thebitterroost

Sounds like he/she set the pitch wheel's range to around an octave, started the chord with the wheel down, eased it up to 0, then hits the mod wheel (or aftertouch) hard at the top of each major note. Pretty sure that's it. Is that what you meant?

I don't think "female-fronted" has ever really been thought of as a subgenre to most folks. More of a tag than anything. Probably should be dropped if it's being used as anything more than that. Were magazines/critics/etc using that term when people like Doro and Lita Ford were fronting metal bands, I wonder?

As someone who did this not too long ago, use an emulator. I don't have quite as many large chunks of spare time like I did when this game came out. I replayed it on ePSXe, which has a great fast-forward/frameskip functionality that I toggled to a controller button using joy2key. Honestly, the vast majority of battles in this game can be run through by just holding down the "ok" button. You'll take a bit more damage, but like most FF games, it costs very little to have a constant supply of 99 healing items. Once you replay it (and I may be treading on some folks' hallowed ground here), I'd be interested to hear how you think the writing/story holds up. Having not played it since 97-98, I had forgotten most of the story and dialogue, and was actually kinda surprised at how amateurish and silly it seemed. I remember thinking something like "ah, so terrible YA fiction started in Japan, afterall..."