertised. I only noticed it first one day because it was sitting on a Blockbuster shelf and had the Sqenix label. Go figure.
I'm still looking forward to playing Front Mission 2 and then 5 sometime soon... I might just hastily use the prototype patch for 2 and read the script on the side if I get impatient enough for the final fan translation patch. I've been waiting for two years now. FM5 was the reason I soldered my ps2 back then. Sigh.
On Enix games
I don't have a whole lot to say or complain here director/game-wise because I have less complaints about Enix. I have less really to comment on the stories of Enix games in general because their gameplay generally overshadows them more. That's not to say that they're bad, though - they just happen to suffice for the game such that I have little to complain (or praise in a sense) about. A game is a game is a game. Square could learn a thing or two from them there.
A lot of blame has been placed in the past on the Square-Enix merger as to why Square as fallen so much since its earlier days, but I'm not really seeing how that could be a legitimate reason. Enix itself was already making decent games without any interaction with Square, and even after the merger, their teams have been largely separate and working on their own games. If anything, FFX-2 preceded the merger (in Japan) and is a better indicator of how Square was already heading in a downward direction prior to any Enix involvement. Sadly.
I haven't been a longtime fan of Enix games, particularly of Dragon Quest like James has - but they're pretty solid in general. Horii's done a good job of keeping the DQ series consistent from what I can tell. Still need to beat DQ4 and 5 sometime in the future.
star ocean:
I've only played the third game, which from what I understand contained a plot twist so major it broke the story of the series. I don't know how else to word it, but I can attest that it did.
The gameplay is fun and reminds me of the Tales series (Star Ocean was actually started by a group that broke off after working on Tales of Phantasia). The main difference is that you can die from consuming either HP or SP or whatever those magic points are called in this series. This makes the game a lot harder when you have enemies who just happen to target both. I also somehow managed to get through some 40 hours of the game without knowing how to cancel chain combo attacks, which meant that after a certain point I was getting killed in every random encounter I came across on the main map - not even in a dungeon. It took me a few years to finally get back to this game, learn how to combo for once, and then defeat the final boss. I don't really have any intention to get to the post-game content though. There's too much of it.
valkyrie profile
The first game in this series is notorious for having used the same voice acting company that provides the voices to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, so I was a bit thrown off by the fact that Nurse Joy/Officer Jenny plays the main character. And Brock/Seto Kaiba plays the male love interest. And Ash plays Freya/a random dragoon party member. and Meowth plays a major villain. You could just hear it in their voices.
But in all seriousness, the Valkyrie Profile 1 is one of the most depressing games I have ever played in my life. You play a Valkyrie who's been sent to recruit fallen warriors(einherjar) for the upcoming war against the Vanir and the coming of Ragnarok, and since all of your party members are freshly dead people, you get to relive each of their final moments before they die. There just happen to be a lot of creative ways to make each and every character die a horrible death. And you can't do anything about it because they're meant to die before they join you.
But the gameplay is fun! it's a platformer combined with rpg battles where each button tap corresponds to a different party member, and you can time the order of the button presses to achieve different combos. The second game compounded this by factoring in geographical location in a 3d battle area and giving you the ability to split up your party, making the battles considerably more complicated.
I think the person I've talked to the most on this to some extent is James- who hates on Square most of the time, but with good reason. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the company myself - they've made so many games I've liked in the past, but the direction in which they've gone over the past decade has been upsetting and to the point where seeing their brand associated with a game is enough to turn me off of a game nowadays. Not going to comment on the FF14 fiasco from earlier this (or was it last?) year, other than it's a fairly typical example of what I don't like about them nowadays.
I'll admit, though, I haven't really played any of Sqenix's newer games past FF12 (other than ports of older games: Chrono Trigger DS, Front Mission DS, and Tactics Ogre PSP), so I can't fairly comment on those. The World Ends With You is next on my to-play list, though, considering all of the good things I've heard about the gameplay. That and Dragon Quest IV/V on the Enix side sometime.
on sq-enix's teams/divisions
It's pretty easy to lump all of Square-Enix as a whole as one sucky entity, but this list of the division of the company's production teams actually provides an informative context into why some of their games turn out the way they do vs. others. I guess this holds true with any company- that following the particular people/teams within the company who work on any given product will tell you more about how the game will likely turn out vs. just knowing the company name itself.
As an example: there were rumors going around a few months ago that Hiroyuki Ito would be directing FF15. If those ever actually turn out to be true, then I would most likely buy that game even though I skipped 13/14, because - well, all of the games that guy was responsible for (directed and designed FF6, 9, 12; designed Tactics and 5) rank among my favorites in the entire series and are rated well. That guy knows how to make good, interesting games.
Just going off the team list also, it makes more sense to me now how similar Xenogears and Chrono Cross are in some respects (such as the gameplay, and sucking at plot exposition lol), in spite of the fact that they're different series. Also, how the two recent big KH games (birth by sleep and dream drop distance) seem to have been different in a good sense gameplay-wise relative to the other games in the series - they were worked on by a different team altogether, the Parasite Eve group (although still with the touch [or stain if you see it that way] of Nomura on it).
The series I go through below are listed by the director I associate most with them, just for reference's sake. Square may have faulty priorities as a whole company, but in terms of individual talent, it's been fairly diverse.
on chrono cross in relation to chrono trigger - kato:
not going to comment on trigger itself because it's my favorite game of all time. enough said.
cross is a beautiful game for the setting and music alone (and I enjoyed the battle system, even though it was no trigger) - it's enough to appeal even to people who've never played the game before; I've heard johny play midis of the songs from this game, and one of the violinists who reproduces some of the songs on youtube had never played the game before either.
because of that, it's still one of my favorite games of all time. lots of good memories.
but it had a number of glaring flaws:
1. getting carried away with having too many party members (40+). it got to the point where they cut out magus because of it... in a game that revolved around the fate of his sister. priorities much? (the retcon that trigger ds introduced made it even worse. smh.)
2. horrific end-game pacing. they explained half of the game's plot in one long paragraph exposition right before the final boss. telling is rarely better than showing in a game, or any medium for that matter.
3. marketing itself as THE sequel to trigger, when it really is more of a side-quel. as in, it only resolves a subplot from trigger, schala's fate, and not the event that would be more important to anyone in trigger that wasn't magus - the fall of guardia after trigger's ending.
seriously, both kid and the fall of guardia were introduced at the same time in anticipation of cross's release, and only one was addressed in cross... because guardia has nothing to do with cross, according to one of kato's interviews. then why call cross THE sequel to trigger?
4. that, and the manner in which cross treats the main characters of trigger that do appear in some form is offensive to anyone who was a fan of the original cast- it pretty much shits all over them. even though cross is one of my favorite games because of what it did well, I simultaneously hate it because of this.
- This all said, I have been waiting for more than a decade for another Chrono game (that addresses the fall of guardia) to come out. But part of me is afraid that even if it did though, Square as it is currently would probably ruin it in some way.
- That, and Kato shouldn't be working on it by himself, if the additions to the ds version of trigger are any indicator. He needs someone else to hold him back and keep him accountable (horii from dragon quest probably), because the writing/exposition for the extra endings of trigger ds was in some respects worse than the worst aspects of cross. Magus's lines in particular made me cringe.
on the xeno-games (xenogears, xenosaga, xenoblade) - takahashi:
I know that technically only the first game is made by Square (Monolith Soft released the latter two) and they technically have no relation to each other story-wise, but they're all connected in having been directed by the same person (Tetsuya Takahashi) and share very similar themes.
- I think Gears has the best (or most interesting) story of the three, while Blade is the best actual game of the three. Saga got weighed down by being cut in half (it was supposed to be a 6-game series but only 3 were made) and by the dismissal of Soraya Saga from the staff of the second game onwards. I still don't understand why, because her contributions were part of what made the first game interesting in spite of the tedious gameplay.
- when people talk about what the "best story of all time" in a game is, especially on sites with a large JRPG audience, Gears is the game that people usually mention first. It does have a more legitimate claim to that title compared with any of the FF games for that matter, but imo it doesn't really compare as well with some of the better stories or writing seen in WRPGs, my western bias aside. It suffers a bit from having almost the entire second disc being a tell-not-show affair (you literally have the main characters telling you the story from a chair like a storyteller), which results in it feeling a lot less subtle and more preachy - and a lot of the philosophical and biblical themes are used rather explicitly, almost to the point of name dropping (Cain kills Abel??? who would've thought. lol.). Also, Gears is a bad example of how to approach story in games, consisting almost entirely of long, drawn out, text dump cutscenes. It's not really a game anymore by that point and more like watching a novel with random gameplay segments.
- Saga has worse gameplay than Gears overall, except for the third game. Story suffers from some of the same issues- too many cutscenes- and in addition, episode 2 was watered down and cut a lot, which alienated both the series' original audience and any new fans it was trying to attract. Episode 3 was the best overall game, but I'm somewhat apathetic about the way the events turned out. The backstory of the series wound up being more interesting than the actual story itself, and Shion and Kevin were just really unlikeable in the last game even though the story revolved around them.
- Blade was one of the best JRPGs I've played in the last... 5 years maybe. It felt like it did everything that FF12 tried to do, but better - an expansive and unique setting (human and mech-based societies living on top of two dormant, formerly warring giants), more engaging gameplay, and a decent story that shared some of the same themes with Xenogears, but without all the unnecessary pseudo-philosophical babble or excessive plot complexity. Takahashi finally figured out how to make a game right for once. That said, my one major complaint about it as a game was that it had fetch quests. Like 300 of them (but really, fetch quests in any game are annoying). Chrono Trigger (prior to the DS version with the stupid sanctum quest) is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that actually did sidequests right - making them actually relevant to the progression of the game in some form.
on kingdom hearts - nomura:
I used to be obsessed with kingdom hearts. Prior to KH2 coming out, I'd check the gamefaqs forums pretty much everyday, literally (I still have 1500+ karma on that site... you gain 1 everyday you have an active forum post), and was sort of like a walking encyclopedia of all things known up to that point about the series... prior to it actually becoming a series. This was back when only the first game existed, and we didn't know whether or not they would make a sequel, and all we had to go off of was the secret videos from KH1 and Final Mix. I lost count of how many times I rewatched Deep Dive, because it was that awesome.
I've been somewhat disillusioned with the series ever since KH2 though. I think I replayed the first game 3 or 4 times, and even played Chain of Memories twice (once in Japanese before I learned Japanese >_>, and once in English). I haven't really touched KH2 since high school though, except for a couple of times in college to replay some old boss battles and that one season freshman year when Nick and I were helping Evelyn beat/farm level 99 Organization member boss battles in Final Mix. But the point being, KH wound up being more about the gameplay for me than the story in the long run, which is unusual for me since I'm almost always a story guy in every other game I've played. Looking at the way the story of the series has turned out since 2, I'm not surprised - it's way too needlessly convoluted and full of itself.
I haven't actually played a game in the series since KH2 - although I might consider Birth By Sleep later though, just for the gameplay. But I still read up on the later KH games just cause - like Naruto, it was big enough at that time of my life that I just want to see the ending now.
to sum up the issues I had with KH2 (which in some ways anticipate what I would dislike about later games):
1. the story took itself too seriously. One of the joys of the first game was how light-hearted it was overall - and even when it got serious around Hallow Bastion, it was still simple and didn't get too caught up in itself. in contrast, hearing Mansex- I mean Xemnas (what else would you expect after knowing that Xemnas is an anagram?) rant about wanting a heart because he doesn't have any feelings was the epitome of making much ado about nothing, literally.
2. they made the Organization consist of 13 members just for the sake of it being 13. It's ironic that the guys that showed up in the interquel GBA game had more development than the guys in the flagship game of the series. The KH2 antagonists barely say anything between the time when you meet them and the time when they die. They barely even interact with each other, in this game. Don't get me started about the later Final Mix or the spinoff games.
3. Sora's motivation for fighting the bad guy in this game is literally because a wizard told him to. It happens right after the prologue. It's annoying how much praise the entire series heaps on him considering how dumb he is.
4. designing the opening in such a way that a spinoff/side-game (Chain of Memories) on a completely different system is actually necessary to understand it. If you only played the first game, the last thing you saw was Sora running off into the distance along some path - and then KH2 starts with him sleeping inside a pod with no explanation, and he barely stops to wonder why. huh?
5. this leads into another problem that the previous games of the series had also - random stuff happens in the game without any explanation that would otherwise break the internal logic of the series. Like Riku pulling a keyblade out of his ass to give to Kairi, even though the first game had this thing about how rare the keyblade was and how only a handful of people could wield one. I know it gets explained later in a different game, but really, delegating something that breaks the suspension of disbelief to later games is not good storytelling.
6. Likewise, having to explain basic plot information after the game in an interview (which your average player won't have access to) or in a revised game (Final Mix) that never gets released outside of Japan is not good storytelling. I used to obsess over getting KH info from these sources, but I realized after some time that most people would probably never see any of this information, which kinda defeats the purpose of having a cohesive story in the first place. It makes it seem like they just tried to churn out a half-assed game first, then finish it and re-release it later for even more profit.
7. James always makes fun of how emo Roxas is, and he has a point. "What are friends? What are feelings?" There's nothing deep about that, especially in the manner in which the game handles it. The same could be said about how this game treats "light" and "darkness" and the "in-between" though.
8. another complaint James brought up - reaction commands pretty much just add the triangle button to the button mashing gameplay scheme and are mostly there for adding flashy looking attacks. they don't actually contribute anything new to the gameplay.
9. This carries over from Chain of Memories, but the game doesn't give any explanation for the black coats except in the journal. Especially for why Mickey wears one - and he just rips it off later on like it was nothing. And several games later (dream drop distance), the villains are STILL wearing black coats. Really? They couldn't come up with anything different?
10. The whole concept of Roxas and Namine being Sora and Kairi's bodies separated from their hearts doesn't really make sense - because where did Sora and Kairi's current bodies come from, then? From thin air?
11. (aside) - the above makes for another unintentionally amusing setup that comes up in parodies as much as the mansex meme, and I saw this in a parody webcomic before: "Come on, we're technically the same person anyway. It'll be just like masturbation!" -_-
In retrospect I was mostly a big fan of the KH series for what it could've been, and not for what it wound up becoming. Deep Dive made the series feel like it could've been amazing and a major jump forward from what the first game was - like how the whole idea of the Nobody being in-between was a clever twist on the Light vs. Darkness theme of the first game. But then they overdid that idea until it literally amounted to nothing much.
That aside - being Nomura's brainchild, the KH series exemplifies almost everything I dislike about Nomura's work and the influence he's had on the direction of FF in the 7->8->10->13 sequence (although Kitase is partly responsible there also):
- the overemphasis of flashy style over substance
- too many zippers and belts (just look at his concept art.)
- a ton of pretty-boy (bishounen) characters with increasingly repetitive/similar looking designs
- talking in cutscenes about abstract subjects that don't really mean... anything (light, darkness, friends, feelings, nobody, hearts, and so on)
- overdramatic action (the cutscene that shows the final boss being defeated after you defeat it was ten minutes longer than it needed to be)
- too many side games/media (see also the compilation of 7 and whatever that 13 project is called) and barely any news on the main games in the series (kh3? that ff7 remake? ff vs.13?)
- a tendency to leave basic plot info unexplained until a "Nomura interview" or a Japan-only international version/final mix release.
on final fantasy (the ones I've played, anyway) - sakaguchi, kitase, ito, and toriyama (+ matsuno kinda),
in order of personal preference:
ff9 > ff-tactics > ff6 > ff7 > ff4 = ff12 > ff10 > ff8 > ff10-2
- ff9(ito) is my favorite. partly because of nostalgic reasons (it was my first ff game, before I knew what ff actually was.), but also because I loved the fairy tale-like fantasy setting/atmosphere, and the cg's, the ability to switch perspectives between your party members after they'd split up, and the scenic presentation (there's an analysis on reddit of ff9's visuals, and it's interesting... how the series has degraded since)
yes, the final boss came out of nowhere, the last disk and a half was kind of a mess, zidane/kuja are among my least favorite ff characters, and the battle theme was repetitively annoying... but everything else about this game, I love. I think setting/atmosphere has a much bigger impact on how I appreciate games than I give it credit for.
- tactics(matsuno/ito) is the only non-numbered game I'm including on this list because it is that good. love the politically inspired plot (based off the war of the roses) and the development of delita in particular. and it technically is related to 12, although you could say that about the other ivalice alliance games I didn't include. but I don't care as much about the rest of the spinoffs.)
- 6(kitase and ito) is the best example of the classic 2D ff game. kefka is my favorite villain in the series, and if I were to exclude nostalgia and focus solely on gameplay aspects I would say this game is actually better than 9 and tactics as a game itself.
- 7(kitase) is overrated of course (but so is almost every ff game to some extent), but the original game itself (if you don't mind the blocky graphics) is actually pretty good and memorable. I actually like most of the cast in the game outside of cloud and sephiroth as well. the gold saucer date sequence is one of my favorite moments in an ff game - I usually wound up with aerith getting mad and beating up a bunch of dudes lol. cloud x barret is also classic haha.
- 4(sakaguchi) is classic for being the game in the series that took the story to the next level and actually focused on it, and also introducing atb. I just didn't like so much the fact that most of the cast came and went based on story reasons - I preferred having the ability to choose the characters in my party as was the norm in later games.
- 12(ito [and matsuno prior to leaving]) is another game for which I love the setting... I just didn't like how impersonal it felt at times due to being less focused on the characters. It would've been a lot better if they'd kept basch as the main character as originally intended, because vaan (and penelo) really had no purpose for being in the game other than "to tag along" and partly contributed to why it felt so unfocused. and honestly, the gameplay isn't as fun as atb - it's either too automatic (if you use gambits) or too frustrating (if you don't). it would've been better with an sequel to 10-2's system or even what 13 used.
- 10(toriyama) was like playing an entertaining big name movie, which is both a good and bad thing in a sense. The overall story was entertaining, but I hated Tidus and thought Yuna was meh. Sphere grid system made the game too easy. the overhead map/airship system made logistical sense, even though I really miss walking around the overhead map ever since this game.
- 8(kitase) was still fun to play and had probably the best of uematsu's soundtracks, but I didn't like any of the characters and the love story was a little too obnoxious for me. and the witch + orphanage backstory felt forced and unnatural. laguna's sequences were more interesting than squall's. (julia's theme!)
- 10-2(toriyama) - you can tell by the complete change in tone between 10 and this game that Square really made this just to cash in on the cheap sequel business. the gameplay was more fun , I'll admit, but the story was trashy and an insult to its predecessor. way too much fanservice.
- I have no interest in playing 13 or 13-2. It's a continued movement in the 7->compilation of 7 and 10->10-2 direction, by the same team, that I wasn't liking to begin with: mostly style/catering to the lowest common denominator, and little substance, and focusing on churning out games in the same series for profit.
- 1-3 don't really interest me in that they predate 4, and hence don't really focus much on a story. I intend to finish 5 sometime.... in the distant future.
- 11 and 14 are mmorpgs, and are excluded by default because I don't play those.
If you're looking for the next game to play that follows in FF's footsteps, it would probably be better to follow whatever games Hironobu Sakaguchi (the creator of FF) has been making since he left the series. Most recently, that would be The Last Story (whose title is even a spinoff of Final Fantasy, heh).
on the ivalice alliance/ogre series - matsuno:
Matsuno has a bit of a limited output, but most of the games he's headed have been interesting in their politically themed and more morally ambiguous storylines. FF12 (which he eventually left for health reasons) and FF tactics I mentioned earlier in the FF section, but vagrant story, ogre battle, and tactics ogre have pretty good stories and settings too. It's too bad (or good?) he left square already, though.
Part of what I love about the atmosphere in these games comes also from Sakimoto's music. Sakimoto is the composer to Matsuno's games just as Uematsu is to Sakaguchi's and Mitsuda is to Kato's/Takahashi's. Sakimoto does a lot of orchestral sounding music that does a good job of evoking the medieval-fantasy kind of atmosphere found in Matsuno's Ivalice and Ogre games. I think my favorite soundtrack so far would be Vargant Story's, even though the gameplay for that game doesn't appeal to me so much.
tactics ogre vs. ff tactics:
I'm still playing through tactics ogre right now, so I can't really comment on how good it is by the end yet... but a little more than halfway through the game, I'd have to say:
- TO seems to be more morally ambiguous. FFT devolved in its second half into a supernatural battle against demons from another realm, which pretty much overshadowed the political story by the end of the game, and even prior to that Ramza functioned mostly as a good-guy foil to Delita even though Ramza was supposed to be the main character. (that, or Ramza was just so much better than Delita? I guess I just found Delita to be more interesting considering he was the anti-hero, and not in an emo-annoying way like freaking Sasuke or Riku)
TO on the other hand has three branching routes midway through the game (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaos), and even though Lawful sounds like the generically good route... it actually isn't. I've found myself disagreeing with "lawful" Denam a lot in his decisions, as he generally follows an ends justify the means methodology for the sake of unifying the oppressed. and I disagree with Catiua and Vyce even more (even though they too disagree with Denam), although not to the point of totally disliking them. I've heard the Chaos route functions more like a typical JRPG plot though.
- That said... while the main story is a little more unique, it doesn't feel quite as memorable so far. There's still a few scenes from FFT that really stick out to me in my head, but thus far (near the end of the 3rd quarter of the game) in TO, there hasn't been anything that's happened that I really find memorable. It's not so much the events being boring as it is the overall cast having less unique or interesting characterization, so that when the plot actually happens to them, their reactions feel.... flat.
I guess another way to put it is that a lot of the characters seem to have stock/simplistic personalities that are defined simply by what attitude they have towards the war. It's like everyone just has to choose a side, and once they're on that side, all they do is root for it. That's all the characters are for - to represent a side. Even when there's internal conflict. It feels harder to relate to them on a personal level since all they do is talk about what kingdom or alliance they're for, and if it happens to conflict with yours... then you kill them. Almost every time.
Granted, FFT suffered from this too, but at least certain characters like Delita and Ovelia and Wygraf stood out from the rest of the cast because their characterization was a bit more lively and distinct. They actually do and say things that would evoke a reaction out of me, whereas I found myself not caring as much when TO's characters would say stuff. And their sprites in battle (well okay, Ovelia didn't fight) had unique abilities that made them stand out even more, whereas the unique characters that have joined my party so far in TO don't have anything special other than having slightly higher stats than generic characters. That doesn't convey a whole lot about them individually. I might be affected by having played FFT first, though, cause aside from that the battles and setting are very similar to each other, so it's harder for me to be impressed a second time.
- TO is a harder game. You don't have a unit as cheap as Orlandu the Holy Swordsman, or a black mage with the calculator ability (0 mp cost with the potential to hit every single unit on the battlefield) or all female units with that auto-life+regen+holy element absorbing ribbon or Ramza as a dual-fisted monk with hamedo (counterattack before anyone attacks you twice = enemies die the moment they try to attack you) and so on. and the enemies in both story and random battles scale in level with your party, which means each battle's difficulty level stays fairly consistent.
- I actually had a harder time discerning what the different classes were good for because they aren't as obvious and clearcut as FF's classes are... although FF's classes are fairly standard throughout the series anyway. The game is still somewhat imbalanced, as crossbows and bows are are better than the majority of the weapons in this game, but I've heard magic becomes a lot more prominent over physical attacks in the end-game. This kind of a gameplay-schematic-changer isn't something I would've expected from FFT.
- As far as Tactics Advance goes, it's a lot more childish relative to the other tactics games so I don't consider it in the same level. The whole obsession with the world inside the book is very much framed as a child's delusion to begin with. It just isn't as interesting when compared with FFT or Tactics Ogre. That, and I hated the judge system.
on front mission - tsuchida
It's too bad that the Front Mission team is now defunct - they were one of the better teams in the company even while everything outside of them was going downhill. Front Mission is pretty much what happens when you take the strategy RPG genre (see the tactics series from above, advance wars, fire emblem, etc.) and apply it entirely to Gundams/mech units (wanzers). The series has an interesting political story (taking place in a future version of Earth 80 years from now) that spans across all of its games, in addition to each game's individual conflict of focus. It's the most realistic game series- if you can imagine our armies developing giant mechs, anyway- out of all of Square's original series, and I was quite surprised to find out that it was a Square series to begin with.
I played through the first game in the series on the ds a couple of years ago, and while it bore the hallmarks of the original snes era it was made in (older looking graphics and sprites; the gameplay is heavily biased in favor of missile units and sucks for melee ones) the game was surprisingly well developed for its time. I loved the ability to customize and modify each wanzer by its individual parts, which is a mainstay for the entire series. The second campaign that you play through was an add-on from the ps1 version of the game, and has a more developed plot in anticipation of Front Mission 5.
I'm actually primarily playing through this series in anticipation of FM5, because the fifth game is supposed to be the culmination of all of the other games in the series, as its main characters were in development prior to the first game. And the game sweeps across the time periods of all of the previous games in the series from the perspective of one of the characters. This series had that much foresight put into it. I love seeing this level of planning.
It's a shame that the two best games in the series (both 2 and 5) were never released officially in English, though. The first game didn't come over here until more than a decade after its release in the form of its ds port; prior to that, the third game had a shoddy localization; and the fourth was barely advertised. I only noticed it first one day because it was sitting on a Blockbuster shelf and had the Sqenix label. Go figure.
I'm still looking forward to playing Front Mission 2 and then 5 sometime soon... I might just hastily use the prototype patch for 2 and read the script on the side if I get impatient enough for the final fan translation patch. I've been waiting for two years now. FM5 was the reason I soldered my ps2 back then. Sigh.
On Enix games
I don't have a whole lot to say or complain here director/game-wise because I have less complaints about Enix. I have less really to comment on the stories of Enix games in general because their gameplay generally overshadows them more. That's not to say that they're bad, though - they just happen to suffice for the game such that I have little to complain (or praise in a sense) about. A game is a game is a game. Square could learn a thing or two from them there.
A lot of blame has been placed in the past on the Square-Enix merger as to why Square as fallen so much since its earlier days, but I'm not really seeing how that could be a legitimate reason. Enix itself was already making decent games without any interaction with Square, and even after the merger, their teams have been largely separate and working on their own games. If anything, FFX-2 preceded the merger (in Japan) and is a better indicator of how Square was already heading in a downward direction prior to any Enix involvement. Sadly.
I haven't been a longtime fan of Enix games, particularly of Dragon Quest like James has - but they're pretty solid in general. Horii's done a good job of keeping the DQ series consistent from what I can tell. Still need to beat DQ4 and 5 sometime in the future.
star ocean:
I've only played the third game, which from what I understand contained a plot twist so major it broke the story of the series. I don't know how else to word it, but I can attest that it did.
The gameplay is fun and reminds me of the Tales series (Star Ocean was actually started by a group that broke off after working on Tales of Phantasia). The main difference is that you can die from consuming either HP or SP or whatever those magic points are called in this series. This makes the game a lot harder when you have enemies who just happen to target both. I also somehow managed to get through some 40 hours of the game without knowing how to cancel chain combo attacks, which meant that after a certain point I was getting killed in every random encounter I came across on the main map - not even in a dungeon. It took me a few years to finally get back to this game, learn how to combo for once, and then defeat the final boss. I don't really have any intention to get to the post-game content though. There's too much of it.
valkyrie profile
The first game in this series is notorious for having used the same voice acting company that provides the voices to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, so I was a bit thrown off by the fact that Nurse Joy/Officer Jenny plays the main character. And Brock/Seto Kaiba plays the male love interest. And Ash plays Freya/a random dragoon party member. and Meowth plays a major villain. You could just hear it in their voices.
But in all seriousness, the Valkyrie Profile 1 is one of the most depressing games I have ever played in my life. You play a Valkyrie who's been sent to recruit fallen warriors(einherjar) for the upcoming war against the Vanir and the coming of Ragnarok, and since all of your party members are freshly dead people, you get to relive each of their final moments before they die. There just happen to be a lot of creative ways to make each and every character die a horrible death. And you can't do anything about it because they're meant to die before they join you.
But the gameplay is fun! it's a platformer combined with rpg battles where each button tap corresponds to a different party member, and you can time the order of the button presses to achieve different combos. The second game compounded this by factoring in geographical location in a 3d battle area and giving you the ability to split up your party, making the battles considerably more complicated.
They were MIDIs converted to MP3s
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