I also recognize that effectively nothing actually changed from roaming a world map
There isn't much, but there are actually a couple of hidden locations related to important sidequests, like the zodiac weapons. I think there might also be something there related to the post-game content in the International version, but I'm not certain.
I'll actually copy a comment I saw recently by someone else who knows more about Final Fantasy than I do. Apparently it's much older than that.
Though historically the ATB system was invented for FF4 and used by all games until FFX itself before being used again for X-2, though I think most of them had the option of "active or wait" like Chrono Trigger to pick from. I haven't played most of those FFs to say for certain. Not that it makes it better, but it technically was the return to form and earlier games just had less you cared to watch happen.
It's wild to me how he left partially because of FFX, which is widely regarded as one of the best, and is my personal favourite.
Yes, lets ignore real problems in favour of turning them into partisan shouting matches.
It's worked so well until now.
You're not wrong. I still remember the day I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline "video games earn more than movies for the first time ever," and I immediately knew where the industry was headed. In retrospect, I was 100% correct.
Weird people were forced out of the industry over the past decade or more, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with making games.
Clearly they would rather be consumed by other things instead.
Well we're going to suffer until enough people do figure it out.
The sad part is that this is a very well known phenomena, yet people become too consumed by everything else to even care about learning of such warnings left behind by long dead civilizations.
Civilization exists because enough people know that we're better off working together than against each other.
All media consumed supplants the ordinary brain function.
Laws aren't enough for something of this magnitude. The general population needs to grow to match the much greater challenges presented by modern technology, or we're going to descend into another dark age until we do learn how to behave.
He knows exactly what he's doing, and he's going to continue to do it until people stop expecting machines to solve all their problems for them.