Originally Posted by Bastian
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 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.
everything is wrapped in gray
i'm focusing on your image
can you hear me in the void?
[QUOTE=Mirage;3005965]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.
My point was that you're calling a minority a majority simply by saying "the majority doesn't count"
Also, you seem to have messed up the quoting process
everything is wrapped in gray
i'm focusing on your image
can you hear me in the void?
1) I don't care. :PMy point was that you're calling a minority a majority simply by saying "the majority doesn't count"
Also, you seem to have messed up the quoting process
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.
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.
As for the development, Japan develops games differently from Western developers. They tend to be more organic experiences. Like the Last Story, 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.
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...
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.
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).
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.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.
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.
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...
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).
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.
Last edited by Bandersnatch; 08-01-2011 at 09:17 AM.
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
everything is wrapped in gray
i'm focusing on your image
can you hear me in the void?
Maybe it's VI and the second half of V?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
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.
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"
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)
>>Am willing to change opinions based on data<<
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