Despite doing my utmost to remain balanced in writing this second retrospective on the Final Fantasy games, I’d imagine things are about to get ugly in its comments thread. I wasn’t commissioned to simply write a wikipedia-style historical document – but rather an informative opinion piece. As the latter FF games have been played and loved by a vast number of people (a far larger audience than the Nintendo FF games ever enjoyed) readers will likely be closely reading this to see their opinions validated. Generally speaking people don’t like other people with a platform telling them that things they love sometimes actually aren’t very good (or vice versa), so I’d imagine I’m going to get a hard time from some quarters.

We live in a society where everybody is entitled to their opinion and the attacking of others’ opinions is seen as a cardinal sin. There is no ultimate standard against which something is judged: if it’s good for you, it’s good, after all, that’s just your opinion. So the only right of expression left to people who disagree with one another is to attack the presentation of those opinions that differ to their own. In my experience, that usually means disagreeing readers shout that I’m a terrible writer when, what they probably mean is: ‘Your opinion frightens me because it’s different to mine but it was you, not me, that somebody paid to express it’*.

Indeed, the fact that everybody has an opinion and that all opinions are seen as equally valid, for websites in particular, is a primary source of generating income. By having a comments thread a web page can greatly multiply its number of hits (a good discussion will ensure participants hit refresh many times over) and so the advertisers are kept happy. That’s partly why the newspapers/ news phone-in shows do it these days.

But doing so devalues the critic/ commentator to just another voice amongst many: the start point to a discussion rather than the final word. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Perhaps I’m just kidding myself and I’m actually really no good after all.

Eiether way, I’m happy the editor left this cheeky footnote in: “If any of the views represented in this article have affected you, sit down, take a deep breath and maybe pop outside for some fresh air. Don’t worry; the world will still be there after all. Always remember, the views expressed in this article are Eurogamer’s own and do not necessarily represent the general views of Final Fantasy fandom, although, if we’re honest about it, we really do think ours are the right ones.”

You can read the article here

*EDIT: As if by magic!: Feanor says: “What a surprise, a poorly written attack on 8 and 10 while the terminally boring 9 gets praised”.

Now, those two sections might well be poorly-written (how odd to pick them out in isolation though) but why throw that insult in when the point you’re trying to make is that you disagree with the opinion?

All opinions are equal but some opinions are more equal than others.