It seems to me that they tried too hard to make it a more visual game.

I agree completely that the overworld and the character models themselves are just too blury to make out. I think Square was more focused on the character attitudes, storyline and FMV's to actually try to upgrade the overworld and battle system visuals. From what I remember reading about in reviews, Square was trying to get away from the anime/cartoony character/world models of VII and make the characters more "human" to make it easier to believe the storylines and places in the world. To that affect they did a good job but it would have looked nicer if they didn't rush the process. I'm glad they learned their lesson and applied it to IX. IMO IX was beautiful and visuall superior to anything on the PSOne.

I think the game actually forced you to play a second time by offering you the Mascot at the end of Ch 5.  As always I would have liked to see all of the jobs come back from VI and Tactics/Advance but I feel they made some pretty nice substitutions (dark knight, mascot, gun mage, a trainer that can't summon monsters (strange)). I'll have to say my favorite dressphere as far as practicality goes was Lady Luck (with the sound turned off ... repetitive sayings are the enemy). Once you got all three girls to master the experience ability it all you have to do was walk down the Mi'ihen Highroad from Luca to Djose with a lure bracer on and they go from Level 1 to 20+. As far as looks goes I'm not going with anything less than Yuna's Floral Fallal (Damn!)

The only thing I found that I remotely didn't like was the traditional "hold-your-hand" approach to "subtly" informing the player as to where to go next. Big yellow and blue text when they talked about towns and places in the world. The utter need to repeat incessantly the towns/places name. I get it, I get it, we have to go to Balfonheim next, geez! I felt very juvinile in not being challanged by the world map at all to where I had to go next.

It's like the old saying goes "half the fun is in getting there!"

Dude you have all of my deepest sympathies (says prayer for lost data). The only other time I have heard of this happening was when others have tried to play XII on the PS3. Apparantly it is a coding glitch and it will corrupt the data but it has only happened a few reported times on other forums. (example below)

http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=finalfantasy&thread.id=185245&view=by_date_ascending&page=2