Fixing Final Fantasy

I found this article while doing the demograph debate, but since that thread has derailed into the validity of statistics and survey, I've decided to continue the idea of adding more mature themes in FF in a new thread.

This article is basically two editors hammering out what makes FF special and what can be done to make FF reclaim it's golden shiny gaming throne. I was curious to know what everyone else thought about it.

Fixing Final Fantasy: A conversation | Nightmare Mode

Fixing Final Fantasy: A conversation, part two | Nightmare Mode

Nope, i respect their opinion but what they said could be said to any game.

And ...

Most of what FF(and JRPG even anime) fans ask for darker palette(Grey/Brown) and a more overall mature aesthetic, Fans want games to be more fashionable no more no less.

don't need to be fixed if it aint broke dont fix it

I would concur with the majority of what those guys said.

The whole 'it's not about graphics!' complaint is very tired and worn out, but I do believe that it still holds some ground. Regarding the new demo released by Square Enix, it was no doubt gorgeous. At the same time though, I'm having a very hard time getting immersed into some of the newer releases by SE. I'm not getting that 'Zidane in Lindblum' or 'Squall in Esthar' etc. feeling from the other ones, and I believe that a good reason is because the 'projection' isn't there. For Final Fantasy XIII in particular, I wasn't sure who I was supposed to sympathize or relate to early in the game. Sazh was the closest thing, but besides him, everyone had their own thing going on, which is still cool, but I guess 'different'.

Maybe I'm just old and jaded, but yes, I would say that the series needs a bit of a revamp.

I really like the idea of the prison guard. I would definitely play that game. I think what FF's are missing is a sense of size. I haven't played FFXIII, so my opinions are purely based on my experiences with the other games, and what I know of the recent outings. You can expect a comparison to FFIX in some sense, because whenever I talk about Square, I always bring up FFIX.

So, in FFIX, there was a phenomenal sense of how insignificant you were. The game starts simple, with small scale projects. "Kidnap the princess", "escape the forest", "win the tournament". Then it shifts up a gear and it's "provide relief to a war torn city", "save the residents", "infiltrate the enemy stronghold", and it keeps shifting up over and over again. Every time I think back to it, I still can't quite wrap my head around the scope of it all. So much happens, both to the characters and the world, and it's difficult to keep up. Arriving at a new continent always left me wide-eyed. Sure, you could run from one side to the next quick enough, but it was the feeling of size that mattered. Just when you start to feel you're beginning to understand things, the game shows you how ignorant and naive you really are.

This is something that I found lacking in FFXII, another game that I loved. Even though the world was massive, it never really felt unknown or imposing. The characters were the main focus in that game, and the world was simply an open space to get you from one character based cutscene to the next. You can see that Vaan and Penelo were added in an attempt to provide the same surprise and wonder, but it never felt genuine. All the other characters had a sense of purpose, so they also treated the world like an open space that needed only to be crossed. The game was lacking in someone I could empathise with. It needed someone to shout "holy trout, would you look at that?!". Basically, Final Fantasy's need Samwise Gamgee.

I wonder if it's time for the series to end? In a lot of ways, Final Fantasy is the product of the era in which it was concieved. Dungeons and Dragons came about in 1974, and it was this environment in which the seeds that grew into Final Fantasy were sown.

Who's to say that role-playing games are eternal? Eventually, things fall out of fashion and go by the wayside. This is the beauty of transient things, that they don't last forever.

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Originally Posted by ShinGundam

Nope, i respect their opinion but what they said could be said to any game.

And ...

Most of what FF(and JRPG even anime) fans ask for darker palette(Grey/Brown) and a more overall mature aesthetic, Fans want games to be more fashionable no more no less.

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I'm not even sure what you mean by this, can you elaborate?

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Originally Posted by Jessweeee♪

don't need to be fixed if it aint broke dont fix it

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When I made this thread, I just knew you would come in and say that. :p

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Originally Posted by Trumpet Thief

I would concur with the majority of what those guys said.

The whole 'it's not about graphics!' complaint is very tired and worn out, but I do believe that it still holds some ground. Regarding the new demo released by Square Enix, it was no doubt gorgeous. At the same time though, I'm having a very hard time getting immersed into some of the newer releases by SE. I'm not getting that 'Zidane in Lindblum' or 'Squall in Esthar' etc. feeling from the other ones, and I believe that a good reason is because the 'projection' isn't there. For Final Fantasy XIII in particular, I wasn't sure who I was supposed to sympathize or relate to early in the game. Sazh was the closest thing, but besides him, everyone had their own thing going on, which is still cool, but I guess 'different'.

Maybe I'm just old and jaded, but yes, I would say that the series needs a bit of a revamp.

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That's why I agree with the article a bit, because I do feel the writers are often writing for a demograph they no longer relate to and it's why the drama of recent entries sometimes falls flat. Sahz is probably the only character I could empathize with in XIII, and I found the rest of the cast pretty lame in execution. I feel that in SE's attempts to create game-selling, appealing characters, they forget to make them people you can really empathize and relate to.

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Originally Posted by Flambard D'Quinceteth

I really like the idea of the prison guard. I would definitely play that game. I think what FF's are missing is a sense of size. I haven't played FFXIII, so my opinions are purely based on my experiences with the other games, and what I know of the recent outings. You can expect a comparison to FFIX in some sense, because whenever I talk about Square, I always bring up FFIX.

So, in FFIX, there was a phenomenal sense of how insignificant you were. The game starts simple, with small scale projects. "Kidnap the princess", "escape the forest", "win the tournament". Then it shifts up a gear and it's "provide relief to a war torn city", "save the residents", "infiltrate the enemy stronghold", and it keeps shifting up over and over again. Every time I think back to it, I still can't quite wrap my head around the scope of it all. So much happens, both to the characters and the world, and it's difficult to keep up. Arriving at a new continent always left me wide-eyed. Sure, you could run from one side to the next quick enough, but it was the feeling of size that mattered. Just when you start to feel you're beginning to understand things, the game shows you how ignorant and naive you really are.

This is something that I found lacking in FFXII, another game that I loved. Even though the world was massive, it never really felt unknown or imposing. The characters were the main focus in that game, and the world was simply an open space to get you from one character based cutscene to the next. You can see that Vaan and Penelo were added in an attempt to provide the same surprise and wonder, but it never felt genuine. All the other characters had a sense of purpose, so they also treated the world like an open space that needed only to be crossed. The game was lacking in someone I could empathise with. It needed someone to shout "holy tit, would you look at that?!". Basically, Final Fantasy's need Samwise Gamgee.

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To me, what you described is not so much a sense of wonder that is gained by a character stopping to say how cool something is, as much as it's just the right momentum of a story. In hindsight, FFIV's story is pretty ridiculous but the game's momentum allowed me to rebel against Cecil's homeland, fail to save two more kingdoms, become a paladin, visit the underworld, go to the moon, battle a giant robot, and fight an alien menace and I never once while playing it, stop and think how utterly ridiculous this all is. The story and rising scale of conflict kept me hooked to the story, and I agree that IX does this pretty damn good as well.

I kind of blame FFVII'spopularity for this shift, even though the games were still good after that. I've been doing playthroughs through the earlier games and I noticed something - hey, we don't get characters who are there to look cool or to be badass, neither do we get a teen's journey in order to grow up. No, in IV we get Cecil, who is already a grownup and has to live with regret and we see him try to overcome his demons. V's Bartz is in the middle of his journey, and while he still has the traits of a shonen manga hero - what with helping everybody he meets, we don't get a romance plot, and the story is surprisingly different than other JRPG standarts. And then we get to VI, where every character has a huge baggage of experiences - nobody is here to grow up or fall in love. Sure, love is a huge theme, but, surprisingly, the romantic kind really gets only small focus (what with the Locke/Celes/Rachel triangle). Heck, we don't even get a central character. These three games really show how they tried to make us rethink some things that are a staple of shonen manga and JRPGs as well...

And I guess, after VII, when they started making big money (and I believe, after X - even more so then), I think this is the point where they started to feel this obligation to aim for a specific demographic. Case in point - how many main characters after VII was older than 18? I mean, the whole cast of VIII was 17/18 (with Quistis (18) being the team mom and a battle-hardened veteran/teacher... yeah...) I know age is not the only indicator here, but I kind of notice more and more cliches later on - expecially after X. And they're not even cliches extablished by earlier FFs - they're from anime, manga, whatever is popular with the younger crowd...

I personally would love some of it to change. I'm really starting to get sick and tired of playing the same game over and over, only with different character models and a revamped battle system. I had hopes for Versus XIII, but now it looks like it's vapor wear, and I am really starting to believe - judging by all the interviews - that it's not going to change. I mean, it looks like it's going to be a fun game, but I guess we're still gonna get tween drama, so that poor little adolescents can understad...

And yet, I don't get why they have a problem with giving the characters more mature problems out of fear that people won't understand them. Take a look at Persona 3. I believe it was rated OK for teens in Japan. It's very popular there. And yet, the themes touched on in the game are usually considered mature. I mean, after playing through it once again, I noticed it even clearer - the game is about death, dying and coping with death - be it the death of a loved one or oneself. This is a difficult subject even for adults. And yet the game deals with it quite phenomenally - it takes its audience seriously and doesn't beat about the bush - the characters react as any normal human would in their situation, it shows how ugly it can get, as well as what good things may happen. And I don't think any of the teens loving this game had trouble understanding that. This shows that a game may be more mature, deal with more universal themes than teen drama and simply saving the world, and still sell well with the target demographic.

I'm sorry, this post is kind of chaotic, but I'm kind of writing whatever comes to mind now :D Anyway, bottom line is, I believe we need change. I don't want to keep playing the same game. I would love it if SE stopped focusing on appealing to their target demographic, and instead try to make another simply good game, with a fresh perspective, and some new interesting themes, instead of once again saving the world and growing up, since OMG, I've already saved the world and grown up like 80 times....

I think the focus should be on fun and not on creating a realistic/serious world or realistic/serious characters. Like WK mentioned, FFIV's story just keeps getting more and more ludicrous but I never noticed it as a kid and I appreciate it even today. The fact is that you were on an adventure and it was just plain fun. That light-hearted feel where a talking purple octopus or an 8-armed giant with low self esteem don't seem out of place is gone from FF these days.

Also please bring back battles where you control the whole party. I'm sick of this AI nonsense. At least give me the option of controlling them like in the latter Persona or DQ games.

I also don't really think it needs to be realistic or serious - what I meant with the Persona example is that they didn't really bother with their target demographic. It was more like - sure, let's make it a school with dating sim elements, but they're still making their own game with strong cues from the SMT metaseries.

FF needs its freshness. It needs to say "screw the money, I have rules!" and just make a game for the hell of it, without trying to please some demographic and telling the other demographic to go away, please.