Eh, i dropped out of playing FF after i got stuck on 5. never been a bif FF fan, more a paper mario style fan person thing. each to their own. from what i ehar, FF series has been going downhill a fair bit recently

They brought back the FFX level up system. Ugh, I hated that garbage.

Not gonna lie. It take awhile to get to the interesting part of the game. And by awhile I mean close to 10 hours or continuous play. I'm enjoying the game so far, but the best part, in my opinion, is the place I just got to which actually lets me explore somewhat. Though the downside is that I also have 30+ hours logged on the game already.

I liked IX, but that, to me, was a great 3 disc RPG with the unfortunate fourth disc tossed in at the end (We've solved all our own inner daemons and completed our quests. So, what do we do now? "Go kill God!" Why? "Ummmmm... 'cause!"). But, overall after VI the series started to get rather... blah. Gone was the era of high melodrama and in comes in the emo-wah-fest heroes who spend more time bellyaching than actually going on with the plot. The reluctant hero is a good archetype, but Final Fantasy really hasn't got hold of the idea just yet. Squall's certainly a prime example of this. At no point does he ever show any interest in the game's plot, would rather be in his room sulking, but for some reason (named the programmers) he goes on each little quest, dragging his feet, and for someone lacking any amount of charisma, for some reason (named the poor writers) somehow Squall has an entire army of mercenaries at his beck and call, willing to die for his cause... Cloud, well, he kinda came off as a bit of a jerk who wanted to simply bang Aeries, but got angry because his Oedipus syndromed friend penetrated her first.

IV you had Cecil Harvey, who, aside from having the worst name known to man, came off as a sympathetic hero. He hated his job and was pissed off about it, so he quit, changed career, and then came back to essentially murder his former employers. His love interest wasn't someone he just met, he and Rosa were an item long before the game started, and aside from his best friend experiencing Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, centuries before the inhalant cure was developed (Thanks, Last Days of FOXHOUND!) And VI, while having a cast a bit too large, managed to create an ensemble cast who's dynamic seemed to work for each other, and a villain who actually achieved his goal in taking over the world (Of course!), but was only stopped by the Power of Plot! And V, well, Butz (Yes, I list Cecil's name worse than Butz) and Co. while they don't explicitly seem to be the hero type (except for Galuf), seemed to be plausible when they banded to fight Ex-Death, in a "wrong place-right time" sort of beginning to their adventure.

But, I'm getting really tangential here. Um, back to your point, I probably won't pick up FFXIII myself either. Suikoden Tierkeris was pretty enjoyable and hope they'll make a Suikoden VI some point considering a rather good job with V. But, RPG character writings and plots just haven't been all that... wow lately.

Welcome to the world of Square. Where idotic gamers purchase the next piece of trite in the series.

I've been having issues with FF since 8. I mean honestly, we forgot we're all from the same orphange cause we use magic/espers/summoms/whatever the hell you wanna call it. There are more plot holes in that game than just about any anime.

It didn't get better with 9 or 10. And then you have X2... I mean 10 the sequel. Where apparently a priestest decided to become a pop icon... I don't know why, I'm sure someone thought it was relevant to the story plot and that their constantly changing costumes were a good idea. Honestly they weren't.

It's like the movie industry. They'll continue to produce crap because people will buy it. Anymore if it wasn't a major issue/time constraint I'd mod my game systems and start stealing the crappy games and purchase the good games. Cause you can't get your money back for purchasing a bad game. If you're lucky you get maybe half in retrade value. So you're still sucking it when you go to get a good game. You could rent a game at block buster or some other video store if they had a copy to rent for 10 or so bucks, or wait for NetFlix/GameFly to send it to you sometime in that month.

So... I just do what I normally do. I go plug in the SNES or the Saturn and start replaying the good games, wait till a game I like hits and then try and rent it to see if it'll have more than one play through in it, and I'm not talking about play throughs to collect achievements. I mean play throughs cause it's fun to play the game.