Square [Enix] I hate you!

Despite what others say, I think FF7 is not that great (maybe it's just too outdated by today's standard). It's very confusing; I often do not know where to go and waste a lot of time. There are also a lot of places which are simply annoying (such as the mansion in Cloud's memory). At the end, I got 2x Cut (later upgraded into 4x Cut), put it on Yuffie with a weapon that had no Materia growth, then just attack attack attack for 9999 almost every single hit....
My Cloud and Tifa just kept healing her, and I beat the game :D
I think I like Tifa the most in this game. But I really did not know how to utilize her correctly. At the end Yuffie did all of the work for me. V_V

This game is the worst. I had to replay it a few times because I leveled up too much and got the monsters to be too strong. Although the real break for me was to figure out that certain Cards can be converted into powerful spells in early game (Water and Tornado). After learning that everything got way too easy.

It wasn't much later on that I realize Squall has 4 different limit breaks. I only managed to achieve the first one. LoL

Rinoa is cute.

I really, really like FF9. It's very cute, and it has a system which I am familiar with (my first FF game is NDS-FF4), and it's reasonably difficult ... until I figured out that Auto-Regen completely breaks the game.

I really like Garnet as a character (I think her butt is cute >__< plz don't flame me on this...). However I never figured out how to use her correctly. Her summoning spells' damage are way too low (Vivi >>> summon). Also the summoning animation is WAAAYYYY TOOOO LOONNNG. At the end, with great pain, I had to ditch her and bring Steiner on instead.

Upon referring to guides after I beat the game, I realized that the final boss' HP is only 55k - a pityful amount.

This game made me realize all of the years I wasted on games with inferior graphics. It's stunningly beautiful, and the storyline is pretty touching. All the charactersare voiced, too, which is a big plus.

While playing it I finally recognized where this beautiful video clip is from:



Mechanism-wise, the wait system is not bad. It allowsme to think carefully of what to do, although it does diverge from other FF-games quite a bit. I am generally OK with new systems (I even think FF8 is OK if it wasn't for the Card tricks)

I remember what bothered me the most about FF10 was the leveling up part. All of the characters are on this HUGE grid and I can move pretty much anyway I like, with certain restrictions. Since backtracking is not a good idea, for a very long time I was afraid to advance some of my characters - especially Kimahri and Auron. It was not much later that I realize (through repeated failures and frustrations at certain bosses, esp. Sin's arms) that Armor break from Auron is really useful and I needed to level him up. Well, back to grinding...

The real break for me was figuring out the toberries in the Omega Temple Ruin drops teleporting spheres. After finding and killing about 4-5 of them, I got enough teleporting spheres to be confident enough to advance my characters without worrying about screw-ups. After achieving Quick hits and the time spells with Tidas, I teleported him to Auron's side of the grid (with tons of +4 str, Armor Break, and Triple Foul) which made him into my first powerhouse. Then I managed to finally level up Lulu sufficiently to get Double Cast, then teleported her back to get Ultima (a bit more on this later).

For Yuna I was a lot more reserved. She went through all of the White Magic lines (got Holy, too) while side-tracked a little bit to get Steal and Use from Rikku's side of grids. I wasn't sure what to do afterwards and she ended up having 25+ moves left when I beat the game.

I was so disappointed at Rikku, though. I tried really hard to advance her, but her side of the grid got almost nothing. Originally I wanted to aim for Mug, then Ultima, but at the end I realized that her Strength and Magic are too low to use either of those. Sigh... worst yet my Yuna learned Steal and Use, so there was no room for my Rikku-chan in the party T_T

After having built some good characters I think I beat the game fairly easily. Although I could be a bit lucky - Jecht's ultimate shot killed my Yuna and Lulu at full health with Protection on while my Tidas survived with 20 hp - then I used megapheonix and continued on (I used Sentinel for Tidas because I knew Jecht's overdrive is coming and I was not sure how to react). That was the climax of my FF10 experience.

I think this game is not bad. Don't flame me >_<!

It's just.... so different from FF10. In FF10 the game waits for you to make decisions. In FF10-2, due to the combo system, I felt that I was often waiting for the right timing to throw a series of attacks.

Originally I used the trio's default setup (Yuna as Gunner, Rikku as Thief, and Paine as Warrior). Then I realized that it's really hard to synchronize their attacks because they react a bit differently - especially when Yuna's in Trigger happen and I was supposed to spam R1 AND control the other two at the same time. At the end I gave up and made everyone into a Gunner, which allowed me to beat the majority of the game. This made things a lot easier (just spam the X button), however I was still very bothered by the fact that Rikku's Gunner attack animation lags behind Yuna and Paine... although using Trigger Happy was a fun experience.

It was not later on that I discovered the Dark Knight dressphere (took me a LOOOONG while). Then I made everyone into a Dark Knight. Later on I spelt about 3 hours to finally beat Shinra and got the Lady Luck dressphere (go go double exp), leveled everyone to lvl 70+, then converted back to Dark Knight.

Unfortunately, near the end of the game there is a dragon-like creature (had to fight 3 times) which got like 200k HP or something like that. For that I had to train a White Mage from scratch (I chose Paine, for some reason... although I have to say she makes the coolest White Mage >_<) to spam Cura while Yuna and Rikku spam Darkness. Paine would run out of mana eventually and had to be fed Ethers....



After some extremely lengthy battles I finally beat those things and got to the final boss - and guess what, it was SOOOO easy. After 3-4 rounds of darkess, *he* fell and I won. The so-called "Terror of Zanarkand" was so laughable compared to Jecht's Shot.

Come to think of it, this game is the harshest of all. The augment system allows no errors or you are screwed. Also it gave me great pain that many characters will leave your party and gone forever - but leaving powerful augments if you gave him/her some before he/she left. After getting too frustrated with poor augment choices (I gave Counter to Yang the first time), I decided to replay it. I think I was lucky - I gave Celia Counter and Draw Attack, and put him on the backrow. All of a sudden healing is extremely easy as Cecil can just defend while Rydia works her magic.

Rydia is cute at the beginning, by the way. But noooo they hhhaaaaddd to make her ggrrrooooowwwww upp. :'(

The rest were pretty easy. Although for the last dungeon I had to grind quite a bit.... but at the end my Cecil was way too powerful