I think I *might* have had the game hang on me in the Cave of Shadows, but I don't remember for sure.

There are, however, a few bugs that can result in you going out-of-bounds on the world map; if this happens, you might want to go back in-bounds (and make sure you're on a vehicle that's appropriate for the terrain) before you save. (Note that "on foot" counts as a vehicle for this purpose, with appropriate terrain being terrain that you can normally walk on.) (It is possible to sequence break a little with this glitch, but I don't recommend doing that unless you know what you're doing.)

Note that the PSP version is the least buggy 3D version of the game, particularly when it comes to these sort of glitches.

Aw nuts, you know, I specifically thought to call it "VI" and not "III" when I decided to write the comment. You are right, it was VI.

The way I see it, sales were not really the issue, but from an artistic standpoint, the series was getting nowhere. Mere mechanics are not enough to bring your productions to the next level.

All over! Many of them are better than others in different aspects (story, combat, mechanics, development, etc...). My rough rating, from best to worst:

Lost Odyssey
10 [non-"International" is better]
4 [I prefer SNES original, but the GB remake has its pros]
5/6 [my ordering varies by mood and weather, so equal. Want story, characters, and music? 6. Want mechanics? 5.]
10-2 [international is better]
World of-
9
12 [remaster/international is a must, original is way lower; great story, bad mechanics makes me place this at the midpoint]
3 [remake preferable]
8 [8/3 are like 5/6 above and could reorder any moment]
7 [remake is grossly inferior]
1 [original original with slot-based rather than MP-based magic is preferred by me]
----[the actively dislike below this line line]----
13 [never bothered with -2 or -3 other than an almost immediate turn off near the start of -2 that convinced me "done"]
2

Not included because they're completely different: Tactics; Tactics Advanced.
I never bothered playing any of the spinoffs, etc (Revenant Wings, etc). I also think they're all other genres.
Didn't include Mystic Quest because it never appealed to me and I really don't remember it.

13 is a great case study in how to mismanage a project so badly it makes a worse product than cancelling it would have been.

Basically they had a bunch of disparate teams all set "work on things on your own!" and then later on tried to cobble it together into a single product. Nothing makes sense. It's a linear corridor game (with a "secret chest" behind you at the start of every screee) with no meaningful backtracking, a COMPLETELY nonsense story, and some of the worst mechanics the series ever saw. The only thing it has going for it is character design.

Thinking Kingdom hearts?

I'd assume no.

When you don't have any real choices, and the first 40 hours is more or less a long tutorial with no branching side quests or being able to do anything of interest, it just gets boring.

Noah Antwiler in his review called the game a big long hallway. You were forced to go a specific route with specific growth with specific abilities, with specific characters, and any 'branching paths' quickly were dead ends with chests.

It was also confusing and all the lore tucked away as extra study material like doing homework.

If it wasn't just... so... boring... it would have fared better.

If anything it's as bad as FF-13, apparently they took the piss saying Non-Japanese players were idiots and 'too stupid to understand JRPG's', balanced so you couldn't lose...

Sadly enough, had I not seen the reviews, I would've probably assumed this game to be one of the best FF games out there. I remember many years back how I was mesmerized just by seeing the promotional videos of FFXIII. If anything, its visuals are the only things going for the game.

I find it hard to get into JRPGs nowadays, but when I played a lot of them in my teens I'd say 8 and 9 were my faves. 8 for its cool story and music, and 9 for its cool world and design.

I also played some of XII on a friend's PS2 and remember really liking the open world and more tactical nature of it, but I haven't gotten around to the PC remaster yet.

Maybe. A bigger issue is inconsistency with a number of things in the story that forces you down 'the hallway'. No doubt the visuals were awesome.

The combat paradigm system was very different as well, a sudden change and jump from single-turn combat and programmable FF-12 style combat. The combat involved basically just giving roles to characters and letting them go at it, from a front-lines approach to more a commander approach watching as they act and switching modes accordingly. It felt like cheating and you weren't doing much, until you get used to it then it flows rather well. The only downside is you can't really select individual actions as they take too long to do, so letting it auto-complete and just switching between settings was more efficient.

Actually i found if you let the character do 2 full cycles of attacks and then switching modes, their next mode would immediately kick off rather than having to charge. So it was a way to combat a little faster.

I take issue with the "balanced so you couldn't lose". I've lost significantly more times on my first Final Fantasy Mystic Quest playthrough than on my play of Final Fantasy 7 (where I got to the start of the 3rd disk). FFMQ has plenty of enemies, particularly later on, with instant death or petrification attacks, and when you have only two characters, it's quite possible for things to go badly. Furthermore, the very first battle is balanced in such a way that, if you get some bad luck (missing too much or the enemy scores a lucky critical), you will lose.

FFMQ is actually a fun game to watch speedruns of, particularly race or marathon style runs (that is, no reset runs), because of how things can go wrong, not to mention that the length of one particular dungeon is RNG dependent.

I was more referring that you'll get a companion who is like 10 levels higher than you, and even if you fall they can probably finish the fight on their own. But with bad luck or never healing would certainly make failing more likely.

But if your companion falls, especially if it happens during a boss fight?

(This is especially an issue later in the game if you didn't pick up the Life spell, and it happens that there's a glitch that speedrunners use that allows skipping the entire world that the Life spell is found in, so getting it does not work out from a time perspective. Don't forget that many late game enemies, including the second to last boss, have instant death attacks that neither you nor your companion will be immune to.)

Also, "never healing" is necessarily the case during the first battle, as you have no way to heal (or do anything other than attack, for that matter) during that fight.

The early fights in FF4 and FF5 can be easily done without any healing, and FF6 gives you strong free healing for the opening sequence of the game thanks to Magitek armor. The first battle in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest isn't like that. (It's also one of the rare situations where you have to fight without a companion; the only other instance I can think of is the start of the final world.)

For me - it's FF6, 7, and 9 from the OG Playstation.

If you have a choice, I would stay away from the PlayStation version of FF6:
* There's load times that weren't in the SNES version. Also, saving and loading saves is much slower.
* Some of the music tracks sound awful in the PSX version.

The SNES version doesn't have these issues, and the PSX version doesn't really add anything; they didn't even fix things like the evade bug.

(Note that this same discussion applies to FF5, with the addition of a bug that sometimes triggers when you try to save on PS2 or later hardware, and the fact that the translation is *awful*. By awful, I mean that fan translators could easily do (and did, in fact) a much better job. FF5 PSX has monstrosities like the Y Burn, Mindflare (Final Fantasy Tactics fans may recognize this one), and I believe even one hint from a townsperson was mistranslated in a way that makes the advice incorrect. Then again, when FF5 PSX was released, FF5 had no official non-Japanese release, so the only other way to play the game in English was via fan translation.)

V, VII and XII are my personal favorites. X is good too. My friends loved VI, but I found it lacking somehow. VIII is just straight up shit.