The Good:
- Story and characters good
- amazing music
- amazing graphics for its time
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The Bad:
- This game has a unique battle system. You can draw magic from enemies and use it. Magic is limited, and you can assign magic to your player. There's one tutorial at the very beginning that explains this. You can't revisit this tutorial. Naturally, I didn't remember exactly how it went, so there I was confused as ****. I eventually picked up on it, but the real problem was having to draw magic from monsters. If you need a certain spell, you need to farm it off monsters. This was tedious. There's also no indication of what magic can be drawn where.
- I missed a lot of GFs because the game gave no indication that you're supposed to draw them from certain enemies. LACK of information.
- ATB does not work well with the drawing function, because sometimes you want to see if there's anything worthwhile to draw. But that takes up time, meaning the opponent can attack you sooner. This discourages drawing, especially with bosses, whom you want to select your commands quickly to deal damage more quickly.
- The menus can block the target selection for your attack and spells. This was a visual annoyance.
- Finding the location of your next objective can be really ambiguous at times (e.g. Esthar ship). I found myself running across the world map just looking for where to go at times. No clues or anything after you missed the last dialogue box of the conversation with the person telling you where to go next.
- Not being able to go over cliffs with Balamb garden was extremely annoying. I understand it's part of the progression design, but it was none the less annoying to just circle islands just to find that dinky shore line where I can hover over. Also you couldn't fast travel with it. Getting the Ragnarok was a blessing, but that is late into the game.
- reorganizing the magic in the menu was extremely unintuitive. You have two separate windows to place the magic, when it would have been much simpler to use one window. It was unnecessarily difficult.
- Having to switch Junctions every time was tedious. The game could have just transfered the junction over automatically every time your party changed.
- GF cutscenes could not be skipped. They are lengthy and break the pace of the game. GFs are powerful and I used them often, making the battles very slow and annoying.
- It can be difficult to tell where you can go in some of the pre-rendered backgrounds. I found myself walking into walls often just to see if it was another entrance.
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Note:
- To be fair, this game came out 20 years ago, so perhaps the negative points I've stated weren't glaring issues at all back then, since standards weren't nearly as high as they are today. This review is from the perspective of someone who is experiencing it in the present.