The difference is that most of these stuff described has some tangible benefit. If I pay someone to PL my character I end up with a more powerful character. But let's say I suck at aiming in FPS. How does paying for a tutor help me aim better? Is he going to show me a secret mouse technique only the experts know that improves your accuracy by 100%?
People place values on all kinds of things and I don't presume to judge them. But in the case of gaming tutor, it is not clear to me there is any value to be obtained at all.
The difference here is that while an instructor certainly can help you improve your short game, how does a game tutor help you snipe better? How does a game tutor help you memorize the map better? React faster? Many of the skills required in a game is simply natural and augmented by training without the assistance of anyone else. Now you can receive meaningful if your tutor notice you always go for weapon X first but it's better to get weapon Y first. Those kind of thing will be analogous to a golf instructor, but I've a feeling most gaming tutors are just trying to sell you things that are either innate or acquired only through repetition.
This was happening way back in Starcraft days
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Top Starcraft players would offer lessons either on a hourly level or a per game level at some ludricous rate too. Of course, given the free flow of information of the Net, you'll find that none of these experts actually had any secret worth paying for because if they did, everyone would've known about it already. Although the secret to being good at games and almost anything else in general is just talent + practice, people are quite willing to pretend this isn't the case and if you just get 'the secret from the experts', you too can be a world class Starcraft or Halo 2 player even if you possess neither the talent nor the endurance to learn the game.
This is one of the biggest perpetuated myths in gaming, that the elements of a game is somehow zero-sum. Exactly how does focusing on graphics take away from gameplay or the story? Do they pull the staff that would've wrote the story or designed the game system to draw polygons never mind that these 3 areas have basically no common skillset?
If a game has poor gameplay it is because whoever designed it didn't do his job right. It has nothing to do with whether the guys at the graphic department were doing their job or not.
Actually that's a very good example. Clearly the story implies Shang Tsung > Goro. However Shang Tsung is only hard if he morphs into Goro which means Shang Tsung is strictly weaker than Goro (because he's not Goro 100% of the time). So it is hard to take the story seriously. This probably explains why Shang Tsung was quickly demoted to a regular character in the subsequent games. While no one plays Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat for the story, it never helps the game if you design the characters set up in a way that contradicts what the story claims.
Even without factoring massive overkill 'you-win' stuff, there are plenty of games where the last battle is not the hardest although they clearly should be according to the story and it's not limited to RPGs. For example in Super Mario World, Bowser is not necessarily any harder than castle 7 (I actually have a harder time on castle 7 than Bowser's Castle). In FFX it's arguable whether Sin is even harder than some of the random encounters along the way (King Behemoth, for example). How are you supposed to take the power of the bosses seriously when his henchman could be harder given the exact same characters? On a game like Mario it's okay because no one plays Mario for the story, but it's still not a good design. The problem is more amplified on anything where story actually does matter, most notably RPGs.
This also works the other way around. Take a game like the original Street Fighter 2, a game that's hard to argue a story even exists. But because the bosses are appropriately stronger than your starting 8, and Bison is noticeably more difficult than rest of the bosses, it is easy to imagine that these extra powerful guys are probably up to no good and clearly Bison being the leader and the most powerful is obviously the most evil, which is why you're trying to defeat him. Because the characters are designed appropriately, it makes it easier to accept whatever random plot they tacked on to Street Fighter. When Akuma is introduced there sure wasn't any info on him I am aware of. He was just an overpowered special boss. But then people filled in the lore. He uses moves like Ryu and Ken so he was the one who killed Shang Long. He is powerful and we all know you don't just get powerful for being nice, so he must be practicing some dark martial arts, which led to the whole 'killing-intent' thing i Alpha series. None of this is anything worthy of literary praise, but it sure is a pretty good result for a character that started out with no story whatseover.
Good game design allows the players to fill in the blanks, and it'd seem the blanks people are able to fill in are often at least as good as what the writers could have come up with.
You heard anybody recognized in a game for writing the story? Sure, the designers get recognized, but even if they wrote the story, they do more than just that.
Games have the disadvantage in that a poorly designed system constantly undoes any sense of immersion. If I wrote: "The heroes fought against the supreme evil, and it was a hard battle but they won", you can at least believe that this thing I wrote about is supposed to be hard. If you act it out in a movie, even with pretty bad acting it's not hard to make a reasonable pass that this is supposed to be a hard battle. But how can you possibly take something seriously if you demolish the supreme evil in 3 hits? It's a lost art to balance game remotely as difficult as what your story claims to be. In theory, the final battle in any game is supposed to be the climatic one, and the most difficult one which is why victory has meaning. But there are plenty of games where the last battle isn't remotely the hardest one, not even counting super extra hard gimmick bosses.
They already changed the story of the Draenai to account for the expansion (The Eredars now apparently were corrupted by Sargeras as opposed to the Eredars corrupted Sargeras). I didn't say this is good. I'm saying when you can ignore cause and effect anything has to make sense. If you think World of Warcraft has any consistency you were just fooled by the game anyway. One of the quests in Barrens involve the tree-hugging Tauren telling you to get some TNTs to destroy the dwarven fort because they were mining the Earth's secrets. A quest in Stonetalon Mountains has Taurens worried about goblin deforesting the land end up asking the Forsaken for the help, because we all know the Forsaken will come up with some natural solution to take care of deforestation as opposed to throwing more plague at the problem.
When you've some persistent ongoing never ending world, like a MMORPG, very little normal fantasy lore can make sense. Just how many world ending threats are there that requires the Alliance and Horde to unite together? And how come after every one of them is taken care of, they immediately went back to declaring war on each other until the next world-ending threat comes along?
Paladins get their power from 'the Light'. It is easily inferrable that the Light is a racial deity, similar to Elune or any of the random stuff Taurens worship. Just like no one that's not a NE gets anything from Elune, no one else besides humans and dwarves can get power from 'the Light'. If you will, the Paladin god is clearly racist. On the other hand, whatever entity that empowers priests/warlocks/etc are obviously not racist because everyone can get those powers fine.
As for the lore justification, you can make up anything you want when you are alowed to say stuff like 'they didn't have this power but they stole it, so now they do'.
The amount of time you have avaliable directly influences whether you'll play any game at all. Because a significant portion of the population are playing WoW, it follows there's considerably less time available, to the entire gaming population, to play any other game. Therefore sales of other games, as a whole, has to decline. This isn't exactly rocket science. If people are expected to buy 3 games a year for the PS2, and 3 super awesome games this year were sold to 100% of the PS2 owning population, you'd naturally expect sales of other games to decline. No this doesn't mean no one will buy any other game this year (no doubt having 3 such games will push up the average this year), but there's no way having your usual 3/year average taken up by 3 games not affect the general well-being of other games.
It doesn't have to take up all your time. If it takes up any time to play WoW, and I assume people don't just subscribe to WoW to donate money to Blizzard, then you have to have less time to play other games. It's true you can still play other games while playing WoW, but no matter what the total amount of time people, as a whole, have to play other games has to go down if 1.5 million people are playing WoW. If people have less time to play other games, it follows sales for those games has to go down too.
I seem to recall Dreamcast did not require a modchip to play pirated games. You only needed a special boot disk of some kind which makes pirating way easier. Compared this to getting a modchip on a PSX that could totally fry your PSX, and you're in a constant game of cat & mouse as newer PSX games would try to detect older modchips and disable themselves (assuming you buy some legit games at some point). Not to mention companies like Sony and Nintendo are far bigger and thus more well-equipped to absorb losses from piracy compared to Sega.
Piracy always hurts the owner in some way. If we assume the notion that selling pirated games somehow helps the owner, then it'd make sense that the game makers themselves to sell you the pirated games. After all, if a pirate selling your game for $10, $1, or $0 with presumably $0 going to the legitmate owner somehow helps the owner, then the owner can at least make $0 from the same sale at the same price (and probably better than $0). Thus is piracy is beneficial, copyright owners would pirate their own games and sell them because they can't possibly make less money ($0) compared to having real pirates sell the games.
The question with copyright damage is always how much, not if it exists. In the case of Dreamcast, it hurt a lot.
Unless you're a PR guy for a MMORPG, the gaming world is not some kind of world that grows indefinitely to accomodate more people. If 1.5 million Americans are playing WoW then there's got to be a lot less Americans available to be playing something else. Is this necessarily a bad thing, though?
For one, Japanese is generally a more compact form of language compared to English and able to represent the same sentence with fewer characters (though earlier Japanese games didn't use Kanji which would be even more compact). Therefore you take an average dialogue box that's filled in Japanese, it can very easily run over the same dialogue box in English and you either need to rephrase the whole conversation so it'd fit. You could just add another dialogue box, but it'd look pretty odd if you always see 1 filled dialogue box and barely 1 line after it. Note that it is also possible something that's long in Japanese to appear to short when translated in English, and likewise those need to be accomodated.
For example, since FF4 was brought up recently, the English black/white magic spellset in FF4 only have enough characters for 5 letters. Therefore you can't have a spell like "Firaga" and it has to be "Fire3". In general abilities can only have 8 (I think) letters so Veolvis's "Maelstorm" attack became "Storm". In FF7, the entire font system had to be reworked in the English version because the name "Cait Sith", which fit under the Japanese system and its font, would be too long and end up truncated on the English version. Instead of doing that, the font system was redone to acoomodate for his name.
FF4 is the last FF game to requires you to use more than 4 characters while also attempting to develop them (FF5 only used 4 not counting Kara). Your party goes through about 10 guys and all of those guys, in theory, have something to do with the game and you get to use them when they're relevant. It is really hard to take character development seriously when you see Barret pop up and say something at the end, and you're thinking "I haven't used this guy since Disc 1 because I didn't like him." This applies to 6-9, though 10 tries to make you feel at least all those guys are supposed to be doing something with the semi-mandatory character switcharoo combat system.
It takes about 10 levels using a +2 to magic on level up or +2 to strength on level up Esper to overcome any advantage in stats any characters may have had at the start of the game.
FF8's draw system is basically a really cool system that failed because it is too complicated/unorthodox. The draw spells are essentially your levels, and the time it takes to stock 100 of all the very best spell is significantly lower than the time it'd normally take you develop a character the good old fashion way. Although there are levels in FF8, those levels are basically meaningless because the boss scale up/down depending on your level (it generally works out higher level still nets you an advantage, but not nearly as much as they normally do). Also there's the fact that you can get 1 level per fight at the end using Quistis's Degenerator or various status-Junction instant kill type effects.
Because Encounter-None is easily obtainable, once you get all your draws done you never need to fight another random encounter. If you're so inclined, you can get about 75% of the essential spells by just playing the card game and avoid the random battles altogether (except enough random battles to obtain key status-junction and Encounter-None).
So far as character diversity goes, the only thing that distinquishes any character from any other after FF4 is the fact that every character has a special command, and they might start with a bonus in some category that is easily surpassable with a few level/items (FF9 is an exception). If you don't see this, then you're just fooled by the game. There's nothing stopping you in FF6 to use Terra like a sword fighting powerhouse (in fact she can melee for 9999 easily being one of the 4 big-Sword users) or use Sabin as a caster with some simple manipulation of stat gains during level up from Espers.
Squall is almost a victim to the game writer's inability to understand his own characters. Squall is portrayed as the perfect lone warrior/commando. You want to blow up something or do something impossible, he's the man to do it. He also possess great skills working/motivating a very small group of people like his father. But he is not a good leader for a large group of people, nor is he a diplomat/politician like Laguna. Yet the game expects him to have such qualities solely due to the fact that he is Laguna's son. From the game you can infer that he doesn't even like to talk to people and the game basically throws him in the defense of the Garden against a vastly superior force. He allegedly motivates a bunch of other scrubs from Garden who most likely never heard his voice into greatness. In fact, you can come up with an utterly unmotivating speech on the leadership scene (it's not obvious what's motivating without a guide anyway) and yet everyone nods and says 'thanks for inspiring us, Squall'!
It almost feels like his inner complaints about 'why me' is a plead to the gaming gods. Indeed, why Squall to lead the Garden when he doesn't even want to? Why does he have to babysit some impossibly stupid comrades from killing themselves?
FF7's plot is probably needlessly complicated, but after you get past the artificial complexity, everything fits together pretty well. However it does get the stigma for starting the 'nothing possibly make sense' genre. I realize you shouldn't fault a game because other games tried to copy it and screwed it up, but FF7 almost single-handed changed the plot we get in RPG from overly simplistic to borderline nonsensical, and I rather have a simplistic plot than one that doesn't make sense.
Believe it or not, the population of American gamers enamored with Japanese stuff is very small. This might be why games such as dating sims never take off here, or that games like Soul Calibur 3 and Dynasty Warriors 4 go out of their way to redo the entire voice acting in English.
Kefka was simply insane. Sometimes simplicity is good, but Kefka is most definitely not a complicated character.
FF4 has stricter level-based requirements than most RPG now (especially compared to FFs). If you're not at a certain level (around 60) Rydia can't survive a Big Bang no matter what which means you'll be down one healer for the last battle right away. The game paces well for a Final Fantasy game, but part of it comes from the system being much simpler than all the later ones so there aren't cheap loopholes to be exploited. It's also one of the last FF where you not only constantly need to use your MP out of necessity in the regular battles, but also have no way of easily replenishing them so you actually have to budget your MP carefully, but not to be so stingy that you don't make it to the end.
When you realize that the main characters are to be completely ignored in FF8, that is when FF8 becomes a good game. Of course I'm sure that is not Square's original intention, but if you just ignore the most whiny and useless batch of heroes ever assembled in a game, you get a rather unique story around Laguna Loire, a man with no special combat powers whatsoever but managed to save the world from destruction.
If you mean FF4 revolutionary as in 'there was no complex RPG before' then in that sense in does define the genre. However just because there are no complex RPG before doesn't mean the first one gets a special pass. Mario is normally thought as the defining game for action platformers, but it is great not because it is merely the first one. It also happens to be the best one. In fact I'm pretty sure there's got to be some kind of action platformer before Mario, but none of them are as well-known as Mario because Mario was the best one.
On the other hand, FF4-6 are very solid but does nothing to distinquish from other 'old school RPG' category. The fact that you can't say whether 4, 5, or 6 was best of the 'old school RPG' is a sign that all 3 games are very average (at least relative to each other). To be fair, an average Final Fantasy game is still a very good one, but they're not anything special. They tell a pretty straightforward, if not boring story, and they do it well. The battle system, music, gameplay, and everything else are all very good. It does not strive for perfection and maybe not even excellence, but it is a very good game.
FF7 is revolutionary. Technically because it's the 'first' 3D RPG in the same sense Mario is the first action platformer. It was far more ambitious in the story department than any game before it, to the point that it is responsible for the 'story that does not possibly make any sense' genre (ironically FF7's story does make sense, it's just hopelessly complicated). It is a special game, for better or worse, which is why it is remembered by the masses. The game tried to changing the RPG genre and I don't know if it succeeded, but the earlier FFs did not even try.
FF4-6 supports tend to be the 'it's good back in the old days crowd'. Yes FF4-6 are superior back in the old days when everything else sucked and plot is not taken seriously in a RPG. But in any modern viewpoint to RPG, FF4-6 are pretty standard, solid, but average games in the FF franchise. Now there's nothing wrong with respecting a game for doing well without trying anything new, but not being revolutionary is certainly not a reason for a game to be great.
So far as FFs go, only FF7 and FF10 really stood out and can be considered revolutionary. Again, being revolutionary doesn't necessarily mean good or bad, but those are the games that defined the FF franchise if not the genre, and the general sales numbers support that at least at a public level. Yes I am well aware that selling more doesn't mean something has to be intrinsically better, but selling less definitely proves nothing positive about the intrinsic value of a game, either.
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People place values on all kinds of things and I don't presume to judge them. But in the case of gaming tutor, it is not clear to me there is any value to be obtained at all.
The difference here is that while an instructor certainly can help you improve your short game, how does a game tutor help you snipe better? How does a game tutor help you memorize the map better? React faster? Many of the skills required in a game is simply natural and augmented by training without the assistance of anyone else. Now you can receive meaningful if your tutor notice you always go for weapon X first but it's better to get weapon Y first. Those kind of thing will be analogous to a golf instructor, but I've a feeling most gaming tutors are just trying to sell you things that are either innate or acquired only through repetition.
Top Starcraft players would offer lessons either on a hourly level or a per game level at some ludricous rate too. Of course, given the free flow of information of the Net, you'll find that none of these experts actually had any secret worth paying for because if they did, everyone would've known about it already. Although the secret to being good at games and almost anything else in general is just talent + practice, people are quite willing to pretend this isn't the case and if you just get 'the secret from the experts', you too can be a world class Starcraft or Halo 2 player even if you possess neither the talent nor the endurance to learn the game.
If a game has poor gameplay it is because whoever designed it didn't do his job right. It has nothing to do with whether the guys at the graphic department were doing their job or not.
Actually that's a very good example. Clearly the story implies Shang Tsung > Goro. However Shang Tsung is only hard if he morphs into Goro which means Shang Tsung is strictly weaker than Goro (because he's not Goro 100% of the time). So it is hard to take the story seriously. This probably explains why Shang Tsung was quickly demoted to a regular character in the subsequent games. While no one plays Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat for the story, it never helps the game if you design the characters set up in a way that contradicts what the story claims.
This also works the other way around. Take a game like the original Street Fighter 2, a game that's hard to argue a story even exists. But because the bosses are appropriately stronger than your starting 8, and Bison is noticeably more difficult than rest of the bosses, it is easy to imagine that these extra powerful guys are probably up to no good and clearly Bison being the leader and the most powerful is obviously the most evil, which is why you're trying to defeat him. Because the characters are designed appropriately, it makes it easier to accept whatever random plot they tacked on to Street Fighter. When Akuma is introduced there sure wasn't any info on him I am aware of. He was just an overpowered special boss. But then people filled in the lore. He uses moves like Ryu and Ken so he was the one who killed Shang Long. He is powerful and we all know you don't just get powerful for being nice, so he must be practicing some dark martial arts, which led to the whole 'killing-intent' thing i Alpha series. None of this is anything worthy of literary praise, but it sure is a pretty good result for a character that started out with no story whatseover.
Good game design allows the players to fill in the blanks, and it'd seem the blanks people are able to fill in are often at least as good as what the writers could have come up with.
Games have the disadvantage in that a poorly designed system constantly undoes any sense of immersion. If I wrote: "The heroes fought against the supreme evil, and it was a hard battle but they won", you can at least believe that this thing I wrote about is supposed to be hard. If you act it out in a movie, even with pretty bad acting it's not hard to make a reasonable pass that this is supposed to be a hard battle. But how can you possibly take something seriously if you demolish the supreme evil in 3 hits? It's a lost art to balance game remotely as difficult as what your story claims to be. In theory, the final battle in any game is supposed to be the climatic one, and the most difficult one which is why victory has meaning. But there are plenty of games where the last battle isn't remotely the hardest one, not even counting super extra hard gimmick bosses.
When you've some persistent ongoing never ending world, like a MMORPG, very little normal fantasy lore can make sense. Just how many world ending threats are there that requires the Alliance and Horde to unite together? And how come after every one of them is taken care of, they immediately went back to declaring war on each other until the next world-ending threat comes along?
Paladins get their power from 'the Light'. It is easily inferrable that the Light is a racial deity, similar to Elune or any of the random stuff Taurens worship. Just like no one that's not a NE gets anything from Elune, no one else besides humans and dwarves can get power from 'the Light'. If you will, the Paladin god is clearly racist. On the other hand, whatever entity that empowers priests/warlocks/etc are obviously not racist because everyone can get those powers fine. As for the lore justification, you can make up anything you want when you are alowed to say stuff like 'they didn't have this power but they stole it, so now they do'.
The Scarlet Crusade is considered as an enemy to both factions of the game and they contain of Paladins.
The amount of time you have avaliable directly influences whether you'll play any game at all. Because a significant portion of the population are playing WoW, it follows there's considerably less time available, to the entire gaming population, to play any other game. Therefore sales of other games, as a whole, has to decline. This isn't exactly rocket science. If people are expected to buy 3 games a year for the PS2, and 3 super awesome games this year were sold to 100% of the PS2 owning population, you'd naturally expect sales of other games to decline. No this doesn't mean no one will buy any other game this year (no doubt having 3 such games will push up the average this year), but there's no way having your usual 3/year average taken up by 3 games not affect the general well-being of other games.
It doesn't have to take up all your time. If it takes up any time to play WoW, and I assume people don't just subscribe to WoW to donate money to Blizzard, then you have to have less time to play other games. It's true you can still play other games while playing WoW, but no matter what the total amount of time people, as a whole, have to play other games has to go down if 1.5 million people are playing WoW. If people have less time to play other games, it follows sales for those games has to go down too.
Piracy always hurts the owner in some way. If we assume the notion that selling pirated games somehow helps the owner, then it'd make sense that the game makers themselves to sell you the pirated games. After all, if a pirate selling your game for $10, $1, or $0 with presumably $0 going to the legitmate owner somehow helps the owner, then the owner can at least make $0 from the same sale at the same price (and probably better than $0). Thus is piracy is beneficial, copyright owners would pirate their own games and sell them because they can't possibly make less money ($0) compared to having real pirates sell the games.
The question with copyright damage is always how much, not if it exists. In the case of Dreamcast, it hurt a lot.
Unless you're a PR guy for a MMORPG, the gaming world is not some kind of world that grows indefinitely to accomodate more people. If 1.5 million Americans are playing WoW then there's got to be a lot less Americans available to be playing something else. Is this necessarily a bad thing, though?
For one, Japanese is generally a more compact form of language compared to English and able to represent the same sentence with fewer characters (though earlier Japanese games didn't use Kanji which would be even more compact). Therefore you take an average dialogue box that's filled in Japanese, it can very easily run over the same dialogue box in English and you either need to rephrase the whole conversation so it'd fit. You could just add another dialogue box, but it'd look pretty odd if you always see 1 filled dialogue box and barely 1 line after it. Note that it is also possible something that's long in Japanese to appear to short when translated in English, and likewise those need to be accomodated. For example, since FF4 was brought up recently, the English black/white magic spellset in FF4 only have enough characters for 5 letters. Therefore you can't have a spell like "Firaga" and it has to be "Fire3". In general abilities can only have 8 (I think) letters so Veolvis's "Maelstorm" attack became "Storm". In FF7, the entire font system had to be reworked in the English version because the name "Cait Sith", which fit under the Japanese system and its font, would be too long and end up truncated on the English version. Instead of doing that, the font system was redone to acoomodate for his name.
FF4 is the last FF game to requires you to use more than 4 characters while also attempting to develop them (FF5 only used 4 not counting Kara). Your party goes through about 10 guys and all of those guys, in theory, have something to do with the game and you get to use them when they're relevant. It is really hard to take character development seriously when you see Barret pop up and say something at the end, and you're thinking "I haven't used this guy since Disc 1 because I didn't like him." This applies to 6-9, though 10 tries to make you feel at least all those guys are supposed to be doing something with the semi-mandatory character switcharoo combat system.
It takes about 10 levels using a +2 to magic on level up or +2 to strength on level up Esper to overcome any advantage in stats any characters may have had at the start of the game.
Because Encounter-None is easily obtainable, once you get all your draws done you never need to fight another random encounter. If you're so inclined, you can get about 75% of the essential spells by just playing the card game and avoid the random battles altogether (except enough random battles to obtain key status-junction and Encounter-None).
So far as character diversity goes, the only thing that distinquishes any character from any other after FF4 is the fact that every character has a special command, and they might start with a bonus in some category that is easily surpassable with a few level/items (FF9 is an exception). If you don't see this, then you're just fooled by the game. There's nothing stopping you in FF6 to use Terra like a sword fighting powerhouse (in fact she can melee for 9999 easily being one of the 4 big-Sword users) or use Sabin as a caster with some simple manipulation of stat gains during level up from Espers.
It almost feels like his inner complaints about 'why me' is a plead to the gaming gods. Indeed, why Squall to lead the Garden when he doesn't even want to? Why does he have to babysit some impossibly stupid comrades from killing themselves?
FF7's plot is probably needlessly complicated, but after you get past the artificial complexity, everything fits together pretty well. However it does get the stigma for starting the 'nothing possibly make sense' genre. I realize you shouldn't fault a game because other games tried to copy it and screwed it up, but FF7 almost single-handed changed the plot we get in RPG from overly simplistic to borderline nonsensical, and I rather have a simplistic plot than one that doesn't make sense.
Believe it or not, the population of American gamers enamored with Japanese stuff is very small. This might be why games such as dating sims never take off here, or that games like Soul Calibur 3 and Dynasty Warriors 4 go out of their way to redo the entire voice acting in English.
Kefka was simply insane. Sometimes simplicity is good, but Kefka is most definitely not a complicated character. FF4 has stricter level-based requirements than most RPG now (especially compared to FFs). If you're not at a certain level (around 60) Rydia can't survive a Big Bang no matter what which means you'll be down one healer for the last battle right away. The game paces well for a Final Fantasy game, but part of it comes from the system being much simpler than all the later ones so there aren't cheap loopholes to be exploited. It's also one of the last FF where you not only constantly need to use your MP out of necessity in the regular battles, but also have no way of easily replenishing them so you actually have to budget your MP carefully, but not to be so stingy that you don't make it to the end.
When you realize that the main characters are to be completely ignored in FF8, that is when FF8 becomes a good game. Of course I'm sure that is not Square's original intention, but if you just ignore the most whiny and useless batch of heroes ever assembled in a game, you get a rather unique story around Laguna Loire, a man with no special combat powers whatsoever but managed to save the world from destruction.
FF7 is revolutionary. Technically because it's the 'first' 3D RPG in the same sense Mario is the first action platformer. It was far more ambitious in the story department than any game before it, to the point that it is responsible for the 'story that does not possibly make any sense' genre (ironically FF7's story does make sense, it's just hopelessly complicated). It is a special game, for better or worse, which is why it is remembered by the masses. The game tried to changing the RPG genre and I don't know if it succeeded, but the earlier FFs did not even try.
So far as FFs go, only FF7 and FF10 really stood out and can be considered revolutionary. Again, being revolutionary doesn't necessarily mean good or bad, but those are the games that defined the FF franchise if not the genre, and the general sales numbers support that at least at a public level. Yes I am well aware that selling more doesn't mean something has to be intrinsically better, but selling less definitely proves nothing positive about the intrinsic value of a game, either.