I've just finished playing DoC again and I'm so frustrated. I desperately wanted this game to be good, but whilst some of it is really enjoyable, a lot of it felt so halfbaked. Why the hell didn't SE think things through!?!?!

Some of the game I have to kinda cringe my way through, but the reason I do play it every now and again is because some of the storyline was actually GOOD!!! I thought the concept of Omega, the Final Weapon, and the counterbalance of Chaos was a really good concept, and Weiss made a potentially great villain. Now I say potentially because he just wasn't in it enough for me. If you put the gameplay aside (I kinda enjoyed it, but that's just me), and just look at the story, you can see that the basics of it make for an excellent plotline. I just felt that not enough attention was paid to the present of the game, too many flashbacks for my liking, and it was difficult to follow the flashbacks in the order they came in the game. That's not always a bad thing, but in an overkill situation it can really make a person's head spin

I liked the Shelke and Shalua thing, and I thought they got the balance right with those two. Yeah it wasn't nice seeing Shalua get killed off, but the effect it had on Shelke's character development was pretty good. I thought Rosso and Azul had a little too much airtime, and that made Nero and Weiss's character development suffer because they really didn't get going until nearly the end of the game. And "hail Weiss"? When I first played this game that annoyed me because it took so long for us to see who Weiss was. He was supposed to be this super-awesome powerful villain, on a par with Sephiroth, but even when he became Omega he still didn't seem very powerful to me

Deepground was a concept with a lot of potential. Such a shame that these killing machines from underground were all so uniform! And I don't just mean that you fight the same soldiers all the way through, which is bad enough, but some dialogue with some of the soldiers underneath the Tsviets would have been cool.

I did like the fact that Cloud and the others were really in the background, it did make things fresh and allowed the other characters to kinda shine through. But maybe not so much as they were in DoC, a little more from them would have been nice too. You never see the outcome of the fight between Rosso and Cloud!

Anyways I could go on, but I'm ready to hear other people's thoughts now.

there was to much rosso and should be some much bigger fights with the other advent children members helping you right before your eyes to show the epicness of the battles as its only shown in the videos in the game itself theres not such of a big sense of war around you just small fights.

Yes I agree. The gravitas of the situation they were in didn't really come through, and though Vincent was the lead character and did become the hero in the end with Chaos, he was pretty much on his own with it.

The game overall is a good one but like you said far too many flash back's for heavens sake stay in the present but like any game there is room for improvment.