Final Fantasy Empires

First let me start out by saying that as far as Final Fantasy fan games go, this is one of the better ones I've played. I really enjoyed the storyline and humor that went into this and it made for an entertaining experience.

The story is pretty interesting. I especially like the way magic was worked into the plot through the use of special stones that are mined out of the ground, sort of like FFVII's materia, although the biggest downside is that you can only equip one at a time. There seems to be some balance issues with the magic, however, as it isn't even as powerful as your regular attack most of the time.

The cities are very well put together, but there are some glitches. For one, some of the houses in the second city have doors that open but take you nowhere. What I mean is, you open the front door, but there's no transition to any other maps. I think there's about 4 empty houses, possibly more.

There were a few mispellings, glitches in tilesets (certain wall tiles being below the hero and so on), but these didn't hurt the game all that much. The biggest glitch I found was the scene where you go to get Axyl and you enter his house only to find a scene you had previously viewed play through again, ultimately resulting in a black screen that forced me to exit the game.

Glitches aside, there are a lot of cool aspects to this game. It felt very authentic in its Final Fantasy approach, and for that I must give it praise. The graphics were well done and well chosen, the music was fantastic, and the cinematography was very nice. I really liked the opening sequence (if I was going to show someone any scene from this game, it would be that one. It's just amazingly well done). Give the game an hour or so of your time and try to ignore the faults, because the world itself far outweighs the problems. It's just too bad there hasn't been an update yet, because this game has some real potential.