how can anybody likes this game?

[ReloadPsi]

Yeah, the datalogs were pretty freaking lazy.

I have a feeling Square-Enix got the idea from the more recent Star Ocean games, given that they published them. The problem is that I think Square-Enix saw that Star Ocean had a datalog explaining half the stuff that hadn't been put into the regular narrative in any detail, but they didn't know why it was there.

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time's glossary or whatever it was called was there to provide information on the three games that came before it in case you hadn't played them (and odds are Second Story was the only one you had played back when you first played TTEOT, if any, due to SO1 and Blue Sphere not being released outside Japan at that point) so while it was never essential that you read it to understand the story, it was nice to have to keep you informed if you cared to put in the time. It enriched the game.

FFXIII's datalog is an excuse to not put as much exposition into the cutscenes. The first thing I noticed is that there didn't seem to be a character to project yourself onto. At first I thought it might be Sazh, but he was just as savvy about what was going on in the game world as everyone else, and within fifteen minutes he too was saying things that made me feel excluded from the events of the game. Every so often the game would then say "right, now you can stop playing and find out what any of this is about, because these characters aren't going to show you; this is a tell-don't-show game." What this also meant was that the cutscenes were practically a complete waste of time. Sure they presented the characters' personalities somewhat, but every single game before that one has manage to give us insight into personality and enlighten the audience to the plot. Heck, there were even times where the datalog contradicted what I'd just seen. Hope follows Vanille somewhat reluctantly to chase after Snow, umming and ahhing all the way, and the datalog calls this a "blind rage." I laughed pretty hard at that one.

The only defence I ever see people provide for this is "...well I like it." Well that's just it. I freakin' don't.

And as for the notion that it gets better so many hours in: that argument's only any good when you're working with something that allows you to skip the bad parts, such as a TV series, or films. Other than downloading someone else's save, or cheating, there isn't a way to skip the bad parts in a video game; you have to play all of it and I'm not going to slog through however many hours of the bad parts (I hear it being anything between fifteen and thirty hours from different people... hell with that!) when I could play an entirely different game that's fun at the very beginning.

Because fun is what games are about. Not work. I've already been working so I can get the money to buy my games and have fun with them.


Having said that, I wish there had been a datalog for Beauty and Warrior, because I barely had a clue what was going on in that film.