I don't know where i stopped with Ni no Kuni, but I really didn't care for the battle system.
An older post in this thread, but it mirrors my time with Ni no Kuni as well. I wasn't super far into the game... an hour or two maybe, and I was fighting some boss on the mountain. I had to block some AoE attack, and it became so cumbersome to swap to the other party member just to pull the familiar back in and such. I really liked the game's aesthetics and everything, but I just was not a fan of the battle system.
Tifa's bossom was nerfed hard.
I figured she finally invested in a good, form-fitting sports bra. It doesn't really bother me as it makes more sense for a busty melee fighter to keep "the girls" in check anyway!
I'm with you. That is always my favorite (this is FF2 right--the one in the US?) I enjoyed it way more than 3, but I still enjoyed 3 quite a bit.
I also thought FF 7 was great...absolutely spectacular for its time. I guess people just can't appreciate how truly crappy those games got after FF 7. ...whether because of 7 or not, it was the last really good one. I liked 9 a lot, but agree the story was garbage and the characters meaningless and pointless, but I loved the battle system and the character classes.
FF4 had one advantage over FF6... a tighter narrative that didn't feel a bit excessive when it came to extra characters. To be fair, those extra characters in FF6 weren't necessary, but that also meant they felt a bit superfluous.
For me, FF4 was a good game, but FF6 has the superior soundtrack, which gives it big points for me.
I always thought that FF7 was the start of the story issues. It's not that FF7 had a bad story, but rather that its base narrative felt like a plot construed by a student that just finished Philosophy 101. In trying to craft less trope-y stories, I think that's also where they started pushing for more proper nouns, which culminated in the goofy names you saw in FF13 (l'Cie and fal'Cie) that make one raise a brow just reading the synopsis.
This is why I stop playing FF. I'd rather play this if it was a turn-based game.
They're adding a classic combat mode to the game. Now, it's still technically action-based, but the idea is that the movement will be automated and the menu will be driven by the player. It seems like an odd take, and I'm rather curious in how well it will work in the end.