Final Fantasy X ruled man, awesome game! It always irks me when people call FF games "interactive movies" when they have quite a bit of depth if you bother to actually play them. Somebody made an actual DVD of all the movies and cinematics in FFX and it was about 3-4 hours long, that's out of a 40+ hour game, so that's only 10% of the time you're watching something intstead of playing it.
Snatcher was a great game too, I don't see where the level of interactivety and amount of cinematics has any relation to how fun a game is. Hell, simple point & click games like Monkey Island are some of the best games I've ever played.
I also loved cinematic games(like Snatcher).
My point was that emphasis has been put more so on aesthetics over gameplay as years go by.
Final Fantasy is the best example, because if you remove the cinemas from the few games that have any, you can see than overall depth of gameplay has been going down a slippery slope from FFVII onward(although IX seemed better than XIII), where as leading up to FFVI, it was just the opposite.
And this is what has setup gaming in a very dangerous predicament leading up to the next generation. Casual gamers now rule, they're the market. And they judge games by budget just like movies. And now only big time developers are going to be able to afford to develop games that take advantage of the 3D power of new consoles.
What this should mean, is that we finally get awesome 2D games again, but somehow I don't think thats going to be the case.
I just hope that publishers start to look at ways of making money in general, not just risky smash hits. Because just as Nintendo can afford to make its own games for its own system, any publisher can make good money putting out a good 2D game, like recent Castlevanias, because it'll cost way less of a fraction to develop than it will proportionately earn in sales.
