I found the two tier structure especially disconcerting. I can spend $5 a month and see more content but then the pet is above and beyond that. Me no like.

I do agree that the mini-puzzles are repetitious but I actually found them to be surprisingly challenging. And I really liked the way cooking was done.

Overall, I’d be very tempted to subscribe to this game. But as it stands I just can’t go done the micro transaction road.

Take FR’s Combat jobs, for example. Instead of exp points, you get stars. These stars you then allocate, on a different menu, to make other skills better. You have exactly enough stars at level 20 to completely max all your combat skills. Why not use this already-existing system as your “levels”? Your level in FR only decides what kind of gear you wear, so it’s largely useless. Why not get rid of it entirely and make/use a new system?

“Because we’ve always done it that way” is a poor reason to do something.

There are gazillion different rpgs and rpg systems without levels and they work fine, in fact most of them work much, much better than any rpg with levels. (If you don’t believe me, just start going through , you’ll find plenty.)

Drives me mad, seeing this asinine comment repeated in every commentary in blogs that talk about the issue.

My only point of contention is your fourth in the bad column. Equating any form of leveling as a grind undercuts one of the very foundations of the RPG genre. Taking out all forms of statistical improvement essentially converts the game into something else. Maybe you don’t want FR to be RPG-like or maybe you’re burned out on the leveling treadmill. However, one person’s treadmill is another’s path to pixellated glory.

Since Ethic gave his few sentence review, I will give mine: I am truly not the intended audience (a feeling I did not get in W101), and everything feels like it has been tacked on instead of blended seamlessly.