how can anybody likes this game?

[ReloadPsi]

Now I didn't really elaborate on this because it's one hell of a long elaboration. But here goes.

The other thing that just got on my damn nerves with this game is not that it started slow, but that it started badly. It managed to annoy me several times in the three hours I played, all of which I videotaped by the way; I only played it because one of my friends knew I would react very negatively and insisted we record my reaction all the way, as I had already decided, based on my not really liking much of anything Square-Enix had put out in the last decade (aside from maybe XII which I'm still very undecided on) that I wasn't even interested in playing this game, but a friend of mine had played it, hated it, and thought it deserved to be hurt back. Now I've always been all about second chances, but this was like their ninth or tenth chance for me so I already had a "meh" attitude... how could I possibly be disappointed?

So after a very pretty opening scene that I couldn't get emotionally invested in due to watching characters spit cryptic and alien plot points for ten minutes, the first battle begins and gives you a tutorial on how to control a battle... that consists of "select the Autobattle command. Well done! Two attack commands were placed in your queue! You can now select a target, but you only face one target this time, so your choice is simple." How about telling us how to manually select said commands and pitting us against two weaker soldiers to teach us how to target, letting us know that there IS an Autobattle option if we get lazy, and then testing what we've learned by having the fight between the hermaphrodite and her African-American stereotype friend, and the robot scorpion that's totally not an FF7 reference, a couple of minutes later? I couldn't believe that the very first tutorial in the game was telling me to let the game complete the tutorial for me. I also found it funny that my these two characters, whose names I did not yet know, but had been watching for the last ten minutes, finally revealed their names by entering a battle and letting me read their names next to their HP meters, rather than using the story to accomplish this. (Subtitles were off by default, and I didn't turn them on until some time after this battle.)

I already ranted on the datalog in an earlier post, so I won't go into that much further, but my immediate thoughts on seeing it explain totally alien plot points that the other characters had already thrown at me were that Squenix, having also published it, played Star Ocean: TTEOT and didn't actually understand the purpose of its glossary; they just thought it was a good idea and used it. Also if the story (and, from what I saw, lots of character motivation) was going to be mostly told in the glossary instead, then why bother showing any cutscenes at all, other than to deliberately waste my time? There was a lot of action but I couldn't get emotionally invested in it because I'm not a dumb kid with ADD and as such appreciate some bloody context. What, am I supposed to read the datalog afterwards and reminisce on what an epic scene it was in hindsight?

One of the other things that got right on my nerves was when I started fighting Cie'th or whatever the hell they were called... and some of them seemed to have higher evade and as such Sazh appeared to have an easier time hitting them with his funky pistol dancing than Lightning did with her sword. Too bad I couldn't tell him to do it, so I had to just wait for him to have a change of heart while I attacked the grounded foes instead. I like being allowed to micromanage my party. It's my goddamn party. At least Star Ocean, which they evidently thought they were somehow imitating, let you switch characters at whim; I've won many a battle in those games while my level was too low thanks to some clever micromanagement.

What really took the piss with the party AI though was when I was fighting Anima, and Snow was standing in the middle punching it while its two appendage thingies wailed on him. I got pretty tired of him dying all the time, as well as him not STANDING BACK A BIT AND THROWING HAND GRENADES INSTEAD AS THERE WERE MULTIPLE TARGETS AND THE NET DAMAGE DONE TO THEM ALL WOULD'VE PROBABLY BEEN MORE THAN WHAT HE WAS DOING TO ONE TARGET WITH HIS ATTACK NOT TO MENTION KEEPING HIM ALIVE. This was another instance where I was screaming at the screen (admittedly playing it up a bit because we were, like I said, crudely filming me playing it) but bloody monkey christ, I was amazed at how stupid my AI allies were being.

Oh yeah, hey, you know Square-Enix love their visuals? So much so that they've released two hundred-minute FMVs as stand-alone movies? You know how they once made this pompous statement of how the amount of time and effort they put into their special attack animations means we shouldn't be able to skip them because it would disrespect their work or whatever, which I admit I can't actually find and as such can't prove that they actually said? Okay, cool, so bear with me on this one. In either 2010 or 2011 this game took a Guinness World Record for the highest headcount of staff members working on a single video game: somewhere in the region of three hundred. So there's this scene where Hope and Vanille commandeer one of those airbike things, and crash it. Offscreen, with just sound effects. I know it seems like a minor point until you consider that three hundred people worked on this game, and that this figure was a world record. Three hundred people. And they couldn't be bothered to animate a brief crash sequence because it was harder than having people stand around and talk I guess.

I didn't play around with the paradigm system very much as I was running out of tape, but from what I could see it was very similar to the garment grid from FFX-2, only now it changed the entire party at once and there was less stuff to choose from. Immediately I started experimenting with it as I noticed that in my first fight I was taking a bit of a pounding, so I pushed L1 (was it L1?) and switched to Solidarity. Five seconds later, the game interrupted me and suggested I try switching to Solidarity. Apparently it thought I was a frakkin' idiot. I then made a paradigm named "Diversity" and pretended my team were now that kickass dance troupe from that one series of Britain's Got Talent. Bitchin'.

So as I said... there's a difference between a slow start and a f***ing offensive start. For me to find this bloody much to bitch about in just three hours... I worry. I have never so vehemently detested a game that I already walked into with no high expectations of which to speak, and in such a short amount of time. If it gets better... I don't care. Eat a dick. I've played through quite a few games I didn't like only to shut people up because I was accused of not giving them a chance, and in fact played so far through some of them that I was now giving advice on those damn games to the people who said I didn't give it enough time because I now knew the game better than they did purely because I played it to prove I could give a game a chance... and so got accused of liking it even though I did not; I got through it because I was good at video games. More so than they, apparently. Catch 22 innit. Point is I've done my time.

"Gets better later" isn't a good enough excuse for me any more, because I could just as well pick up a game that gets better immediately. Some other games may start a bit dull, but dull and slow aren't necessarily bad. My favourite film of all time, Alien, has an extremely slow start, but it isn't a horribly annoying start. If I shot you in the kneecap, murdered your mother and burned down your house, but then started bringing you a plate of freshly baked cookies every day, would you like me?

Edit a month later: looks like I closed this debate. None of you gonna defend any of that horrible BS?