You have to understand, I first played this game when I was 11 years old and it was one of the most amazing and emotional things I'd gotten involved with at that age. Sure, I read books all the time, but video games added the element of interactivity and that made me feel more involved in the story. I cried, I cheered, I fell in love with the characters. I scribbled quotes from the game all over my notebooks and dreamed about being part of the cast of characters.
That said, this game is from the SNES days, and if you've played RPGs from that era, you may understand that the standards for writing and translation were significantly lower than they are today. Dialogue is frequently awkward and badly-written, and the scenes that once moved me to tears are (seen from more mature and experienced eyes) very brief, often too brief to really have the necessary emotional impact. It's like someone had a really good idea that was lost in translation, but as much as I like to make fun of the translator, I suspect that the writing in the original Japanese wasn't much more sophisticated. That, I think, is where this game really suffers. If you are playing it for the first time today, comparing it to modern games, please bear in mind that its writing was excellent for the time but has not aged well. Everyone fixates on how graphics have changed over time, but I think that the level of writing is a more significant and noticeable difference and I think that if people want to judge a game by fair standards, they have to take that into consideration as well.
The music, as many people have said, is one of the strongest points in the game. There's really not much else to say except that it's really good and adds necessary emotional oomph to key scenes. The graphics were great for the time, and I think they're still pretty solid for what they are. The gameplay is ... well, it's Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy gameplay is always solid and never amazing, but at least there's nothing horrid about it like the FF8 Draw system. If you've played any Final Fantasy game, you have some idea of what to expect.
I kind of wish that they could remake this game and help it live up to its potential. The characters (many of them) have the start of excellent development, enough that some of them remain my favorite characters of all time, but the writing does not do them any favors. If the writing could be brought up to modern standards, I think there's enough of the human soul in this game to forgive its save-the-world storyline.
That said, this game is from the SNES days, and if you've played RPGs from that era, you may understand that the standards for writing and translation were significantly lower than they are today. Dialogue is frequently awkward and badly-written, and the scenes that once moved me to tears are (seen from more mature and experienced eyes) very brief, often too brief to really have the necessary emotional impact. It's like someone had a really good idea that was lost in translation, but as much as I like to make fun of the translator, I suspect that the writing in the original Japanese wasn't much more sophisticated. That, I think, is where this game really suffers. If you are playing it for the first time today, comparing it to modern games, please bear in mind that its writing was excellent for the time but has not aged well. Everyone fixates on how graphics have changed over time, but I think that the level of writing is a more significant and noticeable difference and I think that if people want to judge a game by fair standards, they have to take that into consideration as well.
The music, as many people have said, is one of the strongest points in the game. There's really not much else to say except that it's really good and adds necessary emotional oomph to key scenes. The graphics were great for the time, and I think they're still pretty solid for what they are. The gameplay is ... well, it's Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy gameplay is always solid and never amazing, but at least there's nothing horrid about it like the FF8 Draw system. If you've played any Final Fantasy game, you have some idea of what to expect.
I kind of wish that they could remake this game and help it live up to its potential. The characters (many of them) have the start of excellent development, enough that some of them remain my favorite characters of all time, but the writing does not do them any favors. If the writing could be brought up to modern standards, I think there's enough of the human soul in this game to forgive its save-the-world storyline.