This Game is Overrated

[The Man]

The playable cast of VII are all incredibly driven by a history of abuse at the hands of the Shinra, and most of them have a direct connection to a top ranking employee. Barret lacks the relationship, but happens to be the leader of a major resistance group. Cait Sith is the Shinra. Yuffie and Cid have the weakest reasons, but Cid manages to lampshade the majority of the VI cast when he joins your party ("You guys are going against the Shinra? What the hell, sign me up!").

You're also very wrong about IX. Dagger and Vivi are incredibly invested in the events of the story, whist Zidane, Steiner and Eiko all drive the story with their parts in the setting. Only Amarant and Quina resemble the VI cast in that they join you to fill out the roster and then have some minor character building later that is irrelevant to the story as a whole.

Apart from Terra, Celes, and perhaps Edgar, the characters in VI have no actual ties to the Empire, and about as many suffer any direct injustice from the same, if at all. Shadow, Sabin, Gau, Setzer, Strago, Relm, Mog, Umaro and Gogo each have neither of these elements, which you may recognise as being over 60% of the playable cast. The stories of these characters (those that have them, anyway) relate only to themselves or other ancillary characters and therefore can be transplanted into other settings with literally no loss to context.

Cracker already addressed much of this, but I'll add that Freya in FFIX is also completely ancillary to the story and effectively disappears from the plot once her arc is disappeared. Setzer has suffered under the Empire because his business interests have been suppressed (although this was not noted in Woolsey's original translation), Stragos and Relm have their hometown torched by the Empire, and Shadow is betrayed and left for dead on the Floating Continent. So your assertion that FFVI's cast is any more irrelevant to the plot than FFVII's or FFIX's is in fact completely inaccurate, particularly since three of the characters you cite as being irrelevant are optional characters. The only required character with no serious connection to the Empire or Kefka is Gau.

Feel free to support this statement at some point, by all means.

I did. And I didn't even get into mentioning FFII's gameplay which is by far the worst of that of the numbered entries.

The only other traditional jRPGs are FF and IV - the former which makes you pick four classes to play the entire game with, and the latter which changes your cast as the story demands. VII, IX and X are all irrelevent to the statement you're quoting here.

Perhaps you could be clearer on your definition of "traditional JRPG" then, because alongside Dragon Quest and Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy is pretty much the JRPG series.

The abilities your characters have in VII are entirely dependent on the Materia you have equipped, including the potency of those abilities or when they may activate. In VI, each character has a two sets of abilities, including one list that depends on what Magicite you equipped in the past. There is only a single, non-sharable ability that depends on what Magicite is equipped at that time. The difference is so fundamental that describing it as "a rearrangement" is deceitfully simplistic, if not entirely incorrect.

This would be a much more important distinction if FFVII were not so easy that most players will only need to do this for about three battles of the game. This is admittedly a criticism that applies to nearly all of the post-FFV entries, but the fact is that most players will rarely, if ever, need to switch out their characters' abilities for each other's. Most times I've played FFVII I've only swapped materia out two or three times at most.

You're on the right track about the Sphere Grid, which is 100% a linear progression until it's only 90% a linear progression. X's customisability comes primarily from Weapon and Armour customisation, not the Sphere Grid.

Which I might note is a trait it shares with FFVI; characters' effectiveness is wildly altered by weapons, armour, and relics. Relics are, in fact, a prototype for the materia system.

By "interchangable" I mean that you can choose who goes with you at will. Chalk that up to a misunderstanding.

And... this isn't a trait shared by many other entries in the series? I'm not even sure what your point is with most of this now.

No other game has as many characters, nor a story event that causes them to become isolated from each other without a compulsory reunion. Apart from those character building quests (the developments from which are mostly trumped during the normal story progression of other titles), you're left with an endgame content consisting of 8 Dragons, the Mage Tower, and the Colosseum. The first two of those can be powergamed into challengeless time wasters, leaving only the Colosseum. I'll further this point below.

The entire series can be powergamed into challengeless time wasters if you want, including the "difficult" entries like FFIV. One time time I played FFV I powered through by grinding all my characters to level 99 in the second world and teaching them all the jobs. The game was trivially easy when I did that, but I don't complain that all the challenge is removed by doing that because I'm not a pedant. If you play the game the way it was intended to be played it's no less challenging than most of the later entries in the series.

The dohickeys in this case is the story. I've listed some arguments as to why the story isn't as good as people assert, and you've failed to respond to those points other than to say "other games have this problem too."

I haven't bothered presenting any other assertions because I don't agree that having characters with their own focus is a flaw. When you have an ensemble cast, it is almost inevitable that some of them will have more connection to the plot than others do, and FFVI's cast is much more focused than, say, Chrono Cross' or any of the Suikodens'.

Arguing that the primary focus of a game shouldn't be gameplay is ridiculous. Visuals, music and story by themselves only to a movie or, at best, a visual novel. VI is not a visual novel, it is a jRPG, a genre which includes gameplay. If you have poor gameplay, then you almost certainly fail to have a good game, regardless of how well any other aspect performs. The Colosseum is the only endgame content worth a damn in VI and it more closely resembles the tower defense genre, not a jRPG.

Well it's a good thing that the gameplay of a JRPG isn't exclusively limited to its battle system then, isn't it? It's not like the only thing you ever do in JRPGs is fight enemies. That would get boring quickly. FFVI has some of the best dungeon design and puzzles in the series and the side quests are pretty much up to the calibre of Chrono Trigger's. Furthermore, while the combat system itself is simplistic, it's fairly well balanced until you get Osmose (which admittedly, alongside the Offering and Gem Box, is completely broken), with a well designed difficulty curve, and the game does a mostly excellent job of teaching you to play it, to an extent that several other entries in the series could have learned from. It also has better replay value than many other entries in the series, due to the sheer number of party combinations (literally billions of them for the final dungeon) and the fact that taking different characters to various parts of the game reveals different aspects of the story.

Am I the only one who doesn't think IV had weak gameplay?

It's nice for its time but hasn't aged well. Luckily other aspects have aged much better.