However, I absolutely will agree with you that the story lacks the epic scope of other FF games until later on in the story. Not lacking in complexity, but lacking in scope, though this does change later in the game.
I think this is largely part of it. There was the vision of Ragnarok at the beginning of the game, but except for that we haven't had the same sense of "world in peril" that most of the other FF games set up a lot earlier in the story. I'm glad to hear that it becomes more integral later.
I played FF4 on DS last year, and though I liked it quite a bit, the way characters were bounced in and out of the story made me crazy. It kept me from connecting with them, because I never knew when one was going to disappear, or pull a personality whiplash, or abruptly change character classes and have to start again from zero... The only other SNES-era game I've played is FF5, on the PS port, and I fully accept that this might color my views; FF7 is my least favorite of the main titles, but sometimes I wonder if I would have liked it better if I hadn't played it for the first time in 2004, after playing all the other PS generation games as well as X and X-2. (FF6 is high on my list to play someday, although I haven't decided whether to wait for the DS port or if I should be impatient and pick up the GBA version used.)
I would be interested to read your rant about the PS2 era, if you were ever inspired to write a post about it. It could make for an interesting discussion topic, anyway. But maybe after more people have finished FFXIII so we all have the same basis for comparison....
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I think this is largely part of it. There was the vision of Ragnarok at the beginning of the game, but except for that we haven't had the same sense of "world in peril" that most of the other FF games set up a lot earlier in the story. I'm glad to hear that it becomes more integral later.
I played FF4 on DS last year, and though I liked it quite a bit, the way characters were bounced in and out of the story made me crazy. It kept me from connecting with them, because I never knew when one was going to disappear, or pull a personality whiplash, or abruptly change character classes and have to start again from zero... The only other SNES-era game I've played is FF5, on the PS port, and I fully accept that this might color my views; FF7 is my least favorite of the main titles, but sometimes I wonder if I would have liked it better if I hadn't played it for the first time in 2004, after playing all the other PS generation games as well as X and X-2. (FF6 is high on my list to play someday, although I haven't decided whether to wait for the DS port or if I should be impatient and pick up the GBA version used.)
I would be interested to read your rant about the PS2 era, if you were ever inspired to write a post about it. It could make for an interesting discussion topic, anyway. But maybe after more people have finished FFXIII so we all have the same basis for comparison....