Yes. I have very distinct memories of the 12 year-old me thinking Final Fantasy VII was the greatest work of art in human history and looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship with the series. Thirteen year-old me became disillusioned very, very quickly.

Fuck Rinoa.

I never meant to play any final fantasy games after 7. I was still so mad about not bringing Aeris back. They brought back Crono for crying out loud, and he sucked. It wouldn't have been hard to maguffin up some Materia/Lifestream reason to let her return.

I wouldn't have played 8 if I hadn't got it for Christmas.

I feel like 8 was made as a fuck you to regular FF players. It was so bassackwards from every game they made before that. There's no armor. There's no magic points. You keep the same weapon throughout the whole game but if you get some parts if you're lucky you can slightly increase it's damage output, but never by all that much. Summoning is a complete waste of time. You have spells as items that are linked to your stats, and since those stats only stay high if you have a high number of spells, you never end up actually using those spells. The real way to power was to run away from most encounters to keep your levels low, so all the monsters in the world including bosses would also have THEIR levels low, and to play a stupid card game with everyone and their grandmothers. Then you convert those cards into items, and convert those items into spells, and then use those spells to increase your stats.

None of that dawned on me until DISC 4, when I wondered why the Omega Weapon fight was taking me over 2 hours to slog through. I didn't bother reading through the stupid tutorials because I felt like a Final Fantasy game should be pretty straightforward and easy for some veteran of the series, like myself, to figure out.

I hated 8 so hard. I hated all the characters, even the special guest appearances by black Michael Jackson and Robin Williams. I hoped Squall would die out in the cold vastness of space, but I didn't get that chance.

And then I got 9 for my birthday like a year and a half later.

9 was fun. I didn't get why the main character was a lesbian Goku or why the rest of the game had to be so cartoony, but it was at least a fun game to play.

FF8 was hot dogshit that killed the series for everyone I know, but the card game was great.

Even for the people that liked the basic idea of the card game were given the finger by THOSE FUCKING RULES you couldn't control.

You thought 8's card game was shit, I at least started to get a basic idea of what the fuck was going on there. 9, on the other hand, I never even grasped the basics behind that one.

I thought it was like the card game in 8, except the strength values of the card were in HEXADECIMAL, and the whole thing was just for bragging rights.

The shame about the story was that they eventually dropped the Titanic love story aspect, but replaced it with awful mechanics and battle systems, even worse than 8's combat. At no point in conception could anyone have considered the last game's fights to be fun.

In the words of my twin, "I can't believe grown men made this game".

Game designers are neurotic because, in their hearts, they know SteamPoweredKleenex is right, so they have this need to validate their medium by constantly attempting to create **THE MOST EMOTIONAL STORY OF ALL TIME**. Except, as most adults know, emotions are a byproduct of context and rhythm, two things that video game are notoriously unreliable at.

So the engineer in them simply says to increase the quantity of emotion, as if feelings are just one more variable to be tweaked. That's why "romance" in games consists of people constantly flying into each other's arms at sunset, swooning ballroom dances, and soppy melopop. It also explains why every "epic" final showdown is a hallway leading into a giant empty circular room, and why every goddamn character is avenging a dead family.

I totally *will* sleep with anyone who likes Ernst Busch, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Electric Wizard. I can only assume that girls work the same way.

IIRC, one of the developers that ran FF into the ground was a big James Cameron / Titanic fanboy and decided from now on all Final Fantasies were going to be Star Wars AND Titanic ripoffs.

I can't deny that women's opinions regarding Electric Wizard have moved me to make questionable sexing decisions in the past.

Don't forget to mention that they decide to hold this concert in the middle of the place you had to dodge all the lightning bolts in FFX.

I believed but I did not comprehend.

Uncanny Valley all over the place, too.

I thought you were quoting something from Animal Farm for a second.

Upon further reflection: does thinking that a MLP version of Animal Farm would be awesome make me a brony?

Maybe. Or maybe it makes you a Brorwellian?

That IS awesome!

I've been working on an all-MLP adaption of Equus, but an all-MLP version of Animal Farm could be fun, too. It'd go well with my belief that Twilight Sparkle is going to turn into a degenerate tyrant who kills her friends and exploits her "equals"!

All ponies are friends, but some ponies need more friendship than others.

That's the thing that I hated so much about X-2. Everything about the battle system was awesome, the speed of it, the way you could chain attacks, the sheer number of unique classes and how you switched them, etc was all so damn good that I continued to put up with all the stupid dresses and the unbearable-at-times plot for it.

And then they never used that system again for something more serious. God damnit.