I have not played first or any nes.. mostly Snes stuff and playstation things. Infact with somebodys help I made my sucky Re-release of seven better. Backgrounds are much better.. Which is sweet. I have some black bar in bottom of my screen but man, it looks better.. Like there was some person who made widescreen thing in Beyond good and evil. i'm happy with some people NOT freaking out and actually made older games awesome. =)

I actually don't mind the difficulty of the original, makes things pretty fun in my personal opinion. It is why I enjoy the PS1 port of the original since I have the option of playing that difficulty with the enhanced look from those ports mentioned, at least the GBA and PSP port. I haven't checked out the iOS port so am not sure if it looks any better or not.
If you are referring to the PC re-release of the game, I have to admit, that port is kind of underrated, at least the one done by Eidos back in 1998. (Not sure about the current re-release on Square's online store) I am not a fan of VII but from what I tried of the PC port I didn't see it as a disservice to the original like many fans seem to make it out to be. They mostly aim at the soundtrack and I can wholeheartedly disagree because the original version came with a Yamaha Softsynth that is required for the game's soundtrack. With that the music sounds phenomenal, in some cases it even sounds better than the Playstation version. Combine that with those mods you mentioned and you have a pretty nice version of VII to play.

I've played that game a lot.. (in some sense) I do not say that I will wipe my ass on that ocean bottoms weapons ass. It is hard.
I did also mod my music in FFVII it is now pretty awesome.

I also have tried a lot made my DOS music better.. I mean with Police Quest 3 and stuff. I use Bassmidi and all is more great when old (we had soundcourse) and that was just working in mickeys Jigsaw-puzzles.

Taking advantage of MIDI, good man, good man. A lot of DOS MIDI music sounds great if you have the right settings for it that does not utilize Microsoft's Wavetable Synth. If you haven't already you should look into MUNT, the Roland MT-32 emulator for those games that use that for MIDI music. At this point in time it sounds near identical to the actual unit and I can confirm this as an MT-32 owner myself.

I've tried stuff.. it actually in many games sound lot better with Bassmidi and with "weeds" I tried other and I have opinion that I like others but it is fun to try also *tries hangnoose with rope* ..=)

Edit: I mean FFVII.. I will break those tits though.. I mean Alone in the Dark. Best music, horrible eye and rat bastard with that girl.

I don't hate it. I just stopped caring after VII.

I played IV and loved it, VI and loved it, VII and I liked it, but I was starting to get a little tired of the concept. I played VIII about halfway through and then stopped (both the game and paying attention to the series).

Simply put, I grew up and evolved. The series stayed the same.

I'm sure it will have some appeal to an entire new generation of teenagers and guys in their twenties, but I'm no longer the target audience for this.

I don't really mind seeing beloved franchises stopping at some point and making room for something new. Everything has an end.

I think that for a lot of older fans who were around for the earlier games, the series has ended some time ago. They'd call it another name, we wouldn't care.

I don't really "hate" 12, it's just that it was "bland". A lot of the issues I have with it were already mentioned by others; in short it felt like a game that didn't knew what it wanted to be.

One one side it looked like it wanted to be a MMO-like, with real-time'ish combat, open-world'ish etc... but at the same time trying to keep some FF element in it: as a result it failed in both. You have basically the choice between using gambit and letting the game play itself or controlling the characters yourself and struggle with the interface.

Also but the skills system (the licenses, etc...), leveling system and even the characters abilities where not very exciting; I am not a fan of games where all characters are "interchangeable"; here you only needed to chose the characters of your party based on their "look"; their starting "skills" didn't matter at all, any characters could easily become a mage, ranged or tank, etc... added to that the lackluster summon, the luck based chain special attack (forget how it is called),etc... in the end "not as bad a Xenoblade" is the only good thing I can say about FFXII combat.

For the plot it felt the same, on one side it tried to remain a FF game but on the other it seemed to try to cater to western audience but once again IMHO failed in both: most of the characters weren't very interesting and even if it had it's lot of intrigue, plot twist, etc... none of it ever managed to interest me; if anything some of the secondary plot/characters were a lot more interesting than the main one.

The world in itself was not that much better, there was one or two interesting level but most felt like generic heroic fantasy stock locations.

If I have to make one compliment toward FFXII it would be about the English dubbing, while FFX caused my ears to bleed and made me want to violently choke the two main protagonists every time they opened their mouths, FFXII dubbing was mostly good-to-ok'ish.

I actually really liked 12, even though it felt to me like STAR WARS: THE FINAL FANTASY. The gameplay is decent enough (even though I don't really like the license system) and I don't mind the characters outside of Vaan and Penelo. I think it's a good enough game, but I think a lot of people came into it looking for a more generic story and gameplay styling, along with more of a story since this game gets kind of sparse with it later on. All around I think it's a really solid game, though.

Most of the main series doesn't really take place in a school. Really, the only games that come to mind are the Persona series, and even then, only 3 and 4 really put a strong emphasis on the schools themselves. Otherwise, the mainline SMT games (which include Lucifer's Call, as that's actually the third game in the main series but the first to see the light of day in countries outside of Japan) are mostly about pseudo-philosophical religious battles regarding how the world is build/rebuilt. Hell, the second SMT on the SNES seems to have more cyberpunk influences more than anything. I'd recommend giving some more of the non-Persona games a shot, like Strange Journey, or the original SMT 1 and 2 for SNES (Never released in English, but translation patches exist for them), as they might be more of your style.

Unfortunately, though, most of them have/use the same artists, so there's not really escaping that if you don't like the style. At least in the SNES games, due to sprite graphics, you don't really have to deal with it.

Yeah I'll admit I'm only familiar with Persona 3&4 as well as Shin Megami: Lucifer's call.

As I said, I liked the last one, but i really I really don't like their art style :\

Tidus at least had sort of a reason for whining, the whole being disjointed from your time and waking up in a mysterious land thing. Vaan is sort of just there for bad comic relief and doesn't do anything.

What was that dude where he was like Solid Snake: Blonde mullet?

I enjoyed XII. At worst, it was my fifth favorite numbered Final Fantasy. Vaan was rather annoying, however.

Vaan is horrible (and looks like tidus) but I have played FF X-2.. which mostly was Spice girls.

Edit: I liked Paine, also those girls, Yuna sucks though.

I don't hate the game, but it is the only FF apart from the MMO I've never played all the way through. I've tried twice, the first I stopped playing because of a reason I don't remember but it wasn't because I disliked the game, it was just real life stuff getting in the way.

I tried again way later and got quite far in it, but had a crash which also somehow iirc corrupted my session save file and I couldn't bring myself to going all the way back through a torturous section again.

I'd say it's time to try it again though, this thread has inspired me to break my PS2 out this weekend and give it a shot.

I enjoyed playing it.
It wasn't something special "only" a very good game.
If you would ask about FF XIII than yes, i hate that game.