I'm a huge fan of the 'main' franchise up until FFX. I'm not a fan of the MMO, handheld and spinoff titles.
For me the games have always been about storyline & characters first, world second and gameplay third. I know that sounds strange but RPG combat that is too complex often takes away from the story and ruins the 'flow' of the game. Battles are meant to be quick, sharp but have at least some scope for tactical play (for use in the big boss battles which need to be epic in order to help contribute to said story).
The problem i've got is that around about FFX-2, Square (or rather, Square-Enix from this title onwards) forgot to put effort into the story and characters. Sure XIII had some semblance of a story but the issue was that the majority of characters didn't truly have any stake in this story, for several they just seemed to be along for the ride. In every FF before then each character had a very important reason to be there, sometimes a few would share their reason, but there would always be a variety and they would always be believable (aside from possibly Yuffie in FFVII, but hey, she was an optional character. She was still way more fleshed out than most optional RPG characters).
I was at this point going to talk about X-2, but I don't need to rage myself out at this time in the evening.
Skipping forward to XIII, again the characters were lacking, possibly even more-so than in XII. I actually disliked around 50% of the cast which is unheard of for a FF game. There were always characters i preferred, but never any i truly disliked, realizing this was a rather big blow when i was trying to convince myself it was as good as its predecessors. But now, imo, even the storyline was lacking. Many will jump on me and claim i 'didn't get it', but i strongly disagree. I very much DID get it, i know what happened and i know 'why', but what annoyed me is that the story determined the characters decisions, rather than their personality and motives determining the outcome of the story. For me this is the laziest form of writing, any old mug can make up a few varied characters and stick them in an adventure, what's clever is making their personalities create the adventure.
I moan and moan, you'd think i don't even like Final Fantasy, but i do, i really do. I rate both FFVII, FFX and FFVIII among my top 10 games of all time. I love that the characters can be both strong but flawed, yes there usually is a truck-full of angst thrown in there (I'm looking at you VIII) but it just seems to work. You find yourself loving these characters not in-spite of but because of their flaws and issues. Their blind determination to prove something, be it to themselves, their friends, their family or their enemy is both their downfall but also what makes their nose-dive into near certain oblivion believable.
I love the story-lines, they're often clichéd in many ways, but they were always epic and always contained a surprise you'd never see coming (without using cheap deus-ex-machina writing techniques). They always managed to construct them in a way where it would show the personal interests the protagonists have in their quest, then expand it to show the global (or even galactic) implications of them. This is where both FFXII and XIII fell short (particularly XII), they jumped straight to the big picture without carefully crafting the personal world our protagonists exist in, before showing us the epic scale. As an example, look at Cid in FFVII, he showed up after we had learned of the global implications Sephiroph represented, this should have completely downplayed his very personal motivations for moving against Shinra. But the writers did something very clever, they essentially put the story on hold for a while in a believable way, this allowed you to spend time with the character and learn of his personality and his life and, eventually, the reason he follows you into almost certain death.
I could go on forever but i know already that only the most dedicated of fans will have read this far, so i'll stop going into detail. I'll simply finish by saying that, for me, Final Fantasy is what got me into 'intelligent' gaming, by this i mean beyond shooters and beat em ups. More importantly though, FFVII is the thing that got me into stories in general. I never cared about motivations, intricate plots or character development until i played it. This then led me into a love of both film and books, it's always been very important to me.
Yes, i'm sad.
