@topsteer: My favourite genre as well, but I don't think I've played since Lost Odyssey. The ones I've seen since then tend towards either obscurity or fanservice.
I've heard good things about World of Final Fantasy though, so let's hope Square takes it as a sign that there's indeed interest in games like that.
Baldur's Gate, Morrowind, GTAIII, Minecraft and the Witcher 3 are the only games that hid their seams so well that it was hard to think of them as games, but as life-consuming experiences.
I played the Fallout series (1 & 2) long after they came out, and they hold up quite well and hit some of those same notes.
Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma work to a lesser extent (at least for me).
It was well established by Garnet, Steiner and Beatrix, - in what they said and how they acted, - that Queen Brahne wasn't acting like herself. I believe one of the characters mentions it started when her arms dealer (Kuja) showed up.
Queen Brahne wasn't redeemed. What you are seeing is the dissonance between how Garnet sees her and how the rest of the party sees her. Garnet has known her for much longer, and despite being subject to her recent tyranny, she is obviously familiar with a much more human side. A side the party (and the player) have never seen. I am certain this dissonance is intentional.
A similar thing happened in my own life. My grandmother subjected my father and his 9 siblings to her own brand of tyranny. I saw much of the effects it had on my extended family, and this defined how I saw her. When she died and her body was on display, it was surreal to see how suddenly fond of her they seemed to be. A fondness I had seen in them for the very first time. So much so, that the woman who was walking about a few days earlier and the woman in the coffin couldn't be reconciled. It was a side of her I had never been around to see, and the only conclusion I could come to was that I obviously didn't know her, and that my short history with her was insufficient in defining her as a person.
@liquiddragon: Yeah, I feel like since the industry went open-world, a lot of level design's gone out the window. Feels good to have some quality pacing and atmosphere again.
The AI was terrible as far as I recall. I stopped playing when I managed to stealth kill an entire base with the help of a brick. It annoys me when I'm picking off every individual member in a patrol or base, and no one else seems suspicious that 90% of their friends have disappeared.
In most games I wouldn't care, but I was playing this game for the atmosphere and that just broke it.
In all seriousness, the series never managed the transition to spoken dialogue.
I've always thought this. To add to this, once voices were introduced, the music was relegated from being front-and-centre to being in the background, which stopped it from lending emotion to otherwise dull conversations in the same way it used to.
I remember feeling sad during that conversation the party has with Aeris's mother. I don't even remember what they were talking about, though. I'm pretty sure it was just the music.
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