Petition to Square Enix to create a new 16 bit FF game

[dasaten]

Hi all!

I have written a petition in the hopes that if it gets enough sigs, SE may make another game that brings back the awesomeness of FF IV, V and VI. I know it's a long shot, but SE has responded to other petitions in the past. A petition to remake FFVII which has 20,000 sigs was submitted, and SE replied that they have no intention to do a remake currently. So, I'm ambitiously hoping to get at least 100,000 sigs before submitting the petition. Also, I will translate it into Japanese and send it to Square Enix Japan.

If you don't agree, that's fine. Don't sign. But, if you're like me and think that SNES was the greatest system ever made and long for a new 16 bit Final Fantasy, please go ahead and sign. thanks! Just click on the link below.

To Square Enix: Please create a new 16-bit Final Fantasy Petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/finalf16/petition.html)

[Bastian]

Um...

Final Fantasy Legends: Hikari to Yami no Senshi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Legends:_Hikari_to_Yami_no_Senshi)

But there's still no word on it being released outside of Japan. I hope they consider porting it to WiiWare or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cp1Qvz51U

[Evastio]

Heh, I was about to tell dasaten about Final Fantasy Legends of Light and Dark, but it looks like Bastian beat me to it.

Did you write the petition yourself? It's really good, not bashing on the newer games and keeping the whole letter in an optimistic tone.

Anyways, I signed the petition. You can guess which signature is mine easily.

[VeloZer0]

Signature #5, I got in on the ground floor!

That said I am highly skeptical something like this would really work. But for the cost of 30 seconds of my time to sign it why not.

[TrollHunter]

Hey it's worth a shot, read the petition it's well written and I would be excited if something like this worked out. I'm not sure if it WILL be successful but I'm in a "why the hell not" mood.
I signed #6 baby

[G13]

I'd be happy to sign it, and I wish you luck in your endeavor. :)

[NeoCracker]

The issue is that petition completely misses out on why those games were fun. Compelling characters, very well done battle systems for it's time, lively characters, and great art design.

The graphics weren't to the games advantage at the time, they were it's limiter.

Look at a game like Xenosaga, a PS2 era game. It had so many memorable scenes, and simply beautiful graphics. I could go on and on about this and bring more examples, but really one should be enough.

I have no Idea why you would ask for a 16-bit quality final fantasy game of quality to VI when you should be asking for a current gen graphics quality game of equal quality to VI. No need to short change yourself here. :p

[VeloZer0]

Maybe SE thinks of going back to good characters and story as a risky business strategy and may be more likely to go for it if they can make a smaller investment. :D

[Slothy]

The graphics weren't to the games advantage at the time, they were it's limiter.

They were a limit in terms of graphical fidelity to be sure, but the older I get and the more I've been studying sprite art and the like lately, the more I realize that being forced to work with a handful of pixels really seemed to help focus the art style on what was important. Great art design can show through with any graphical style, but I think a lot of mediocre stuff manages to scrape by these days whereas even mediocre sprites can be hard to read properly. You really need to bring your A game to do sprites well and focus on the most important design elements so it all stands out.

[VeloZer0]

Ditto for music as well.

[Wolf Kanno]

I would argue that the return to lower grade graphics would force the development team to focus more on gameplay, characters, and story. While I certainly feel the The After Years was an unnecessary endeavor of Squenix, I can't deny the games quality or variety. Its pretty sad when a 16-bit micro-sequel series has more variety, side missions, and freedom of choice then the multimillion dollar cutting edge entry did.

I doubt the After Years or FFLegends had even half of the staff or resources that XIII had.

[Bastian]

I have no Idea why you would ask for a 16-bit quality final fantasy game of quality to VI when you should be asking for a current gen graphics quality game of equal quality to VI. No need to short change yourself here. :p

Because some of us find 16-bit quality charming and prefer it (or enjoy it equally) to current gen graphics. New gen isn't inherantly "better" than 16-bit, it's a completely different style all together.


While I certainly feel the The After Years was an unnecessary endeavor of Squenix, I can't deny the games quality or variety.
Really? I enjoyed it enough that I'm happilly playing through it a second time on my The Complete Collection copy. Yes, I have issues with it (the fact that it reuses SO many of the first game's maps and such) but it introduces a lot that is new, I think.

Anyway, I would love to see more 16-bit retro games. I wish FFLegends would get ported over here. :(

But anyway.

The problem I have with signing the petition is that it misses the point that S-E already did exactly what the OP asked: they created a brand new 16-bit era style FF game. Final Fantasy Legends. Did it sell well enough to warrent releasing outside of Japan is another matter all together. I have no idea. Does anyone have information about its sales? They brought FF IV:TAY over, but the fact that it was a sequel to one of the best loved FF games probably had more to do with that than Japanese sales.

tl;dr version: They already did; the petition is moot.

[Roogle]

Really? I enjoyed it enough that I'm happilly playing through it a second time on my The Complete Collection copy. Yes, I have issues with it (the fact that it reuses SO many of the first game's maps and such) but it introduces a lot that is new, I think.

Anyway, I would love to see more 16-bit retro games. I wish FFLegends would get ported over here. :(

I agree. I think that Square Enix took the right approach with Final Fantasy IV: The After Years because of how heavily it mirrors the previous game in the series.

If Square Enix wants to recapture some of its fanbase, it may want to simply adopt the mindset that it carried before. Perhaps create mobile or social media games with similar graphics as the 16-bit era.

[Wolf Kanno]

While I certainly feel the The After Years was an unnecessary endeavor of Squenix, I can't deny the games quality or variety.
Really? I enjoyed it enough that I'm happilly playing through it a second time on my The Complete Collection copy. Yes, I have issues with it (the fact that it reuses SO many of the first game's maps and such) but it introduces a lot that is new, I think.


My issue stems from both being anti-FF sequel, cause I feel it destroys the point of the franchise's early days, but more importantly, I felt FFIV didn't need a sequel. Storywise, I still don't feel the game was necessary and mostly shameless fan service. Its still fun and I do get a kick out of it, but the wannabe writer in me feels TAY is just milking old ideas for quick cash.

I don't deny the game's quality, and I do enjoy playing as Golbez and Ceodore, seeing what the Mysidian Twins are up to 10+ years later; but I kind of feel at the end of the day, the game didn't present to me, anything that added to FFIV. Course I'm bias in all this, like I said before, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. :D

[The Crystal]

Graphics =/= a story's quality. FFIV:TAY is a good example of this(unnoriginal plot and lots of fanservice).

IMO Square is slowing dying. FFIV:TAY, FFXIII, FFXIV, most of the FFVII Compilation... So many crappy games. Unfortunatelly, the golden age of Square-Soft/Enix is over, dude. It was over from the moment they released FFX-2 IMHO.

[Bastian]

Its still fun and I do get a kick out of it, but the wannabe writer in me feels TAY is just milking old ideas for quick cash.
I get that, and I even agree. But the most important point for me is: it was a hell of a lot more fun for me than anything post FF6 (except 9)... Fun is all I care about. :P I'm a sucker for sequels if they're decently done. And I feel that TAY, despite its issues, was decently well done.

Anyway, maybe what we really should be doing is starting a petition to try to convince SE to localise FFLegends?

[Bolivar]

Ah, to be young and believe in petitions. BTW, SNES isn't the greatest console of all time, PS3 is, because it plays PS1 games, which is the best console of all time.

I've been wanting this for a while, posted about it in our remake/something thread (specific!), forgot about that FFLegends game... Love to see something like that, but another great point got brought up - Final Fantasy is all about doing something new everytime, and that spirit has been destroyed since the merger (hate to blame it on that, but it just so happens to coincide). I'd love for them to get back to that, only call MMO's "FFOnline," stop releasing any sequels or spinoffs, and just make new games. If they have to be on a smaller scale, so be it.

[Roogle]

Anyway, maybe what we really should be doing is starting a petition to try to convince SE to localise FFLegends?

I have a feeling that it will find its way here somehow if it performs decently in Japan. I wonder how much effort these titles take to make and localize when compared to larger efforts like for Final Fantasy XIII or its sequel?

[champagne supernova]

It was over from the moment they released FFX-2 IMHO.

X-2 has one of the best battle systems of any Final Fantasies. And it wasn't taking itself seriously, so a comparison of the story with other FFs will be doing it a disservice.

And I have an issue with this 16-bit FFs are the best. I played IV for some time. And then I got bored in the sealed cave. And then I played it again the other day and got to the moon. Before I got bored again. The storyline was never particularly interesting and for the most part, I couldn't care about the characters.

This has happened to me in FFV and FFVI (both at the end-world state) and IX, strangely enough (although for the most part, I liked the story, characters and art of IX, I just could not handle the slow pace of battles anymore). Before people bash me saying that I am too interested in graphics, I also played Chrono Trigger. And although I did stop playing for some time (strangely linked to when I got God of War 3, Final Fantasy and some other games), I came back and finished it. And I am going to New Game + it.

So I challenge all the people who say that 16-bit FFs have a better artistic style or gameplay or story or characters to actually prove it. Because I do not know how VI can have greater character development when there are more characters than there are in VII but less in-game dialogue by them. Or how the old FFs had a greater artistic style, because IV, V and VI look very similar. As for the Kefka destroyed the world because he's such a nutter argument, that is confirmation bias at its best, because Square were too lazy to flesh in a backstory is just as plausible an explanation (and the first one people latch onto with Ultimecia).

So let me finish with a moderating statement. This isn't meant as a bash of the old FFs. They were great games considering the time they existed in. But they are not superior to the newer ones. They just didn't have the resources to compete.

[Slothy]

X-2 has one of the best battle systems of any Final Fantasies. And it wasn't taking itself seriously, so a comparison of the story with other FFs will be doing it a disservice.

I will happily grant you that X-2 had a great battle system, but trying to excuse the problems with the story because it wasn't taking itself too seriously is a cop out. I have no problem with a story that doesn't take itself too seriously (some of my favourite games do this frequently), but that doesn't excuse a bad story. And the story in X-2 was pretty awful.


And I have an issue with this 16-bit FFs are the best. I played IV for some time. And then I got bored in the sealed cave. And then I played it again the other day and got to the moon. Before I got bored again. The storyline was never particularly interesting and for the most part, I couldn't care about the characters.

This I will also grant you since I don't think FFIV's story telling has aged well looking back on it, but to simply leave it at that would be to ignore how influential the game was. You can basically thank it for actually developing story telling in JRPG's in the direction that every FF title after it did, and which many other JRPG's were riffing off of for years. It was the first really popular title I can think of with a fairly complex story given the time, and any real character development. That is significant in and of itself and makes it a landmark title in the genre if you ask me. It's just best to go into it for the first time these days keeping in mind that much of what it did was very new at the time.


So I challenge all the people who say that 16-bit FFs have a better artistic style or gameplay or story or characters to actually prove it.

I could actually go on about this all day, but to preface this, I like the 16-bit titles more in general than most PSX or later titles, but I don't think they're necessarily always better games in all respects. Taking FFVI as an example, which is my favourite FF no less, yet I happily admit that its combat system is pretty awful. There weren't enough limits on the player to make developing any sort of strategy a necessary part of playing the game if you want to get through without grinding for days, and the whole thing devolves into spam your most powerful spells, heal when needed and use osmose to regain MP when needed. In fact, Osmose alone almost totally breaks the game.

But by the same token, in FFVII you can easily equip almost all of the materia you have access to at any given time (or at least all of the stuff that's powerful enough to guarantee you never have much trouble in battle), not to mention limit breaks which are easily gained and stored, MP which is high enough that you'll almost never run out between save points, and if you do, the abundance of recovery items in the game, and generally decent strength of regular attacks makes it little issue. I could go on and talk about FFVIII, but anyone who can't see that it's gameplay is completely broken isn't worth the time it would take to explain why they're wrong.

Meanwhile FFV easily has one of, if not the best battle system in the series Almost none of the abilities are really over powered that I can think of at the moment aside from gil toss, but at least it's limited by how much you really want to throw away all of your gil. Spells weren't as obscenely powerful as they became in later entries and you were fairly limited since you could only equip so many abilities at once. Usually just one additional ability over and above what a job class includes. Adding in the different stats with various jobs meant that you actually had to put some thought into what abilities you used based on your current situation, as well as what you wanted to learn in the future. And to top it off, pretty much every job class was useful for something, whether it be an ability, or being strong against certain enemies, or what have you. And given the sheer number of jobs, it having any illusion of balance would have been remarkable. The fact that it actually is one of the better balanced games in the series is downright outstanding.


Because I do not know how VI can have greater character development when there are more characters than there are in VII but less in-game dialogue by them.

The question you need to ask is how many characters in FFVII really had any real character growth and how often did it happen? Because while FFVII certainly had far more dialogue than FFVI, most of it never really develops anything and at most serves to just move the plot forward and get the character moving to the next objective. Now it's been a while since I played FFVII, but I can only think of one scene per character, maybe two at the most where the dialogue really serves to demonstrate some significant changes or backstory development in the characters of FFVII. FFVI may have had less dialogue by necessity, but it still had at least that much, and the real kicker is that almost all of those character developing scenes in it were quite believable and relatable, not to mention the fact that they touched on some things that many RPG's hadn't at the time. Celes trying to kill herself being a big one, but others such as the revelation that Edgar accepts the responsibility of the throne so Sabin can be free of it, Locke coming to terms with his inability to save Rachael, or Cyan learning to move on and start living again after his family died are all moments where there may not have been tons of dialogue but they were still handled with a maturity that isn't often seen in gaming, and which many people can relate to on some level.

I don't think that FFVII did as well at tackling themes which the player can relate to in general, outside of maybe learning about Barrett's history with Dyne and Cid's dreams of outer space and to some extent their dealing with Aeris' death. Long story short, FFVI might have had less dialogue, but it did a lot more with what it had than FFVII was able to if you ask me. I like FFVII mind you, and maybe some of the problem is the piss poor localization it had, but I still just didn't find the character development as relatable or interesting.


Or how the old FFs had a greater artistic style, because IV, V and VI look very similar.

Considering Yoshitaka Amano did the concept art for all of them and they all had much of the same staff to my knowledge, it shouldn't be surprising that they look similar. For that matter, I feel that FFVII, VIII, and X all look quite similar in terms of design. X breaks away from VII a bit more than VIII in terms of world design if you ask me since VII had a much more realistic look to it, but the similarities in Nomura's character design still stands out, even given how blocky the characters in FFVII are.

But what I think the earlier games did do a lot better was instill some real personality into the characters in game. When you don't have a lot of pixels to work with it forces the artists to focus on some of the more recognizable features. Which is essentially why characters heads were the same size as their bodies back then, why you can't make out any facial features aside from the eyes and why each main character in games like FFVI are given very distinctive clothing and hair colours/styles. The heads are so big because the human brain spends a lot more processing power on recognizing faces and facial expressions than just about anything else, the eyes are the only facial feature you can make out because they can be used to convey far more emotion than a nose, or even the mouth, and characters were given some very interesting clothing and hairstyles because they needed to be instantly recognizable and stand out from other characters and NPC's. Now because of this focus on the most important aspects of the design of these characters, I do strongly believe that they not only looked a lot more interesting than many characters we see in modern video games, but they stood out a lot better and even emoted better than characters in most games. Instead of getting hung up by complex facial animation that skirts the uncanny valley in an attempt to convey emotion or, in the case of FFVIII, having no facial animation, they had to focus on the fundamental aspects of various facial expressions for conveying emotion and did so in a much simple and more effective manner than striving for realism in games ever has.

These are also essentially the same reasons why TF2 has such a striking art style and Pixar are so undeniably good at what they do.


As for the Kefka destroyed the world because he's such a nutter argument, that is confirmation bias at its best, because Square were too lazy to flesh in a backstory is just as plausible an explanation (and the first one people latch onto with Ultimecia).

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Are you trying to say that explaining Kefka's reasoning for destroying the world as being that he's crazy is a cop out for him not having a backstory? Because they outright say in the game that he's crazy. It's something that's easily missed since it's an NPC in an obscure part of Vector who says it, but it is there. I'll gladly admit that it's not an amazing backstory, but the character is interesting and entertaining enough throughout the actual game that it didn't really matter to me that much.


So let me finish with a moderating statement. This isn't meant as a bash of the old FFs. They were great games considering the time they existed in. But they are not superior to the newer ones. They just didn't have the resources to compete.

Let me also finish by saying I don't hate the modern FF's (except FFXIII but it really had no redeeming qualities), but like many games have done with the constant march of technology, they're guilty in many ways of not adapting what has always worked visually (not just in games but in animation and visual arts in general) to the modern consoles largely because with fewer technical limitations, the pursuit of realism seemed easier and more desirable than ever. Gameplay is another matter entirely mind you since both eras have had their successes (FFIV, V, IX, X-2, and XII) and their dismal failures (VI, VII, VIII, XIII). But to say that the 16-bit titles didn't have the resources to compete is folly.

Aside from the fact that that's like saying hand drawn animation can't compete with 3D animation in film or TV which is an absurd stance to argue, it also misses the fact that the pursuit of realism has in many ways resulted in more modern titles either forgetting or ignoring some of the fundamental visual design principles the older games had to adhere to simply because it was the only way to make anything that looked visually appealing. This is something that isn't even remotely limited to only FF titles though as most modern games are guilty of it.

[champagne supernova]

But to say that the 16-bit titles didn't have the resources to compete is folly.

By this, I meant actual resources in terms of money and staff. I don't know how big the staff was for the old FFs, but it certainly wasn't the 300+ that worked on VII onwards. I will also give you that Celes trying to off herself was a very mature them that probably will never be handled again in a video game.

But even there, has it really been developed? Cid dies, there are a few scenes of Celes being upset and then she jumps off a cliff. Here is the scene in entirety.



Cid: I... I'm not long for this cruel, new world...

Cid: My worst nightmare is to think of you alone here on this wretched
island... hack... wheeze!!

Cid: Cough... hack... ACK!! While I can still talk, I... wheeze...
pant... want to thank you... cough!

......
Celes: Granddad. You have to eat, or else... W...What's the matter?
Celes: Cid...
Celes: No... NO!! You promised you'd stay here with me!!
Celes: Granddad, ANSWER ME! Tell me you're just joking!

Cid: Those others who were here... when they were feeling down they'd
take a leap of faith from the cliffs up north... perked 'em right
up!
Celes: Everyone's gone... Even Locke, who promised to watch over me... The
world's slowly ebbing away...

Celes: Phew... Why did you nurse me back to health? Did I ever ask you to
help me!?
Celes: A bandana??? No... it can't be...
Celes: Hey, you! Where'd you get this!? Is the person who healed you still
alive? Answer me!
Celes: He's alive... Locke's still alive!!!

You need to leave! The others are surely waiting for you! Find the stairs next
to the stove. Down them lies your road to freedom.
Love, Granddad.

Celes: I'll make you proud of me... Granddad...

It's not like it was a built-up thing or that there was any evidence of Celes being clinically depressed at any point in the game. She literally just decides on the spur of the moment to jump off a cliff. And, if you look through this, Cid first tells her to jump off a cliff and then leaves a note saying there's a boat and go find your friends. Contradiction of note there.

I'm not saying the latter FFs would challenge Dostoevsky for delving into the depths of the human minds, but I think they were better than that. There generally was some sort of build-up to a characters actions (and their history shaped their personality).

As for the worlds looking the same, let's look at a town from IV (the first sensible one from Google images):
http://www.significant-bits.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Final_Fantasy_IV_treasure_town.png

From V:
http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/s/66462-final-fantasy-v-snes-screenshot-in-a-regular-towns.jpg

From VI: http://pocketmedia.ign.com/pocket/image/article/764/764961/final-fantasy-vi-advance-20070215044811900_640w.jpg
(And I think this is supposed to be ruined town.

Versus VII:
http://www.lawrence-lai.ca/uploads/5/0/9/5/5095817/4301381_orig.jpg?399

VIII:
http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/b/b2/Balamb_Town_3.jpg

IX: http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/8/8c/Lindblum_Theater_District.JPG

I think VII-IX exhibit a very different aesthetic relative to IV-VI. Which I would expect, because they had greater technical ability to transform an artistic vision into an artistic reality.

EDIT: Looking at those pictures together, it is quite cool to see how the graphics improved from game to game. Anyway, back to discussion.

[Slothy]

By this, I meant actual resources in terms of money and staff. I don't know how big the staff was for the old FFs, but it certainly wasn't the 300+ that worked on VII onwards.

VII onwards didn't have 300+ sized development teams. FFVII itself was around 120+ according to Wikipedia, and even with modern consoles, it would be unusual for a development team to go above that number. In fact, Assassin's Creed 2 was the first time I'd heard of it happening for something that wasn't an MMO or the like, and still blows my mind at 450+ people. Money I'll grant you as well, but keep in mind the limitations of the cartridge format in terms of storage. Even if you had thrown the staff and money at FFVI that they did FFVII and later titles, it's not going to get more onto the cartridge that late in the SNES life cycle unless they used most of it to develop a cartridge with more storage space. That kind of money and staffing wouldn't have been a benefit to older titles because the technical limits were such that you didn't need them.


I will also give you that Celes trying to off herself was a very mature them that probably will never be handled again in a video game.

But even there, has it really been developed? Cid dies, there are a few scenes of Celes being upset and then she jumps off a cliff. Here is the scene in entirety.

...

It's not like it was a built-up thing or that there was any evidence of Celes being clinically depressed at any point in the game. She literally just decides on the spur of the moment to jump off a cliff. And, if you look through this, Cid first tells her to jump off a cliff and then leaves a note saying there's a boat and go find your friends. Contradiction of note there.

I won't quote the script portion so things are a bit more concise. For starters, I won't deny that things are rushed a bit more than they would be in reality or in other media. I mean, would anyone really want to play days, if not weeks of Celes and Cid alone on an island? That said, just because the build up isn't plainly spelled out in dialogue doesn't mean it can't be inferred from what is happening.

Accepting that those events are taking place over days at least, if not weeks (otherwise we can safely say Cid died because he was force fed too many fish for one man to digest in a week let alone a day), we have a situation where Celes wakes to find herself in a ruined world and confronted with the possibility that her friends if not already dead are beyond her reach with the world slowly dying. To add to this, everyone else who was on the island already gave up and killed themselves and the only real thing she's left to live for is taking care of the one person in the world she thinks of as family. But is then forced to watch him slowly die the same way the world is. Considering this, it's not even a large step, let alone any sort of leap, to understand exactly why she tries to kill herself. Finding Locke's bandanna on the bird afterward gives her something else to hope for though because she thinks that someone else she cares about may still be alive. This is one of the things that I like about this scene actually because they didn't have to spell everything out. If it's not obvious that Celes would be losing hope and running out of reasons to live in this sort of situation then I'm not sure how it can be made more obvious without beating the player over the head.

I'll also add that Cid didn't tell her to jump from the cliff. He told her that others had but asked her not to give up hope because he didn't want her to die.


As for the worlds looking the same, let's look at a town from IV (the first sensible one from Google images):...

From V:...

From VI:...
(And I think this is supposed to be ruined town.

Versus VII:
...

VIII:
...

IX: ...

I think VII-IX exhibit a very different aesthetic relative to IV-VI. Which I would expect, because they had greater technical ability to transform an artistic vision into an artistic reality.

Again, not quoting the pictures to keep things sort of concise.

I'll start by mentioning that that isn't a ruined town in VI. It's definitely in the world of balance and that house in the bottom left had burned down if I'm not mistaken, but the town itself was unscathed at that point.

Second, including IX is somewhat silly as Yoshitaka Amano did the character design for that one, and it was made as something of an homage to the 2D titles, which is why it actually is quite similar in visual style to the earlier games, even if not in scale. It also would have had a different development team than VIII without a doubt and maybe even VII, since it was released within about a year of FFVIII, and the director was not the same guy behind FFVII, VIII, X, X-2 or XIII. It's also a little misleading to base comparisons on a single screen shot from each game.

Unfortunately Google is not very helpful at coming up with many more in game shots to compare, but both VII and VIII did always have a bit of a more realistic take on their worlds if you ask me that were quite similar visually in many instances, but none more so than the character design. Especially when comparing battle sprites between VII and VIII since they're the most directly comparable, but even in terms of having a more modern design and use of colour they always struck me as being quite similar.

[champagne supernova]

I'll also add that Cid didn't tell her to jump from the cliff. He told her that others had but asked her not to give up hope because he didn't want her to die.



Those others who were here... when they were feeling down they'd
take a leap of faith from the cliffs up north... perked 'em right
up!

There's an exclamation mark in there. Not really discouraging her from jumping off a cliff.



For starters, I won't deny that things are rushed a bit more than they would be in reality or in other media. I mean, would anyone really want to play days, if not weeks of Celes and Cid alone on an island? That said, just because the build up isn't plainly spelled out in dialogue doesn't mean it can't be inferred from what is happening.

It's suicide. Cid literally says people jumped off a cliff and Celes ran off and jumped off a cliff. I'd hope people have more of a think down when they attempt suicide than this.



Accepting that those events are taking place over days at least, if not weeks (otherwise we can safely say Cid died because he was force fed too many fish for one man to digest in a week let alone a day), we have a situation where Celes wakes to find herself in a ruined world and confronted with the possibility that her friends if not already dead are beyond her reach with the world slowly dying. To add to this, everyone else who was on the island already gave up and killed themselves and the only real thing she's left to live for is taking care of the one person in the world she thinks of as family. But is then forced to watch him slowly die the same way the world is. Considering this, it's not even a large step, let alone any sort of leap, to understand exactly why she tries to kill herself. Finding Locke's bandanna on the bird afterward gives her something else to hope for though because she thinks that someone else she cares about may still be alive. This is one of the things that I like about this scene actually because they didn't have to spell everything out. If it's not obvious that Celes would be losing hope and running out of reasons to live in this sort of situation then I'm not sure how it can be made more obvious without beating the player over the head.

But most of this you are inferring. Nowhere in the game does it suggest this takes place over days. It's fairly easy to suggest time has gone past - fade to black and then from back. And yes, you can understand why she'd try to kill herself. But there is never any indication, apart from 2 lines of dialogue, that she understood why she should kill herself. And yes, this is a video game and we can't have weeks of gameplay of Celes getting slowly depressed. But they could just show snippets of scenes: Celes burying Cid, her sitting around doing nothing at the house, sitting at the beach, so on, until she finally says something akin to what she says there: everybody's gone.

If they had done something like that, it would have been a good example of storytelling. The way it comes across is - let's do something dramatic and make our character jump off a cliff.

Compare this to the end of Disc 2 of VII.



(The scene fades in to show Cloud and Tifa alone on the bridge. Tifa is
still watching the clouds go by.)

Cloud
"What are you going to do, Tifa?"

(She turns to him)

Tifa
"Did you forget?"
"I'm... all alone. I don't have anywhere to go."

(The scene fades out, then in to show Cloud and Tifa on a grassy hill.
Tifa stands close to the camera, looking past the player. Cloud is behind
her, staring in another direction. The Highwind hovers above. The only
sound is that of the wind.)

Tifa
"Everyone's gone..."

Cloud
"Yeah, we don't have anywhere or anyone to go home to."

(She looks down.)

Tifa
"You're right..."

(A pause. She looks up and straightens her hair with one hand.)

Tifa
"But... I'm sure someday... they'll come back, don't you think?"

(He crosses his arms)

Cloud
"Hmm... I wonder...?"
"Everyone has an irreplaceable something they're holding on to..."
"But this time, our opponent..."

(A long pause. The sound of the wind fades. Tifa nods)

Tifa
"Hmm... But that's all right, even if no one comes back."
"As long as I'm with you... As long as you're by my side... I
won't give up even if I'm scared."

(He uncrosses his arms and looks at Tifa.)

Cloud
"...... Tifa......"

(She moves her arms behind her.)

Tifa
"No matter how close we are... We were far apart... before this."
"But when we were in the Lifestream surrounded by all those
screams of anguish, I thought I heard your voice..."

(She closes her eyes, crying softly. Her arms fall to her sides and she
bows her head.)

Tifa
"...sniff... you probably don't remember this..."
"But deep in my heart I heard you calling my name... Or at least
I thought I did..."

(Cloud looks away and puts a hand to his face)

Cloud
"Yeah... At that time I heard you calling me."
"You were calling me back in from the stream of consciousness in
the Lifestream."

(He lowers his hand. He nods)

Cloud
"After all, I promised. That if anything were to ever happen to
you, I would come to help."

(Tifa opens her eyes and looks up.)

Tifa
"Cloud...? Do you think the stars can hear us?"

(She gazes off to one side)

Tifa
"Do you think they see how hard we're fighting for them?"

(Cloud looks up at the sky.)

Cloud
"I dunno... But..."
"Whether they are or not, we still have to do what we can. And
believe in ourselves..."
"Someday we'll find the answer. Right, Tifa?"
"That's what I learned from you when I was in the Lifestream."

(She nods)

Tifa
"Yeah...... that's right..."

(Cloud stares off into the distance. He turns away from her slightly and
lowers his head.)

Cloud
"Hey, Tifa...... I...... There are a lot of things I wanted to
talk to you about."

(He shakes his head slowly.)

Cloud
"But now that we're together like this, I don't know what I
really wanted to say..."
"I guess nothing's changed at all... Kind of makes you want to
laugh..."

(Tifa shakes her head)

Tifa
"Cloud... Words aren't the only thing that tell people what
you're thinking..."

(Cloud looks at her. She continues to stare past the player, into space.
She straightens her hair again with one hand.)

Cloud
"............"

(She closes her eyes. The camera pans up, past her, to the sky, as the
scene fades to black.)

(The scene fades in once more to the grassy hill. It is still mostly dark
out, but the hint of a sun is glowing beyond the horizon. Cloud and Tifa
are seated on a small rise in the ground. Tifa is resting her head on his
shoulder; both are dozing. Cloud lifts his head slightly.)

Cloud
"............It's almost dawn..."

Tifa
"H, huh...?"

(He lifts his head further, just enough so that he can look at her.)

Cloud
"Sorry. Did I wake you...? It's almost dawn, Tifa."

(She lifts her head off his shoulder and looks around sleepily.)

Tifa
"Umm... G, good morning... Cloud."
"Give me a little longer... Just a little bit longer..."

(She rests his head on his shoulder again.)

Tifa
"This day will never come again... So let me have this moment..."

(He nods)

Cloud
"Yeah... okay."

(He lowers his head again.)

Cloud
"This is probably the last time we'll have together......"

(The scene fades to black)

What happens there is fairly (if not deliberately) ambiguous, but the way I see it, it is a much more realistic representation of how the two of them would get together than Celes is a representation of how despair would drive someone to jump off a cliff.

EDIT: I counted the credits and there's 300 odd people, which is where I got my figure. Actual individuals on the development teams is a more relevant number. Although I can't find a number for this for VI.

[Depression Moon]

I'm not sure if I'll sign this. There are a couple of mistakes that I noticed and I don't think Square will take you seriously if you didn't take the time to look over and correct those mistakes before sending it in to them.

[Loony BoB]

If it were my decision, I wouldn't go through with this. 16 bit FF games, at their time, were very good for their generation. Hell, they were massively influential, too. But imagine if, after FFVII through XIV, they were released now. Would they be influential? No. Not at all. It's all old-school and perhaps people with nostalgia might like the idea of playing such things, but let's face it, these games just won't cut it in today's gaming environment. If they would, then surely other companies would be churning them out in a big way. The only thing I can think of that it works for would be Pokémon on the DS, and that's largely down to the "CATCH A LOT OF CUTE ANIMALS AND EVOLVE THEM!" rather than an amazing storyline.

To think that somehow SE is suffering from gameplay and storyline purely because of the graphics is naive. There are other games out there that have good storyline, characters, gameplay and graphics. Perhaps it is not so much the problem that SE are struggling to make time for gameplay but rather the time they do spend on said gameplay is not spent to good effect?

Basically, my thought is along the lines of "Graphics and gameplay are two seperate things dealt with by seperate teams. Downsizing graphics does not make a good game, just like cutting back storyline does not lead to amazing graphics."

EDIT: Personally, I would be more in favour of them employing...
1. The use of major fantasy authors to come up with solid plots from start to finish.
2. Thatgamecompany to come up with more/better minigames.
3. A new PR team to focus on communication with fans and what they want.

[VeloZer0]

3. A new PR team to focus on communication with fans and what they want.
Having your job description be "get a consensus out of the Final Fantasy fan base as to what they want from the series" sounds like something waiting for bad people in hell.

[champagne supernova]

If it were my decision, I wouldn't go through with this. 16 bit FF games, at their time, were very good for their generation. Hell, they were massively influential, too. But imagine if, after FFVII through XIV, they were released now. Would they be influential? No. Not at all. It's all old-school and perhaps people with nostalgia might like the idea of playing such things, but let's face it, these games just won't cut it in today's gaming environment. If they would, then surely other companies would be churning them out in a big way.

That's what I was going for. Although 16-bit could be re-imagined in a very creative way while still using the power of modern consoles (like the way LBP used classic 2D platformers as a kind of inspiration for the game it came up with). There are a few other games that are much closer to old-school 16-bit games, such as BlazBlue (I think that's the sprite fighting game) and Record of Agarest War Zero, with varying levels in the success of implementation.

Point being that the visual style of 16-bit consoles can be reimagined for the modern generation, but they need to utilise the power that the consoles have, and secondly, a release of VI as is in this day and age would be a critical and commercial fail.



Basically, my thought is along the lines of "Graphics and gameplay are two seperate things dealt with by seperate teams.

And I'd add story to that too. Obviously there is some overlap, but blaming story and gameplay declines due to increasing graphical standards is silly. Yes, the developers of XIII said they couldn't give us a broad game world because it takes a long time to make graphics, but everybody knows that is rubbish. The team just developed the game badly, hence why they had enough content cut off to make another game.

Although I would disagree with Bob that the stories and characters of FF have declined. I found the older FFs to be inferior to the PSone era in terms of story and character development. From then on, I would say quality has been fairly similar. Fair enough, there is still some ridiculous propositions in the stories and they are still somewhat overly melodramatic and twisty (even the very subtle XII), but they've been very good (for games).

I think what Square-Enix really need to do is start making games with a clear vision. XIII wasn't a fundamentally flawed game. There were a lot of good aspects to it and it was immensely polished, like all FFs. However, it was clear that it never reached the potential that it could have because the design team weren't focused from an early point. That's why I have hope for XIII-2. There seems to be a much clearer focus on what they want. And even maybe Versus, although it seems to be in development nowhere, because it seems that there has been a design vision that has been carried through the project.

[Loony BoB]

Oh, sorry if I gave off the impression that I actually believed the stories and characters have declined. I've frequently mentioned that XIII, for me, had the best collective group of playable characters since VII or possibly ever. I for one liked the storyline, too, and love the mythology. But I still think they should look at getting in a new author in for the next game purely on the basis of being original and creative. I'd just be very interested in seeing them become more global in their scope when it comes to storylines, taking themes (for both story and visuals) from obscure areas of the world. I understand many of their stories are still to this day based on Japanese folklore.

[champagne supernova]

I don't know if I would like a fantasy author to write the entire script, but I'd definitely say they should get involved in a sort of overseer role.

I don't think an author would be able to implement the linkages between story, history, culture with the gameplay, which is necessary for a game. Looking at VII, materia was critical to both gameplay and story. GFs in VIII and Espers in XII were less involved from a story side (apart from making people forget), but Eidolons in IX, Espers in VI, Aeons in X and the whole l'Cie thing in XIII were critical to the story.

However, I think an author would make dialogue more believable, get rid of some ridiculous melodramas and twists and make sure there aren't any really silly things (GF memory loss and laughing scenes for example) don't occur, or are at least toned down.

[Bastian]

I don't think anyone is saying that Final Fantasy XVII should be done in the 16 bit graphical style (though nothing would please me more) because, no, that wouldn't be marketable to the masses.

But there are those of us who would like new 16-bit style FF games made. Perhaps FF Legends can become a spin off series and release games in this vein for the iPhone or Wii ware or something. Some of us actually prefer that graphical style and gameplay style to the modern entries in the series.

[champagne supernova]

I don't think anyone is saying that Final Fantasy XVII should be done in the 16 bit graphical style (though nothing would please me more) because, no, that wouldn't be marketable to the masses.

But there are those of us who would like new 16-bit style FF games made. Perhaps FF Legends can become a spin off series and release games in this vein for the iPhone or Wii ware or something. Some of us actually prefer that graphical style and gameplay style to the modern entries in the series.

I think it would have to be more than a rehash of an old-school FF to cut it in this day and age, even if it's on a phone. I think 16-bit done well could work really well on a RPG similar to Dark Cloud - where there is world building as well as role playing.

[Loony BoB]

If you want more of those kind of games, don't worry about SE, there are hundreds of people who have made use of RPGMaker2000 over the years and I'm sure you can get all the 16-bit action you want on the best of their created games. I'm certain there must be thousands of those games made by now, so surely that includes at least a dozen great games.

[Slothy]

I'll also add that Cid didn't tell her to jump from the cliff. He told her that others had but asked her not to give up hope because he didn't want her to die.



Those others who were here... when they were feeling down they'd
take a leap of faith from the cliffs up north... perked 'em right
up!

There's an exclamation mark in there. Not really discouraging her from jumping off a cliff.

Ugh. The SNES translation does needlessly obfuscate things doesn't it? It's been a long time since I played that version. Unfortunately, the censorship forced on games by Nintendo of America at the time was legendary, and FFVI tackling a subject like people killing themselves was certainly not something which was able to dodge it. The GBA version was much closer to the original intent of the scene and makes the fact that they were committing suicide much clearer.


Cid: Ever since that day, the world's been sliding deeper and deeper into
ruin. Plants wither, and animals waste away. The other people who
were here with us all gave up hope... One after the next, they flung
themselves from the northern cliffs in despair...
Celes: So...everyone could already be...
Cid: Celes... Try not to take it so hard. We can still live out our lives
together in peace! You're the closest thing to family I have left in
this world...

If you haven't played the GBA version before I'd really recommend it over the SNES version as the translation is overall a massive improvement.


It's suicide. Cid literally says people jumped off a cliff and Celes ran off and jumped off a cliff. I'd hope people have more of a think down when they attempt suicide than this.

She jumped off of a cliff when the only family she had, and for all she knew the only other living person besides herself, died. That was the final straw that drove her to try and end it because at that point she literally had nothing else to keep her going. I'm not sure why you find how quickly she turned to suicide after losing the last bit of hope she had to live for hard to believe. Or why not having her sit around saying how depressed she is all the time somehow makes it impossible to infer her depression. Depression seems a pretty logical reaction to every single thing that had happened to her, and to its credit, the GBA script makes it much clearer that Cid was trying to give her a reason to keep going.


But most of this you are inferring. Nowhere in the game does it suggest this takes place over days. It's fairly easy to suggest time has gone past - fade to black and then from back. And yes, you can understand why she'd try to kill herself. But there is never any indication, apart from 2 lines of dialogue, that she understood why she should kill herself. And yes, this is a video game and we can't have weeks of gameplay of Celes getting slowly depressed. But they could just show snippets of scenes: Celes burying Cid, her sitting around doing nothing at the house, sitting at the beach, so on, until she finally says something akin to what she says there: everybody's gone.

If they had done something like that, it would have been a good example of storytelling. The way it comes across is - let's do something dramatic and make our character jump off a cliff.

Compare this to the end of Disc 2 of VII.

...

What happens there is fairly (if not deliberately) ambiguous, but the way I see it, it is a much more realistic representation of how the two of them would get together than Celes is a representation of how despair would drive someone to jump off a cliff.

Again, I'm not sure why you think she would have to hang around for days while she slowly spirals into suicide. To me, that's really not the least bit unbelievable. In fact, I'd say it would be more unbelievable if she spent days or weeks on the island alone before falling into despair and jumping. The world was already destroyed, everything is slowly dying, and she's lost all of her friends. And after all of that, she slowly watches the man she considers to be like a father to her die and leave her alone. Her losing all hope and deciding to kill herself then isn't the least bit difficult to understand. I think the problem is that you're assuming that because she didn't state what was going through her mind at all that it can't be inferred from the events that happen around her.

But that's inherently silly since anyone who even imagines being in that situation could undoubtedly understand her frame of mind and why she would choose suicide so soon after Cid dies. It's not like his death was sudden or anything, it was clearly coming for a while.

All of that out of the way, I don't disagree that that scene from FFVII wasn't a good scene. It's actually one of the better scenes in the game if you ask me. But I don't think the Solitary Island segment of FFVI would have benefited from more dialogue or more scenes. The only thing I would have done differently might be a more distinct indication that it takes place over a longer period of time, but I think that was somewhat obvious simply from how many fish you catch and feed him, but if you feel that it wasn't obvious enough then clearly it could be done a bit better. But just because Celes' state of mind is subtly presented and needs to be inferred from what's going on doesn't undermine the scene as far as I'm concerned. I'd say it actually improved it because it didn't have any hokey dialogue that so many later FF's could fall into.

[champagne supernova]

The GBA translation is definitely an improvement. Maybe that's why I've been so biased against the old ones, because that dialogue actually makes sense. I think there should have been an indication of time between Cid's death and Celes' action, but yeah, that translation makes it a whole lot better.

Maybe I'll play VI again on GBA and it will hold my attention. I found a lot of the dialogue to be quite weak, but this is probably why (seeing that I loved Chrono Trigger and it had a proper translation, it is quite plausible).

[Bastian]

If you want more of those kind of games, don't worry about SE, there are hundreds of people who have made use of RPGMaker2000 over the years.
I'm one of those people... and my RPG is considered one of the "good ones" (with almost 3000 downloads) but 99% are absolutely awful. I've only played two (apart from my own) that I actually liked.

That's not the point, though. The point is that I was more 16-bit FINAL FANTASY, specifically.




I think it would have to be more than a rehash of an old-school FF to cut it in this day and age, even if it's on a phone.
Huh? What does "this day and age" have to do with anything? FF4,5,6 are great games. Something done in that style with that same level of quality would also be a great game, regardless of the day and age.

[Wolf Kanno]

I was going to lay the smack down in this thread but Vivi22 beat me to it.

Actually, the DS has pretty much proven that old school gaming is still relevant and has an audience. I mean old school PC dungeon crawlers where everything is a FP view and you never see your party beyond their names and stats have been doing fairly well on the system. DQ itself is a game that has rarely changed in its history from a design point of view and it still outsells FF in parts of the world.

I feel 16-bit games still have an audience out there, and I feel that at this point in time, this comes down to what Capcom said when they made MM9 and 10. That they chose to make it retro cause it was the style they wanted. FFLegends and FFIV:TAY were purposely done in a 16-bit style, cause its the creative direction the director wanted. FFIV:TAY is a sequel to the DS version of the game, and yet he still chose to make it 16-bit and chose the cell phone as the platform, when he could have easily just used Matrix to build it as a DS title. SE itself has been pushing out lots of 8-bit/16-bit style games in their ports and whatnot, so I don't feel SE agrees with the idea that 16-bit can't turn a profit in this day and age.

As for my thoughts on why 16-bit FFs are so great? I like to keep things in historical context and ultimately it was the 16-bit era that actually shaped and created the FF series identity, and in many instances, several popular franchises that are still big sellers today.

In FFII, Firion, Maria, Gus, Leon, and the rest of the cast are characters, only so far in that they have distinct names and dialogue. In FFIV, Cecil, Kain, Rosa, Tellah, and Edward actually have backstories and events in the game that flesh them out as characters.

Firion's claim to fame is chased down by imperial guards and barely surviving to join the rebels, Cecil starts his game remembering the brutal slaughter of people and then begins to question if his home is truly the benevolent kingdom he was raised to believe it was. When placed into historical context, its obvious what IV did for the series. Hell, before FFIV, characters didn't have last names in the series.

So there is the historical contribution, but my other issue is that while the PSX generation certainly improved several aspects of the series, I felt other sections began to falter, that the 16-bit does better. FFVI is able to at least give some closure and character growth to 13 of its 16 member cast, sure its not as detailed or its quantity of moments is less than some characters get in later titles (i.e. one character gets at least two moments in the game just about them, as opposed to a later installment where the plot may actually revolve around one characters problems) but it was still able to do so while later titles can't even give a fair closure or screen-time to its cast of six characters.

I also find the dungeons more involving in earlier games cause they are actually gameplay specific set pieces as opposed to being visual canvas for the story. The Lodestone Cavern in FFIV or the Ancients Tower in FFIII are more entertaining dungeons than the Lunatic Pandora in VIII, Macalania Woods in FFX, and most of XIII's dungeon cause they were designed for gameplay, not some set piece for the story. I feel the ratio between story and gameplay has shifted in the series, and I personally feel the 16-bit era is kind of the happy middle ground with FFVII included.

I feel VII ultimately falls into some of the problems of the 16-bit era, but it brings about also one of the bigger problems I have with the later games. Using the scene from VII you quoted, you could easily condense that dialogue, both characters often repeat sentiments made before in the same conversation and even references things the player has already seen and heard in the game. The dialogue has more repetition than it really needs. Granted, I feel this scene is better than some later examples in the series like FFXIII... (please, you don;t need to remind me every cutscene how screwed you people are, and how unfair it all is, we got it the first 20 times you said it... we get it, being a l'Cie sucks, now stop your bitching) :roll2

My point comes back to the difference between the Celes scene and the Cloud/Tifa scene is that the player is given more responsibility to understand the content and context of the moment in the Celes scene, whereas the scene in VII leaves little to the players imagination cause it repetitively verbalizes what the characters are thinking and feeling. The scene in VI is the player taking the role of Celes, whereas the scene with Cloud and Tifa is the player watching them. Both have their strengths and weakness as medium for story telling, but I have to be bias towards VI in this because the scene asks more from the player whereas VII's scene is pretty straightforward about what the characters are trying to convey and leaves little for the player to think about. You just take it for face value, you never really stop to think what the characters are thinking cause they already told you. I feel this is the difference between watching a story and experiencing it, cause part of what makes the story special is what you bring to it. ;)

[champagne supernova]

Agree with you on the fact that the older FFs tend to focus more evenly on characters. But I think I prefer more development on some characters than equal but less development on all characters. Personal thing.



My point comes back to the difference between the Celes scene and the Cloud/Tifa scene is that the player is given more responsibility to understand the content and context of the moment in the Celes scene, whereas the scene in VII leaves little to the players imagination cause it repetitively verbalizes what the characters are thinking and feeling. The scene in VI is the player taking the role of Celes, whereas the scene with Cloud and Tifa is the player watching them. Both have their strengths and weakness as medium for story telling, but I have to be bias towards VI in this because the scene asks more from the player whereas VII's scene is pretty straightforward about what the characters are trying to convey and leaves little for the player to think about. You just take it for face value, you never really stop to think what the characters are thinking cause they already told you. I feel this is the difference between watching a story and experiencing it, cause part of what makes the story special is what you bring to it. ;)

But I am going to argue that you are putting your own perspective on a story, adding additional meaning that was not intended or accurately portrayed in the older stories. Basically, you are fitting a meaning that you want to evidence that is ambiguous. Of course, I just found out that the SNES translations of FF games are appalling, so I'd probably have to play the GBA versions to more accurately comment on what is what.

Gameplay is a bit of an iffy one. I find that the dungeons in all FFs can get very tedious except for XIII because I spend half my time recovering after a fight and worrying about items etc (or in XII, waiting for my MP to recover). Because of this, many ordinary battles were just a grind of attack etc, which becomes very dull, especially as you cannot avoid them (and that is not a technology thing - Chrono Trigger). XIII was less of a slog because enemies were more challenging (as you automatically recovered after battle) and you were unrestrained in using abilities (because there was no MP). However, it definitely pulled the balance to something too simple, and definitely needs to be more intricate going forward. And it also got tiring near the end to continually stagger enemy, maul them, etc etc.

Anyway, my point is that FF's gameplay has always had its issues. I find that the older ones had more grinding than the newer ones as well, and I HATE grinding. If I want to battle enemies, I will battle enemies. But don't force me too.

EDIT: I think there is still a market for fixed focus, 2D-ish titles. But that isn't really 16-bit. If Square are going to do it, they could at least have detailed scenery etc, because nobody wants to play through a world that is visually so repetitive as VI (and yes, I know it is varied and awesome for its generation, but it's not 1991 anymore). As I said, there are games that combine the old-school with new-school graphics and design style and do it very well. That is something I would like Square to do, but perhaps in a new IP.

[Wolf Kanno]

Agree with you on the fact that the older FFs tend to focus more evenly on characters. But I think I prefer more development on some characters than equal but less development on all characters. Personal thing.

I'm the opposite, I feel if your character is important enough to be playable, they need to have justification. Course, I prefer ensemble casts cause trying to play through a game where you don't like the leads (VII, X) makes it unbearable cause the game won't shut up about them. Whereas I always feel bad when some characters (like most of VIII's cast) had the potential to be interesting, but are constantly shoved into the background so the game can focus more on the leads.




My point comes back to the difference between the Celes scene and the Cloud/Tifa scene is that the player is given more responsibility to understand the content and context of the moment in the Celes scene, whereas the scene in VII leaves little to the players imagination cause it repetitively verbalizes what the characters are thinking and feeling. The scene in VI is the player taking the role of Celes, whereas the scene with Cloud and Tifa is the player watching them. Both have their strengths and weakness as medium for story telling, but I have to be bias towards VI in this because the scene asks more from the player whereas VII's scene is pretty straightforward about what the characters are trying to convey and leaves little for the player to think about. You just take it for face value, you never really stop to think what the characters are thinking cause they already told you. I feel this is the difference between watching a story and experiencing it, cause part of what makes the story special is what you bring to it. ;)

But I am going to argue that you are putting your own perspective on a story, adding additional meaning that was not intended or accurately portrayed in the older stories. Basically, you are fitting a meaning that you want to evidence that is ambiguous. Of course, I just found out that the SNES translations of FF games are appalling, so I'd probably have to play the GBA versions to more accurately comment on what is what.Play the GBA versions of the 16-bit games. They are significantly better in terms of translation and localization. VI definetly needed it, but I feel FFIV and V benefited more from it. As for bringing your own point of view...

That's the point though, you the player yourself are able to add your own touch to the story, which I feel is far better than having the author say "this is how it is and its not debatable, unless I change my mind 10 years later..." ;)

Honestly though, I feel that the argument Vivi22 had about the buildup for the Celes Suicide is anything but a leap of the imagination, when you really think about it. Is it so unreasonable to believe time was passing by as Celes fished? That after learning all the horrible truths of the WoR, and watching her father figure pass away, as she vainly tried to save him, on top of the realization she may be all alone in the world, is not enough to make her snap, and commit towards suicide? I mean, its not a very big leap here and I don't feel that driving it home with extra scenes would really strengthen the moment, it would simply just prove that the writer had little faith in its audience to get the meaning.

Hell, the VII example you gave, implies that Tifa and Cloud got it on, but its just as easy for someone to think that they just fell asleep next to each other. Its not like they were naked when they woke up, and had to get dressed, or you even see them kiss and imply a more energetic physical exchange, yet fans were still able to understand what the author was implying. Sometime, its better to let the audience come to their own interpretation, instead of holding their hand the whole time, cause you're afraid they may misinterpret the meaning. If they do, its because you didn't do a good job writing it, or you had a shoddy translation. ;)


Gameplay is a bit of an iffy one. I find that the dungeons in all FFs can get very tedious except for XIII because I spend half my time recovering after a fight and worrying about items etc (or in XII, waiting for my MP to recover). Because of this, many ordinary battles were just a grind of attack etc, which becomes very dull, especially as you cannot avoid them (and that is not a technology thing - Chrono Trigger). XIII was less of a slog because enemies were more challenging (as you automatically recovered after battle) and you were unrestrained in using abilities (because there was no MP). However, it definitely pulled the balance to something too simple, and definitely needs to be more intricate going forward. And it also got tiring near the end to continually stagger enemy, maul them, etc etc.

Anyway, my point is that FF's gameplay has always had its issues. I find that the older ones had more grinding than the newer ones as well, and I HATE grinding. If I want to battle enemies, I will battle enemies. But don't force me too.

I disagree here, and I know we've had this discussion before. For me, saying you don't like item management/grinding in an RPG is like saying you don't like aiming in a FPS. You're literally attacking the only real challenge in the game, and a gameplay mechanic that has been part of the genre since Dragon Quest. Once you take it away, there is no real challenge anymore, without implementing other, oftentimes just as stupid mechanics like XIII did. I actually prefer the longer dungeons with a few puzzles thrown in for good measure. It makes each new story event feel like an accomplishment

I pretty much hate the dungeons of the more modern FFs. While FFXII were mostly fine, I did miss the heavier puzzle aspects from the older titles, and FFX and XIII's dungeon were so tediously simple, I often wonder why the game bothered having them in the first place cause they present no challenge and they were rarely connected to the events of the story in XIII's case. Once the challenge is stripped from them, everything else begins to lost its purpose.

The best RPGs I've played in the last couple of years are often times the ones that actually adhere to the old rules of utilizing item management, labyrinth-style dungeons, and more focus on exploiting weaknesses. I don't see how you can have fun in a game where everything is simply handed to you; as long as you're willing to navigate a character to the next plot point.

I also disagree with XIII being challenging, the fights are fairly easy when the game doesn't screw you over by making Hope the lead character or cast an instant death spell that every character survives except for your hopeless leader, is more annoying than challenging, and having your failure simply zap you back to just before the fight with no consequences just defeats the entire point of making this a "life or death" struggle. Its almost like playing in god mode and I wonder what is the point of it all? You actually need the item management aspect to give RPGs a challenge. If the FF series only wants its audiance to enjoy the story and characters, it needs to end as a game series and just become a film project cause once you remove the relevancy of the gameplay side, their is no point cause it doesn't add anything to the game. XIII is a title where the gameplay and story are simply divorced from each other. You could easily get the same experience from XIII by watching the cutscenes on Youtube.


EDIT: I think there is still a market for fixed focus, 2D-ish titles. But that isn't really 16-bit. If Square are going to do it, they could at least have detailed scenery etc, because nobody wants to play through a world that is visually so repetitive as VI (and yes, I know it is varied and awesome for its generation, but it's not 1991 anymore). As I said, there are games that combine the old-school with new-school graphics and design style and do it very well. That is something I would like Square to do, but perhaps in a new IP.It was 94 actually, and you act like VI fans spend all day bemoaning VI's graphics. :p I'm sorry to say this, and I don't really mean any offense by this, but I feel your issue with the graphics is kind of some irrelvant personal OCD issue, cause most people I talk to about older RPGs and such don't seem to care, they just accept it and go on with their life.

As I said, Etrian Odyssey is a rather successful RPG series nowadays yet its mostly like this:

34535

So, I feel your argument of people not wanting to see 16-bit style graphics, and repetitive backgrounds is simply a sad attempt at trolling. I don't feel that people place as much priority onto graphics like some game developers and people do. Often times, I'm too busy fulfilling some task to care how much detail went into making the scenery. I want to get to the boss battle, I don't have time to look at the background and notice I've seen that same rock formation three times before.

SE has been making 16-bit titles, more often than modern games lately. The countless FFI/II ports, FFIV:TAY, FFLegends, FFIV PSP Collection, and Chrono Trigger DS. Even Disgaea is one of the better rated SRPGs on the market; and its style is mostly 2D sprites on a 3D background, with cutscenes using pictures with voice overs. So I simply can't agree that 2D doesn't sell and retro games won't sell. I'm surrounded by a generation of kids wearing T-Shirts that reference games that existed before they were even born. So I would say 16-bit is still hip. :cool:

[champagne supernova]

I disagree here, and I know we've had this discussion before. For me, saying you don't like item management/grinding in an RPG is like saying you don't like aiming in a FPS. You're literally attacking the only real challenge in the game, and a gameplay mechanic that has been part of the genre since Dragon Quest.

To use the FPS example, I'm saying I don't like spending my time running around for a medikit. And, if we look at FPS these days, what do most of them have? Regenerating health systems.



Once you take it away, there is no real challenge anymore, without implementing other, oftentimes just as stupid mechanics like XIII did. I actually prefer the longer dungeons with a few puzzles thrown in for good measure. It makes each new story event feel like an accomplishment

I pretty much hate the dungeons of the more modern FFs. While FFXII were mostly fine, I did miss the heavier puzzle aspects from the older titles, and FFX and XIII's dungeon were so tediously simple, I often wonder why the game bothered having them in the first place cause they present no challenge and they were rarely connected to the events of the story in XIII's case. Once the challenge is stripped from them, everything else begins to lost its purpose.

The best RPGs I've played in the last couple of years are often times the ones that actually adhere to the old rules of utilizing item management, labyrinth-style dungeons, and more focus on exploiting weaknesses. I don't see how you can have fun in a game where everything is simply handed to you; as long as you're willing to navigate a character to the next plot point.

I agree that there isn't much in the way of puzzle mechanics in modern FFs and I agree that this is a dynamic that would improve the gameplay. But trawling through lots of the same/similar enemies isn't my idea of fun. And games have been successful in only having big, boss-like battles. Shadow of the Colossus springs to mind.

I also agree with you that XIII took away too much control from the player. Continuous auto-attack is taking the complaints about XII playing itself to another degree. Although it did look mighty dramatic :p (I've always thought XIII is definitely style over substance). However, a lot of individual battles in XIII had the potential to trip you up, which I enjoyed, rather than grinding.

I also write a bit (although I'm not yet published), so I thought about the Celes scene and found some more issues with it (from a technical perspective).

1) Cid mentions that there were people on the island as he dies. As far as I remember, they aren't mentioned at any stage beforehand nor is there any evidence of their existence on the island.

2) Cid then says that everybody apart from him ended it by jumping off a cliff. To say that an entire community all decided to end it is quite a leap of faith. Especially as they weren't in the position Celes was. They still had a community.

3) Why would Cid mention on his deathbed to Celes that a whole lot of people jumped off a cliff, but she should retain hope. Especially when we consider 4.

4) Cid had made a raft for Celes to go to the mainland and find her friends. If that was his intention, surely he would have told her that on her deathbed, instead of writing it in a letter and directing Celes to the quickest life exit.

5) The 5 stages of grief say that people go through denial, anger and bargaining before they hit depression (and then after that, acceptance). I'm not saying that everybody grieves in the same way, but generally, it takes some time for people to process that someone close to them is dead. Celes just went from Cid dying to depression in about 5 seconds flat.

6) The entire scene is avoidable if you feed Cid enough fish. Which is just weird if it's supposed to be so important.

So, from my point of view, the Celes suicide scene seems more to be something the development team decided to tack on rather than something that was thoughtfully built up.

Also, Kefka's motivation as a mad pseudo-nihilist stems from lines such as this:


And time will destroy all of those as well. Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? ...Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
&


Life... Dreams... Hope... Where do they come from? And where do they go...? Such meaningless things... I'll destroy them all!

And the VI fans laud him as the greatest villain in the series.

However, another villain says something like this:


Reflect on your... Childhood...
Your sensation... Your words... Your emotions...
Time... It will not wait...
No matter... ...how hard you hold on. It escapes you...
And...

Which is exactly the same pseudo-nihilistic rubbish that Kefka is talking about. Yet Ultimecia is criticised, mostly by the same VI fans who love Kefka, as the weakest villain in the series whose actions are unmotivated. Despite the fact that her dialogue suggests loss and the background of the world suggests she would be persecuted, while Kefka comes across more as a pseudo-intellectual emo git.

As much as this comes across as a massive bashing session of VI, I really do admire the game. I think, for it's time, it was an amazing game. But I feel the story in FF has developed since VI, although no FF will ever rate as a great story, because they are supposed to be escapist melodramas. And gameplay as a whole has moved on since 1991.

But maybe the only way to prove this point is if Square-Enix do release a rehash of their SNES games. If it gets critically panned as outdated, I win. If it gets critical acclaim as taking the genre back to its roots, you win.

[Loony BoB]

*joins the long post crew and makes a few points based on things he's read in recent-ish posts*

You can point to older games focusing more evenly on characters, but FFXIII probably does that better than any of the other FF's. Admittedly, it makes it easier when you consider that there are only six characters, but I don't think every game needs a cast of sixteen - my preference is around eight characters, but I guess everyone has their own personal opinion on that matter. But XIII definitely gives an even distribution of character time.

One thing I do miss in FF is something I've only seen once that I can remember (possibly more if I try harder, but I can't be arsed) - player-driven storyline. The ability to change the outcome, even if only marginally, by playing the game in a different way. The thing I'm thinking of is fairly blatantly obvious - the FFVII dating scene. I know FFVI has differing outcomes at certain points depending on your actions, too. This is something that I personally feel the new games lack due to the FMV sequences. Hover, having said all that, VII managed to do it in 3D so I don't see why we would have to go back to 16 bit just to get that kind of thing done effectively. Just make more FMVs if you have to. They spend long enough as it is on developing the games. They could even sacrifice a few FMV sequences so that you still have the same total number of FMVs on a disk but only see a certain number in any one playthrough.


Hell, the VII example you gave, implies that Tifa and Cloud got it on, but its just as easy for someone to think that they just fell asleep next to each other. Its not like they were naked when they woke up, and had to get dressed, or you even see them kiss and imply a more energetic physical exchange, yet fans were still able to understand what the author was implying.

I love how there are two different versions of this event, too. :D One of them she's just a little embarrassed about it, the other she is mortified that they were seen. I think that kind of makes it obvious what happened in the latter scenario and gives a good idea of how you, again, can influence the storyline. But yeah, these things aren't written in stone, they are implied - but the same can be said for many things out there in 16 bit, 32 bit and even in the current games. It's what allows for so much debate in FF forums, which is obviously good for us. xD Or bad, depending on how much you enjoy such debates. ;)

I agree with charlie rather than WK when it comes to XIII and how challenging fights were. They were far more challenging in XIII than they were in older games. You could die in almost any fight, whereas in older games your first battle after a sleep in an inn would almost always be an absolute walk in the park. But, of course, this is all dependant on how you play the game, how much time you spend fighting, etc. However, WK is right that if you die, you appear back where you were just before the battle... but that means the game is easier, not the battle. Basically, you die more often, which means battles are harder. You are more limited in your ability to level, which means you can't over-level, which means battles will (for most of the plot) rarely become easy. However, does it mean that the game is harder because the battles are harder? No, because in VII, you can have a save point a very long way away and have to get from one end to another without dying once through multiple battles. This can be easier and can be harder depending on your level in the older games. To be honest, comparing the two and saying that one game is harder than the other... it's not something I would do. They're all beatable in one way or another, for a start, and there are no difficulty levels in any of them. There are simply too many angles to look when it comes to difficulty in these games that, unless it's VIII (where you can be literally invincible for large periods of the game), I would not say any one game is easier than the others. And I suppose you could even make VIII harder if you pushed through the game at speed without making huge efforts in drawing magic, using item/card mod, etc.

I wouldn't say anyone is trolling. It's just opinion based on preference and maybe in some cases lack of knowledge in any one area.

Also, I agree that Kefka is one of the better main villains while Ultimecia is not. This is mostly because for me, the whole Ultimecia time compression thing makes no sense whatsoever. But more importantly, the constant changing of the main enemy in FFVIII makes you less "attached" if you get what I mean. Also, her weird talking just makes her look stupid rather than unique. For me, VIII was about battling sorcerors about as much as Shaun of the Dead was a romantic movie (it was marketed as "A romantic comedy - with zombies" :D). I mean, sure, it's there, but let's face it - we were watching that movie for the zombie comedy side. Likewise, the game FFVIII was not about the enemy but about Squall and Rinoa doing their thing. And TripleTriad. I love the game but not for the plot.

I honestly don't think it matters how critically acclaimed another 16 bit main-series numbered FF would be because I don't think it would feel right not having FF push the boundaries of the system like it always does with it's graphics. I mean, I'm playing the old FFs lately (and I've already finished I, II and V this year... and have played a notable chunk of IV and VI long ago, too, but am replaying VI now) and they're great at £6.99 games, but if they were released as a main game today I would be insanely disappointed. Not in the game for it's price, but in the lack of ambition shown by Square Enix. SE is great because it has constantly pushed the boundaries to try to come up with something new. Now, recently that hasn't worked as well (for most people, I still liked FFXIII), but that doesn't mean that they should stop trying altogether and go back to making games that will operate fine on a GBA.

[champagne supernova]

Oh, I definitely think Kefka is a better villain than Ultimecia. I just don't like the hypocrisy in saying that Kefka has a great motivation because of his mad pseudo-nihilistic take on the world while Ultimecia has no motivation because of her pseudo-nihilistic take on the world. But Kefka is woven into the story and the player is shown what a evil nutcase he is, whereas Ultimecia feels tacked on at the end.

And I agree that having lots of easier fights can be as hard/harder than one hard fight. I just prefer having more harder fights because it keeps each individual battle more interesting, whereas I find in the older FFs, I get bored of attack, attack, attack, end battle, heal, repeat. Not that XIII is not guilty of getting boring. Because the battle system is so automated, it does get boring because you just mash auto-attack. Although it is saved by having some fairly stylish looking animation. It just looks cool. Style over substance, true, but still, more interesting than a sprite jumping across to another sprite and hacking it.

And that gives me a new point. Graphics allow people to be immersed in the world. As much as XIII is flawed, it is a stunning game and I can just run around and just enjoy what I see. I spent a lot of time in XII, and I had a lot of issues with XII (pacing and Penelo mainly), just running around the world and thinking how amazing it was too. RPGs especially should benefit from better graphics because they are about suspension of belief and immersion in a game world.

But I have no problem with a 16-bit-esque game being developed by Squenix, as long as they modernise it. Something more in the mould of 3D Dot Game Heroes. I mean I saw a game called D-Pad Hero which runs on a NES emulator and is basically an 8-bit version of Guitar Hero. Thought it was a genius concept (although it's bloody hard to play without a gamepad). But once the nostalgia wore off, I really started wanting to play Guitar Hero. That's the problem that this type of game has to overcome. Once the nostalgia wears off, if they haven't modernised it, people will get bored.

[Loony BoB]

I just realised that's the second time I've got you confused with charliepinayi today. I need to read more than the first three letters of a username when replying to posts. Oops.

Yeah, I get what you're saying regarding Kefka/Ultimecia in that case.

While some battles can be easy in XIII if you overlevel, it should be noted that the cap in XIII means that even with maximum leveling done at any point, some battles will still be very difficult without a guide. Especially if you are trying for the five star thing. In most other games, the cap is so insanely out of reach without endless, endless grinding that by the time you're at cap (usually "Level 99"), you can beat the most powerful enemy without much effort at all. I really like the limiting factor brought in by XIII.

EDIT: I agree totally with the paragraph you edited in just now regarding modernising the games. I do tend to switch off from FFVI very easily, whereas with modern games I want to play endlessly.

[champagne supernova]

Agreed about XIII. The Adamantoises and the later marks will always be difficult, irrespective of how much you've played. It was the vampires in Vanille's village that were my particular irritation. Maybe because I was trying to enjoy the scenery. VIII also tried to make battles more consistent, but failed because of the junction system being RIDICULOUS.

Yeah, I think that I may come across as bashing VI, which I'm not. I just get frustrated that nobody will pick up its flaws. VII was the first FF I played and I will always enjoy it and want to play it, but I am willing to admit it has its flaws. And I get more frustrated when anybody tries to sell a FF story as if it setting new standards in the way that stories are told. They are video game stories and, although the gap is closing, they are not in the same class as great books or great movies.

[Slothy]

I was catching up on the posts here on my phone last night in bed and early this morning so hopefully I don't miss anything I wanted to comment on.


I also write a bit (although I'm not yet published), so I thought about the Celes scene and found some more issues with it (from a technical perspective).

1) Cid mentions that there were people on the island as he dies. As far as I remember, they aren't mentioned at any stage beforehand nor is there any evidence of their existence on the island.

2) Cid then says that everybody apart from him ended it by jumping off a cliff. To say that an entire community all decided to end it is quite a leap of faith. Especially as they weren't in the position Celes was. They still had a community.

3) Why would Cid mention on his deathbed to Celes that a whole lot of people jumped off a cliff, but she should retain hope. Especially when we consider 4.

4) Cid had made a raft for Celes to go to the mainland and find her friends. If that was his intention, surely he would have told her that on her deathbed, instead of writing it in a letter and directing Celes to the quickest life exit.

5) The 5 stages of grief say that people go through denial, anger and bargaining before they hit depression (and then after that, acceptance). I'm not saying that everybody grieves in the same way, but generally, it takes some time for people to process that someone close to them is dead. Celes just went from Cid dying to depression in about 5 seconds flat.

6) The entire scene is avoidable if you feed Cid enough fish. Which is just weird if it's supposed to be so important.

So, from my point of view, the Celes suicide scene seems more to be something the development team decided to tack on rather than something that was thoughtfully built up.

1) Celes and Cid literally exchange 11 lines of dialogue before he mentions this. I'm not sure why it matters whether or not he says it right after she wakes up, or if it's revealed as part of a conversation with him when he's ill less than five minutes later. It's also difficult to say there's no evidence of their existence on the island. We don't know how long they were there, or whether that house was on the island from before the world ended. Presumably, they wouldn't have simply happened to have the tools with them to build it, so it's entirely possible that a single house is all that survived on that island and they wouldn't have been able to make any other permanent shelters or beds. This is a bit like saying because there are no bathrooms in FFVI no one ever takes a piss.

2) You assume there were a large number of people there to begin with, or that simply having a large number of people would be enough to stave off depression. It also never says that they all decided to kill themselves at once. For starters, the island is very small, presumably with limited resources to keep a large number of people alive, and those resources were dying off even without being used. Second, these people had just watched the world end and were suddenly faced with dead loved ones, and little hope of ever escaping the island to anything better. In a survival situation, losing hope can quickly lead to depression and your will to go on quickly dwindling. Even in a group, these feelings of hopelessness can be contagious and spread quickly, especially after the first person makes that leap from the cliff. Make no mistake, in a situation like that, hope would fade fast and even with a community of a dozen or maybe even more people, coping with the harsh reality of survival in such a situation would be far from a cake walk. Some people in those situations will simply stop caring about going on and that is poison to the rest of the group when survival is at stake and there's little reason to believe things will get better.

3 & 4) He mentions it as soon as he starts to become ill. At this point it's possible he doesn't realize he's dying. He may have simply planned on recovering and making the trip with her. But you also need to keep in mind that we're talking about taking a raft out on the ocean in hopes of finding either the main land or some other form of rescue. To say that it's a simple matter of let's hop on and find your friends is to ignore the reality that you may never find land or rescue, end up worse off if you do, or even die of dehydration in a matter of days before you get to safety. Such an escape attempt isn't a simple decision if you're able to survive where you are. It's entirely possible that he may have written the letter shortly before Celes comes back to find him dead, knowing he didn't have long and may not last to tell her about the raft himself. It could be a simple matter of him not being ready to accept that he was dying until it was almost too late.

5) The assumption that she has to grieve according to a five stage process isn't necessarily realistic since as you said, everyone grieves differently. It also ignores the fact that Cid's death had been coming for a while, giving her time to process the inevitable before it happened, not to mention that taking care of him was likely the only reason she kept going. You're assuming her depression is the result of his death, but it's far more reasonable to assume that it started before that and taking care of him was the only thing that kept her from succumbing to it.

6) I've never seen or heard of anyone avoiding this scene on their first playthrough. In fact, it requires some pretty specific knowledge that you're not likely to have or notice on a first playthrough. I don't think I even found out you could save Cid until quite a few years after I first played through the game, and the first time I heard about it I didn't even believe it given the number of rumours that had formed around the game over the years. The scene is important, but I don't think being able to save him undermines it when many people will never even realize that they can save him. Certainly not on the first try anyway.


I just don't like the hypocrisy in saying that Kefka has a great motivation because of his mad pseudo-nihilistic take on the world while Ultimecia has no motivation because of her pseudo-nihilistic take on the world. But Kefka is woven into the story and the player is shown what a evil nutcase he is, whereas Ultimecia feels tacked on at the end.

I don't think I've ever seen an FFVI fan claim this, and for the record, I'm perfectly willing to cop to any flaws the earlier games actually have, including Kefka's weak backstory. I'm pretty sure WK is more than willing to do the same as well, and we're probably two of the bigger FFVI and SNES era fans and defenders on the forum. But as Bob already covered, Kefka isn't a great villain because of his backstory. In fact, I'll outright state for your benefit that anyone who says he's great because of his backstory is either an idiot or thinking of a different villain. He's a great villain because he's entertaining, and really smurfing successful. Not many villains can claim to have wiped out an entire kingdom, and entire race of magical creatures and destroyed the world. Though I will admit that I do enjoy his reasons for doing it a bit. It wasn't just for power or some thirst for conquest. He did it because he wanted to, for no other reason than to do it. It's the same sort of reason that I like the Joker I suppose who Kefka seems to riff off of at least a little.


And that gives me a new point. Graphics allow people to be immersed in the world. As much as XIII is flawed, it is a stunning game and I can just run around and just enjoy what I see. I spent a lot of time in XII, and I had a lot of issues with XII (pacing and Penelo mainly), just running around the world and thinking how amazing it was too. RPGs especially should benefit from better graphics because they are about suspension of belief and immersion in a game world.

I have to disagree with this statement just about in it's entirety to be honest. First, I think the general concept of immersion in gaming in the sense that if we keep making things more real and up the detail and fidelity on everything that players will get lost in the game is a complete and utter lie. For starters, the player is never going to forget that they're a person playing a game. Nor do better graphics mean the player is better able to suspend disbelief. If that were the case then hand drawn animation in film and TV would be utterly pointless with the advent of computer animation, and companies like Pixar would be making Beowulf or The Polar Express, not The Incredibles, Cars, and Toy Story.

I'd say getting the player engrossed in the experience is a more accurate term for the sort of feeling and state of mind that most people are actually aiming for when they talk about immersion, but saying it's dependent on graphics is a joke. If it were dependent on our ability to create and consume more realistic experiences then gaming would have died and stayed dead in the 70's and 80's. In fact, some of the most immersive games (to use the common term) that I've played don't have great graphics by modern standards. Games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, the SNES FF games, Chrono Trigger, Mario 64, Mario World, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and more but I don't want to spend half of a post listing games.

What makes a game immersive isn't graphics and it never has been. They can certainly help to deliver an immersive experience but they aren't the make or break aspect. The things that the truly great games of any era have in common are that they offer the player a great deal to explore and reward them for doing so. That exploration can come in terms of searching every nook and cranny of a well developed cohesive world to learn more about it's history, people's and characters while still leaving the player feeling like there's always more to discover, or it could be as simple as offering an exploration of the gameplay systems. Super Mario Bros is an incredibly simple game. You start off with the ability to run and jump and in theory could beat the entire game using only those two movements, but the number of new and interesting challenges you'll be faced with overcoming with those two simple movements are too numerous to count and the satisfaction that comes with mastering those abilities is what leads to people getting engrossed in those games. And none of it has to do with the graphics.

FFXII is engrossing for me because it easily has one of the most vast and highly developed worlds I've ever seen in gaming, not to mention having a combat system which was detailed enough and challenging enough to make me feel as though I was accomplishing something when I beat a dungeon or a boss or a mark hunt. The fact that I liked it's art style helped greatly as well. FFXIII wasn't because while there was plenty of HD scenery to look at, the character, level and monster designs looked utterly boring to me, and there was nothing to do in these levels except fight. Nothing to explore, no history to learn about from the locals, no sense that there was always more out there aside from another corridor to slog through. And even worse was that I agree with WK completely about the combat in that game, and even agree with you in a lot of ways. A lot of player agency was removed by adding auto-battle and essentially requiring the player to switch between a handful of paradigms, and the only time's I really died were like WK said, when the game decided to cheese by hitting my party leader with an instant death attack I couldn't have seen coming the first time.

[Loony BoB]

If those are the only times you died in the game then you must be freakishly good. Firstly, you can not be strong enough to take on a boss fight due to dodging too many battles. Secondly, you can use the wrong set of characters, meaning you miss out on vital options that other characters provide. Thirdly, despite how automated you can make the game, you are still in control of what your character is doing and there is every possibility that you can wind up "doing it wrong". And, of course, you can have the wrong paradigm setup or not switch in time or... well, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, let's face it. If you felt the battles were playing themselves then... well, with the amount of times I died in that game, you are a FF God amongst FF men. :p Some of those battles were incredibly frustrating for me.

I agree with you that graphics do not make immersion, but I hope you can also see where I'm coming from when I can say exactly the same thing about old-school graphics not making gameplay and story. And when I say that, I mean in relation to the original purpose of this thread: 16 bit graphics will not suddenly make amazing gameplay and incredible story. So for me, petitioning for a thing in the hope that somehow a 16 bit game will fix Square Enix's creativity is silly.

Whatever SE can do with 16 bit graphics, I am confident they can do the same in a 3D environment. Maybe it will take longer and maybe it will be heavier in the amount of disks it will take up or something, but 16-bit is not the answer to the real problems at SE. One of the biggest problems they have lately is their inability to make games that appeal to the masses. If that is the case, how will 16-bit appeal to the masses? Put simply, it won't.

[champagne supernova]

In the newer FFs, I like wandering around the towns and, in the PS2-onward generation, like wandering around the landscape and admire it. I feel like a person exploring the sights and checking up on my people. I do not get that in the older FFs because of the restraints in dialogue and the fact that everything looks relatively samey (compared to the variation in the modern games). And this expands outside of the FF series. I enjoyed Ultima 7 & Ultima 8. I felt immersed in the world. But, today, this second? I would rather play Elder Scrolls 4.

So, I think graphics are a factor in making a world immersive. But maybe we can leave it as personal preference, otherwise this argument's just going to go around in circles :)

But Bob, believing that modern FFs not appealing to the masses is the problem with modern FFs is, in my opinion, the type of thinking that is going on in Square-Enix that is causing them to release weaker FFs, which in turn, don't have the mass appeal. There is too much focus on what will make FF sell instead of having a clear vision on what will make a good game. This makes it a bit wishy-washy. That's why I've been hopeful about Versus XIII. I think it's Nomura's baby and he wants it done in a certain way, whereas XIII was a bit of a corporate bureaucratic decision.

@Vivi, I disagree with your take on most of the points that you bring up. If they wanted suicide to be a major theme, they should have built it up properly, not in a 5/10 minute section. It's quite a major thing. As for people deciding to give up slowly because life was meaningless - I'm a nihilist. I don't believe in an absolute meaning to life. I'm not planning on jumping off a cliff. And, in general, most people would rather live than kill themselves. Instinct of survival and all that jazz. But personal opinion again.

[Loony BoB]

I am fairly confident that every single Final Fantasy game, or at least every single one since FF1, has been made with the intention of appealing to the masses. I don't think this is what has made them suffer in recent times - I think it is the extremely long development times (making the games cost so much, meaning they won't gain a profit unless they sell twice as much as Uncharted 2 did, which would be an insane target) and the lack of understanding/communication with gamers (see: FFXIV until Yoshi-P came along). Oh, and in some cases you could say a lack of creativity. I think the storywriting has been there, no problem. The varying battle systems haven't really been the cause of suffering - they will continue to evolve, and some people will like some battle systems more than others, etc. The difficulty in striking a balance between too much to do (FFXII) and too little to do (FFXIII) hasn't helped.

For me, the voice acting has not been a positive thing for Final Fantasy but I'm not sure if such a thing can be changed in today's gaming world. Perhaps that is why RPGs do well on small consoles - they can allow the music to really sound through and set the mood, people can make up their own voices instead of having to listen to Tidus, Yuna and Seymour, we can actually remember the music and, well, better immerse ourselves.

As I say, though, it's too late for all that - voice acting is here and it seems it is here to stay. I wouldn't bet against the idea that even if they did another 2D game that they would still use voice acting, it's that prominent in the modern era. But, you never know. Perhaps someone will eventually catch on. Could you turn down sound effects and voice acting and turn up the music on FFXIII? I don't think you could. I'm not sure. But that might have been a good idea, if they made the music more obvious. FMVs probably don't help either. Everyone knows when Aeris died how that music fitted so perfectly, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what kind of music was playing when Sahz and Vanille had because I was too busy listening to their actual voices. Which, it must be said, were great - I did love the voice acting in FFXIII as well as FFXII. But the music suffered big time as a result in both games.

But yeah, whatever people might say is wrong with SE/FF, I stand by my assertion that reverting to 16 bit graphics will not fix it. FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX are all fan favourites, although in many cases some are liked more than others and some are even hated by others. But they all did well commercially, they all did well with the critics. FFXI did well enough. FFXII was an interesting one but I wouldn't say it was a bad one, and it has grown on me since I first played it. In fact, checking out the reception it got from major critics and it's metacritic score, I'd say FFXII did wonderfully. So XIII was too linear for a lot of people and certainly lacked gameplay elements. Is that a reason to say their single player games are all crap now? One game, with a couple of things that didn't click right? If so, I still think that's absurd. Perhaps me liking the game makes it harder for me to comprehend why that one game is enough to make the entire single-player series go bust, but oh well. Second up we have FFXIV which was a complete failure, and I personally believe this is down to a seeming inability for the original producer to communicate with fans (as evidenced by the many fans who were in the beta that said pretty much nothing was improved on between beta and the game going live) and also a board-pushed deadline which the game was simply not ready for. Also, levequests. But basically a lot of things went wrong, but I like that they are working hard to fix these things. Either way, we'll have to wait and see what Yoshi does there. But for the single-player series, one game with a metacritic score of 83 (which, it should be noted, is not bad for your average mainstream video game) is not the end of the world by any means.

Still, I do want them to appeal to the masses better purely because I want FF to continue as a solid series. I don't have any major problem with FFXIII, so you could say I should not declare that there is a big problem at SE because I can't see it. But I can understand that if such a problem is seen by so many others then the company needs to look at it purely in the interests of continuing to make FF games. If I want more FF games, I have to hope that they make a change that is in the interests of the wider community than just myself.

[champagne supernova]

I agree with you that FFs are designed with a mass appeal in mind, but that applies to every large game. But a game that has mass appeal is first and foremost a strong game. So I think they should focus on a game they feel will be something brilliant and the appeal will follow. This is a theme for most Japanese studios though - more and more they try copy Western studios when maybe they should try differentiate themselves more.

I don't think it's long development cycles though. X and XII was 5 years (which was long), but XII to XIII was only 3 years. And there was also X-2 in the middle of that. It may have recycled some stuff, but there was a lot of new locations & characters made, variations in old locations, a new battle and class system and new mini-games. GTA3 to GTA4 was a gap of 7 years, with Vice City and San Andreas coming 1 and 3 years after GTA3 respectively. Vice City and San Andreas could probably be considered as somewhere between a X-2 and a new FF in that it required more work than a X-2, but still retained a large quantity of the basic engine, unlike XII and XIII which were completely reworked.

Disagree with you a bit on voice acting. Yeah, when the voice acting goes wrong, it's bad (laughing scene), but it can also be very good (Reddas at the Pharos). Those old FMVs also had no dialogue, so maybe Squenix should focus on using the visual and musical aspect more in its games.

But you're right: in the single-player RPG, there is yet to be a bad FF. XIII might be overly linear and hopefully Square-Enix will learn their lesson. Can't be worse than the notoriously ridiculous (so I've heard) levelling system in FFII, and Square-Enix learnt their lesson from that. But I think the focus on mass appeal led to the overly-linear nature of XIII. Lots of people (myself included) complained that XII was paced too slowly. If Squenix listened to that, then they moved too far in another extreme, thinking that people want a quick, action-packed game, rather than looking for a more balanced approach.

The other possible issue with XIII is that the head of development may not quite be at the top level yet. But it's a learning experience. I think Matsuno not being around to put the final touches on XII also led to that game not being as good as it could be. And it's why XIV is such a mess-up. From what I've heard, it's all over the show without any clear focus. That's what this new producer is having to do: define what FFXIV is first and then make the gameworld to implement his vision.

But I think WK agrees with me that Versus XIII looks good (and I'd rather they kept quiet and announced a release date 6-months before it's done rather than rush it like XIV) and I think XIII-2 could be an interesting glance at where the future of the FF series will be now that mistakes have been made. XIII-2 could be an indicator whether lessons have been learned.

And Loony Bob is right. Making FF go back to its 16-bit roots will limit the game. FF has always been about renewing and innovating. And I don't like the idea of a spin-off 16-bit FF because I feel that they are just cashing in on the brand. Rather let these smaller design teams work on original IPs so they can try develop gameplay and storylines that are new and non-FFish.

EDIT 1: And this thread highlights how focusing on mass appeal can be detrimental. You, me, Vivi22, WK and Bastian all have our own views on the series, and although you & me are closer than Vivi, WK and Bastian, they are still divergent. Now, imagine Square-Enix try to appeal to all of us by incorporating all our views. It would be a mess. Okay, I've exaggerated the example to illustrate my point, but I think I wasn't getting across what I meant when I said, 'focusing on mass appeal.'

EDIT 2: I also remember watching a history of FF on either X or X-2, and they said they always made a Final Fantasy like it was going to be their last one (basically, like when they all thought it was with FF1). Thus, there was huge commitment to making a product first and foremost. I think there has been/was a bit of a movement to a corporate culture of profits, getting games released at a certain time, middle-management interference etc. Hopefully they've learnt their lesson.

[Depression Moon]

but XII to XIII was only 3 years. And there was also X-2 in the middle of that.

XII came out in 2006. XIII came out last year. X-2 came out three years before XII.

[champagne supernova]

but XII to XIII was only 3 years. And there was also X-2 in the middle of that.

XII came out in 2006. XIII came out last year. X-2 came out three years before XII.

I used Japan's release dates on Wikipedia :confused:

[Bastian]

Again, I don't think ANYONE is saying that the new FF (what are we on now? 14? 15? 16? I stopped playing after 9) should be 16-bit graphics etc.

What we're saying is that we want a FF in the style of 4-6 (I would personally limit to "the style of 4-5 myself). It doesn't have to be "Final Fantasy 18" . . . it could be called "Final Fantasy Legends 2" or "Final Fantasy: Retro Game To Make Our Very Old Fans Happy" . . . whatever. We just want something that for us harkens back to the golden days. Because I've gotta tell you, I've tried my hand at post-FF6 games, and they just don't do it for me (except 9, but even so, I think I would have preferred that one as 16-bit) because there's just something super charming about 16 bit that speaks to my nostalgia.

And maybe that's all it is. Nostalgia. But that suits me just fine.

When I first found out about FFLegends I was over the moon. When I played FF4:TAY I was estatic. I much prefered playing FF in a style that more closely resembed my first introduction to the series.

Do I think that 16-bit graphics are better than HD 3D current-gen graphics? No. But they're charming. Do I believe that 16-bit graphics magically force a great story and so on? No. While there's a bit of truth to the "restrictions breed focus and creativity" but it doesn't always work out. There are some terrible 16-bit RPGs out there.

We're not demanding that Squeenix stop making current gen-styled FF. Some of us just want to return to our own childhood and play a brand new FF in the style that we grew up with.

Is that so wrong?

[Mirage]

Yes, I think it would be cool to create a brand new 2D game that wasn't a sequel of some other FF game, but I would still want this game to be of very good technical quality, so I disagree with calling it a 16-bit game.

For me, 16 bit means limited color palettes, sprite resolutions, animation frames, sound quality, polyphony, and lots of other limitations. Don't get me wrong, many 16 bit games look good for their time, and have aged well, but in a new game, I would want something that at least tapped into a bit of the power that a new console brings with it, even if the game isn't 3D.

It is perfectly possible to make a game that looks retro, but would still struggle to run smoothly on something like a PS2. That scott pilgrim game, for example, would probably be impossible to make run on a PS1, it would most likely take the power of a PS2 to run the game at the same resolution and framerate.



-edit-
I also agree with champagne supernova, sort of. FF10-2 had what I can only describe as the bery best implementation of the ATB system to date, and sported a very good job system as well. Too bad the story was derp and ruined the wonderful ending of FF10.

Despite that, I've played FF10-2 three times as much as I played FF10. Simply because the gameplay is way better.

[Slothy]

If those are the only times you died in the game then you must be freakishly good. Firstly, you can not be strong enough to take on a boss fight due to dodging too many battles. Secondly, you can use the wrong set of characters, meaning you miss out on vital options that other characters provide. Thirdly, despite how automated you can make the game, you are still in control of what your character is doing and there is every possibility that you can wind up "doing it wrong". And, of course, you can have the wrong paradigm setup or not switch in time or... well, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, let's face it. If you felt the battles were playing themselves then... well, with the amount of times I died in that game, you are a FF God amongst FF men. :p Some of those battles were incredibly frustrating for me.

For the record, I never had the chance to beat the game, but I did get part way through Chapter 11 I believe it was (when you get to Gran Pulse), and yeah, the only times I really died were when the game threw things at me that you couldn't possibly see coming the first time and I was killed by a situation which was essentially unfair (one of the many reasons I despise combat in that game). I don't tend to run from battles when I play RPG's so I had no trouble hitting the cap on the Crystarium each chapter, and frankly, most battles were easily beaten by rotating through three paradigms for much of the game. I had a fourth which included two healers and a commando in case I came across an enemy who could dish out a lot of damage and I would occasionally need more healing, but I can probably count the number of times I switched to it on both of my hands. The number of useful strategies in the game were quite limited which made it easy to make a handful of efficient paradigms. You just had to pay attention and read the flow of battle properly, which only became difficult when they threw instant death attacks in there which you couldn't know about before hand (which was stupid). And for the record, I wasn't getting low ratings on the majority of battles. Maybe the first time I encountered an enemy if it threw something unexpected at me, but once you learn their attacks it's not hard to get a good rating every battle.


@Vivi, I disagree with your take on most of the points that you bring up. If they wanted suicide to be a major theme, they should have built it up properly, not in a 5/10 minute section. It's quite a major thing. As for people deciding to give up slowly because life was meaningless - I'm a nihilist. I don't believe in an absolute meaning to life. I'm not planning on jumping off a cliff. And, in general, most people would rather live than kill themselves. Instinct of survival and all that jazz. But personal opinion again.

Once again, they didn't have a lot of available space on the cartridge to build things up. A lot of concessions had to be made in the script as well when it was originally brought over from Japan because they simply couldn't squeeze all of the english text onto the cartridge. I'm not going to say that the scene couldn't have been done better as a result, but I am saying it did a damn fine job of condensing the scene to the essentials that effectively got the point across.

I also never said that people would have given up because life was meaningless. I said they'd give up because there was no hope of their situation ever improving, or of ever seeing their loved ones again. Again, we're not talking about some ordinary everyday situation here. We're talking about a situation where the people on that island not only saw the world end and lost people they cared about, but the world itself and the plants and animals on it were slowly dying. So not only would it be very difficult for them to survive, it was literally only going to get worse. There was no hope of rescue, of ever seeing home, or of ever building a new life on the island because the world itself was literally dying. Combine that with the fact that suddenly being forced to survive in the wilderness on it's own, even with the shelter of a house, would be extremely difficult to a degree most people can't actually imagine (try going days, or even weeks without a decent meal, trying to scrounge up whatever food and water you can. Even fishing can be far more difficult than the game implies, even with proper equipment).

The most important part of any survival situation, before food, water, shelter, or anything else is actually maintaining the will to keep going. And without hope of things ever getting better that can be extremely difficult, especially for those who have lead relatively comfortable lives. People who've been lost in the wilderness in the real world have given in to the depression that can creep up on you quickly in a situation like that, and easily spread to the rest of the group. And when depression starts to take hold of someone, particularly in situations of high stress, it can quickly spiral out of control. Yes, it's no simple matter to override our natural fear of death and instincts for survival, but then, we override natural instincts all of the time, and when someone has spiraled into a deep depression, they aren't always thinking straight. But even if you are thinking straight, are you going to tell me it isn't rational to end it quickly rather than face the dwindling resources and slow death a ruined world offers?

You may not agree with this take, but it's not only a plausible explanation for a group of people ending their lives, but a realistic one given the circumstances we're talking about here.

Also, to clarify something here which Bastion already mentioned, I'm not arguing that Square should go around making new 16-bit FF entries. I would like to see some 2D entries in a spin-off series or something like that, but I wouldn't want it limited to simply 16-bit graphical stylings. The thing is that with the drastic move to 3D over the years, there's been little improvement in 2D graphics. With the exception of Vanillaware, no one has really done much beyond 2D sprites, and I think that's a real shame. But then, I've always wanted to see an RPG with an accurate representation of Amano's concept art as I think that would be an unbelievably beautiful game to play. And the irony is that now that we have the hardware to start pushing some really creative boundaries with 2D it may never happen.

But I will also state that I do believe that SNES era FF titles, and even FFVII and IX managed to convey a lot more with their simple graphics than an entry like XIII did for me. I'll also gladly defend their art styles for that matter, and do completely believe that they've held up pretty well. Sure the technology may not be there, but they still paid attention to principles of good art design which helps give them a charm that isn't lost because console tech has moved on.

[champagne supernova]

You may not agree with this take, but it's not only a plausible explanation for a group of people ending their lives, but a realistic one given the circumstances we're talking about here.


So you either have to believe that an entire group of people gave up on life or that that element of the story wasn't written well. As I said, personal opinion. I'm going for the latter.

I just have a personal objection to the masses of spin-offs using the FF name, because I think it weakens the brand. Something like Dissidia I can handle because it is using FF intellectual property. But FF Crystal Adventures: My Life as a King etc is pushing it. I'd also like Square-Enix to try develop some new IPs and as they seem to be so risk-averse at the moment, perhaps this could be an area they could generate something interesting (like FF Tactics - which if I recall was graphically more similar to the SNES FFs than the PS FFs).

EDIT: What part of VIII's art style do you think is inferior to VII & IX?

[Bastian]

Yes, I think it would be cool to create a brand new 2D game that wasn't a sequel of some other FF game, but I would still want this game to be of very good technical quality, so I disagree with calling it a 16-bit game.

For me, 16 bit means limited color palettes, sprite resolutions, animation frames, sound quality, polyphony, and lots of other limitations. Don't get me wrong, many 16 bit games look good for their time, and have aged well, but in a new game, I would want something that at least tapped into a bit of the power that a new console brings with it, even if the game isn't 3D.

You can have that. It's called FF: 4 Heroes. But that's not what I want. I want an actual factual 16-bit game with those "limitations" you were talking about. I WANT the synthetic sound of the SNES sounds, I WANT the "limited color palettes, animation frames" etc. Some of us LIKE the old school blocky sprites from the 16-bit era and would love to play a brand new Final Fantasy game in that style again.

I have never played or seen the Scott Pilgrim game, (though I loved the movie) so I don't understand your comparison. I don't understand how a game that looks retro would struggle to run on a PS2. Perhaps we're using "retro" in different ways.

To be clear: what I want is basically FFLegends: a game which would for all intents and purposes be played on a SNES. I don't want any new features that would make that impossible. I want blocky 16-bit sprites, I want synthesised instruments. Etc.

Would I also want a HD current-gen style 3D game with photorealistic graphics? Absolutely (so long as it had castles and armor and magic and dragons and stuff) but that's not the issue at hand. I ALSO want a retro 16-bit styled game. I want both.

[Mirage]

The game looks pretty much just like this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB4wS10mgWg) The reason I don't think it would run on PS1 is simply because in some scenes, there's too many sprites and stuff going on for it to fit in the 2 MB of video RAM the PS1 has got.

[Loony BoB]

Doesn't 16-bit refer to systems? So really it would be kind of impossible to call a PS2 game "16-bit"? Not sure, I don't know huge amounts about this kind of thing. And why not go the full deal and go back to 8-bit rather than 16-bit? :p

I can't comprehend why someone would want the limitations in colouring and whatnot. I agree with Mirage that it's fine to want 16-bit (or 2D or whatever) games, but to settle for having them as a "FF Legends 2" or whatever rather than "FF XV". In which case, sure, these things still might happen. But you'd think that if FFL sold well, they'd make it global. But they didn't make it global. Suggesting that it didn't sell well enough to justify it.

[champagne supernova]

Doesn't 16-bit refer to systems?

Yeah, it does. I think it refers to the memory size of the CPU per operation, or something like that. So we can never REALLY go back to 16-bit systems.

And yeah, why limit your artists in terms of colour and performance? Letting them do a 16-bit style is one thing, but forcing them to constrain their talents to preserve the smaller colour palettes and performance of an outmoded and outdated system just seems to be peculiar.

[Mirage]

It just refers to how big numbers the CPU is calculating in one chunk, like it can calculate for example a 32bit integer in one swoop rather than having to split it into 16 bit values and calculate them. Also, more bits enable a larger addressable physical memory space.

[Wolf Kanno]

I'll just post a few points here:

On the subject of the suicide scene: The people killed themselves cause their values were literally taken from them. A self proclaimed nihilist chooses to recognize there is no meaning in existence (Like Kefka and most FF villains) but a person who does place value in existence only to have it taken away is more likely to take a suicidal approach (though historically, most nihilist cannot be true nihilist unless they are criminally insane cause normal people who try to be nihilist do eventually go into depression and kill themselves or go insane, hence why the biggest dilemma in philosophical nihilism is justifying living and trying to create a meaningful reason to avoid suicide) so as, Vivi22 pointed out, I feel these people simply each lost hope and killed themselves. Yet more importantly here is that I feel you missed the point, it doesn't matter who these people are, their deaths simply served as a foundation to the aftermath of the Floating Continent and are meant to show the player that the new world is not a happy place and is one of total despair. The entire theme of the second half of the game is hope and finding value in life, which is ultimately (and very cheesily) expressed in the final conversation with Kefka. So I feel you are being misguided by an irrelevant element of the story, and missing the bigger picture here.

As for it being irrelevant cause its skippable, I feel you are wrong cause its the fact that Cid's death and Celes' grief is a direct reaction to the players input that adds weight to the scene for the player. If it was meant simply for just Celes' character growth, it would have been presented more like the way you felt it should have been, instead its presented the way it is because you, the player, are suppose to be affected by it. Not out of empathy, but personal responsibility.

I don't feel the love triangle in VII would be anywhere near as heated among fans if it didn't have its interactive elements, Tifa and Aerith didn't choose Cloud, they chose you, the player, which is what makes it so personal. The fact the suicide scene doesn't reward you for saving Cid, makes the player have to choose his death in later playthroughs. Are you a kind person who wouldn't let even a virtual character die? or would you rather whack him off and revel in the drama? The scene says more about the player than the characters, and this is something that I feel makes video games a superior medium for story telling.

The problem with later games that have dropped these elements, is that the gameplay and story are divorced from each other. The fact the games are getting easier and simpler is only adding to the pointlessness of the game side, and the fact the player has no control over the story means that watching youtube cutscenes allows a guy to have just as much involvement and enjoyment as the guy who played through it. The player is no longer really getting anything out of the gameplay, and several games as storytelling mediums are unable to bring anything new to the medium that movies can't already do.

On the subject of personal preference: I agree this mostly just proves how difficult the idea of trying to appeal to the fanbase is, cause we ourselves are pretty divided on what makes a game good. I could care less if a game re-uses maps and visual textures as long as the dungeons feel different with elements like puzzles or strange gimmicks like the Lodestone Cavern in FFIV. Whereas you want to enjoy the story and characters and don't like being bogged down by traversing dungeons and having to micro-manage skills and resources. Yet at the same time, I don't feel we couldn't agree on a happy medium somewhere.

I am intrigued by Versus XIII as a game, but I honestly can't say I'm excited for any SE title in terms of storytelling cause I disagree with you and BoB about the writing. I found XIII to be overly pretentious and boring, and most of the cast felt like stock rpg cliches whose only form of character development was whining about their problems, for 10 straight hours and then smurfing around for another 10 before finally deciding to just give in and have everything magically work out for them in the end. I hate XIII as a story and its cast is one of my least favorite in the series. While I can agree that the changes being made to XIII-2 is certainly for the better and its coming off better as a game, I feel the damage has been done. I probably won't play the game cause I have no interest in the characters or story, nor the world. I found it all poorly written, and overly melodramatic for my taste.

As for whether or not a 16-bit RPG would help the FF franchise, I do feel it could. This is not saying that I want FFXV to be a retro title but, rather I feel the current "FF Team" would find making a retro title beneficial cause it would fix what I feel is most of the teams problems. The reason being that the limited resources would force the team to prioritize what they feel is important to make a compelling game. When you can't rely on visual effects and subtlety in character animation, to tell a story, you have to do better with the dialogue and music presentation. If you can't build visual backdrops as dungeons, you now need to make dungeons more engaging by adding puzzles or maze like structures. You can no longer "fix" the game by simply throwing high-res graphics and cutscenes at it to make it engaging, you actually have to find something that works beyond those levels. Would said game be better? In some ways yes, in other ways no, cause technology has brought many things to the series that old games just cannot replicate, but I feel the current designers inability to recognize how to use these elements properly cause they have a weak understanding of the fundamentals has made these elements moot in recent releases. Would it make their next attempt at a modern FF better? Yes, I do, cause now they know what makes a game fundamentally engaging. I feel the problem with many of the modern FFs is that they have forgotten the fundamentals and mostly lack balance.

As dungeons have become more and more like visual backdrops for the story, they have also become much simpler in actual design. I feel its easier to talk about dungeons in the older FFs cause they were engaging, in modern titles, you can mention how cool they looked and what story event happened there but no one actually talks about how fun it was tackling the Mushroom Rock, the Estersand, or The Ark in the later FFs, but people bring up the Lodestone Cavern, the Phoenix Cave, and the Shin-Ra building and how fun the dungeons themselves were. Its because they had elements that made traversing them fun, whereas the other locations are just pretty, or big, and nothing else.

Writing will always be subjective, but if SE continues to insist on making every story some overly melodramatic tripe, I don't see much hope in that getting better or becoming more engaging than just skipping the middle man and watching a show. I don't feel SE has any real writers at this point, there's some promising people in the KH division, but as long as they keep outsourcing to Nojima or using some of their current people, I don't see it getting better. Personally, I feel like SE needs to do everything in their power to re-hire Saga, Kato, and Matsuno cause all three tend to be connected to some of Square's best titles (VI, VII, CT, CC, Xenogears, FFT, FFTA, and VS) and their few duds tend to follow a pattern of having heavy executive meddling involved. Personally, I feel the writing is where FF is becoming weakest cause its the one that has grown the least. Kitase is pretty content to keep the franchise where it is at, to simply appeal to teenagers, that I don't feel FF will ever try to tackle some of the darker and more mature subject matter of other titles. Even XIII really sugar coated the theme of accepting ones own mortality and idea of destiny. I still feel P3 did a better job tackling the subject matter than XIII ever hoped to.

As for VI being perfect, it really isn't, but I feel its aged better than some installments in the series. Many elements were simply good for their time. Half the cast is pretty irrelevant to the story, its a pretty easy game unless you purposely make it challenging, its filled with side characters that don't go anywhere, and its customization system begins the FF tradition of being mostly fluff, as it tries vainly to re-invent the FFV Job class system, while having too many exploitable abilities that suck the challenge from the game. It has its fair share of problems, I just get annoyed that 16 years later, SE is still making some of the same mistakes.

In all, this comes down to preference and where your nostalgia lies. I feel the franchise has lost its reputation from the 90s; and nowadays its remembered more for being easy, wacky designs, and graphics. I don't feel like FF has led the franchise in years. Will Versus XIII fix that? Maybe, hopefully, or it might just collapse under its own weight from the amount of pressure fans are putting on it to redeem a rather lackluster decade, from one of the "golden childs" of the 90s, who could do no wrong. Either way, I'm sure SE will still be able to make millions off the FF name and if that doesn't help, there are still legions of pre-teen fans who will keep them afloat with the KH franchise.

[Depression Moon]

Hold on a minute, you can save Cid?

[Mirage]

Yes.

[Wolf Kanno]

Yeah, if you just feed Cid healthy fish (the fast moving ones) but honestly, saving Cid just nets you a very boring "Thank you Celes, hey I made a raft, why don't you go find your friends?" and he'll just stay on the island and do nothing. I usually purposely kill him (by feeding him weak fish) cause the suicide attempt scene is just nicer to watch and actually adds a bit to Celes' character.

[Loony BoB]

For what it's worth, I find FFXIII to be no more or less melodramatic than any other FF I've played from VI onwards. FFI & II were completely lacking in any kind of drama whatsoever because the characters had less personality/story/background given to them than the average two-line NPC has in FFVII. FFV wasn't what I'd call melodramatic, really, but it didn't have too much drama purely due to the lack of lengthy dialogue. Mourning for entire nations being wiped off the face of the earth would generally last about six lines. But that's okay because it was always a light-hearted game with a job system I couldn't get enough of. But yeah, overall, if you're looking for melodrama, every single player FF from VI through to XIII is full of it. To say XIII suddenly had more than most is a little silly, for me.

[champagne supernova]

Agree with Bob generally with the exception of XII which I think was only slightly melodramatic at certain points. But they are fantasy games - they need some melodrama. I think Vagrant Story probably got the balance very close to perfect in terms of story.

Oh, look at FFIV. People killing themselves left, right and centre (then actually not). People being brothers and related and so on - yeah, it was also fairly melodramatic. Can't remember V though.

[Loony BoB]

V's biggest melodrama was always the death of Galuf and 'passing on of his strength' to Lenna. I mean, firstly there is the omg he died stuff, then there is the "oh, Lenna can suddenly do all the things he could stuff. Which I would actually say is far more deus ex machina than anything XIII had to offer. :p There was a lot of "spirit" stuff as well.

[VeloZer0]

Oh, look at FFIV. People killing themselves left, right and centre (then actually not). People being brothers and related and so on - yeah, it was also fairly melodramatic. Can't remember V though.
Actually FF4 would be less melodramatic and more realistic with people moving on and focusing on what they had to do after each 'death'. If FF4 was written in the style of FF13 your party would have slit their wrists after the first two or three deaths.

[Mirage]

V's biggest melodrama was always the death of Galuf and 'passing on of his strength' to Lenna. I mean, firstly there is the omg he died stuff, then there is the "oh, Lenna can suddenly do all the things he could stuff. Which I would actually say is far more deus ex machina than anything XIII had to offer. :p There was a lot of "spirit" stuff as well.

Lenna was with the party from the beginning of.

[Loony BoB]

Oops, sorry, wrong name. That other chick. The one I didn't like. Blondey. Uhm. *checks* Ah. Krile. That's the one. Even her name is annoying. =|

As for XIII's characters slitting their wrists after a couple of character deaths, I disagree. For all Snow, Serah and Sahz knew, they would not be getting their loved ones back. They were crystal, gone forever. And in the case of Hope, very early in the game he witnesses his mother's death. But they all kept going. I imagine they wouldn't have slit their wrists over each other's deaths considering how many people they probably knew had died. Few of them were friends until very late in the game and they had carried out the killing of many a beast/soldier before then.

Oh, and the only other two I haven't mentioned lost everyone they ever knew on their planet. So... yeah.

Either way. Final Fantasy bleeds melodrama. I'll give you that I can't think of too much that went on with XII melodramatically, but the plot was so hard for me to keep up with. =| Cid, though. That guy alone was all kinds of melodrama. xD He could have been an actor of many a character in a one-man play.

[champagne supernova]

I'll give you that I can't think of too much that went on with XII melodramatically, but the plot was so hard for me to keep up with. =| Cid, though. That guy alone was all kinds of melodrama. xD He could have been an actor of many a character in a one-man play.

That's the Sansea's fault. By the time I got to the end of that, I had almost forgotten the story. Oh, and the trip to Mt Burmecia (or whatever it's called) took forever. Also to Archades. Maybe XIII forced story down to often, XII maybe not often enough.

And yes, Cid was melodramatic. But never Kefka/Sephiroth/Kuja melodramatic.

[TrollHunter]

Hope might as well be cutting his wrist behind the scenes for like the first half of the game. Everyone else? They fared well and hope seemed to be more of an annoying pessimistic brat than a helpful member of the party. I'm very relieved that the story is almost pure character development because I wouldn't have been able to deal with snow claiming hero status and hope contradicting his name for like 50 hours of gameplay.

[Bastian]

And why not go the full deal and go back to 8-bit rather than 16-bit? :p
I knew someone would say this eventually and I should have preempted it by saying ahead of time: the 16-bit ones were better. No one refers to the 8-bit era of FF as the Golden Era, but yet the 16-bit era commonly is.


But you'd think that if FFL sold well, they'd make it global. But they didn't make it global. Suggesting that it didn't sell well enough to justify it.
The error in that thinking is that what sells well in Japan will not sell well overseas. Hence the whole Project Rainfall hoopla going on (Nintendo of America feels that RPGs do not sell well enough in this territory to warrent localizing the three main Wii RPGs coming out over here). FFLegends probably did sell fairly decently (I have no numbers on it) and may at some point be ported to Wii ware or 3DS ware or something. It took quite a while for Sqeenix to port FF4:TAY from mobile to Wii ware, so FFLegends may still be ported yet, and may still be localized overseas. We'll have to see.

[champagne supernova]

And why not go the full deal and go back to 8-bit rather than 16-bit? :p
I knew someone would say this eventually and I should have preempted it by saying ahead of time: the 16-bit ones were better. No one refers to the 8-bit era of FF as the Golden Era, but yet the 16-bit era commonly is.

Actually I think most game critics rate the PSone era above the SNES era. Not that that is a good enough reason in the first place.

I think WK has a good point in saying that limiting certain things forces developers to focus on other areas, but why should I pay for that learning experience? Why don't they use it as an in-house training exercise for their staff? Or why does it have to be a FF? Why can't Square-Enix develop a completely new IP for this rather than diluting the FF brand.

[Slothy]

I think WK has a good point in saying that limiting certain things forces developers to focus on other areas, but why should I pay for that learning experience? Why don't they use it as an in-house training exercise for their staff?

Every game ever made has essentially been an on the fly learning exercise at some point. If it wasn't then the development team didn't put much effort into it. Also, why not sell the end product of such an experiment if it can be made to a high enough standard? A training exercise they can make money on would seem to make more sense than one they won't sell, particularly when the whole point of the business is to make games people will buy.


Or why does it have to be a FF? Why can't Square-Enix develop a completely new IP for this rather than diluting the FF brand.

None of these are bad ideas, but let's face it, when it comes to sales the FF name alone pushes units and the brand past the point of being far too diluted quite a while ago.

[Loony BoB]

Call me a sceptic, but I don't understand just how degrading the graphics is going to improve their abilities for storytelling and gameplay. If they have it in them, then they have it in them. If they don't, they don't. I honestly don't imagine that when they came up with the storyline for FFXIII that they intended on half-arsing it. I actually believe they would have come up with the story before the graphics were made. I don't think they would do this any differently regardless of the systems they are designing for. You make the story before you put together the graphics. For me, that's logic. Maybe I don't understand the game development industry enough. Hmm. As for gameplay, we all know from other FF's that they're capable of putting together gameplay, but from what I understand the entire time they made FFXIII it was with the intention of focusing on just battling and storyline. Which is something I disagree with, as do many, but again - it's not that they lacked gameplay ability, it's that they were told not to use it. For whatever stupid reason.

I disagree regarding them passing the point of being far too diluted "quite a while ago" - they haven't made a single player game with less than an 80 rating since the PS1 generation. It's not that the games don't sell and aren't rated at the bare minimum of "very good", but more that they spend so much on the development that they struggle to make a profit despite the high sales. Also, while FFXIV was a disaster, I wouldn't say FFXIII was. Sure, you might not like it, but then I didn't like FFX and it's one of their highest rated games. You can't deny success, and it is judged by ratings and sales. Sure, some areas can be criticised and SE will hopefully learn from that (as they seem to be doing lately, fingers crossed...), but the overall package still has been liked more than disliked and that's not bad or "diluting". FFXIV, though, well... we'll have to see what happens there in the long run. I'm cautiously optimistic, and at the very least have respect for SE for pushing so hard to make such dramatic changes to the game in order to help it turn good.

[Slothy]

Call me a sceptic, but I don't understand just how degrading the graphics is going to improve their abilities for storytelling and gameplay. If they have it in them, then they have it in them. If they don't, they don't. I honestly don't imagine that when they came up with the storyline for FFXIII that they intended on half-arsing it. I actually believe they would have come up with the story before the graphics were made. I don't think they would do this any differently regardless of the systems they are designing for. You make the story before you put together the graphics.

The thing is that even if you have what you think is a good story in the beginning, maybe it won't translate well into a 40 hour game. Now you have to tweak it. But maybe you've already spent a year working on a lot of the level design and art assets. Do you scrap a big chunk of it and start over or try to make it work in with some re-writes. God help you if you leave play testing until the end of development and find out that the pacing is atrocious or a level isn't rating very well with testers.

So yeah, game development is a much more complicated beast than it can initially seem. And one of the things that limiting what the developer can do could help with would be letting them prototype, test, and figure out what works much faster. Not to mention making it easier to scrap things that just don't work.

I also happen to believe that when you can't cover up a lackluster story with fancy graphics, cutscenes, and flashy animation and effect it makes it a lot harder to pass off a turd as something decent. But if you have the talent and experience to nail pacing, story, characters, gameplay, etc. in a game with tougher hardware and software limitations, then you can more easily scale that experience up. Again, it forces you to get to the fundamentals and make the entire package work together to convey a great experience since you have so many fewer tools to work with to get that experience across.

[champagne supernova]

I actually believe they would have come up with the story before the graphics were made. I don't think they would do this any differently regardless of the systems they are designing for. You make the story before you put together the graphics. For me, that's logic. Maybe I don't understand the game development industry enough.

As far as I'm aware, that is the process Square take. Certain other genres may develop graphic systems and gameplay first (FPS, strategy games) and then add story to tie the gameplay sections in. But a RPG's gameplay and locations are driven by story, so they get nailed before production gets scaled up.

I don't know about dilution. There's FF Legends & FF Crystal Chronicles along with the three XIIIs and I think Square-Enix need to keep the FF experience under one brand and generate new IPs, instead of having FF being split into different brands.

XIV was a monumental mistake though. Fortunately it gets to be rereleased on PS3 when they've hopefully fixed it, and if there are enough positive reviews, it can still become a commercial success.

[Slothy]

You caught me with that edit BoB. I wasn't saying the series was far too diluted in terms of quality or sales. The former is arguable, though XIII's shoddy development history and the mess that is XIV certainly seem to indicate that Square does not have its tit together in that area. The latter certainly isn't terrible for the main series, though it's worth noting that with the exception of FFXIII making a jump of about 1 million units sold over XII, the sales for the main entries have been steadily declining since VII.

I was mostly getting at the sheer number of titles released in the last several years with FF in the title, whether it needed to be there or not. It started with Tactics Advance and Crystal Chronicles, and kept on going with a sequel to X, the FFVII compilation, an almost endless stream of remakes and re-releases, and now the multiple entries around FFXIII. Some of which are barely even connected but still have XIII attached all the same. At this point, whenever I see Square announce a new game, if I see FF anywhere in the name I kind of groan a bit and move on. Most of the various sequels, prequels and spin-offs haven't been very good and it gets old seeing the FF name pop up related to some new title that doesn't even have to made as an FF game. In fact, it's kind of gotten to the point for me that I would (and have) actually stand up and take more notice of a new IP or entry in another franchise from Square than a new title slapped with the FF name to help make sure it sells well enough to be worth it. I'm also willing to bet I'm far from the only one who feels this way.

[Bastian]

Why don't they use it as an in-house training exercise for their staff? Or why does it have to be a FF? Why can't Square-Enix develop a completely new IP for this rather than diluting the FF brand.
...HUH? Because... I want a FINAL FANTASY game. That's the whole point of this discussion. I don't want a new IP (unless you consider Final Fantasy Legends a new IP). I want more Final Fatansy games from what I consider the "golden era" (snes). Squeenix has hear these pleas across the seas and thus created FF4:TAY and then FFLegends. We still haven't gotten FFLegends over here.

How is this "diluting the FF brand"? In my opinion, the brand was destroyed by all games post FF6. I want FF to return to its roots. You all can keep playing your current gen FF, but I also want my retro FF. Besides, the brand is already diluted. FFT, FFCC, the Disidea games, the Chocobo games. I think that SE should simply continue what they were doing with FFLegends and make that a legitimate spinoff series and bring it to the States.

[Mirage]

What's so important about it having "final fantasy" in its title? I really don't understand this. Could you try to explain?

[TrollHunter]

I think just having a fantastic rpg from square in general would be awesome. Putting the label "Final Fantasy" on it doesn't seem necessary in the slightest.

[Loony BoB]

Ah, you mean dilution as in all the spinoffs. In which case I agree. I love FFTA, so it's hard to see that as a bad thing (I see it as a game that would more appropriately be named FFT2, with FFT being a series in it's own right), but the sheer number of spinoffs such as chocobo racing, dirge of cerberus, X-2, XIII-2, etc... it can be annoying. Still, for the most part I ignore spinoffs and it doesn't bother me. I only invest in spinoffs where I really, really, really liked the original game. Because anything that gives me more lore is something I'm interested in. =] I can't heeeeelp it, I'm an addict. :(

Vivi22: Surely they can avoid that problem by putting together more simple graphics initially, sort of like a skeleton game (think 3D stick figures) and then, once they are happy with the gameplay, they can work on the graphics and FMVs before releasing the game. I mean, I just can't really comprehend the idea that they would do the things they can't change before they do the things that they expect they might want to change. I'll reiterate that with FFXIII, they intended on the lack of gameplay options. It wasn't poor abilities or anything that they need to take time out to work on or anything - it was just, put simply, a stupid decision made by management.

Speaking of management, if XIV has shown us anything, it's that the likes of Tanaka who have been around since day one may not be the people to turn to when it comes to pushing FF to the future. Sometimes you need a newer more open minded person leading in order to get the best results. The people who are considered geniuses when it comes to the retro games have not always done so well in recent times, and a changing of the guard is a healthy thing. It's not always that SE have lost their way, it's sometimes a simple case of SE's top dogs being around too long and not moving with the times or having a good understanding of what makes people enjoy a game. You don't fix this by putting out a retro game. You fix it by changing the producers/directors, the people who control the direction of the game, the key decision makers. Or, you change it by simply changing. You note the things that people didn't like and you adjust accordingly. Bad experiences can be a good thing if people are capable of learning from mistakes. We can only really wait and see, though.


In my opinion, the brand was destroyed by all games post FF6.
Ah, and thus everything is explained. You don't just want nostalgia, you have it in your head that everything that is a 3D Final Fantasy is somehow a destroyer of all things FF. I don't think we can help you there. You're definitely in the minority. I mean, some people might prefer the retro games but I've yet to find many people at EoFF over the past 12 or so years that have insisted that every FF from VII onwards was bad. :p

For you to say that the SNES was the golden era would be a matter of personal preference, as there would be nothing to back up your claims when you consider ratings and sales. If you go by ratings, the golden era began with FFVI and ended with FFXII - all single player games in this period got metacritic ratings above 90. For me, there is no true golden era, every game is judged on it's own merits.

[champagne supernova]

Ah, you mean dilution as in all the spinoffs. In which case I agree. I love FFTA, so it's hard to see that as a bad thing (I see it as a game that would more appropriately be named FFT2, with FFT being a series in it's own right), but the sheer number of spinoffs such as chocobo racing, dirge of cerberus, X-2, XIII-2, etc... it can be annoying. Still, for the most part I ignore spinoffs and it doesn't bother me. I only invest in spinoffs where I really, really, really liked the original game. Because anything that gives me more lore is something I'm interested in. =] I can't heeeeelp it, I'm an addict. :(

The compilation and the direct sequels actually annoy me less than something like Crystal Chronicles, Tactics Advance etc, because at least they are related materially to the main entries. Tactics should be its own series, as should Crystal Chronicles. Same with Versus XIII and Agito XIII. If they can't be considered traditional FFs, call them something else. It would be like Kingdom Hearts was actually named : Final Fantasy with Disney Characters.



If you go by ratings, the golden era began with FFVI and ended with FFXII - all single player games in this period got metacritic ratings above 90. For me, there is no true golden era, every game is judged on it's own merits.

And XIII wasn't a train wreck; it has a meta-critic rating of 80-plus.

[Loony BoB]

Yeah, I liked it. :)

I don't mind FFT being a seperate series still with the FF name. I can imagine it would have done well as it's own IP anyway, mind you, but perhaps it's because it still has so much to do with FF in it that makes me see it as a Final Fantasy game regardless. It's just not a main series game because it's a tactical RPG and they wouldn't suit the main numbered series. Also, FFXII is in the same world as FFT/TA so it makes sense to keep the FF name for all of them.

[Slothy]

Vivi22: Surely they can avoid that problem by putting together more simple graphics initially, sort of like a skeleton game (think 3D stick figures) and then, once they are happy with the gameplay, they can work on the graphics and FMVs before releasing the game. I mean, I just can't really comprehend the idea that they would do the things they can't change before they do the things that they expect they might want to change. I'll reiterate that with FFXIII, they intended on the lack of gameplay options. It wasn't poor abilities or anything that they need to take time out to work on or anything - it was just, put simply, a stupid decision made by management.

A lot of companies already do a lot of playtesting. Valve in particular are quite well known for playtesting pretty much everything they make constantly throughout development, both internally, and by bringing in people from outside the company to play them and get feedback in a multitude of forms (as in not just asking them to explain what they think of it, they'll literally measure things like where you're eyes are on the screen, how long you fixate on things, and I believe they even recently talked about measuring how sweaty people's palms get during different scenes, all to measure reactions players don't even realize they're having). The trouble is, many Japanese developers don't do a lot of playtesting. Now they may test things internally to some extent throughout development, but they rarely do it as extensively as a lot of the better western developers are doing or moving towards doing these days. There can also be a bit of a problem with a cinematic heavy JRPG I'd imagine in the sense that those take a ton of time to render, and how do you even prototype that in a way that will have the same impact on the player as the final version? Being able to render it all in real time in the engine certainly helps a lot these days, but it doesn't make any difference how quickly you can prototype something if you never play test it (and yes, I absolutely believe that you should be playtesting the story throughout production, as well as the gameplay. Pacing is every bit as important as having good gameplay systems). And you also have the question of how many resources you throw into prototyping before you move on. It's all a bit of a delicate balancing act.

Even if you cover all of your bases by doing quick iterations and constant play tests, you could still end up with a section of game added later on which it turns out through testing isn't fun, or that part of the story is rating poorly with players. Maybe the only way to change it is to alter something else earlier on that has been mostly finalized now. Game development is a very organic process and developers sometimes have to be ready to scrap something, even if it's already finished, if it means making a better game. But this is why play testing and being able to make changes quickly is so important. Some companies like Valve and Naughty Dog have this stuff down almost to a science.

And that was one thing that came through in almost every interview I read post-release for FFXIII, and in the postmortem that got put up on Gamasutra (aside from them apparently dicking away a few years with no real direction while they tried to make an engine without really knowing for sure what they would be doing with it): they didn't heavily playtest anything. And internal playtests (assuming they even did much of that) can be very misleading because often you're too close to something to realize that you may have made it too hard, too easy, or that most players don't like it, etc. In fact, I would be willing to venture a guess that had they done some external play tests much earlier in development, they may have realized most people didn't really like the long corridors, lack of exploration, and lack of NPC interaction, possibly before it was too late to make changes.

[Mirage]

And XIII wasn't a train wreck; it has a meta-critic rating of 80-plus.

You say that as if game scores aren't terribly inflated, the "actual" scale is more like this:

0-75 = terrible game
76-89 = average game
90-100 = good game

Oh, do I miss the days when an average game actually got an average score, meaning 50-60%. A score in that range these days is practically the same as saying the game is awful and not worth buying at all.

[champagne supernova]

XIII left out quite a lot of content, so it can't be blamed that the set-pieces etc forced it to be a certain game.

What is the biggest criticism of the game? The linearity until Pulse. Why did they make it linear? They wanted a fast-paced story and allowing players to wander off would remove the immersion in the storyline - probably a massive counter-reaction to XII. Were they right? No, they went too far. But it was a design choice made early on and was so fundamental to the way they wanted the game to be made that it couldn't be undone.

For me, the linearity isn't a problem. I love exploring (Oblivion is something I still sink hours in, even after I've done most the side-quests), but it worked. It is a problem, but not one that ruins the game. The other problem I have with it is that the battle system, while looking immensely slick and stylish, is worse than XII in playing itself. There is no ability to customise attacks etc and you basically feel like an Army General above the battle. I think that additional options to add more depth could be included, even if they weren't necessary.

Oh, the fact that abilities were filtered down to the player at such a slow rate also annoyed me. And that equipment was basically useless.



You say that as if game scores aren't terribly inflated, the "actual" scale is more like this:

0-75 = terrible game
76-89 = average game
90-100 = good game


Infamous has a MetaCritic rating of 85. Infamous 2 has a MetaCritic rating of 83. Killzone 3 80 something. Demon's Soul & WipeOut HD - 89. BioShock 2- 88.

Actually, I give up. Just look here: http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/ps3?view=condensed&sort=desc
0-50 = Terrible
50-70 = Bad/Okay
70-80 = Above Average/Good
80-90 = Very Good
90+ = Excellent

[Loony BoB]

I do wonder if they would listen attentively, though. I mean, with FFXIV, the beta got put up, they got a lot of complaints and from what I understand they didn't listen much. They had to get rid of the producer before they really got to a point where it seemed they were defintely listening. Since then, SE has seemingly (at least from the SE Europe perspective) been doing all it can on various mediums to get in touch with it's fans. They're obviously on either a PR push, a marketing push or are getting much more interested in the idea of getting feedback from fans. I like to think it's all three, but you never know until much further down the line.

[Mirage]

0-50 = Terrible
50-70 = Bad/Okay
70-80 = Above Average/Good
80-90 = Very Good
90+ = Excellent

That just verifies what I said though. The first 50 percents are left practically unused, with all "actual" scores being spread among the 50 remaining percents.

Of course, scales with more than 5 levels are completely pointless anyway. No one is going to be able to convince me that there is an actual difference in quality between a 8.1 game and a 8.2 game, and due to the nature of reviews being very subjective opinions, the inaccuracy from that alone is greater than any decimal point for any score.

Why not keep it simple and use Very bad, bad, average, good and very good? A sensible scale from 1-5.

[Bastian]

What's so important about it having "final fantasy" in its title? I really don't understand this. Could you try to explain?
I didn't say it was essential that it must include the words "Final Fantasy" but so long as it has Fira and Thundara and Chocobos and is styled like the Final Fantasy games from 4-6, then I'm good to go.


In my opinion, the brand was destroyed by all games post FF6.
Ah, and thus everything is explained. You don't just want nostalgia, you have it in your head that everything that is a 3D Final Fantasy is somehow a destroyer of all things FF.[/quote]
Well, okay, XI was pretty decent. But I still prefer the 2D style of the older games.


You're definitely in the minority.
Here, perhaps. But in my real world group of friends, not so much. My friend Casey is a HUGE Dragon Quest fanatic but refueses to play DQVIII because of the 3D approach. My friend Dylan won't touch any 3D styled games. We're old. We prefer our games 2D, thankyouverymuch.


For you to say that the SNES was the golden era would be a matter of personal preference, as there would be nothing to back up your claims when you consider ratings and sales.
I thought I'd made it repeatedly clear that it was only my opinion. :P

But yes, most of us who grew up on the NES and SNES feel that the golden era for RPGs ended shortly thereafter (there are still a lot of those who accept FF7 into the fold, but I'm not one of those).

But, again, to bring the conversation away from FFx is better than FFy silliness: the point of this thread, as far as I can tell, is that the OP wants people to sign a petition saying "Yes, we would like more retro-styled FF please! Specificially from the 16-bit era, thanks!" If that's not your cup of tea, fine. Don't sign it.

I didn't sign it for the reason that SE already made such a game (FFLegends) which may or may not end up being ported to a non-mobile phone platform at some point in the future and then may or may not be localized. So I feel to sign this would be to ignore that they are already trying to provide the very thing being asked for.

[Mirage]

You're definitely in the minority.
Here, perhaps. But in my real world group of friends, not so much. My friend Casey is a HUGE Dragon Quest fanatic but refueses to play DQVIII because of the 3D approach. My friend Dylan won't touch any 3D styled games. We're old. We prefer our games 2D, thankyouverymuch.



I remember last time I narrowed a sample size down to an incredibly low number and started talking about majorities and minorities. That turned out pretty bad.



But, again, to bring the conversation away from FFx is better than FFy silliness: the point of this thread, as far as I can tell, is that the OP wants people to sign a petition saying "Yes, we would like more retro-styled FF please! Specificially from the 16-bit era, thanks!" If that's not your cup of tea, fine. Don't sign it.

But this is a discussion board, not an advertisement board. Without an actual discussion around the topic brought up by the thread starter, I don't think this thread has the right to live :p.

[Bastian]

[quote]You're definitely in the minority.
Here, perhaps. But in my real world group of friends, not so much. My friend Casey is a HUGE Dragon Quest fanatic but refueses to play DQVIII because of the 3D approach. My friend Dylan won't touch any 3D styled games. We're old. We prefer our games 2D, thankyouverymuch.

You're overlooking the whole point. It doesn't matter how many people want it over how many people don't, it just matter how many people want it. If enough people want a product, a business is usually happy to provide. And they have. That's clearly why they created FFLegends... enough people felt the same way I do. Sure MORE people probably feel the opposite, but that's not the point.

[Mirage]

My point was that you're calling a minority a majority simply by saying "the majority doesn't count" :p.

Also, you seem to have messed up the quoting process :p.

[Bastian]

My point was that you're calling a minority a majority simply by saying "the majority doesn't count" :p.

Also, you seem to have messed up the quoting process :p.

1) I don't care. :P
2) I don't care. :P
3) I really wanna play Final Fantasy Legends. It looks way more interesting (to me) than anything post FFIX.

[Wolf Kanno]

Whoa, lots of comments to get back to.

Melodrama: My issue with XIII stems partially from the fact I have to compare it Persona 3, cause they both tackle the same themes and several characters parallel each other. The issue here is that P3 is just better, not only in making the melodrama not feel as angsty, but actually making the characters not feel as two dimensional as they really are.

XIII was 15 hours of:
Lightning - "I'm angry"
Snow - "I'm a hero!"
Hope - "I hate Snow and I miss my mommy"
Sahz - "I just want to protect my son"
Vanille - "I'm kooky! and I have a not so big secret"
Fang - " I like Vanille"

and I do mean 15 hours of just this, all of them just repeating over and over and over what you learned in the first several hours of the game, and I have to ask myself why they have to keep repeating this? Especially when any review of the game can paraphrase the fist three chapters and all the cast in a paragraph. Its not helped that the last fifteen hours is the whole cast just saying "what are we going to do" while the villain prods them along until they finally decide to do what they said they wouldn't do 25+ hours earlier in the plot, and it just magically turns out alright, which only pisses you off cause if they had just done what they were suppose to do, then we could have saved ourselves 25 hours of your life you'll never get back, just watching your party fret and kill time.

While Sahz certainly gets a wonderful moment of character depth in Chapter 6, I feel like Snow and Hope's was so predictable, Lightning's was so anti-climatic that I wonder why they even bothered "we're just pets..." gee, Lightning, it took you ten hours to realize your life is controlled by machine gods? Vanille is mostly a walking plot device whose only story contribution is that she caused everyone's problems to begin with, and she spend the second half of the game complaining about relying on others and even in the Deus ex Machina ending, she fails to help Fang, and she needs Fang's help to cause their last minute bulltit move to save Cocoon. So did Vanille really learn anything out of this? Fang's whole deal is just that she's overprotective of Vanille and once you remove that, she has no personality and character depth. What really makes Fang a better written character than Tellah, who goes on a mad quest of vengeance that ends in tragedy, or Setzer, who lost his love in his youth and has spent his days wandering in a fatalistic stupor? I don't really see much.

My issue here is that XIII has as much depth and characterization with most of its cast as a 16-bit RPG so how can you really say "its just so much better written than those blocky characters, Hope has real depth, unlike Cecil, Lenna, and Locke..." I just disagree cause I found XIII's cast very flat and boring, and I felt most JRPGs on the market blow it out of the water in terms of building a likable cast of characters. I've NPCs in games like Assassin's Creed and Fallout that are more charming, original, and down to earth than XIII's emotionally charged over the top cast of misfits. Sahz is probably the only exception of the rule, but having one endearing character in a pathetically small cast of assholes and idiots is not an achievement in my book.

As for FFV pulling a Deus Ex Machina, first, the party gets its power from the Crystals so there is a logical explanation to how Krile got her grandfather's power cause the Earth crystal simply chose her. Even then, FFV does have its fair share of Deus Ex Machina's but you know what? FFV is from a third generation console that modern cell phones have the power to out process, a staff of a few dozen, a small budget, and had a development cycle of a year between the last entry. XIII is from a modern console that its fanbase claims is the most powerful console on the market, it's only a year old, had a 50+ team behind it, cost as much to make as the first six FFs combined with money to spare to make, had almost a decade in development cycle (XIII was announced in 2004) and yet it writes itself into so many corners it has to pulls stupid ass saves in the story like games from 15 years ago?

The issue here is that I'm not seeing much progress. The technology, the resources, the pedigree, it was all there for XIII so why is SE's president recognizing fans weren't happy with the game and suggesting the FF team needs a break, and the director/writer vehemently defending it, if it was such a wonderful success? The game didn't even have a direction until they were forced to make the demo that was released a year before the games release, that's five years the team wasn't sure what kind of direction or game XIII would be. Its design choice for limited gameplay and major story sounds like one made from a team that's been pulling a Duke Nukem for five years if you ask me, not some great vision that people didn't understand, like the director tries to argue.

Considering XIII-2 was announced so quickly after XIII, dev team members suggesting lots of content was unused, and Wada himself stating the idea XIII was "too big for one game" tells me SE is just trying to build another cash cow rather than build the best RPG ever. That's the difference between FFV and XIII. V was meant to be the best RPG ever, XIII was just a part of a bigger franchise with the whole being better than the sum of its parts. Which to me, leads to why I feel FF has been diluted, XIII can't stand on its own, hell even huge successes like FFX and VII are now just part of some micro-franchises within themselves. FF used to define the genre, now its just a name that lives off its past successes anymore. If FFXIII is one of the best JRPGs on the PS3, its only because there is nine JRPGs on the system to begin with. :p

As for the development, Japan develops games differently from Western developers. They tend to be more organic experiences. Like the Last Story, (http://gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=162923) where Sakaguchi admitted that he designated where the story was as they went along. Basically building a dungeon and setting up the encounters and what not only to reach a door and decide, now would be a good point for some dialogue. He's only used this technique for two other games. Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy VII. Square has just botched the development with their games in a noticeable manner with the last three titles. I feel they are beginning to recognize this so it might work out better for them. Versus XIII itself seems to be falling more into FFXII's issues, where the game is overly ambitious, which is why its development was so long, let's just hope it doesn't suffer a similar fate.

As for the developing a smaller game to help with a bigger game, it does help. Its not an issue about talent, the reason why the FF series was getting better as time went was because the team's skills grew. A more restricted medium to play on forces the team to be look at what is most effective for entertainment value. You can't pull and FFX/XII/XIII and make dungeons visually stunning, if you've got only a field, a mountain, a cave, and a castle palette to play with, and the director wants 18 dungeons total, you've got to learn how to make each of these dungeons entertaining so players don't get bored and move on. With this knowledge of adding puzzles, special bosses, and labyrinth style design, you can later put that knowledge to make your more visually unique dungeons that much more memorable.

Would the Shin-Ra building be such a great dungeon if it was simply just the party fighting their way to the top? I don't thinks so, I felt the puzzles, the extra story segments, and the alternate routes set it apart from other dungeons in the game. dungeon design has become pretty piss poor in the PS2 era and modern systems. I love XII, but even its open ended dungeons can't compare to the Lodestone cavern, the Phoenix Cave, and Shin-Ra building.

This one part they would learn in terms of dungeon design, the other side being that it has to be fun, and when you have limited resources, that's when you better make sure its worth it. As for story, limiting it, forces the writer to be more direct and prioritize, not simply make plot elements that suit your fancy that don't go anywhere, or make the mistake of being so subtle that most fans don't notice it. You have to clearly define the cast and what their roles are. This goes back to the problem I have with what BoB said about development, cause he mentioned the story and characters should be defined first and then the game comes second and I feel that right there is the problem with the later FFs, cause I feel they approach it as a film first and as a game second, which is why I feel gameplay starts to get weaker in later titles. I feel like dungeons are more like obligations in the later FFs than actually being meaningful to the story. I'd like to remind everyone we're playing a game, not watching a film, so why should story and characters be developed first? Why can' you start with a cool idea for a dungeon and write the story around it? How about a gameplay mechanic? I'm sure the idea of the mechanics and gameplay came first in Mirror's Edge's development and the story was developed around it, not the other way around. Gameplay should be equal in importance and connected to the story, not trivial padding between cutscenes.

Working on a low tech game forces the developer to weave both together. Suddenly, mountain dungeon is no longer just a dungeon between city A and B, its where you meet Klive, and this isn't just any mountain, its the place where his brother Jack died when he was picking his nose and not watching where he was going. Its no longer mountain dungeon, its now Stupid Jack's Grave and its where you get Klive and his amazing flaming yo-yo fighting style. How many locations in FFXII and XIII do you feel had significance to the plot and didn't just feel like a place to just fight things between your party actually talking and telling the story? You could switch which dungeons Light/Hope and Vanille/Sahz went to in the early chapters and it wouldn't change the story one bit. They need to be put together to make them meaningful.

[champagne supernova]

The ShinRa building is cool because it isn't a dungeon in the traditional sense. It's more a true puzzle game where you are solving the problem through interacting with other NPCs, etc. Kind of like the infiltration of Don Corneo's mansion or a whole lot of FFVIII side-quests (how I loved that game for that). It may be a dungeon by strict definition (you fight battles in it), but for the most part, it was a puzzling section. Which isn't something you really had in the earlier FFs. You did have them in Chrono Trigger though (Chrono Trigger was awesome).

I also disagree with Versus XIII falling into the same development trap as XIII. Nomura might be ambitious in what he wants for the game, but he has clear goals as to what he wants. He wants a world map - ambitious, but definable and a clear goal to work at. He wants the game to look like a movie - ambitious, but definable and a clear goal to work at. And I think the most striking difference is that Nomura seems to have the idea of the game all worked out in his head already. It might have taken a long time to get there, maybe because it was ambitious, maybe because they were called in to work on XIII, but they have everything in place.

XIII had a lot of ideas and I can see that the story had a lot of elements they wanted to include, but they just didn't have the vision to weave everything together effectively. Too many ideas and not enough clear vision.

XIII's cast might have been melodramatic and Hope, in particular, might have been a whiney brat, and the game may have been too linear and the battle system may not have provided an option for more complex battles and the ending might have been WTF and there is no worthwhile equipment system - but on the whole, it was good fun. Do I want more puzzle elements and NPC-driven side-quests. YES, I do. But that's from the PSone era, not the SNES era? Do I want characters and stories that are more believable and less over-the-top? YES, I do. But that's from FFXII.

[Wolf Kanno]

The ShinRa building is cool because it isn't a dungeon in the traditional sense. It's more a true puzzle game where you are solving the problem through interacting with other NPCs, etc. Kind of like the infiltration of Don Corneo's mansion or a whole lot of FFVIII side-quests (how I loved that game for that). It may be a dungeon by strict definition (you fight battles in it), but for the most part, it was a puzzling section. Which isn't something you really had in the earlier FFs. You did have them in Chrono Trigger though (Chrono Trigger was awesome).

I disagree, cause beyond interacting with the Mayor for one puzzle, you really didn't interact with many NPCs and even the few employees can talk to, it was either in a planned unavoidable cutscene, or you were still in areas where you are still fighting and trying to find the route to the next floor. This isn't new really. You also still have plenty of floors and sections where you are fighting so I'd say its just a typical design for its time. The first part of Locke's scenario in South Figaro is more of what I count as a puzzle dungeon cause its possible to get to Celes without ever killing anyone, and combat is actually discouraged.

The early games may not have had the puzzles you are fond of, but they did have puzzle elements that are becoming scarce as the series moved on. FFIII-VI had dungeons that changed how you played (by basically giving a middle finger to people who prefer melee over magic). III and V had dungeons and sections of the game that were very difficult if you didn't bring the right job or abilities. I actually miss this, cause it made building your party more important, and its was nice to have skills that weren't strictly for combat. Ironically, its a 16-bit game that first started to move away from this set-up...

...VI itself brought in the idea of actual plain puzzles inserted into the dungeons, like the follow the light puzzles in Narshe, the clock puzzle in Zozo, the myriad of switch puzzles in the game where you split your party up for (which VIII used for Ultimecia's dungeon) as well as just Gogo's dungeon altogether, which actually has puzzle elements that do send you to a game over if you smurf up. Hell, most of VIII's puzzles can be traced back to VI.

The other issue here is that the old games utilized labyrinth style dungeons which pretty much started to disappear with FFVIII and by XIII is mostly gone. By FFX, even the puzzles you mention of being fond of are being removed from the game as most of FFX's puzzles are irrelvant until post game, beyond the Cloister Trials.


I also disagree with Versus XIII falling into the same development trap as XIII. Nomura might be ambitious in what he wants for the game, but he has clear goals as to what he wants. He wants a world map - ambitious, but definable and a clear goal to work at. He wants the game to look like a movie - ambitious, but definable and a clear goal to work at. And I think the most striking difference is that Nomura seems to have the idea of the game all worked out in his head already. It might have taken a long time to get there, maybe because it was ambitious, maybe because they were called in to work on XIII, but they have everything in place.

XIII had a lot of ideas and I can see that the story had a lot of elements they wanted to include, but they just didn't have the vision to weave everything together effectively. Too many ideas and not enough clear vision.


Actually, I said Versus was like FFXII(12), silly Roman numerals. Its game actually had a clear vision up until the lead designer left from stress, it was only afterwards that the game became muddled up cause of corporate meddling, deadlines, and in-fighting. Yet, from listening to what the team wanted XII to be like, it would have been a very different game. Course, most of Matsuno's games are unfinished visions. Even FFT and Vagrant Story had tons of content cut out due to budget and time constraints. The issue here is whether Versus XIII will suffer a similar fate. Especially since its holding up the development of other games (KH3).


XIII's cast might have been melodramatic and Hope, in particular, might have been a whiney brat, and the game may have been too linear and the battle system may not have provided an option for more complex battles and the ending might have been WTF and there is no worthwhile equipment system - but on the whole, it was good fun. Do I want more puzzle elements and NPC-driven side-quests. YES, I do. But that's from the PSone era, not the SNES era? Do I want characters and stories that are more believable and less over-the-top? YES, I do. But that's from FFXII.

In regards to XIII, I ask what is left for their to be fun? XIII was very boring experieince for me, with no connection to the silly plot and cast, and the boring dungeon layout, there was nothing else to offer that could be described as "fun". XIII was the first FF I played that felt more like a tedious chore than a game.

As for the second part, I feel I've shown the elements started in the SNES era, and I feel their are still fun puzzle elements that have been badly neglected from the series post-VII that I would love to gt back into the franchise (labyrinth dungeon design, dungeon elements that focus more on utilizing the customization system, item management) cause these are what made the game challenging and fun. The story driven puzzles of later games offer little in replay value and are often pretty simple and easy. I want the series to get its brass balls back.

[champagne supernova]

Okay, I am different in that. Do you remember the cafeteria's lady's kid in Fisherman's Horizon in VIII? You are WK, so the answer to that is probably yes. But it's still a little easter-egg in a non-combat-orientated arena of the game. Also the Fisherman. That's what I want to see more of.

But yes, enemies that make you think and dungeons which require certain constructions is also something that has been lacking in FFs. Definitely.

On Versus, the interview with Nomura suggests that the battle system for Versus is going to be a frontrunner to KH3, so a lot of the development ideas from Versus will be used in KH3. As for content needing to be cut: FFT and VS are PS1 games on CD, so that's likely. XII's issues were due to Matsuno leaving. It's unlikely Nomura will leave or blu-ray will run out of space.

Check the Shin-Ra building, but I remember most floors weren't combat floors (apart from when you first enter and the one with the Midgar Shiny Model TM).

[Bandersnatch]

I haven't played a Fantasy since FFX. The series at a massive decline. I try to but the magic isnt there anymore. No heartfelt story, or badass, stategic struggles. They think there new "innovations" are.... innovating but theyre just destroying the mythology and foundation that is Final Fantasy. The later half of the 16-Bit era was pretty good, but I would much rather them make a game like those games as a new numeric title for PS3. Nothing like the linear FFXIII or the stupid online XIV.

Besides, these petitions never work, Idk why people keep trying them. Im pretty sure the writers and directors down at Square would like to do what they want to do instead of what some fanboy kids want, I mean why would they go out of way for something like that.

[Mirage]

By later half of 16 bit, do you mean like a single game? Or last one and a half games? That's not very many :p.

[champagne supernova]

By later half of 16 bit, do you mean like a single game? Or last one and a half games? That's not very many :p.

Maybe it's VI and the second half of V?

[Bandersnatch]

Later half meaning IV - VI, those three games make up the second half of the 16 bit era. And in my opinion, are the second best handful of games the series has to offer, right behind the PS1 Trilogy

[champagne supernova]

Later half meaning IV - VI, those three games make up the second half of the 16 bit era. And in my opinion, are the second best handful of games the series has to offer, right behind the PS1 Trilogy

? Those are the only 16-bit FF games, as far as I recall. I-III were all 8-bit.

[Bandersnatch]

Ahh sorry, I know they're 8 bit, I was typing without thinking, I was making "16-Bit era" synonymous with "All old school FF"

[VeloZer0]

The problem with that classification is that it implies FF6 is closer to FF1 than FF7. IMO FF7 was just FF6 with a different graphics engine. Other than technology I am not seeing a massive shift between the two. (And I think they are both fantastic)

[Bandersnatch]

I completely agree with you that VI and VII where close to each other. That was just me comparing The 16-Bit Trilogy to the PSX Trilogy and stating that they are pretty much held on the same pedestal to me, despite the 16-Bit limitations graphically. Which in turn makes me want a game like VI and VII again but with the graphics of FFXIII. Not a brand new.. old school style FF.

[Mirage]

the x-bit-era stuff stopped making sense after 16 bit anyway :>. I loled a few days ago when i heard people talking about the "64 bit era" as if it was something in the past.