I was never big on the final fantasy games. Too drawn out with a boring story. Every FF game seemed that way. I would always find myself losing interest and getting bored before half way through the games.
Man I couldn't agree with you more, but I would expand that to MOST Square's rpgs. I just can't get into em. FFVII was meh, then I met all the crazed fanboys/girls and was not only perplexed at why they though it was THE end all be all rpg, but quickly became annoyed. Besides, Wild Arms, which released the same year was FAR better in every regard IMO. The characters had personality, and while the main plot wasn't groundbreaking(neither was FFVII, in fact FFVII did more harm than good for being such a big influence on rpgs, unless you love characters that have the personality of a brick and emofests.
), the characters were well developed, and interesting, especially the villains. The plot was certainly more involved; Wild Arms is one of those games where you can play it over 1000 times and still notice something you didn't before, be it plot related, character interactions, or otherwise provided you care about the game in the first place.
Actually this can be said about much of the Wild Arms series in general. I've noticed that not only do they tend to develop the good characters well, they often do the same for the villains, if not more so. The series is one of the few that I can relate to a lot of the characters because of how they act, the conflicts they are met with, how they solve their dilemmas they are constantly faced with, and how they ultimately develop as a character are very true to life in so many ways and in so many cases. They aren't your typical, non realistic, clear cut, and trivial black and white type situations that so many jrpgs like to split everything into. The characters are often presented with (again often similar to real life) complex situations where the answer is not clear. They struggle greatly with these situations and often they act in the way a person in a similar stage of development in real life would. They consistently change throughout the course of the game by reevaluating their sense of self, their sets of morals and beliefs, and their perspective on various things, and not always in ways that are totally predictable.
While this isn't true of every major character, nor is it true that every game in the series is completely equal in this aspect, overall the Wild Arms series has more complex character development than a lot of jrpgs out there. The games certainly are a lot deeper than they initially seem. By far the first one alone surpasses FFVII in areas of plot progression, character development, (I seriously can't be the only one who didn't give a crap when Aries, a severely underdeveloped and unrelatable character, was killed by Sephiroth in an overly dramatic fmv sequence...) interesting situations and characters, keeping your interest in general, graphics (and I stand by that 100%), and not dragging out crap that doesn't need to be dragged out. By these aspects alone Wild Arms is decidedly more "brilliant" than FFVII.
Hmmm.... Maybe I should change the topic to "General JRPG discussion."
