I will respectfully leave Call of Duty out of the thread, it has been far too long since I played one (and the game I was actually thinking of was Medal of Honor, not Call of Duty). Once again, my bad.

Skyblade, I respect you, I admire you, but I really have to question where you're coming from on this one. OF COURSE IT LOOKS BLEAK AND DEPRESSING!!! Read the news reports and rumors at the pubs, they had just lost a war, there's a famine going on, out-of-work soldiers are forming revolutionary groups and waging open warfare against the nobility. Of course it looks like no one would want to live there, no one does.
My problem isn't that it looks as though no one wants to live there, my problem is that it looks as though no one lives there at all. The world feels more empty than FFXIII's world, and that takes some doing.

It's not strictly the color pallete, it's how those colors are used. FFXII and especially FFTA did a far better job, even using the earth tone pallete, than Tactics did. Tactics almost never used color, light, or tone. The only variation is when they make things even darker during the scenes where they show the bad guys plotting and schemeing in dark rooms with thunderstorms going on outside.

FFXII, FFTA, and FFTA2 made phenomenal use of both color and light. Yes, I used an extreme example of a bright and colorful scene. But those games all use both extremes. They have dark, serious, and sombre scenes, and they have things that balance it out, that show a lighter side to things, that show life in the world.

Ivalice in FFT looks like a place that's been burnt to the ground several times over, and always has a cloud of ash covering the sun. There's no sign of life or civilization in the entire place, and the choice of such an incredibly dark aesthetic only further reinforces that thought. Why would anyone fight over Ivalice? After the fifty years war, it's a run down country with no military might, zero international political standing, and, from what we can see in the game, no decent infrastructure and no population.


Ivalice feels dead. Not dying, not hurting, just dead and lifeless. When I first entered a Jagd in FFTA and saw the ruined buildings and lifeless courtyards, the first thing I thought of was Tactics. That's what everywhere was like in Tactics. In FFTA, it was used to great effect to adjust the game's tone, to show the benefits of the Laws, to build up tension. In FFT, that's just how the world is. A barren, lifeless wasteland.