Most unreasonably disliked FF title! Now with 33% more fan bias!

[Bolivar]

But I have to honestly say, that when peopel criticize the storylines in newer FF games it relies purely on nitpicking which then gets exaggerated.

I don't want to sound undermining, but I think some of you need to grow up and experience the real world before you call the love story "non-sensical". In real life there's plenty of examples everywhere you turn with people giving their emotions to someone who doesn't care about them. I've seen plenty of times when girls or even guys fall for the person who treats them badly, in the worst cases with significant others who are flat out cruel to them. This happens all the time. I felt VIII's love story was a little more complicated than your traditional, stereotypical, cliches video game love story and it added a level of reality to it.

I didn't say it made no sense for Rinoa to care about Squall. People can be attracted to others for the strangest of reasons (lord knows I've seen far more messed up crap with some of my friends than that), so her liking someone who was rude, indifferent, and never showed any feelings towards her is something I'm more than willing to accept. Squall's sudden shift in character though is something else. It's not like he accepted her affection because it was convenient and continued treating her the way he did. He had a massive shift in his attitude and behaviour towards her for no other reason than the writers decided they should be together. It didn't fit his character, and it never sat well with me.

You could look at the first 6 installments and say that they barely have character development at all, villains who are almost completely irrelevant to the plot, and hardly any plot to begin with.

No character development? Have you even played FFVI. There isn't may not be as much dialogue there as in future titles do to hardware limitations, but the character growth that's there is something that even most modern RPG's don't match.

OR you could play these games for what they are and enjoy them, like my man WK said earlier in this thread. I swear internet forums are dominated, or at least infested, by a group of gamers who went through the newer FFs restlessly searching for reasons to hate them. All of the games in the series are great, especially for their respective times, so please, as gamers, as a community, we need to stop the hate.

At what point did I say I hate FFVIII, or any of the newer FF's for that matter (FFIX happens to be my second favourite in the series, and I feel FFX has some of the best gameplay and character development of any RPG I've ever played as well)? You see people pick apart the things they don't like about a game and assume that means they hate it. On the contrary; I love FFVIII. I just hate people who try to gloss over it's flaws and claim it's flawless. The same goes for any game for that matter. Even with FFVI, which is my favourite title in the series, I'm more than willing to admit that the game was far too easy, and there wasn't as much variation between the characters as I'd like. In the end though, it's still enjoyable to play and the story and characters more than make up for it.

woah, woah, hold up. first off, my bad, i didn't want you to take the whole thing as directed towards you, its just your quote was convenient for summing up people's negative views on the storyline.

Second, it's not that Squall just suddenly changed his whole persona out of nowhere. He obviously had feelings for those around them, it's just he kept them all to himself, as evidenced by the first time he really tells Rinoa how he feels is when she's in a coma, on the bridge to Esthar.

He finally learned to let go and open up, and to me that was a beautiful way to develop his character.

Speaking of character development, yes, I've beaten Final Fantasy VI 3 times now. The characters are shallow and they hardly change at all. They just stop being so self-loathing and bitchy after their respective sidequest. Cyan's really the only one who goes through a major change, learning to finally let go. But in the case of the others who change, Terra, Locke, Celes (not really), they just stop complaining. The only real character change in the entire game is a temporary loss of hope, which is quickly gotten over. Boo-hoo.

Once again, I wasn't suggesting you hate FFVIII or the newer ones, but there's a whole army (although still in the minority) of your peers who played through the newer ones with a predetermined view on them. That's all.