LogFAQs > #946771822

So, some overall thoughts. I really, really liked this game. It hooked me pretty early with its moral grey gritty realistic tone and getting into the weeds with its politics and shading the characters pretty well. The gameplay is very addictive, still holds up today and manages to feel unique compared to others in its genre. I'm guessing it holds up well with multiple playthroughs given the sheer number of jobs you can have. It all feels very customisable and you can play how you want without getting overwhelmed by the choices. They also do a good job making the maps pretty varied and keeping things fresh through most of the runtime. The bars+bios are a good way of putting in background lore for those who want it while not making it way too complex and boring codex-y like in later FFs.

Quibbles with the gameplay would be the random battles maybe, I like them every now and then but I dreaded having to cross the entire map to check out shops/bars and maybe having to fight a bunch of randoms on the way there. The number of sidequest/plot characters you get gets pretty high by the end too, so you have to throw most of your randoms away if you want to keep all the named ones. Despite what the tutorial says, there's really no need to focus on more than 5/6 party members for the duration, and trying to spread it out seems counter-intuitive. Sidequests and a few missable things are poorly marked too, I would have missed a lot more without help from you folks. Finally, the difficulty. The game is paced pretty damn well for the most part, with one glaring godforsaken castle that is just a bit *too* hard, but it gets way too easy in the final act. I didn't even use Cid and I walked through most of the final battles.

The artstyle is pretty charming, some of the chibi models aren't great and the portrait faces all look the same, but they do manage to wring a great sense of atmosphere out of the environments. IDK the word for it in video games but there's good 'cinematography' in various scenes, and lots of really neat little details. Nice use of body language given the limitations too, much like FF8. Definitely aged better than FF7's visuals. The music is great, generally it's good background stuff but I never got tired of the battle musics and there's some really great tracks I will be continuing to listen to afterwards. Delita's theme is one I haven't mentioned that is great.

All this would be well and good, but the primary draw for this game is its narrative imo. It's a very refreshing take on gritty medieval fantasy long before that stuff became en vogue with Game of Thrones etc. I'm a complete sucker for morally grey stories, and the game sets up discussions of classism, monarchy, power, nobility, corruption etc very well. Honestly this could be a great HBO miniseries. The primary flaw I have is that much of this stuff diminishes later on. Unlike some others I'm not against the addition of the stones and major fantasy elements, the story takes a left turn when they're introduced but for a while it does it well imo- Draclau and Wiegraf's sections use the fantasy elements to add to the game's themes and deepen their characterisation, but later on it feels kinda forced and they don't have the characters connect to their demons very well. The political side disappears entirely for the last few hours, as Martin correctly points out it would be hard not to with everyone already dead, but what is there still feels rushed and not so good. Vormav has no good dialogue scene, there's very little emotional conflict in the final battles, and by the end it feels like you're just ticking off the 12 stones for the sake of it.

I'll go into more detail with the characters later on but I can't talk about the narrative without mentioning the Ramza/Delita dynamic. It's the central framework for the story as directly stated in the prologue, and their contrasting journeys play really well off each other. My criticism here is that there's just not enough of it, Delita in particular fades from the narrative later on and as said earlier the ending is a mess. Ramza doesn't get the last act centred on him much, only the stuff with his brothers and even that is minor. I very much like that they don't spell out the good guy/bad guy thing and leave Delita complex, but Ramza probably gets to be a little too pure and good. The other characters are for the most part good, though by the end I was a bit disappointed when someone joined my party because it meant they would hold zero plot relevance ever again. There was precisely one moment where Agrias speaks post-recruitment, and none of the others ever do (unless I missed them).

It's a real shame that the game doesn't quite stick the landing in the final hours because everything before that is so good. You could remove the fantasy entirely and it would still be a great mature story of medieval war, it is just a shame they seem to lose sight of the game's themes, particularly of classism, by the end.

Well that's all that comes to mind right now, I'll do a character-by-character discussion a bit later on.

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