This makes me sad too.

First of all, the story of this game is wonderful for several reasons. One, because they actually found a way to make the plot of a sequel good, which is hard to do. Second, because the story can go many different ways, which is a big change for FF games, and I like it. I will admit that it does take a while for the story to pick up, but once you get to Chapter 3 it's awesome. The characters are very good in this game, especially Paine. The humor of this game made almost all of these characters very memorable, espeically Brother. The dress sphere system is awesome. They took the cool concept of jobs, made it cooler, and then made it so that you can change dress spheres mid-battle, similar to how you could change weapons and characters mid-battle in FFX. Brilliant.

The new ATB system is chaos. And I love it. It's the best one they've ever done, hands down.

How aweful are the mini-games in this game? About as aweful as they've ever been. I liked some of them, I didn't like others, I wanted to through my PS2 out the window while playing others. No different than any other FF.

This game is genious for one simple reason. They made a good sequel, despite the bad hype that the game had before it was even released. A lot of sequels in the world don't live up to the first. This one so does. This is one of the best FFs I've ever played.

And please leave the knocking of FFVIII to the FFVIII thread.