Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
How anyone can objectively say that any location from VII onwards is worse than a random lengthy mine/cave dungeon in FFI through FFVI is beyond me. At least in 3D worlds the mines/caves can look different. Seriously.

I can understand abnormally high encounter rates, but if you're going to go down that road then I'll point to some rooms in early FF dungeons which had encounters for every few steps you took. Basically you had to avoid those rooms and not explore them unless you wanted to level up using them or something. Either way, those early FF dungeons were basically crap in every way I could imagine. I can't really blame SE for that, games of that era were restricted by game engines and graphical capabilities. But that doesn't mean that suddenly a beautiful landscape in one of the more modern games is suddenly worse.

It sounds to me like people are associating these locations with one-off plot devices or cutscenes rather than the locations themselves.
I can get behind the FFVII dungeons are blah cause only a handful of them really impressed me because as I've mentioned (I'm a broken record now) that the adment of 3D simply made dungeons more about how they look and lost a lot of their gameplay appeal, not the the first six games don't have troutty dungeon design at least somehwere but I do agree that barring the ShinRa-HQ and the Temple of the Ancients, I never felt like any of the other dungeons had lasting gameplay appeal. Even the Crater is a pretty subpar final dungeon in comparison to the four games before it.

As for why people trout on a dungeon, I feel its perfectly legitimate to nail it for story reasons, especially if its because the game either can't justify the place for story reasons of in the case of my Mt. Gagazet rant, I felt the story interfered with enjoying the location. Its a package a deal if you ask me.