Quote: "Two sides can win, any amount of lossess can be taken, virtually infinite games can be had. Final Fantasy is always the same-- same group wins, no variations, the same characters die, etc."
Ah, but in Final Fantasy, each battle has its own outcome, and in each battle either side could potentially win. You choose your equipment and party based on strategies to defeat the computer. Yes, the story stays the same every time you play, but the story in chess stays the same as well, it is the moves that change. The basic story in chess is "White vs. Black" (or one side vs. the other), and that never changes, either.
Even the experience of reading a BOOK isn't always the same, as each time you read it you will be in a slightly different mind-set than the last time. Each time you read the book you will come away knowing more than you did the time before. I hardly think that you can justify the statement "Final Fantasy is always the same" when even if you were to record every action you performed the first time you played and then feed that back into the playstation for a second run, you would get different battles, items, etc.
The truth is that the freedom in Final Fantasy simply isn't a brand of freedom you enjoy. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
