I think there’s a lot I could have chosen for this prompt (love at second sight), but I ended up going with Final Fantasy IV because I wanted to draw Cecil 😛.
I don’t think I hated FFIV when I first played it, but I did find it frustrating. I didn’t like the fact that it kept switching around my party and throwing in weird stuff, like the cave that weakens metal equipment. As time went on though, I started appreciating what it was going for. FFIV is less an RPg and more of an rpG. It’s constantly throwing challenges at you because it wants you to explore its mechanics and come up with new strategies, and it does it in a way I don’t think a final fantasy has really replicated until XIII.
Also, I think Cecil’s paladin arc has really resonated with me as the years go by. I don’t play much western RPGs, but from the way my friends talk about the Paladin, it seems like a tenuous thing. Being a paladin requires you to be static, and any deviation from your code is a failure. In FFIV though, being a paladin is about change: it’s the call to a journey to do better, and it’s never too late to answer that call. I find that to be much more compelling