@VeloZer0 - There are a few good ones (Shin-Ra HQ/The Desert Palace) but I honestly don't feel the dungeons post-2D are as memorable beyond visuals because they are largely visual and have no real gameplay purpose. At least in FFIII and IV I faced dungeons that dramatically changed how I set up my party. I never did that in VII-XIII so the dungeons are less memorable to me cause it left little impact. I couldn't even name most of the dungeons in the 3D entries whereas I could name most of them in the 2D ones. Though its not like the 2D entries are all gold either, FFII is on par with FFX and XIII in terms of really bad dungeon design, and FFI's dungeons are more memorable for their unforgiving encounters than the actual design. I like gameplay in my dungeons and I feel dungeons should be places to challenge the gamer not just add color to the world, this goes back to my statement that the FF series has hurt itself by focusing on story and narrative to the detriment of everything else in the game.
This largely has to do with narrative and story design but there are some gameplay examples as well. From a story standpoint, I feel its better to be a likable character who lacks depth due to limitations of the hardware and staff like say FFIV's cast, than to be a game that easily has the tech and a staff that should have the experience to pull through, utterly falter at making a likable cast of characters, like I'll say FFVIII to be safe. The ability to create and animate grandiose plots due to not having the hardware limitations of early games also opened up the window for plotholes, terrible characterization, and awful writing. The early games have their writing problems and some are awful but we can always blame the tech not being there. Its easy to forgive FFII on the NES for having a paper thin cast and plot, its harder to do so with FFXIII which is a multimillion dollar budget game with hundreds of staffs and two decades of RPG making experience behind it for faltering.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShinGundam
In gameplay design, I feel FFIV has a very sound and balanced system, it may lack the pizazz and interest of the heavy customization games that came after but it also doesn't suffer from game balance problems or terrible interface issues. Sometimes a simple design is better than an ambitious but complicated design. I honestly can't completely fault FFIV on its terms of what it was designed to do, I can only fault it by placing unrealistic comparisons to modern gaming taste. Whereas I can fault more modern entries (VI-XIV) because they tried designs that didn't work, had balance issues, or just really lousy choices, but with them I can easily cite any modern game or even past games as examples of how to do it, its comparisons are at least against its peers.
