Criticize this game!

[Skyblade]

Okay, I know I said I wasn't go to comment on anyone's actual criticism cause that's the whole point of this thread, but I just can't help pick out this point...

Where to begin...

Well, let's start with something I haven't criticised recently. The graphics. This game is aesthetically dull. It's not "dark", it's not "serious", it's boring. Oh, it can do dark and serious at times, and do it quite well. Usually in a one minute cutscene of the villains. But, for the majority, it's just brown and grey and more brown. There is no vibrance in Ivalice in this game. Everything feels washed out and lifeless. Colors are muted and landscapes are dull. There is no hint, anywhere, that anyone actually lives in this bloody world.

And it's not a result of war, don't give me that lame excuse. Go back and take a look at the War of the Roses, and you'll see that those people used color all the damn time. Outfits, banners, signs... Armies were things of vibrancy and life, even as they were slaughtering each other. Even the bloody spells in this game looked muted. Lightning is pretty much the only thing that has any glow to it, and I'm convinced that's only because they couldn't find a way to make it brown. It's hard to believe that there is anyone living in Ivalice when the entire world, even the bustling cities, looks like something lifted from Call of Duty or Quake.

You do realize that the flashy colors and the outfits proved to be a detriment to the French right? The flashy outfits easily allowed English Longbow men to spot Captains and other high ranking officers easily from their troops and be targeted and killed. I mean the War of the Roses is partially why military uniforms changed to be more universal and bland. Hell, even the Revolutionary War had the British Redcoats having trouble not getting easily spotted by Rebel forces and sniped. So flashy exotic colors are not exactly a plus in a military setting.

You do realize that brightly colored uniforms stayed in use for several hundred years, well beyond the death of the feudal age, don't you?

You do know that the American Militia, with its lack of brightly colored uniforms, was considered a dishonorable outrage in Britain at the time of the war, even though it made the militia's sniping and hit and run tactics extremely effective, don't you?

As for the JP system forcing 'grinding', I think that is a matter of semantics. In a game like FFT the battles are the meat of the game, and I would argue that fighting random battles is considered part of the gameplay. It only becomes grinding when you are using extremely repetitive strategies to maximize JP earned. (Which people do do, but they also grind in every other game.) I don't think that the game forces you to fight several random battles for every story battle is actually a knock against the game though, I see these random battles as just as much gameplay as the story ones.

Unfortunately, the random encounters are boring, repetitive, unbalanced, and tedious. FFTA and FFTA2 had just as much non-story combat as FFT, except those games did all they could to make it intereseting and fun, instead of just "here's five mobs, go kill". They actually included stories and objectives that made combat outside of the main story something other than a simple, boring, gridfest.

BAD GRAPHICS! HOW COULD ANYONE PLAY THIS GAME? COD IS MUCH BETTER.

I love this because I specifically compared this game to COD, as I feel they both draw from the exact same color pallete.

It was incorrect of me to use the word graphics, however, as the term for what I was criticisizing is "aesthetics". The aesthetics of this game were horrible. The graphics were actually brilliant, and served the aesthetics really well. It's just a lousy aesthetic choice. I apologize for my poor word choice. I also puzzle as to why I use it in the first place, when I clearly know it's wrong as I use the correct term, aesthetics, in the very next line. I will blame it on my posting very late at night.

Actually, I do have a graphical complaint, but it is related to the rereleases of the game, rather than the game itself. Why the hell do they ruin the game's aspect ratio by stretching it to fit the screen in War of the Lions and the PSN verison of the game?!

[maybee]

The story is dull, the battle system is dull and the characters are dull.

I don't really understand the hype around the game to be honest with you all.

[Skyblade]

Where to begin...

Well, let's start with something I haven't criticised recently. The graphics. This game is aesthetically dull. It's not "dark", it's not "serious", it's boring. Oh, it can do dark and serious at times, and do it quite well. Usually in a one minute cutscene of the villains. But, for the majority, it's just brown and grey and more brown. There is no vibrance in Ivalice in this game. Everything feels washed out and lifeless. Colors are muted and landscapes are dull. There is no hint, anywhere, that anyone actually lives in this bloody world.

Two words, Akihiko Yoshida.

Irrelevant.

War of the Lions.jpgFFTA2_Battle.png

There we go. The first two gameplay screenshots of War of the Lions and FFTA2 I found with Image Search. Notice the difference? FFTA2 has COLOR. Grass is actually green. Plants look alive. People don't look like they're dressed for a funeral.

And he was FFTA2's artistic supervisor.

dangit.jpg

Picture 3 is about 2 minutes of editing with Microsoft Office color saturation and midtone adjustment. It almost looks like a world which has a sun (although admittedly it washes out the few light tones of the pic).

[NeoCracker]

@Skyblade.

Yes, people used colored uniforms for ages. And the revolutionary's were scoffed for not doing that.

Guess which way won out for it's vast superiority?

On a serious note, even of your screenshots I think FFT looks better. The TA look fits it's less serious story (Not to say that it's a story that can't be taken seriously mind you.). Even with the more uniform look, I find there is plenty of Variety. Mostly in the NPC's mind you. I love the designs of guys like Wiegrahf and the Heaven and Hell Knights.

[Wolf Kanno]

You do realize that the flashy colors and the outfits proved to be a detriment to the French right? The flashy outfits easily allowed English Longbow men to spot Captains and other high ranking officers easily from their troops and be targeted and killed. I mean the War of the Roses is partially why military uniforms changed to be more universal and bland. Hell, even the Revolutionary War had the British Redcoats having trouble not getting easily spotted by Rebel forces and sniped. So flashy exotic colors are not exactly a plus in a military setting.

This didn't change for most people until the early 20th century, really until World War I, and even then there were almost riots in the French Parliament when the discussion of abolishing les pantalons rouge was underway. In the setting FFT equates to there really would need to be a justification for colorless drab armies, because knights and dukes and so forth really really loved their banners and colors and heraldry (and with good reason; when battles descended into melees you needed to be able to tell who was on your side). Furthermore massed archer attacks didn't tend to have the accuracy needed to target individuals (and in this age in many battles the important people were at the front of the charge anyway), though I suppose if you saw a chap who was clearly important you might be inclined to fire in his direction. I don't actually mind FFT's graphics or aesthetic myself but that's one particular issue I wanted to correct. Again it could very reasonably be justified but that doesn't happen, and it really does need to given real-world historical context. Also the War of the Roses was an English civil war, not a fight with France - you may be thinking of the Hundred Years War, where the English with their Longbowmen did indeed annihilate the French knights more than once (Agincourt, Crecy, and Poitiers).

:milsperg:

Also there's nothing wrong with grinding in and of itself, it depends on the gameplay. Grinding in a fun game is still fun, grinding in a boring one is not. This is a boring one.

My bad, I always get The War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War mixed up, blame the American educational system (it's hard to even say those two words together without smiling) since every World History class I've taken they tend to stay ethnocentric and focus on elements that attribute to the founding of the good old U.S. of A. So not much about British politics and wars after the Magna Carta.

Also Skyblade, Ivalice actually is more of a drab world than you think it is, considering



Tactics
fft_battle.jpg

Vagrant Story
vagrant_3.jpg


and FFXII
FFXII-nam-yensa-sandsea-save-crystal.jpg

all share the same color pallette (a heavier emphasis of earth tones, but I do like how it makes blues, reds and purples stand out, hell even the original FFTA feels "washed out" in its color scheme.

FinalFantasyTacticsAdvanceGBAScreenshot.jpg

I completely disagree about the magic not being colorful, of anything I felt the color range of the world made them more vibrant whereas I got the opposite effect in the TA series since everything is colorful rainbows in those worlds, I mean the summons are pretty underwhelming beyond the Totema, and even the Espers in FFTA2 feel really out of place due to different graphics styles and the DS' limitations of doing high quality 3D graphics.

[Gamblet]

BAD GRAPHICS! HOW COULD ANYONE PLAY THIS GAME? COD IS MUCH BETTER.

I love this because I specifically compared this game to COD, as I feel they both draw from the exact same color pallete.

It was incorrect of me to use the word graphics, however, as the term for what I was criticisizing is "aesthetics". The aesthetics of this game were horrible. The graphics were actually brilliant, and served the aesthetics really well. It's just a lousy aesthetic choice. I apologize for my poor word choice. I also puzzle as to why I use it in the first place, when I clearly know it's wrong as I use the correct term, aesthetics, in the very next line. I will blame it on my posting very late at night.

Actually, I do have a graphical complaint, but it is related to the rereleases of the game, rather than the game itself. Why the hell do they ruin the game's aspect ratio by stretching it to fit the screen in War of the Lions and the PSN verison of the game?!

Not sure if serious... I was just being sarcastic.

[Bolivar]

I love this because I specifically compared this game to COD, as I feel they both draw from the exact same color pallete.

Hold your tongue before you speak about the smoothest running, content-overflowing, undisputed leader of console gaming.

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.

And of course the TA games look colorful and fluffy and magical.

They're children's games.

[Skyblade]

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.

[DMKA]

It's pretty hard, both in level of difficulty and learning curve. Or at least, I thought so.

I got to the battle where the black mages are burning a city down and I gave up.

[Gamblet]

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.

1.FFT is supposed to be a dark game looking at its story.
2.There were sunny moments in that game.
3.There are people actually everywhere, but it is just not necessary to show them, besides a few cutscenes.
You have to play the game with open mind.

[Raistlin]

MILF may have the worst taste in Final Fantasys of anyone on this board. It's almost pitiful.

And I thought FFT's graphics and colors were great for the game. Of course it's earthy -- FFT put more emphasis on feeling real than most FFs, where the story is all about saving an entirely evil Big Bad from destroying the world with magic. This was a more serious game with a more mature, politics-oriented plot. The colors suited the atmosphere.

Of course there are still some things worth criticizing in the game. Some of the jobs have only very niche uses, certain jobs and characters are crazy overpowered, and regular enemies level up with you in a way that can make it rather difficult for you if you're not paying attention.

[DarkBahamut]

I don't many flaws about this game, but....The story is a masterpiece. The way the story has been told is a little lame.

[qwertysaur]

Why do Mediators equip guns? It doesn't fit the job.

[Skyblade]

Why do Mediators equip guns? It doesn't fit the job.

Anyone else want to negotiate?

[Laddy]

What else would they equip? Katanas?

I mean, Atticus Finch was a lawyer, and he could shoot any mothersmurfer he wanted.