Final Fantasy

[badotori]

I'll always have a soft spot for Chocobo Hot & Cold in IX - partly because of the music, but mainly because it made mashing the crap out of the X button into a mini-game that I enjoyed, which takes some doing.

But, I gotta admit, I did love me some Blitzball. I especially enjoyed recruiting players that tended to get overlooked (Zev Ronso, Vilucha, Shuu) and levelling them up to epic proportions. And I remember getting addicted to that chocobo race around Yunalesca's temple - took me a good few hours to get all them treasure chests and then still beat the other chocobo as well.

It's one element that really suffered in FFXII thanks to its maturity and drama really. There wasn't really a place for fun mini-games that gave a different impression of the world you were in and that you could just play to pass the time/reap rewards.

[TKz]

Aside from the battle system that I just couldn't get into, one of my biggest problems with FFXII was the setting. It just felt far too western for me, I like my Final Fantasies more like X in terms of colour and shiney stuff everywhere. I get what they were going for with 12, but it just didn't work for me and left me feeling like it was just any old RPG, it lacked the flair that FF usually brings to the table. It worked in 6, it worked in Vagrant Story, it was okay in IX and I'd assume it works in Tactics, but for a PS2 Final Fantasy, I didn't like it.

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

[badotori]

I thought the urban areas were brilliant in FFXII, the likes of Rabanastre, Bhujerba and Mt. Bur-Omisace were some of the more interesting cities or towns that I've seen in an FF game. That's probably due to the graphical opportunities that the PS2 presented and the fact that I still haven't played 7, thus haven't walked around Midgar. The bit that annoyed me though about XII was how quickly the dungeons and other locales became noticeably samey. They just became so stereotypical - "you are now entering a desert, it is sunny and orange", "this is marshland, it's wet and boggy" - that I stopped giving a shit about Ivalice until I got back to a city and actually felt like I was exploring a lived-in world. Whilst, in FFX for instance, Bikanel Desert had rusting machina, collapsed building and signs of life in it. Macalania Forest was this sparkling, idyllic place to marvel at. It felt like Square, to me, appeared to care more about creating Spira then they did about Ivalice. But, that might just have been me expecting too much from XII, which I still do every time I go back to it. I've still only got up to Mt. Bur-Omisace, so I may be missing out on something amazingly beautiful - I dunno.

I think it stems from FFXII being influenced by Square's MMO's - whenever I've played an MMO, I find my attention wanders more when I'm traipsing around countryside.

Edited February 15, 2010 by badotori

[PkmnTrainerJ]

Same.

As for fav mini game? The Card Game in VIII, it is wonderful. Followed by....Blitzball in X. In X-2 it can go suck a nut.

Agreed. X-2 Blitzball sucked wang. Blitzball is easily my favourite mini-game.

[Clawson]

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

I just pretended they were wasted.

[hugobomb]

Ugh, yes Quistis, maybe you were a bit too harsh on Rinoa but maybe, just maybe, the apology could wait until AFTER the major political assination? Would that be too much to ask?

That bit never fails to piss me off

[TKz]

Ugh, yes Quistis, maybe you were a bit too harsh on Rinoa but maybe, just maybe, the apology could wait until AFTER the major political assination? Would that be too much to ask?

That bit never fails to piss me off

What about 'I FROZE UP. I'm a sniper and I've never had a problem firing my weapon in battle, at least not until it was convenient to the plot!' Also reaching the part with Chocobos in FFX made my very uneventful day.

[hugobomb]

Ugh, yes Quistis, maybe you were a bit too harsh on Rinoa but maybe, just maybe, the apology could wait until AFTER the major political assination? Would that be too much to ask?

That bit never fails to piss me off

What about 'I FROZE UP. I'm a sniper and I've never had a problem firing my weapon in battle, at least not until it was convenient to the plot!' Also reaching the part with Chocobos in FFX made my very uneventful day.

He tops it later on 'Oh by the way, we all grew up in the same orphanage together and Edea raised us' 'Why didn't I mention I might of had a problem shooting the woman who raised me in the face? Ummmm.......... oohhhhhh...'

[Mongrel]

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

Yeah, the battle system is part of the reason I just can't finish FFXII. It just made everything look samey - oh there's more wolves and fucking chickens, but they are a different colour. I understand that it was the same in past games, but at least there there was sort of an element of surprise as to what you'd get.

That and the gambit system is fucking awful, IMO.

[TKz]

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

Yeah, the battle system is part of the reason I just can't finish FFXII. It just made everything look samey - oh there's more wolves and fucking chickens, but they are a different colour. I understand that it was the same in past games, but at least there there was sort of an element of surprise as to what you'd get.

That and the gambit system is fucking awful, IMO.

God yes, gambit was terrible. It wouldn't have been SO bad if you didn't have to fucking buy the commands. What the fuck was that about? Though I do think a big part of it for me was that I didn't like that system in Final Fantasy. Dragon Age had a similar system and I enjoyed it in that, but that's not what I like Final Fantasy for.

[stokeriño]

Came across this rant about XIII, written by that Dom guy on the Megatokyo site. It's exactly the kind of shit I need to hear, because to be honest I'd rather convince myself to save money rather than convince myself that the £35 expenditure is going to be possibly-maybe worthwhile. >_>

Late last night, I decided to take a break after a nightmarishly busy month of moving and AOD 2010 prep work by sitting down for a half hour with Final Fantasy XIII. I had saved my game just before the end, and I figured that I'd earned a nice half hour of sitting down and watching the fireworks. Eighteen minutes later, I was done with Final Fantasy XIII forever - not because I'd beaten the game, but because the game had pushed me with so many horrible design decisions and uninteresting segments that I finally washed my hands it before I broke a controller.

So, a month and some 50 hours after I first cracked the game with low expectations (seriously, have you heard any of the insanely bad buzz this game has been getting? Trust me, it's all justified), I'm ready to write out everything that Final Fantasy XIII did wrong and why it was wrong.

The short answer on what went wrong: Everything. FFXIII was designed with diametrically opposed design goals, and succeeded at none of them.

The long answer

The long answer is a bit more involved, and I'm going to sum it up by saying that Final Fantasy XIII is the result of too many cooks throwing everything in the pot, while other cooks just take things away from the pot. What's left is a watery, sour monstrosity that can barely be called soup. I'll go system by system and pick apart what went right and what went wrong.

Part 1: Level design

The first thing everyone mentions about Final Fantasy XIII is the level design, AKA One Long Tunnel. Honestly, I don't mind the tunnel thing - I'm used to visual novels these days, and those are some of the most linear experiences you'll ever see. But you have to have a damn good game to support the tunnel, and while Final Fantasy X was also one long line for the first half of the game, it had an interesting story to prop up the rather dull journey, and it rewarded you for your patience by opening itself up in the later half and making a huge number of areas more accessible than before. Final Fantasy XIII finally gives you a more open world in chapter 12 (out of 13), but even then it's just one big grassy plain with some tentacles of even more linear dungeons radiating out from the center. So you're left with some very pretty but uninteresting "hold forward" dungeons for 90% of the game.

Even worse is the fact that a lot of these dungeons extend the amount of time you spend in them with long periods of dead time and criminally underdeveloped gimmick mechanics. The biggest culprit in the wasted animation department is the "treasure chests" of the game, which are floating orbs that bob up and down to grab your attention. When you open one of these, your avatar stops, turns, pokes the orb with one hand, and after a flash of light, you get your item. It's about two seconds longer than your average "Treasure chest opens, you get your stuff" animation from other RPGs; it seems like a minor gripe at first, but after a few hundred chests you start to despise the animation as you just want to get on with the game, especially combined with all sorts of artificial dead time as you wait for bridges to extend and platforms to float lazily into place - one dungeon is just a series of buttons and extending bridges, and it's excruciating to combine that with the interminable periods of running without anything happening - and there are a lot of those segments.

A final frustration is that you see occasional hints of a more involved experience than "walk until you get to the next monster," but they take the form of half-assed gimmicks that just don't work. A prime example of this is one dungeon that tries to play around with a rainy-sunny weather pattern, with different monsters that appear depending on which switch has been pulled. But because they didn't develop the concept very well, it was just as easy to keep running forward as it was to play along and hit the switches, which wasted a good 15 seconds every time I hit them as the game needlessly cut away to the sky and showed it being overtaken by the new weather pattern.

Combine that with the "We didn't know how to do towns so we gave up" and all of the window dressing feels like curtains thrown over a strip mine to try and disguise the mess.

Part 2: Mind-Numbing Repetition and Inexcusable Dead Time

Related to the piss-poor level design is a massive, unbelievable oversight by the developers: the game they worked so hard to make so pretty is just plain boring. The combat system is mostly automated, with you only taking control of one character, and there is potential within the combat system for things to be interesting - some fights are a dance of role switches, burn phases, fortification phases, and so on. But more often than not, you just go Attacker/Blaster/Healer or Attacker/Blaster/Blaster and spam the X button for seven minutes. Yes, a good portion of the dungeon encounters are designed to last upwards of seven minutes each. They're not particularly interesting minutes, either - in many cases, the enemies will be resistant to physical attacks, so your Attacker will forgo the visually interesting and painstakingly crafted physical attack chain in favor of standing in place and waving his/her arms around like a moron. It's even worse as a Blaster, Healer, Enhancer, or Jammer, because you never actually move. The camera stays still, you stand still, and all of that talk about how every battle is like watching a pre-rendered movie from another game turns into "Every battle is like watching grass grow."

God forbid that you try and play a Defender, which, by the way, the game forces you to do a couple of times. The only commands you have as a Defender are "Taunt" and "Defend," with a "Revenge" option available that can barely break the monotony of having to watch your character make "come on" motions and then curl up into a fetal ball for minutes at a time. There's a part of the game where you only have Snow and Hope in your party, and for that segment of the game, I had to stand there and watch a ski bum get beaten like a pinata for 4 minutes before I could actually take any offensive actions, just because the plot forced me to field a terrible team that wasn't capable of generating an offense against more than one person at a time. It was soul-crushingly boring watching minutes upon minutes of "Taunt" "Taunt" "Taunt" "Taunt" and "Defend" "Defend" "Defend" "Defend" while I had to wait for the AI partner to do actual damage. I'll get into the combat system in a lot more detail in the next portion of this rant, which is already way too long and deserves to be longer.

The last part of my kvetching about how boring portions of the game is the sheer repetitiveness of the subquests. In Chapter 11 of the game, you finally are plopped into something resembling an open map (it's just a giant plain). You finally have some subquests to do here, too - but all of the subquests are exactly the same: "walk across the map and kill this guy." There is no variation, there is no break of pattern, there's just walking to a new place that looks like the last place you were in, then killing a monster that says "mission" over its head. Even the points where they tried to break up the monotony seem like colossal failures, like the abortion of a chocobo-finding mini-game that basically involves running in a circle and spamming X (this is a theme, by the way), or the mech mini-game that mostly involves holding forward and ignoring everything. Other than that, there is zero variation in the game play. Look forward to 60 hours of trying to train your pet to hit X for you, with occasional actual interaction when you have to change jobs - then it's back to hitting X a lot.

Oh boy! Next time I talk about such exciting things as boss design, menu design, narrative structure, and the most annoying sounds you'll ever hear out of your speakers.

[Benji]

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

Yeah, the battle system is part of the reason I just can't finish FFXII. It just made everything look samey - oh there's more wolves and fucking chickens, but they are a different colour. I understand that it was the same in past games, but at least there there was sort of an element of surprise as to what you'd get.

That and the gambit system is fucking awful, IMO.

God yes, gambit was terrible. It wouldn't have been SO bad if you didn't have to fucking buy the commands. What the fuck was that about? Though I do think a big part of it for me was that I didn't like that system in Final Fantasy. Dragon Age had a similar system and I enjoyed it in that, but that's not what I like Final Fantasy for.

As I've said a billion times, FFXII was a good game, but it belonged in its own series, potentially taking a "[THING HERE] Story" style spin-off of Vagrant Story, it just doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy in any way, shape or form, and I say the exact same about Final Fantasy XI.

EDIT: Eurgh, I wish I hadn't read more on FFXIII, this game does NOT look good, I think Square-Enix need to sit back and take a serious look at the franchise, because if all these reviews are right, they've turned the ultimate goose laying golden eggs into a generic cash cow.

[TKz]

So let me get this straight, his problems with this RPG were that the areas to wander around didn't have enough places to wander around in... That it takes an extra 3 seconds to open 'treasure chests'... That the battle system doesn't involve characters moving around and is mostly dominated by selecting the attack and watching it happen... you know, like most RPG's ever... and that when you play as a class specifically made for DEFENCE... you can't attack... and that you have to press X a lot.

MADNESS! Allow me to go and cancel my pre-order.

[Ruki]

Does anyone else not like the whole 'being able to see the enemies' thing? I get it's trying to be more realistic, but I highly doubt if I was wandering around a field and saw a couple of huge ass Werewolves with Scythes, that they'd just be walking around in a circle non-stop.

Yeah, the battle system is part of the reason I just can't finish FFXII. It just made everything look samey - oh there's more wolves and fucking chickens, but they are a different colour. I understand that it was the same in past games, but at least there there was sort of an element of surprise as to what you'd get.

That and the gambit system is fucking awful, IMO.

God yes, gambit was terrible. It wouldn't have been SO bad if you didn't have to fucking buy the commands. What the fuck was that about? Though I do think a big part of it for me was that I didn't like that system in Final Fantasy. Dragon Age had a similar system and I enjoyed it in that, but that's not what I like Final Fantasy for.

As I've said a billion times, FFXII was a good game, but it belonged in its own series, potentially taking a "[THING HERE] Story" style spin-off of Vagrant Story, it just doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy in any way, shape or form, and I say the exact same about Final Fantasy XI.

EDIT: Eurgh, I wish I hadn't read more on FFXIII, this game does NOT look good, I think Square-Enix need to sit back and take a serious look at the franchise, because if all these reviews are right, they've turned the ultimate goose laying golden eggs into a generic cash cow.

I am with Benji here. Bring us back to the pre-XII era! Everything from I to X (and while X-2 gets a lot of flack, it's NOT a bad game) I loved! Why can't they go back to what they're good at?

Still gonna pick it up, still gonna play it, and still gonna beat it...but this very well may be strike two!

[Sousa]

his problems with this RPG were that the areas to wander around didn't have enough places to wander around in...

Right, exploration, one of the key components of pretty much every Final Fantasy game. Looking for hidden chests and crazy weapons and other wacky shit. I can't imagine a Final Fantasy game where you aren't roaming the side areas of the map looking for hidden gidgets and goodies.

That it takes an extra 3 seconds to open 'treasure chests'...

When I was a freshman in college, Nintendo and Rare put out a game called Star Fox Adventures that basically cast Fox McCloud in a Zelda-style action-RPG-beat-'em-up-break-'iz-neck type game. It wasn't the world's best game for a number of reasons, but one of the things that killed the experience for me was the fact that whenever you opened a treasure chest--ANY treasure chest--or picked up an item--ANY item--there would be a five second cut scene of Fox looking at the item, throwing his arms up for joy, and very slowly reaching down to pick it up. It wasn't the game's only problem, but by about hour two I couldn't stand it anymore. Stupid shit like that removes the player from the action. Have you ever noticed that when you watch a movie, they usually don't show you every time a character takes a dump? There's a reason for that. Nobody cares.

That the battle system doesn't involve characters moving around and is mostly dominated by selecting the attack and watching it happen... you know, like most RPG's ever...

When you're controlling one of three party members and the battle system is hyped to the moon as something that's an exciting change of pace for the series (I haven't even been following the press blitz for this game and even I knew that), then finding out that much of the control is taken out of the player's hands can be sobering.

and that when you play as a class specifically made for DEFENCE... you can't attack...

Oh, bullshit. In every single RPG I've ever played you can ALWAYS attack, regardless of your class--it's the core move of pretty much every video game of this type. Final Fantasy has had defensive classes in the game since Final Fantasy I (the Fighter/Knight class), and you have ALWAYS been able to attack. Not being able to inflict damage upon an enemy via a basic weapon attack is the most retrograde move I have ever seen for an RPG. It makes zero sense.

and that you have to press X a lot.

Yeah, I can't imagine a video game reviewer ever complaining about button-mashing in a game (much less a goddamn RPG). That'd be just unheard of.

[Liam]

To be honest, I wish people who hadn't played the game waited until they played the game before moaning about this somehow being the death of the Final Fantasy series. The reviews have largely been good, and from what I've heard, the game will probably be good to play, but maybe lacking a little bit in replayability due to some stylistic/design choices. One guy ranting about the negatives shouldn't suddenly mean that the game won't be good, or most importantly, that you won't enjoy it.

[probablyoliver]

According to wiki, some Japanese magazine gave XIII 120/100, which is a pretty good score if you ask me.

[Benji]

To be honest, I wish people who hadn't played the game waited until they played the game before moaning about this somehow being the death of the Final Fantasy series. The reviews have largely been good, and from what I've heard, the game will probably be good to play, but maybe lacking a little bit in replayability due to some stylistic/design choices. One guy ranting about the negatives shouldn't suddenly mean that the game won't be good, or most importantly, that you won't enjoy it.

I'll never say it's the death of Final Fantasy because, barring absolute retardation, it'll never end. There's a difference between the high quality of games they have put out and ensured they stay somewhat faithful to the franchise compared with everything since XI, thus the "golden egg" vs "cash cow" comment.

[hugobomb]

I liked XII, but again it doesn't have the same effect on me as VII,VIII and X had. It's in a group with IX and X-2 'Good but not great FF games'. Though I have to say I do like the monster appearing on screen, cause the idea of being sneak attacked by a huge T-Rexuar also seemed a little silly.

I won't get XIII, only because I don't currently have a PS3, but I will be getting the PSP game, Agito on the day it comes out, because it sounds very good.

Edited February 16, 2010 by Hugobombski

[Benji]

Speaking of, Versus looks very cool.