When I say little to no story, I'm talking about length. There's not really a whole lot spoken in these games if we add it all up. Text ate up a lot of those sparse few megabytes on each cartridge. Of course, that has no bearing on how powerful they can make those few little words, which I think is more of what you're getting at.

But once again, we have a misunderstanding. You seem to think I proposed, "moments are what makes people play these games on their initial playthrough." What I meant was that moments are what have made Final Fantasy such an enduring pillar of gaming culture, it's a combination of all of its artistic elements, which is also what makes video games such a unique medium.

I think we have a chicken-or-the-egg debate here, if the moments are only powerful because of the buildup with the story. I would definitely disagree. To go with your example, the build-up to Cecil becoming a Paladin is pretty poor. Why would someone pursue a dark path if he was going to be so conflicted about it? As a matter of fact, why would Cecil choose that route for his King if Baron truly was a good man? And if Cecil was raised by the man, how would he not be able to tell that it was Cagnazzo? Why do any of these things exist other than the fact that the game tells us that it should be so? We accept them because we didn't solely buy the game for a story, we bought it also for its gameplay, for its entertainment.

I'm not one of those peculiar fans who thinks that the stories in FF are bottom of the barrel. I love the stories in all the games and appreciate them for what they are, but especially for the whole that they contribute to. But for the first six games, there isn't much story to examine, and when placed under a microscope, the characters are molecule thin.