I enjoyed the fanservice from the first game. And honestly, me being a fan of Valkyria Chronicles, Sakura Wars, and Virtua Fighter, the Sega team was my favorite from the first game. Looks like they dropped Valkyria Chronicles, sadly, but they did bring in Yakuza, which is cool, as I'm a fan of that series as well.
You're a good man, Larry. I, too, have had to care for my wife when she got sick.
I generally prefer games with rich color palettes, and I like a lot of games with (seemingly, anyway) lighter themes. That said, a bright palette does not preclude a dark game, as some of the games I found to be the darkest looked quite cheery on the surface - see Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, as in my last post.
My first Playstation experience was FInal Fantasy VII. It's the reason I got a PlayStation. The N64 had nothing like it. It's my favorite game of all time.
One thing I always liked was the elegant simplicity of the interface. Instead of four, five, or six buttons, Virtua Fighter has an amazing plethora of moves on an interface that only uses three buttons - one of those being a block button.
Virtua Fighter 4 was my go-to fighting game on PS2. Between that and Skies of Arcadia Legends, I had high hopes for Sega as a third party. Of course, the reality didn't quite match up, outstanding games like Valkyria Chronicles aside.
Wind Waker has in-game cameras and a huge mini-game centered around them. I must confess that I never finished that particular mini-game.
Right now, my big thing is taking videos and screenshots of Final Fantasy VII and posting them on Facebook and YouTube.
Are the rumors about you being seen at Charlie Sheen's house parties true?
Is it true that you made it all the way to the roof of the castle in Super Mario 64 without using the cannon?
Sorry about the lateness of my reply. I agree with Matt. The SNES had notable RPGs, to be sure, but its library in that department was nowhere near the breadth and depth of the PS1, and it had a lot of throwaway RPGs too. The PS1 had so many games I loved - the Final Fantasies (the three main games plus Tactics), the Lunars, Xenogears, Valkyrie Profile, Dragon Warrior VII, Tales of Destiny/Eternia. One thing the PS1 had in its favor was that there were far more companies making RPGs for it, therefore a much wider variety of voices beyond those of Squaresoft, and there were far more games getting localized rather than being stuck in Japan. My favorite Final Fantasy games are VII and IX (along with XII on PS2 and Tactics on PS1) on top of all that.
I had an opportunity (which sadly, I failed to take) to see Sakimoto in person at the Distant Worlds concert in Pittsburgh last summer. I met Nobuo Uematsu in Omaha at Distant Worlds in 2013 and had him sign my FFIX cover jacket. If I had gone to DW Pittsburgh, I would have asked Mr. Sakimoto to autograph either my FFXII case or the instruction manual for Tactics.
Agree full-on about Mr. Matsuno. I wish he'd become a full-time producer on Final Fantasy, but apparently working on XII (my second favorite game in the series after VII, with Tactics tied with IX for third) was too taxing for him.
