I played the game and these are my thoughts.
Story is fantastic… For like 7 characters, the other ones are not that relevant.
Music 10 out of 10.
Graphics amazing, yeah, play your games with scalines or CRT effects if you’re using emulators.
And then the gameplay is like 3.5 out of 10, for many many reasons.
First, the game isn’t hard but they force you to overgrind. Since the game introduces so many characters and it wants to give all of them espers (what gives most of them magic) you have to grind each of the 14 characters. You get some of them very late and that’s something…
Well after that you’ll realize that most of the magic is useless, it doesn’t affect the bosses and the normal enemies die faster with normal attacks or the elemental magic.
The combat system is boring and frustrating, and that’s surprising considering that the game is easy. Some fights can last up to 1.5 minutes, and that doesn’t look like much, but then you find the worst thing about the game.
The random encounter enemy rate is ridiculously high, like mercilessly high, sometimes after ending a battle you will encounter an enemy after TWO steps.
You cannot disable the random enemy encounter till the end of the game when you obtain molulus charm.
And therefore if you want to explore throughout the game, it’s gonna be hell.
I wanted to play other final fantasy games, after finishing this one i decided to play star ocean for the snes and breath of fire, and God that’s an improvement.
And FF VII, VIII and IX are no different in that aspect, yet they’re all called masterpieces specially VII. All three of them aged much, much worse than VI too.