Obviously, it turned you into a filthy communist, krissy.

Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar
This article is multiple pages about how great the opening is, and one paragraph on how the rest of the game is bad, with no evidence to back it up other than your insistence that it must be so. You don't deny that the flashback was a creepy small-town horror story, Cosmo Canyon an emotional story of forgiveness, or that the observatory tapes revealed a haunting tragedy of Professor Gast and Ifalna.

You also overlook how Sephiroth embodies and reinforces the socio-economic themes of the opening as their darkest manifestation - when the monsters created in the name of progress and reason come back to haunt them.
I agree with some of your specific criticisms, but I disagree with the conclusions you draw from them. I agree that kotora could have stood to lengthen the piece a bit and give more specific examples from the game. I also agree that he was much too broad in is assertion that there is "no artistic merit" in the rest of the game, which is something I pointed out before the piece was published. Art is a very broad term, and justifiably encompasses the rest of the game for a variety of reasons. However, I do agree with kotora's underlying focus that most of the rest of the game is substantially more lacking in allegorical or symbolic merit, and disagree with you that Sephiroth "reinforces and embodies" the socio-economic themes of Midgar. Sephiroth had the potential for much more, but turned into your standard destroy-the-world JRPG villain.

As for your other examples (Cosmo Canyon, etc.), while I agree that they are art and have artistic merit, they lack the allegorical merit that I believe was kotora's real focus. The only other part of the game that really continued the Midgar themes was Corel, which probably did deserve mentioning.