Review!

Story: Yet another great story from Square. This one takes a little bit of a different twist than all the others plotwise, well near the end you will see what I am saying. The only part of the story I didn't like that much was I was confused on the crystals. They had people trying to steal the crystals all throughout and nobody seemed to ever bring it up, till the end of course, but I was still a little confused. Very good story though, the crystals were just a part of it.

Gameplay: Nice gameplay, random battles do get kind of annoying after awhile but I just run away from them and then level up later. The magic learning system is well done, you get magic only by equipping equipment that you can learn it from, and then you must gain enough AP to learn it. I had to keep putting on cruddy armor for leveling up to do this right. Gameplay is much better than VIII but Materia still rules.

Sound: It lakcs a bit in sound. The battle tune is a little here and there, it changes from an FF kind of battle theme and then goes into happy sunny mode for a few seconds and then back. Still the tune beginning was nice. The music was very good compared to any other games out there but after Final Fantasy VII er expect alot from Square. Better than VIII but VII's tunes were downright amazing. I hope I can relive those great tunes like those soon.

Graphics: Pretty great! Some of the sprites were a little odd looking but they were still good. FMV's were amazing and backgrounds were downright out of this world. There's also a mind-blowing FMV near the end were Square tried something new. Putting a sprite in all-out action FMV. It looked funny for awhile but still it looked really cool.

Replay Value: It has alot of sidequests but not as much as VII. You might play this over again sometime to relive the story (If you can live through random encounters again) but only hardcore RPG fans will be able to really finish all these sidequests. It's better than VIII but a close-call for VII in this.

Overall Thought: Great effort from Square, they seemed to fix up alot we didn't like from VIII but they are starting to lose what they had from VII. I think Square should stop thinking a great gaming experience and start thinking a great cinematic experience. Make scenes like a movie, like Vagrant Story. The scenes in that amazed me. Still, this is a very good game from Square and I highly recommend you try it. I give it 9 out of 10 moogles.