A game in which you save the world using an
"underwater rugby" ball can't be taken seriously,
the_randomizer.
And a
poorly programmed one at that.
Of all the Final Fantasy mini-games that I have played, it is without hyperbole the worst that I've had to endure. Yes, worse than Triple Triad, even. The 15-piece puzzle in the first
Final Fantasy only really gets a pass because it was done within the well-known limitations of the Famicom/NES hardware, and at a time when the company was literally betting the farm on it.
The Sphere grid might have been thought of as an ingenious way to really change things up regarding developing your characters, but for all the positives people bring up about it, what it does ends up making all the characters feel even
more generic and expendable/replaceable than the Materia system in Final Fantasy VII. At the least the different limit breaks specific to each character did far more to make each one unique and valuable in battle (except for the obligatory worthless character).
The
Final Fantasy franchise has previously had a strong exploration aspect. Even with the initial portion leading up to when you leave Midgar for the first time in VII, at least the game felt like it was taking the first step into that larger world you'd have available to explore. Final Fantasy X only really showed that big world in a map screen, but never let you explore any of it. You were so on rails, it wasn't even funny. Not only that, but the game actively seemed to discourage any kind of real exploration, since most of your destinations were blocked off beyond the path that you were intended to go.
The fact that you couldn't really understand anything that the Al bhed were saying unless you then did a new game + is obnoxious, especially when the game made it so frustrating to deal with its nonsense the first time around, ESPECIALLY the god-awful story. And each successive entry seems to have intentionally gotten worse. The amount of blatant plotholes in a given cutscene of any recent numbered Final Fantasy ( FF XIII being the worst offender that I've witnessed ) seems like their writers failed basic storytelling, or like they're trying to use an alpha build of some kind of auto-story-tron program/system to generate the plot and story arcs for their games, and nobody's bothered to update it or do any kind of proof-reading whatsoever.