Ever since last Eid, I've been trying to complete this game. Slowly chipping away at this game, but now It's finally complete. The premise has always stuck out to me. Though, this game starts to show its flaws the further you go. It's a game designed for bus rides to school, for the long car rides to grandma house, not for the long binge sessions I'm usually accustomed to.

After fighting the grueling fight against Articuno, the cracks started to show. With the party you randomly amassed, dungeoneering starts to feel like a clusterfuck. Especially with the map covering the screen. Though, it might just not be for me

This certainly feels like when Final Fantasy became "Final Fantasy". The series aesthetic is crafted throughout your journey that punctuate a rather mature story for the usual FF affair (at least so far from what I've played and know from osmosis). I became a kid again playing this game, just imagining this game remade with that FF7R flair, all the batshit crazy set pieces that could be crafted. It elevated my experience by getting past my disdain for pixels.

I enjoyed the keyword system, I enjoyed the skill based leveling system. It was more so just FF1, but with most of my gripes ironed out. While it still isn't like...the greatest thing in the world, it was definitely a lot more enjoyable than the first game.

As a child this was the coolest thing known to man even as a Non FF player at the time. Though, in reality, it's a JRPG disguised as an arena fighter. A lot of the RPG elements fight against the Fighter part of the game. I'll discuss more on BOTR, but my biggest gripe with this game is that characters feel concrete. They give you slots to add HP attacks and different bravery attacks, but...you don't get that many attacks to really customize your favorite characters. So a lot of the time you spent spamming the same two moves to actually do damage even in the postgame sections.