In November of 2012, I saw the storyline of Final Fantasy VII from beginning to end for the very first time. That will also assuredly be the very last time I do so.

Despite the inaugural edition of GINPA dealing with Chrono Trigger, and this second edition dealing with perhaps the most revolutionary console RPG (at least in some respects) out there, I don’t hate popular Squaresoft RPG’s–I swear!

I’m finding it difficult to pin down the underlying reasons why I have the feeling that I will never play Final Fantasy VII ever again. Unlike what I experienced with Chrono Trigger, I didn’t 100% this game. I never bred a golden chocobo, I think I only Mastered one or two materia in total (one of them was Fire; the other must have been Restore), and I certainly didn’t come close to scratching any of the Weapons. So it certainly isn’t Final Fantasy VII Fatigue.

Or is it? I know I didn’t 100% the game because *I didn’t want to*. Not because I was in a hurry to finish the game, or because the main story was so gripping that I just _had_ to see what happened next instead of going on a sidequest, or because the rewards didn’t seem worth it (for the most part I know that the rewards are pretty sweet).

The more I think about it, the closer my radar is pointing towards the grind. I know that RPG’s in general are a grind. There’s something about Final Fantasy VII that seems grindier than other RPG’s that I’ve loved and would readily revisit, though. When I found myself at several points in the game too poor to afford new weaponry or materia, I had to grind for gil. When I saw how many AP I’d need just to level up a materia by one star, but felt that I needed the additional spell to proceed past some part of the game, I had to grind for AP. (Oddly enough, I never felt like I had to grind to defeat a particularly powerful boss, but perhaps that was because the gil- and AP-grinding conveniently resulted in EXP-grinding.)

When I found out what it took to breed a golden chocobo? Hoo, boy–I said, “No thank you” to that grinding.

In an odd way, even the mini-games felt like a grind. Probably because I ended up severely disliking them, but I had to sit through them in order to proceed. Learning the button prompts to march in the ceremony at Junon; doing squats; snowboarding; sitting through a chocobo race; taking control of the slap-fest between Tifa and Scarlet (and come on, really?)… these are all things that felt mechanically sub-par, were mandatory, that I had no desire to do, and that completely destroyed any forward momentum I felt from exploring the game world or experiencing the story.

Kind of like grinding, except at least with traditional grinding, you get something out of it. I suppose.

But let’s take this objectively. Is the grinding sensation of Final Fantasy VII really any different from any other game in the series, or RPG’s in general? Probably not. Final Fantasy VI had its own AP grinding. Final Fantasy VIII had the Draw system, which completely redefined what it is to grind. If you wanted to manipulate the Sphere grid the way you wanted to in Final Fantasy X, that could be a grind. Merriam-Webster’s alternate dictionary definition for “Dragon Quest” is “level grind”. (As fate would have it, Dragon Quest IV is most certainly a prime candidate for a GINPA.) And in all fairness to Final Fantasy VII, you could probably beat the main story with no more grinding than it would take to beat any of the other Final Fantasy games–that is to say, more or less a decent amount that never becomes unreasonable.

Perhaps the lack of desire to ever touch, or even smell, Final Fantasy VII again is because while it is a good game, and one I’m glad I finally experienced all the way through (instead of stopping near the end of Disc 2), I waited too long to do so. During the delay, I experienced games which I feel are superior, both within the series and outside of the series; both within the genre and outside of the genre. That the game has aged horribly aesthetically doesn’t particularly help it, but nor does this harm it, so I’m not considering that aspect of it.

But there are other aspects that don’t seem to age well, where older games in the series–and even other games which intentionally bill themselves as “old-school”–hold up just fine. The mishmash of minigames is part of that. They destroy the focus and tightness of the game, but I feel that if they were designed more carefully such that they held up better today, I might not mind them so much. The botched translation is another–it hindered my understanding of certain objectives, or at least, my enjoyment of some of the plot threads. And some of the dungeon design seems uninteresting today–from a structural standpoint, not so much an artistic one.

Meanwhile I find that its direct predecessor, Final Fantasy VI, somehow stays better-playing, better-sounding, better-designed and even better-looking–imagine that. (Some will argue that it’s because VI is one of my favorite games all-time, but I’ll argue that it’s my favorite because of those exact reasons.)And Final Fantasy VIII–for all of its detractors and the heinous nature of the Draw mechanic–still feels like a more tightly-focused, more tactical experience that remains more interesting and forward-thinking. In my eyes, these two titles have aged much better.

I did enjoy my time Final Fantasy VII. I liked enough of the sights, I really enjoyed Midgar, and AP-grinding aside, I did get a kick out of customizing my characters with Materia as a foreshadowing of things to come with VIII’s Junction system. Some part of me really wants to be able to commiserate with my fellow Final Fantasy veterans about the trials and tribulations of beating Emerald and Ruby weapon. Unfortunately, a much bigger part of me doesn’t ever want to do the work that gets me there, nor does it want to re-experience Cloud’s tale ever again.

Back in 1995 I owned Chrono Trigger for the Super NES and played the bejeezus out of it. Unfortunately, I never could get over the hump of beating the final boss, and after I foolishly sold it off along with the rest of my SNES-related items, I figured that hump would stay never surmounted.

Thank goodness for the Nintendo DS port, then.

Not including New Game+, I played through 100% of that port, which is something I rarely do nowadays. I did every sidequest. I got every special item. Unlocked every tech, double tech and triple tech. I even took down all of the bonus content available for the DS and iOS ports. I took down Lavos with vicious aplomb.

Instead of taking a breather, and then evaluating how I wanted to tackle New Game+, I erased my save, put the DS card back in the box, and went to eBay to post a sale auction. Title? “Chrono Trigger Complete, Like New”.

I liked Chrono Trigger when I first owned it, and I liked it just as much the second time around. Perhaps I don’t hold it in as high regard as most fans of videogaming do, but I truly, honestly really liked it.

I have absolutely zero desire to ever play it again.

Chrono Trigger is a game that I’d typically keep in my library. It’s a role-playing game, and even though I got every single piece of one-playthrough content I could have gotten, there’s still the challenge of beating the game under-leveled, or power-leveling to see how much patience you have. There are multiple party configurations with which you can march through and beat the game. Like exploring Marvel vs. Capcom teams, you can find out which “main” is your favorite. And specific to certain games, like Chrono Trigger, New Game+ exists solely for you to explore the game once again but in a different situation (in this case, marching through the game like a god just to see every one of its myriad endings).

I’ve been trying to figure out why I convulse at the thought of ever playing the game again. The one thing that I keep coming to again and again is the fatigue I developed with the game’s bonus content. Not present in the original, the additional quests you can go through comprise a sloppy patchwork of boring, zig-zag level design and irritating thrown-together tilesets of other existing dungeons. There’s no inventiveness to the dungeon layouts, and there’s only one truly interesting fan service reveal in the perhaps five to ten hours I spent doing extracurriculars. There are bonus weapons galore, and boy, are they worth it. But a weapon as a reward for a slog doesn’t make the slog itself any more interesting. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that, by the time I exhausted the extra content, Chrono Trigger had simply worn out its welcome. I just wanted to take the Epoch to Lavos and end it.

There’s a bit of irony to this, no? Extra content, which is supposed to get you to play the game more, has–in this case–made me not ever want to play the game again. Granted, the context is different; I did, in fact, play the game “more” than I would have if I just played through the main story one time. However, I might actually have the desire to play through the main story and even New Game+ more had the grueling experience going through the extra content not made me sick of the game. For the sake of a few extra hours of new stuff, I’ve given up a lifetime of extra hours replaying and enjoying the classic stuff.

Ultimately, this inaugural installment of GINPA is obviously less an indictment on the core game and moreso on the new content that Square Enix saw fit to slap onto the end of the game. It’s also indirectly an indictment of my decision to tenaciously pursue the completion of this content to the bitter end. Perhaps I should have tried some New Game+ gameplay before deciding to dip into the bonus content, so that I could see what I was missing back when I sold the original SNES cart, and experience it how I would have back in the old days before seeing what newfangled dungeons were lying in wait.

But perhaps Square Enix should have made extra content that, you know, wasn’t boring in the first place.