I said I wasn't going to bother with this guy because he doesn't know what he's talking about, but I just have to take the bait.

(SPOILER)

SaGa revels in making the player feel as though his chances are running out. Final Fantasy makes a young player walk around in circles for six hours to save up enough money to buy a Silver Sword, which will make the Marsh Cave objectively 30 times easier. The Final Fantasy player feels much like a young boy being given an electric guitar; he knows that, with practice, he can one day rock the Budokan. The SaGa player, when the bus ride ends and he's home after work sitting against the balcony door with a cigarette and a bottle of beer, feels like an aging hipster who has, literally, one last chance to impress a crowd with his rock and roll. SaGa revels in making the player feel sick and lonely. In its fourth world, the post-apocalyptic one, non-player characters are set up like stick figures or finger puppets; members of a resistance group, they are raging against Suzaku, a giant malicious phoenix who eventually, over the course of four hours, devours and destoys them all one-by-one, as we learn their names. No doubt Kawazu thought this was funny. It's not funny. It's mean. The ten-year-old me wanted to wag my finger at Kawazu like I was his mother and he'd just pushed a kid down the stairs at school. It was a naughty thing to do, and the game just kept doing it, again and again. Surprises heaped on surprises until the story, which no one really cared about in the first place (we were just gaining levels on the bus, see), had contradicted itself into nothingness. So the tower goes to Heaven, and the being at the top is evil? Okay? Though he's not really the real god -- the other guy is, and he's evil too? The player's so numerically being in control of his characters progress turned out to be a sneering curse as well, like, "Yeah, you thought we'd keep giving you these hit-point upgrades, huh? Well! No! 600 is all you get! Now you're weak, and the monsters are strong! You'd best start running!"


This guy seems to be missing the entire point of the game. He's looking at the game from a Nintendo mentality as oppose to an artistic one. Yes, the game is very morbid. In his article he makes it seem as if there's just random acts of killing off characters to advance the story. There's a reason for that. I really don't want to spoil a game this incredible, but:

(SPOILER)This is a very rare game in which the gameplay actually tells the story. This isn't an RPG where there's a war going on, and the story is told in cutscenes between different dungeons on your quest to take down the evil empire. The gameplay IS the story. You don't know it throughout the game, but God is testing the best fighters on Earth for the qualities he desires in a heavenly companion. It's sort of like a really screwed up reality show. That means that every single character in the game besides the main party is actually a backdrop created by God to fit his exam. World 4 isn't mindless killing, it's God testing how paradisial candidates will deal with fire, wrath, death, and sorrow. Splendid little game, really.

And to counter his last point, yes, Ashura is the boss at the top of the Tower, and yes, he is the "ultimate evil". He questions why the boss at the top of the Tower to Heaven is evil. Then this clueless writer questions the validity of the "other guy" after Ashura, who turns out to be just a bigger evil. I already spoiled one of the best points to the game, so I'm not going to spoil anything else. Let's just say that if he decided to pay attention to the game instead of just grumble about the fact that it isn't Final Fantasy, he'd know he was completely wrong about who the last boss was.