Eureka!

[Skyblade]

And, seriously, someone's gotta invent a decent word recognition thing. That'd be truly magnificent. If you could type in any word and have it read nice and proper.....oh yeah.

I'm guessing you're making that suggestion to allow naming characters in a game with voice acting (if I'm wrong, please say so). Unfortunately, that wouldn't really do any good. The computer doesn't make the voices, the voice actors do. Every single voice acted line in the game would have to be rerecorded over and over for every possible word. That is a lot of storage space that is essentially wasted. Even having the computer do it wouldn't help much, because while we could recognize and synthesize speech for hundreds of words fairly easily, getting them in something other than a standard monotone would be insanely difficult. When a character is ticked off at your main character, they say your name in a very different way then if they're calling for help. The amount of variation that would lead to for thousands of word possibilities makes it totally unfeasible. For a long time, if we have games with voice acting, we'll be stuck with either unnamed characters (ie: Tidus), or ones with set names.

Anyway, I disagree with the "there is no definite bad guy/good guy" thing. Vayne may not have been trying to literally destroy the world, and may have been facing off against the Occuria, who are none to righteous themselves, but that doesn't make him any less of a psychotic villain. And just because she's leading a war doesn't make Ashe any less of a hero.

The plot was ok. A bit politics heavy, but since the majority of those politics were "ooh, let's see how we can assassinate our enemies now" rather than "let's solve this diplomatically and have a nice sing-song", I don't mind nearly as much as I do most other stories with heavy politics.

The biggest problem in my mind was the gameplay. I never had a problem with turn-based combat, and I still don't. I also don't have a problem with the basics of the gambit system and preset enemies. But when the system has to be thrown out the window in order to make your bosses "hard", I think there is something seriously wrong with it. I'll look forward to seeing if they fix the problems with the system in future FFs, but my hopes aren't high.