There's a Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo hidden away on the dash board. I've still never played a single FF so I'm downloading it now for a looky-look.

but I think the PC used rubbish MIDI sampling

As far as I can tell from other opinions, XIII and XIII-2 aren't particularly great entrance points to the series. In fact, there hasn't been a truly great game (in my opinion at least) since the PSX, so you're not going to find it there!

They've always had their quirks, but they seem to have been getting progressively more 'WTF Japan?!' in recent years.

Really? One of the party in VII was a stuffed slot machine....

[]...a robotic talking cat who is friendly, but often unreliable and speaks with a Scottish accent.[14] In Final Fantasy VII, he rides on the back of an unnamed robotic moogle; in subsequent adaptations, he either walks by himself or rides Red XIII. As a robot, he is able to be rebuilt and replaced, and is controlled by Reeve Tuesti, whose original intent during Final Fantasy VII was to infiltrate Cloud's group and sabotage their resistance efforts on behalf of his employers.[15] He is revealed to be a spy but convinces the party that he has had a change of heart[15] and later volunteers to extract the black materia at the Temple of the Ancients, noting that he was a robot and thus could easily be sacrificed. However, Cait Sith also states that, despite there being several toys with the same appearance, he was a unique being that would be willing to sacrifice himself to protect the Planet

And leaves you almost powerless in a series of random battles as you try to find her to get it back.

Yuffie and Vincent are optional characters, consequently they don't appear in any of the end-of-game FMV. I think I'm right in saying you can encounter Yuffie before too as there's a very small chance she'll appear in a random encounter battle in the forests near Wutai.

That's Yuffie does that.

Wow, just checking into the above I found this: http://www.jegged.com/Playstation/Final ... anics.html

I had no idea stuff like that was built in. Dialogue from the word go will affect something really arbitrary quite far into the game. Neat

Reading those mechanics, to get Yuffie you'd have to make a point of doing everything you can to appease her while pissing off everyone else as much as possible.

I can barely remember the combat from FFXV but this isn’t any more complex than smashing square and occasionally pressing triangle once before smashing square a ton.

It's very much not the combat system from the original ff7, which is why I haven't played it beyond the demo. In that I thought it were inferior and just made me sad that with every game since FF12 they've gone deeper into a well of cinematic but boring real time combat.

Can you not turn on a classic combat mode?

There's a better thread for this.

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... &start=200

This is much better since Tifa & Jessie have turned up.