Final Rant-asy
Now, before I launch into full rant mode, allow me to explain the events that prompted this long-winded bitchery:
1) Living in Virginia, I was totally mollywhopped by Mother Nature on the twenty-ninth of June and had my power knocked out along with a million other folks in the tri-state area. Waking up in a pool of gross sweat on the thirtieth, I muttered to myself, “fuck this noise,” and headed out to find other accomodations. I had to go all the way out to Frederick, MD just to find a hotel that had both electricity and vacancy… and only because I decided to start looking for lodging at seven-thirty in the morning that day.
2) By some serendipitous miracle, I broke down and bought a Vita… on the twenty-ninth, mere hours before the fateful storm that would turn countless people into honorary Amish.
3) By the first of July, I found that the Holiday Inn Express was slowly eroding my sanity. In a last ditch effort, I tried to keep my shit together by downloading Final Fantasy IV: Complete Edition. Even after twenty years, that game is incredibly engaging. It completely reminded me of why I used to enjoy JPRG’s.
4) The next day, while charging my Vita, I poked around the internet and watched Square-Enix’s concept trailer for their “next-generation” technology. It completely reminded me of why I no longer play JRPG’s.
S-E is clearly more concerned with making movies only vaguely disguised as video games. Even worse, these movies are absolutely fucking terrible. All emphasis on gameplay has been shirked in favor of meandering, incoherent plots, irritating characters, atrocious dialogue and the ear-sodomizingly terrible voice acting.
Really, Final Fantasy XIII served as the paradigm for the new Square-Enix development initiative.
Some may consider railing against FFXIII a full two-years after its release to be beating a dead horse. It probably is, but the horse in question was such a shitty, inept, bastard of a nag that people are still lining up to take a swing.
It is, without a doubt, the single biggest disappointment of this console generation. I agree that there are lesser Final Fantasy games in the main series, but XIII was the first one where I was straight-up pissed off that, not only were the words Final Fantasy on the front of the box, but it was a main, numbered entry.
That shit was not a real Final Fantasy game. I’m not even sure it was a real game, as I’ve seen DVD menus that offer more interactivity.
Now, there are elements from previous Final Fantasy titles that rub me the wrong way… namely, the increasingly convoluted, downright nonsensical mush-mouthed plots, and Tetsuya Nomura’s absurd character design philosophy of “ADD MORE ZIPPERS AND BUCKLES… AND FOR GOD SAKE, MAKE THOSE SHOES BIGGER.”
But those gripes merely reflect my own personal preference… because, at the end of the day, all of the main numbered entries (though I can’t speak for XI or XIV) are actually RPG’s, and that’s really all that matters.
In fact, only require two things from Final Fantasy:
1) That my characters (regardless of how stupid they look or how idiotic the shit that spews from their mouths may be) have plenty of stats and options for customizable combat advancement/growth, and lots of equipment configurations.
2) Some decent side quests/super-fucking hard side bosses, ones that can only be beaten through clever stat advancement/growth and sweet equipment configuration.
That’s it. I don’t even need old-school, turn-based random encounters. FFXII totally flipped the combat on its ear, ditching the traditional turn-based/ATB system in favor of something that had more in common with MMORPG’s… but it still made me bust my ass and use my head to make my characters Gods Among Men.
FXIII? Not only was it painfully linear, but there was no customization, to speak of. All your characters had three different roles that could be leveled up, but no choice in how to do so. You just held down a button and spent points on a linear advancement track, only providing the illusion of customizing your characters.
The weapons? Level up the one you have or buy a new one. There was no option to seek out a sweet boss and find an Ultima weapon, or any of that shit. I was just forced to use silly items to level up whatever I was using.
People complain about the linear world design of FFXIII, and while I agree that it was God-awful, what was even more unforgivable was that the growth of your characters was just as linear.
Years ago, I managed to kill Kefka in two goddamned attacks at the end of FFVI… but only because I threw together absolute devastation using an absurd combination of Gogo’s mimic, Sabin’s Bum Rush, a fucking Genji Glove, etc… it was glorious. And it was all me. My strategy. The game allowed the player to get creative, and kick-ass on their own terms… and that shit was on a 32-meg cartridge being played on a 16-bit system.
FFXIII, on the other hand, just wants you to sit there and look at all the pretty cut-scenes, and hit a button every so often. It was like an animé movie that got increasingly annoyed by the fact that there was a person on the other end of the screen holding a controller.
Granted, once you get to Gran Pulse, the game opens up and provides some sweet side quest business (and almost feels a bit like FFXII, in scope and structure), but it takes, like thirty-five hours of bullshit to get there. And then, you go back to Cocoon, for fifteen more hours of bullshit.
No, just no.
Please, Square, if you want to make a fucking movie, by all means do so. But stop confusing your Final Fantasy games with Final Fantasy interactive movies, because it doesn’t seem to be pleasing any one.
Square mentioned that FFXIII was so damned linear because they couldn’t create a vast, open adventure with the graphical quality being what it was.
Well, here’s an idea… don’t make the graphics so amazing, next time. We won’t care, so long as we get an actual game. I mean, hell… I can’t seem to stop playing a Final Fantasy game that came out two decades ago.
Square-Enix is like a junkie, hopelessly addicted to empty spectacle, aesthetic and visual fidelity.
But maybe if they’d stop chasing the dragon and let me fucking slay one every now and again, they’d be a little more relevant in 2012…
So, FF4Complete outsold FF13 and FF13-2 then?
The saddest part is that in order to finance their big fiascos, they are stuck at reselling their classics at ludicrous prices : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_enix.android_googleplay.FFIII_GP&feature=search_result
I think it has to do with the art assets used by a modern engine. If you want to take full advantage of the engine, you need insane amounts of detail, which means insane time and money spent creating 3D models.
Now, gameplay-wise, every time you create a new scene, you must either:
a) reuse old models (WHAT! HERESY.)
b) create new simple models (WHAT! HERESY.)
c) create new complex models (insane time and money)
You can make a large world with A or B. Heck, if you use some sort of procedural generation, you can sort of fake C. Look at .kkreiger, a sort of proof-of-concept; every model was procedurally generated, there are no art assets, and probably essentially no level assets either. Even though it was created a few years ago (2002 I guess), the whole thing fits on a 5 1/4″ floppy–it’s less than 100k.
But Square doesn’t want to reuse models, not for something modern, and they don’t seem to be jumping on the idea of procedural generation. So they have to pay artists, and at some point, I guess they lost control and just had the artists take over design. Since art time absolutely explodes with every new scene, well, FFXIII. I guess. I never played it, I don’t have the system needed or I would have.
That doesn’t excuse the lack of character customization, not by far, and let’s be clear, it is a mistake on their part to have let it get that far. In particular I wish Enix, or specifically Tri Ace, the guys behind Star Ocean, would slap some sense into them and tell them that content is king.
Seriously? FF IV was a far worse game than XIII. Not that I’m a staunch defender of XIII (I think they had a lot of interesting ideas but they really didn’t pan out well) although I will say XII-2 is a vast improvement.
But still. IV is the worst numbered installment in its original format. I can’t speak for any of the more recent remakes where they’ve apparently fiddled with the gameplay a lot, but the original version and earlier remakes was terrible.
Even the original Final Fantasy had more customisation. At least in that game you could choose your party members (albeit once, at the very start). IV gave you a wide variety of characters throughout the game, but you could only ever use whoever the plot said at that time. And character progression? They actually managed to make it worse than XIII, by having stark linearity combined with randomised stat changes. With the risk of losing stats at level up.
Do I need to repeat that? You could gain a level and be weaker for it. The only way to avoid it was to save frequently, but the best places to grind XP tend to be away from save points. And it’s not like your whole party is going to level up simultaneously every time.
Then there’s how dull combat is. Yeah, yeah, XIII is an alarmingly hands-off experience, but when you do have to pay attention it’s to make actually pretty meaningful decisions. IV, like a lot of the series really, in the bulk of battles demands a lot of time spent doing little more than mashing your confirm button on whatever controller you’re using. The only real difference is that XIII will cause less RSI.
But what about the story? That’s the good bit, right? The part that causes everyone to hold it up and say it’s a great game! Eh. It has a lot more dialogue and event scenes than the first three, but the quality isn’t really any better. In fact, the plot is basically a patchwork of those earlier games.
It’s got the political drama against the backdrop of a world at war, like II. Or at least it pays lip service to the concept, but doesn’t delve into it even as much as that earlier game even with its technologically limited script space.
It’s got a final villain who echoes Chaos from the original. A chessmaster moving all the pieces around to bring about the end of the world, who was once a fallen hero but over interminable ages of solitude saturated with magic became an unstoppable rage monster. Actually, yeah, Zeromus really is just a rehash of Chaos. No wonder he’s not the guy they used for Dissidia.
There’s the two worlds in conflict theme from III. Except here the other world is pretty much dead and just used to explain the villains and why the main protagonist is such a special snowflake. There’s no interesting contrasts, no commentary on how people from other places are people just the same. They’re just nearly-extinct Lunar Ubermenschen.
But hey, what really sets the game apart from what came before is all the characterisation they could fit in! That’s where the technological improvements really helped them step up their game. I’m not even being sarcastic. Unfortunately, they’re still not interesting characters, because they’re just broad sketches of personality at best.
Cecil is the original Final Fantasy emo pretty boy. He tends to be the assigned player character more than anyone, which means he has very few character moments where he’s being proactive. In making him the player avatar, he just gets herded along where the story needs him to go. His only decisions are the player’s decisions, which are very little other than ‘do I grind here a bit longer or can I take the boss now?’
Kain and Golbez are pretty much the same character. One is like a brother to Cecil, the other is his long-lost brother. Both spend a lot of time as villains under the control of the next villain up the ladder. Both briefly see sense before turning bad again only to redeem themselves in time to help defeat the final villain. Both have really cool, ornate armour. Both are part of an ancient but diminished legacy of badarses. And both have no personality.
Rosa has a little personality, most of which is how she loves Cecil. And is a pure and virtuous White Mage. And that’s it.
Rydia has a lot of crazy stuff happen to her, but the entire extent of her personality is that she’s besties with all the Summons.
Edge is pretty much Han Solo with less charm, except that he has hidden depth! His parents are deeeeeeeeaaaaaaad! Hm. I take back the Han Solo thing. He’s exactly like Dick Grayson.
Cid and Yang? Another pair of characters who are the same person. Older mentor figures who assist the heroes for a time before appearing to sacrifice their lives (but miraculously survive)? And they’re both sources of forced comic relief to boot! At least they have different personalities. Not that ‘serious monk’ and ‘crazy engineer’ are particularly interesting when there’s nothing more to them than that.
Palom and Porom …You know what I was saying about pairs of characters who are the same person? Yeeeeeeeaaaaah. And they’re so precocious to boot!
FuSoYa is a plot and exposition device. The End.
But, uh, that does leave Tellah and Edward. And you know what? Those two are both pretty legitimately well-realised and distinct characters. I kind of have to wonder if their section of the story was written by one person who didn’t have as much input on the rest. In fact, you could remove them without significantly harming the main plot.
So, worst gameplay, entirely derivative story and largely shallow characters. That’s why IV is the only numbered installment in the series I outright scorn.
Tellah got lower stats as he leveled to reflect his age. That’s all i have to say about that.
I think Square Enix management is well aware that their Japanese development teams have collectively lost the plot; there’s a reason they swooped in and rescued Eidos, and why Square Enix’s business is almost entirely built on Western-developed games.
When you’re spending that much time and money, you really need a clear vision of what you’re doing and the ability to iterate rapidly, and their Japanese development teams simply don’t have that culture. Neither do most Japanese developers.
I hope you’ll indulge me with my own rant. You said you don’t care what they do with the game as long as:
“1) That my characters (regardless of how stupid they look or how idiotic the shit that spews from their mouths may be) have plenty of stats and options for customizable combat advancement/growth, and lots of equipment configurations.
2) Some decent side quests/super-fucking hard side bosses, ones that can only be beaten through clever stat advancement/growth and sweet equipment configuration.”
We need to do better. RPGs have staggered forward on these crutches for too long, but when you peel away at most of these games all you find is an addiction to Watching Numbers Go Up. Take Bejeweled, for example. The average player keeps playing it because they’re sure the next time will be The New High Score. They believe that through their own effort, eventually that new high score will come. And it does, but not because the player was particularly good, but because your success at Bejeweled is almost completely determined by the initial layout of the pieces and the placement of your power-ups – both elements beyond your control. Genius!
So let’s go back to RPGs. When you’re exploring a dungeon, you’re not being challenged. It’s a flat labyrinth and your goal is simply to go through every path. Ah, but there’s the battles! So many options to choose from! But almost all of them are meaningless. Random battles can’t be hard because you won’t make it to the boss. Once you make it to the boss, you figure out it’s weak to fire, so you cast Fire II this turn, Fire II the next, Fire II the one after that, ad nauseum. You have a repertoire of over 50 abilities and you’re stuck in a loop casting Fire II. But you’re so clever, because you knew it was weak to Fire! And after you beat this thing you’ll get some sweet EXP that’s sure to get you another level which is going to make your Fire II even more powerful! The numbers have become their own end.
But you can’t build a game around Watching Numbers Go Up any more. It can hook you on the short term, but when you’re cut off from the game for a week or two because life is hard, your artificial high wears off and for some reason you’re no longer compelled to play. And that’s because the game was empty and shallow all along. Unless you REALLY want to see the end of the story, you don’t go back. But you can’t rely on that crutch any more either – every game can deliver a cinematic experience these days. RPGs no longer have a monopoly on story. And if you want a mindless, addictive experience there’s hundreds of apps for that on your phone now.
We need real gameplay. We need real depth. But it’s not going to happen, because everybody is caught up on what an RPG should be. Everyone’s stuck trying to fit into the mold Dungeons and Dragons lay out for them. If you had to reinvent the RPG from scratch, instead of being tied down by tradition, you’d throw away a lot of these elements because they’re just plain bad.
Hey, there has been some ground-breaking stuff but I guess not a lot of it sold well enough?
There were actually 2 or 3 action roleplaying games based on White Wolf’s tabletop RPGs (not a D&D knock-off… actually, their standard tabletop RPG systems could use another overhaul, but they’re not D20, they’re D10, and things such as Werewolf, Vampire, Mage, and Changeling can be played together or separately, with a lot of interior distinctions.)
Playing Malkavian or Nosferatu in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is definitely awesome, for instance. With the former your character’s in-game responses to the player’s decision are clearly and intentionally insane. In the latter. every human you meet reacts in abject horror, because you’re so obscenely hideous. (Of course, these make the game super hard and the other clans are more typical.) It’s also a mixture of your active choices combined with your stats. Stealth doesn’t work if you’re just standing right in front of them. Admittedly with the one super tough werewolf boss, there’s only really two options for succeeding, and only one of them makes you feel like you’re awesome because the other one involves running around frantically as you try to buy time and find a good hiding place without dying horribly. :)
The company that made the game went under, sadly.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply there haven’t been good RPGs with good battle systems. But as you said, they’re rare, and even when good ideas pop up they tend to be forgotten and you see yet another game defaulting to bad RPG standards.
I should check out those two games, thanks for the suggestions!
Not everything White Wolf licensed turned out to be that quality. Hunter: the Reckoning had three hack ‘n slash games on consoles. Ahead of their time for endless zombie killing, but if you want something more than button mashing look elsewhere.
It’s been a slow downhill slide for me on the FF series too. I jumped in at FFVI, though I was passing familiar with its predecessors in the US.
FF VI: Large cast so that a lot of the time I could use mostly whomever I wanted and for the most part avoid irritating mascot characters. Decent mechanics for the time period. Story was good and some nice hidden things to find if you looked hard enough.
VII: Loved it. Just wish I could have a version with Cait Sith written out, and be able to save Aeris even if it is almost impossible. (I tend to hate cutesy mascot characters- personal preference.)
VIII: the mechanics were “ok”, and the wangst was kept down to tolerable levels. Barely.
IX: Never bothered grabbing it, had other things taking up my time then.
X and X-2: Decent combat, but could really stand to lose the j-pop and angst.
XI: Pretty, but grind-fest. What happened to the fun? Doubt I’ll touch any of their online offerings after this.
XII: Didn’t bother trying it after reading up on the combat system.
XIII: Made the mistake of buying it without reading the reviews extensively. Refuse now to buy any more of the series at all until Square Enix pulls their heads out of their collective asses. Not holding my breath though.
lucky you, being able to leave, i had to go into my job which didnt have power and sit there doing nothing, because upper management wanted us to ‘wait till the power came back on’
“Please, Square, if you want to make a fucking movie, by all means do so.”
This kind of thought process led to the creation of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, so you may want to reconsider it.
I believe the hope is that all the godawful scripting, acting, and art designers will get shunted over to the movie, so the programmers can just get on with making decent games like they used to.
I don’t consider myself a Final Fantasy fan, because I simply do not like about half the games in the series. But 13 is, in my opinion, rather decent. Unlike many games in the series, the story of 13 is actually a rather compelling character-driven drama, in which the characters are both important and consistent. And the battle system is fast-paced and actually requires some real strategy.
The extreme linearity of both the world and the leveling system are legitimate gripes, in my opinion, because they take out a lot of the strategy and player control that the best games should have. The game takes way too long to give you any real control over party setup, though once it does it adds a fair amount of depth.
All of this being said, when you get down to it, there is a much larger problem that the rant only barely touches. It isn’t just FF13, or even just Square-Enix at large. It’s the whole gaming industry that has become addicted to power and graphics over decent gameplay. Oddly, this is why I preferred the Wii over the PS3 or Xbox360. What so many people claimed was wrong with it (low power) was its greatest strength. Games had to rely on being *fun* instead of being flashy blockbusters.
Also, there’s far more to worry about than just lack of real gameplay. The fancier the graphics get, the more expensive it becomes for developers to do their work. More detail in the graphics means more time and money to create them, and that’s time and money that can’t be spent on the rest of the game. Even worse, it increases the price for us, the consumers. Games are already up to $60, and even that isn’t high enough for developers to make a good profit anymore. If things keep going as they have been, with the constant push for more power and prettier graphics, we’ll be seeing games at $80 or $100 pretty soon. And with game purchases already on a downward slope, prices that high could accelerate the decent into an outright crash to rival what happened back in 1983.
Gaming really needs to take a step back, stop pushing for power and graphics, and focus on fun gameplay. Not only would that make games better overall, but it could also reverse the industry’s recent downward trend.
“Also, there’s far more to worry about than just lack of real gameplay. The fancier the graphics get, the more expensive it becomes for developers to do their work. More detail in the graphics means more time and money to create them, and that’s time and money that can’t be spent on the rest of the game. Even worse, it increases the price for us, the consumers. Games are already up to $60, and even that isn’t high enough for developers to make a good profit anymore. If things keep going as they have been, with the constant push for more power and prettier graphics, we’ll be seeing games at $80 or $100 pretty soon. And with game purchases already on a downward slope, prices that high could accelerate the decent into an outright crash to rival what happened back in 1983.”
I agree with much of what you wrote, however, the prices you are quoting already happened back when cartridges (circuit boards with plastic cases) were the medium upon which this software was distributed. Not only did they happen, but they happened to the games made for Nintendo, the company which brought the industry out of the crash and capitalized upon it. I recall paying 80 to 90 U.S. Dollars for Final Fantasy VI in the form of the FF III SNES cartridge (MSRP $79.99). Even the infamous Superman 64 cartridge was somewhere around 70 USD, initially. To put the cost of the physical goods in perspective, here is a graph showing how much you would pay per MB of RAM for a PC in a given year; one megabyte was the upper-end for RAM on an NES cartridge and when Final Fantasy came to the NES in 1990 a 1 MB stick of RAM for a PC may have cost 72 USD.
I think it warrants further thought as to just what, exactly, we are currently being sold. No longer are these discrete collections of chips, resistors, capacitors and such which had to be procured (perhaps at varying values for scarcity and complexity), then assembled (perhaps differently for different games), and loaded with copies of the programs necessary to recreate the games. Outside of Nintendo’s portables, these are mass produced discs that are pressed. We are a decade beyond the point when people were making their own copies of Dreamcast games with a CD-R which cost them less than 10 bucks, plus access to a PC and an Internet connection. The re-releases of Square’s games should cost less, right? I think there may be things which justifiy it, other than production values, but I would like to see what others have to say.
On the one hand, yes we’ve seen those prices before, in the mid-ish 1990s.
On the other hand, back then, the games were generally considered to be better than they are now. That was my real point: not merely that prices are set to rise even higher, but that this is *in addition* to the general lack of quality gameplay. When you have low quality combined with high prices, a lot of people are going to spend their money elsewhere.
The comparison isn’t perfect, but there are still some very stark similarities between video games now and video games back in the early 1980s. Quality was low, and people just weren’t willing to pay money for what they saw. We could be approaching another crash like that.
…
WOO
CLOUD
From my favorite review of the game (from my favorite review site ^o^)
My second.
To give some perspective on just how unfocused production on this game was, they had enough graphical assets left over to build an entire second game.
I agree that XIII was a disappointment, but I’m pretty much already ranted out at this point. Suffice to say, Final Fantasy is no longer part of my must by list.
I’ve been getting increasingly tired of these “open roaming worlds” with random battles in JRPGs, you just have hours and hours of wandering aimlessly, accomplishing nothing, and fighting the same three wolves over and over. And tactically? in these fights you just hit “attack” over and over so that you can grind your way to a higher level.
Whether it’s Final Fantasy 3 or final fantasy 13, little has changed – the optimal thing to do in a combat is usually obvious, and the whole “Gameplay” element of the game is just a sham, to pad the game out to 40 hours. It’s cardboard cut-out videogaming. When I was ten I lapped it up, but that was 20 years ago, and I’m tired and bored of it.
I’m kind of happy to see the back of it, Linear game? yes please! I can get all the story with a minimal amount of tedium. Sure, I might have to fight three wolves, but at least I’ll only have to do it a couple of times.
Sure, there’s less “tactics” if you can call them that, but these tactics were never challenging in the slightest. If you want to really tax your brain, there are other genres of game that’ll do it (or, a good SRPG will do you okay.) – I’m finding it a little refreshing to be done with all that. It’s still a crappy game, but it’d have been a lot crappier with a massive slew of random battles to slog through.
Oh. I’m told you should try Xenoblade Saga, if you’re pussed off with the current state of the JRPG. I haven’t gotten around to it yet…
Square already DID make movie, bro. Two of them. Both equally shit. Advent Children had interesting fight scenes to its name at least, but I couldn’t bring myself to suspend my disbelief for their unbelievably retarded understanding of motorcycle physics. I’m not much of a science geek but even I found it to be offensive to everything I hold dear.
Still, this is not entirely a Final Fantasy problem. This is a current generation gaming problem. With graphics advancing as far as they have, and the majority of gamers not actually BEING real gamers, graphics have become king shit of the pile.
If you get absolutely NOTHING right, you will still sell Gabens weight in gold if it looks pretty on the outside. So quality of gameplay and plot take second rung. They’re not as important. They’re also much more difficult.
“It completely reminded me of why I no longer play JRPG’s.”
Final Fantasy is not representative of the entire JRPG genre. It’s one franchise that’s fallen on hard times. Drawing this conclusion would be like playing the most recent CoD game and pointing to it as a reason to discard all FPS games. It’s just ignorant.
Wooooo BANDIT!!!