The best JRPG ever. It's something spawned out of wish fulfillment that feels like we honestly shouldn't have it in our hands. it's a game that can only exist as a culmination of everything before it, the swan song of the JRPG Golden Age of the 1990s and early 00s. A work created out of pure passion by a struggling company that had fallen behind the times and was developing for a dying platform. Even with the first 4 chapters of the game being slow-paced and full of retreading environments from FC, it is still the best JRPG, and one of the best video games ever made. Everything introduced in FC is resolved in SC in the most impactful, poignant way possible. It's a work of pure passion, created by RPG fanatics themselves and no doubt something that would spawn new ones, even in the west where it is being praised en masse decades after its original release. Game of the year all years.