http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...th-Square-Enix
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Ninety percent of his bitching is about Nomura specifically, not SE as a company. I wonder if he even realizes that. I'm also amazed that of all the things in Final Fantasy XIII to bitch about, he chose the character designs and the story; the least of that game's problems. :p
He's absolutely right about how they miss the point with overcompensating by dumping money into new graphics engines and tech demos then complaining that a game that sold 3 million copies in a month didn't sell enough.
Depends on your point of view. IMO a lot of their unpopular gameplay choices exist to help SE weave a tighter narrative. If the narrative sucks then the gameplay choices fail on their own, but if the story was superb then the choices would be justified.Quote:
Originally Posted by DMKA
I really liked FF13 because of the art style, music and combat. The story was dumb and I still don't understand it to this day. FF13-2 was even better than FF13 in Graphics, Music and Combat, but again the story lets them down. I've yet to play Lightning returns, I have a feeling my comments wont change. The issue with this is that while these games to me are good, they do not have the lasting appeal that some of the older games have as you cannot relate to the struggles of the characters.
Vivi Struggling with his own mortality, Yuna going on her pilgrimage despite knowing the end result of her journey, etc. I think what was missing in FFXIII was that the sense of mortality was not merged in with futility. The Characters in FFXIII just seemed to be travelling for the sake of meeting the big bad and killing him, rather than really developing at all. It's pretty much where people considered the series to start going downhill.
Also, Jim missed a trick in not saying that FF13 did not have focus for a game designed around fulfilling your focus.
Yeah, I do think Square-Enix is trying a bit too hard with both its graphics and its art direction in general.
It's called a metaphor DMKA. The Nomura design was uses as a metaphor to talk about the company's problems as a whole. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by DMKA
Interesting. Most of us agree that SE lost the plot a few years ago and became too arrogant to help themselves but the way this video comes off is very pretentious. That doesn't mean I disagree with all of what he said, but he talks as if he is the only one who has realised that SE has been having direction and priority issues and 'this is why you're all stupid because of it'.
A few things did stand out though.
I disagree that SE should just be more "normal", I mean, why? SE have changed gameplay of most of the FF since the introduction of the ATB, not all decisions turned out great, but I do appreciate the different styles. I think SE should make whatever crazy world they want, just not be arrogant when things don't turn out so hot and be willing to adjust accordingly.
Also, I like the larger than life character designs, and its not a 'flaw' of SE/Nomura as much as it is a personal preference. If you don't like it, that's fine and I wouldn't try to tell you why you should like them. I don't like all of them, but I don't see an issue here, if i'm honest.
Jim's main issue is remembering the characters, well, I haven't had that issue.. but then I follow and care about the franchise more than him by the sounds of it, so...
I do agree that following more recent FF plots can be a difficult task, it can get pretty nuts, but I also read books with confusing plots as well. So again... i'm not really sure that this is a 'problem' as much as it is some people, well, not caring enough to figure it out. And thats cool.
Poor writing does exist in the franchise, sure, but it's kind of ridiculous to say that the writing sucks just because I don't get it or care to understand.
The above post focuses on FF since that was more of less the focus of his video. Oh, and the evil villain laugh at the end, classic!
And for the record, I like Jim's honesty, he cares about the industry and I do to, but I think the expression 'mountain out of mole hills' is applicable here.
Regarding the video, I think I agree with most stuff except the combat. I want the combat to be different every time. Learning a new gameplay system is half the fun for me.
I think Nomura's design have been more or less rotten ever since after FF8, and I wish he'd just get the smurf out of there and let someone with actual creativity design some characters instead. I think the plots, especially in the FF13 games is a complete mess that is complicated just for the sake of being complicated, not for the sake of being a better story.
I understand the plot and events of FF13 and 13-2 (and probably will understand 13-3 whenever i play that game), but they are made unnecessarily complex for some idiotic reason. I can only speculate as to why, but I get a feeling that it is in order to trick players into thinking the story is more epic than it actually is. "Hey guys, this story isn't just really epic, it's mega ultra superfantastical turbo-epic, you can tell from all the stupid terms and words we made up in it". Something like that anyway.
Another thing I completely agree with is that they have a serious problem with cost efficient game making, at least in what now is the last generation of consoles. They made 0 KH games for that gen, and one main FF game with two sequels because reusing assets and engines is cheap. We can only hope that they have learned from the massive mistakes they did in the PS360 years, and actually make an efficient development pipeline for their PSbone4 games.
The only good thing that came out of the entire FF13 clustersmurf is a set of absolutely fantastic soundtracks. I guess I should be kind of glad for those. Ok, I am.
Nomura seems more focused on the clothes that his characters wear than on what dramatic purpose the character serves in the story.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Never liked Jimquisition but the man does bring up some points. SE is too obsessed with going overboard in order to stand out in both its design and concepts which would be fine if their was actual meaning and purpose behind them. As Mirage points out, the plots of the XIII games are not difficult to understand but they are written to sound more complex than they really are because the writers suffer from Fantasy/Sci-Fi Novelist syndrome where they have to complicate everything by adding meaningless fictional terminology and acronyms to everything. VII got away with it cause no one had really done it back then, even then the staff back then had the common sense to scale it back with VIII and IX before X kind of brought it all back and the series has ran with it ever since.
The main issue with the writing is that I feel they have lost characterization through the graphics and production values, I can't help but often feel the game is just telling me how to feel instead of letting the viewer come to their own conclusion for it. Not to mention the series lost any subtlety years ago. The handling of Hope's story in XIII is a wonderful example of just driving a point so hard that it loses its meaning. We are already presented with the reasoning for Hope to hate Snow in the first chapters but the next several chapters are designed to spell it out to the player why he came to this conclusion through silly coincidences , bad role models, and watching Snow return to the plot only to be the biggest idiot in the game for the simple reason to drive the point home that Hope is justified in his beliefs instead of leaving it up to the player to debate the merits, instead it just makes everyone look bad.
The other issue with the writing is that I feel SE has become too conservative about really pushing the story telling aspect. Games like FFIV, VI, VII, and IX were seriously pushing the envelope of what a narrative game could be and touched on powerful issues. Since the PS2 era, I feel they have largely shy away from this thinking and while they may allude to certain deeper issues, they never give it proper focus or do a watered down version of it. I stated before that hd XIII chose to actually kill off Sahz by suicide and then went along with it, the entire story could have been given better focus and could have actually created a strong and progressive advancement of the story and characters by switching focus to deal with it, but instead they copped out which no one was surprised by and a potential moment is lost simply because SE's marketing doesn't want them "to go there". They compensate their lack of thought provoking writing by being over the top with the visuals and concept instead. Who cares about addressing the issue of mortality, the fear of a parent, the despair of being pushed into a corner, the concept of a media that has brainwashed the masses into sheep, or dealing with waking up after a coma/hyper sleep to find everything you have known is gone, we've got transforming gunblades, sword wielding Behemoths, Jurrasic park monsters, beautiful locations you can look at but not touch, and transforming summon you can ride into battle! Don't worry about the heavy stuff, if you want that, play a grown up game! says Square-Enix :jess:
The graphics engines are an issue but fans have whined about that for years and its still the only positive thing SE is known for while every other element is contested by fans, I don't see this changing. I do agree that the designs of the franchise have gone too far and while the worlds and outfits are pretty they also dip too often into poor taste but if we really looked closely the whole franchise is kind of guilty of this, the older games just get a pass cause the graphics engines couldn't properly do the outfits justice or the characters were designed to be very simplistic to help the graphics team. I still feel that the designs are way over the top and have sadly overtaken what the series is known for over what it was back in the "glory years" if you want to call them that.
Gameplay, I'll agree with most that its not as big of a problem as the video gives it to be. Though I would point out that I consider gameplay to be much more than just a battle or customization system but also sidequests, mini-games, and exploration. While XIII seriously dropped the ball and the original XIV did as well the sequels and reboot largely fixed said issues and while I have no real love for XIII's battle system its not like I haven't had issues with prior battle systems either and I would only be making more of a fuss if SE declared tomorrow that going forward the battle system would be the same as XIII's for the rest of the franchise. There are certainly some bad gameplay designs that SE has popularized but I feel even they have slowly began to recognize the flaws in it and are pulling it back a bit so I can't really argue that it is an ongoing issue. Of anything the only thing I could argue is that FF has lost its identity as a game. The fact Bravery Default's success shocked the corporate heads simply shows that SE has not only lost touch with their audience but also that they have spent so much time redefining the genre that they kind of forgot what they were trying to redefine. We'll see where that takes us but we're a long way off from knowing the ramifications of this silly revelation on the development side of things.
In conclusion, the video hits a few points and I do like the clever analogy of the Nomura Batman figure is pretty dead on but I feel his points are hit or miss at best. Still think the guy is a bit full of himself as well.
Pretty much. I agree with everything he said, and it's funny that anyone would think he's mostly talking about Nomura when the majority of things he talks about being absolute trout weren't even Nomura's fault. The only thing he really did in FFXIII for example were the character designs. And the irony there is that his character designs weren't even the worst designs in the game. The enemies and a lot of the NPC's were ten times worse than Nomura's contributions. But he does work as a metaphor (especially the Batman concept) because he has no concept of what makes good art anymore and just keeps adding lines and belts and zippers and dangly bits until he's made his designs sufficiently unidentifiable.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeoCrackerIt's called a metaphor DMKA. The Nomura design was uses as a metaphor to talk about the company's problems as a whole. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by DMKA
He designs like a 13 year old trying to make something look badass, and the rest of Square Enix is no better these days.
Someone from SE should come and read this thread. And perhaps also watch the video. I wonder if they would cry.
Sorry for the derail, but I just imagined one of SE's rank and file that doesn't read English coming across this thread and not understanding anything.
That was a good episode. I like watching Jimquisitions and even if he contradicts himself every now and then I think he thinks things through quite well before arguing. His arguments about Squeenix are pretty spot on in my opinion, although I do think his choice for words as SE having to be more "normal" is a little off. Simplifying and focus would have been better terms.