FFXIII's Lightning-Based Game to be Announced in September

[krissy]

do you guys think i can finish xiii-2 before the september 1st announcement if i start today?

[Del Murder]

Yes. The story portion of the game is quite short, maybe 15-20 hours. A lot of the game is exploring the time periods and doing quests for fragments. It is not necessary to do all those things to complete the main story (though you may have trouble with some of the later battles if you aren't leveled up and have crappy monsters).

[Roogle]

Unfortunately, I am not interested enough in the setting or characters presented in the original game to follow the series in its entirety right now. This is something that I wouldn't mind playing far into the future when I can, at the very least, edit the game and play around with it a little bit.

[Jiro]

Looking at that teaser site, it sure looks like this will be a full FFXIII-3. Lame.

And also, apparently the original FFXIII was just the first part of the "Lightning saga." Now Square even goes into new FF games with a plan to milk it.

That's kind of terrifying to think about. I mean you had this overarching grouping (Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy) which contained multiple games (XIII, Versus, Type-0) and then within XIII (and potentially the others) you have sequels or story arcs, which could in all likelihood end up with a 5+ game mini universe inside of the preestablished loosely related Final Fantasy universe itself. Christ.

[Raistlin]

The worst part is that Squeenix is likely to pull this crap for every major FF installment from now on. We'll be waiting 8 years between major games because they have 10 sequels and spinoffs to make.

[krissy]

you guys know what i think the issue is

it takes too long to make a game nowadays

back in the day there was no body-scripted video and lip-synched vid for every single conversation

not everything had a voice attached to it

but now they gotta record all that for every single npc

i'd give it up for a text based thing as long as the story was more cohesive and stuff

radiant historia is amazing and no one talks in it. and there's only a few animations per character. it's not that hard, but the ff's have become a grand spectacle now, so a lot of the emotional subtlety disappears.

[Del Murder]

I agree with Reno. The issue is that this spectacle is what racks in the big bucks. Gamers make their voice heard through their wallets. FFXIII sold millions of copies so that didn't really send the message we wanted to SE.

In an interview a while back, Wada or some SE exec said that they would like to do Final Fantasy more like Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty. Each installment coming annually and being modifications of the previous one rather than a complete overhaul. This is contrary to how they produced games in the past, all of which were pretty unique from game to game. It seems likely that FFXIII-3 will be something like this rather than a new concept.

[Jiro]

They say they want to model it like CoD except it still takes them a smurfing age to release anything anyway. Perhaps we should start purchasing their handheld games and remakes and such to show what we're really after.