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.