Summary
Personally my favourite RPG of all time
The Good
- excellent soundtrack by the one and only Nobuo Uematsu. The music adds plenty of atmosphere and emotion to the game. Terra's theme is truly inspirational (heard in the intro and on the world map of the world of balance and some other places throughout the game).
- brilliant plot with many twist (one brilliant twist in particular, but can't give spoilers so you will just have to find out for yourself).
- characters all have unique abilities. All of them have personality helping the player to become more engaged into the story. There are characters you can care for like Terra and characters you hate such as the epic villain, Kefka.
- Many, many side-quests to uncover character backgrounds and extra items, etc to go with the 20 - 70 hours of fun you can get playing through the game depending on the amount of secrets, level building, etc you can be bothered with
- a generally all round classic RPG with great story, great characters, great music, and has to go down as one of the best games of all time.
The Bad
However the game isn't faultless:
- too many random encounters
- the story pretty much fades away after the world of balance (near the end of the game anyway though, which is pretty much all side-quests, so not that bad)
- leveling up system automatically levels up characters not in your party, and your characters gain more attributes when they have espers equipped making those levels gained without espers equipped semi-useless.
- maybe too many characters (i think about 14 or so including secret characters). Some of the characters you get too late on and don't develop much, e.g mog.
The Bottom Line
Snes version is better that playstation. The playstation one has extras such as fmv's but there are annoying loading times. A MUST play for all Japanese RPG and final fantasy fans. However some people find it hard to play 2-d RPGs in this day and age of 3-d brilliant graphics but they will only miss out on one of the best games in existence, some people even believe that all the newer final fantasy's have threw away all the good plots in exchange for graphics (except maybe FF7, of course). If you are like that then you should try Final Fantasy 7 - also a classic for playstation.
