One of the hallmarks of Final-Fantasy-style computer RPGs, as far as I'm concerned, is convoluted plots that lose my interest along the way.
I don't play FF-style games, mind you. I watch littlestar play them, lose track of what's going on as I wander into and out of contact with the game, then read summaries and find the plots just plain old goofy.
I just read Crisis on Infinite Earths.
It was sitting there in the used book store, where I have a giant pile of credit. I picked up Crisis and American Virgin as I was curious about both.
When Crisis rolled around initially, I wasn't really a reader of DC comics. I was pretty firmly stuck in with the X-Men and G.I. Joe, and read nothing else. My closest contact with Crisis was when I picked up issue 12 of Secret Wars. That's pretty tangential, since Secret Wars was, I've been told, Marvel's attempt to have a similar cross-cutting, all-encompassing comic event in the vein of Crisis.
The goal behind Crisis was pretty solid. DC found itself with a messy complex of older and more recent continuities. While I'm a strong advocate for simply pressing the giant reset button rather than trying to find and "in story" way to fix continuity issues, at the time the idea of actually making it a grand event was reasonably novel and decent. It gave you time to pay proper attention to fans of some of the continuities you'd be removing, effectively "honoring" the characters they loved by writing their removal into the story.
That said, and without meaning any disrespect to Marv Wolfman because it was 1985 and comics were written that way, the overall story reminded me every step of the way of those overly convoluted, hard to follow, hard to swallow plots from Final Fantasy and its computer RPG brethren. Much like the various FF games, the core concept is solid, but the final execution is needlessly labyrinthine. In both cases, I find myself saying, "Really?" rather more often than I'd really like.
It also doesn't help that DC of the time was rife with goofy names. Monitor? Good name. The world-destroying, event-causing enemy being the Anti-Monitor? No. Psycho Pirate?
Psycho Pirate?
So, I didn't find the story all that engaging overall. Some of that comes down to writing that fits its era -- much like the Chris Claremont X-Men dialogue that I loved as a kid but can barely read now -- but a lot of it also comes down to a plot that was oddly overdone for the key story elements it was trying to hit.
Of course, if I were a long-time DC comics fan in 1985, I might well have been completely rapt.