Posted February 03, 2022
These are probably two of the most beloved games, but I just could not get into either of them.
Final Fantasy 7 -- The characters were not all that interesting, and Cloud has less personality a cardboard cutout. Other games have done the silent protagonist thing a lot better. The sprites for Chrono in Chrono Trigger include him laughing, for example. In Persona 3 and Persona 4, intermissions will grind to a half waiting for the player to select a dialogue choice. Most of these choices only affect how the other characters respond to you, but it gives the main character a semblance of having some personality. There's also Final Fantasy 6, which had a huge cast of playable characters, yet the game managed to give them all time for you to know who they are.
To The Moon -- It's not a game at all. I wouldn't even call it a visual novel. You have a bunch of RPG-style intermissions of the sort that you might encounter in Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4, or Final Fantasy 6 and virtually nothing that feels like gameplay. Oh there's that weird sphere thing between intermission sequences, but it really feels like it was tossed in after the fact so that the developers would have any excuse to call this a game. It really isn't.
Final Fantasy 7 -- The characters were not all that interesting, and Cloud has less personality a cardboard cutout. Other games have done the silent protagonist thing a lot better. The sprites for Chrono in Chrono Trigger include him laughing, for example. In Persona 3 and Persona 4, intermissions will grind to a half waiting for the player to select a dialogue choice. Most of these choices only affect how the other characters respond to you, but it gives the main character a semblance of having some personality. There's also Final Fantasy 6, which had a huge cast of playable characters, yet the game managed to give them all time for you to know who they are.
To The Moon -- It's not a game at all. I wouldn't even call it a visual novel. You have a bunch of RPG-style intermissions of the sort that you might encounter in Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4, or Final Fantasy 6 and virtually nothing that feels like gameplay. Oh there's that weird sphere thing between intermission sequences, but it really feels like it was tossed in after the fact so that the developers would have any excuse to call this a game. It really isn't.