I already answered this but...Originally Posted by Serapy
Will you feel the same thing after the release of FFXIII?
It depends, I need SE to succeed with a few FFs in a row for me to become confident in them again. I would probably be more accepting if SE stopped hiring Nojima for his services cause he has never written a good plot on his own. His style is very amateurish and very pretentious and I don't like having the game tell me the equivalent of a children's story and at the same time treat me like I'm too stupid to understand what's going on.
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(Further thoughts)
I guess my issue is that Nojima/Kitase/and Nomura are creators for the mainstream. Its not a bad thing but I always felt FF was suppose to be on the edge defining the genre rather than just being the most well made. I don't have faith in the team that gave us X, cause X lacked any stellar innovation and its plot was filled with so many anime/rpg cliches it was kinda a blow to the head to see a series that brought us groundbreaking titles like, VIII and IX backtrack and make something that only the mainstream anime nerds would like. Even though VIII was a title they worked on, I admit I felt even then, it was moving towards a more mainstream approach but its drastic art and gameplay change saved it.
I appreciate trying to redefine "fantasy" by going to their Japanese roots but its plot is literally one of the most overdone legends in Japanese mythology and its most unique concepts was a rip-off from VII with a greater emphasis on the Buddhist belief system. My other issue was that the plot made it too easy to invoke emotion from the player and rather than do it low-key, it laid it on so thick that the drama was more comical than tear jerking. In fact its rather bland cast had to overuse the plot devices to invoke any real emotion cause they themselves were lacking of any character.
Playing X felt like watching a casual Hollywood blockbuster, it doesn't have real actors just people who look the part, its plot tries to be thought provoking but its so poorly written/told that its depth is the equivalent of a blank fortune cooking, and the whole thing was very predictable, you knew going in how it was all going to turn out.
For a movie, its a few hours of your life you wasted cause you might have been bored, as a game it was 40 hours, and coming from a series that had blown me away with each installment; X fell short big time by basically being like every other RPG on the market except have the best graphics and sound quality. I don't know about anyone else but I don't really play these games for pretty graphics.
XI is a good game but the direction to MMO gameplay makes the game not well received in most of the fanbase. I personally have been having a blast with the game but I cannot bring myself to let it be a part of the numbered series.
Then there was XII which I thoroughly enjoyed cause it brought back the edge into the series. Yet XII has one fatal flaw... FFTactics, Ivalice was an established world long before XII and the dream world of Matsuno. XII was his way to bring his vision of the FF he created back then; yet here is where the problem lies. Ivalice will always be Matsuno's and the Tactic's world. Despite how good it is, its hard to accept it as a numbered FF cause it is literally another chapter in the World of Ivalice. It would be like Dragon Quest IX suddenly getting retitled as FF XIV. It may be a great game but its obviously a DQ game no matter how you see it. And though I felt XII brought the series back to its original spirit and felt far more like an FF then X; it doesn't change the fact that Matsuno is gone and his team is working on building up the Ivalice world. So we are now back to the people who originally destroyed my faith in the franchise and all they keep doing is showing flashy trailers with things they know fans want to see...
I keep telling myself that X was a fluke, it was a game where so many bad decisions happened at once and I should not judge the team cause one game went disastrously bad for me. Yet playing any other title they have involvement in (i.e. Compilation of FFVII) I find myself seeing the same terrible pattern I saw in X. Yet I cannot really blame Kitase and Nomura. I blame it all on one person, Nojima.
During all this time, I've watched Nojima fail miserably as a writer, I hate what he has done with Kingdom Hearts and the VII Compilation and anything else he somehow gets involved with. He has steadily gotten worse over the years with his writing. He needs to no longer be hired for service cause he cannot write anything intelligent, rather he just writes what the brain dead masses want and in turn makes them more brain dead. I generally blame him for the fall of the FF series, I noticed that he is generally the key factor in whether I like a title or not anymore. If he's involved the story pisses me off cause of its show boating and inconsistencies and over the top soap opera drama. If its anyone else, it is amazing and good. SE just needs to drop the dead weight in their development staff.
*END RANT*
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