We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Ff 4 has the first compelling story in the series and has decently complex characters at the cost of not giving you control of your party classes, 5 has a complex as hell job system and a weird story and is also the first to really play with the idea of multiple maps, 6 is the final snes game, has a great cast, a ton of secrets, and one of the best villains in final fantasy.

I lied, I actually played 5 as well.
I couldn't finish it though, because the difficulty started spiking like crazy and I hadn't Optimized The Jobs ™.
It was pretty forgettable overall, though. It was sure crazy, but more the "just makes no sense" kind than the "postmodern oneiric poetry" kind.
I guess I could look into ff4. It's on wiiware so no trouble to acquire.

General consensus from everyone I've talked to about this seems to be that VI was somewhat of a peak, though, so I may just pretend it was the only FF game.


ALSO, now that I've had time to think I'm gonna go ahead and post my absurd crank theory about video game writing.

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Spoiler
So, several years ago, we had this debate in English class about whether symbolism in some book was intended by the author, or just read into it by critics. And my conclusion was that symbolism would show up in authored works whether it was intended or not, because the author makes subconscious associations as they choose setting elements/metaphors/adjectives etc., and thus whatever symbols are present in their mind will come to the surface even if they aren't trying to write that way.
So it's entirely possible that the reason I don't see this in video games so much is because of somewhat of a lack of authorship. Games tend to be designed by groups, and a group doesn't have the kind of cohesive subconscious associations that an individual does. Beyond that, even, the notion of "design" implies that you choose your visual/plot/gameplay elements for the express purpose of creating results, rather than just choosing what feels most appropriate to the author. And hence you'd expect a video game to possess less metaphorical background associations than a book, even if the author wasn't trying to be poetic.
Anyway this is going out on a very long limb of pop psych and probably wrong. But for the record, I have noticed that I prefer games that were more under control of one all-powerful designer to those that came about through design teams. Even when single-author games aren't very good, there's this certain kind of idiosyncratic charm that shines through, like you can tell someone's on the other side of the screen.