Quote Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno View Post
In Shin Megami Tensei III, you watch the world end in the beginning of the game, demons overtake the world and bid in a struggle to fight to see who will remake the world. You are given three main paths to choose from. Now unlike most games where your choices are simply be a saint or be an evil creep, you instead face three different philosophy's that are neither good or evil. Shijima believes in absolute order, individuality is wiped out in order to create a society that is like a clockwork machine. There will be no suffering or sadness, but neither will there be happiness or passion. Yosuga believes in survival of the fittest to an extreme, the weak should be killed or enslaved to benefit the strong. Though it has its cruelty it also allows the most freedom for its people. Musubi is detachment and introspection, it believes all people should be separte from each other and exist in our own world, there, we will be able to psycho-analyze ourselfs and reach new depths of introspection in exchange for contact with others, we lose out on pain that others cause but we also lose the joy and insight that others bring. How's that for mature philosophy, its not often games make you think about choices that hold no real "good" or "evil" connotations to them.
Sorry, but, while I haven't played the game, I have to say that your assessment that there is no good or evil is a bit off, from how you presented the philosophies. Two of them talk about a world in which love and joy have been done away with, either through an elimination of free will, or through an introspection so deep that it cuts off all interactions with other people, including family and friends. And the third philosophy includes mass murder and slavery. So, yeah, there is good in the game in that you are "saving the world", I suppose, but the three choices you presented are basically evil, evil, and more evil.

The final fantasy stories while they are fun to play they are very childish at the same time. Let's look at ff7 (which many people consider to have one of the best stories if not the best story within the entire series).

Try to sit down and think about what took place within ff7. When you think about it the only thing that happened was that Cloud met up with a group of rebels. The rebels tried to save the city by blowing up the reactor. Then the rebels find out about a person named Sephiroth and virtually spend the rest of the game finding things out about Sephiroth. That's it. That's all that really happens story wise. What made ff7 so interesting was the things you were able to find out about the main characters along the way. But plot wise the game was rather mediocre.
Well, "many people" consider FF7 to be one of the best games if not the best game in the series, the opinons on the story have been a little more flexible. There have been plenty of people who thought the story could have been improved upon, but who still loved the game due to gameplay, character development, music, graphic style, etectera.

Of course, I could say that Lord of the Rings is about a guy finding out that his uncle's ring is the key to destroying the world, and that they spend the entire rest of the story trying to destroy it and getting in trouble along the way, since, y'know, that's what pretty much the entire plot is about.

Not that FF7 is anywhere near the literary quality of LotR, but your little synopsis pretty much ignored 90% of the game's story. Yes, they found out about Sephiroth, but that was nowhere near "all" they did.