Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post

I hope you're trolling because insisting I must be a SE employee suggests an inability to empathize with the perspectives of others, which is a sign of immaturity (as is insisting I'm "blind to the truth"). Are you honestly citing divisiveness as evidence of series decline? Do you remember some of the things you used to post about Final Fantasy VII and VIII? Those subforums were far more divisive in their heyday and make FFXIII's criticisms look like child's play.

And you know this (man).

Your analogy about art and individual experience is fallacious, which I'm going to take as evidence of a blind spot for you. Also, I criticize design choices in most games I like, so it's again illogical to take that as a sign of anything you're trying to prove.
I simply call you out because you're the first to defend SE and lately you've been whining around about how "it's not SE, it's the fans" which is pretty much the same hyperbole that Toriyama and Kitase gave when *gasps* the fanbase didn't completely rejoice about how wonderfully creative XIII was. When a game designer blames the fans first instead of taking a step back and maybe thinking that they had a misstep, it's a real bad sign.

Let me put this to you in terms you may understand, you're Vincent Valentine and Squenix is Lucretia, you are trapped in an abusive one-sided affair and instead of calling Lucretia out on their nonsense you're being overly defensive and taking their side convincing yourself that "you" or I guess "we the fans" are the problem instead of taking a step back from any emotional attachment from the situation and realizing that SE has some serious problems and maybe they need to be addressed if anyone is going to make this relationship work.

There is also nothing fallacious about my artist analogy, FFV (a game you claim to like) took one year to create, had a staff of maybe two dozen people and a modest budget. It was a solid game which you and I both agree on, was critically acclaimed for its time and is still hailed as one of the strong entries in the series franchise by both critics and fans. XIII took five years to develop, of which the entire gameplay concept was finalized only in the fifth year due to poor management making the development team basically waffle about as they dealt with silly internal politics like making the game a show piece for the new Crystal Engine which ballooned the development time. In five years the best they could come up with was a dumb down linear map system based on FFX and a dumb down Gambit system with the speed revved up to compensate for the lack of any real strategic thinking. They threw the rest of their resources into the story and graphics, the game had a development team twice the size of FFV and didn't bother doing any play testing until the game was almost ready for its initial release and largely ignored most of it. Now explain to me again how this comparison is so radically different considering one game was developed by six year veterans whose largest success at the time was FFIV and the other was developed by people who had a minimum of ten years and their names are attached to two of the most critically acclaimed entries in the franchise?

If you want to seriously sit here and dissect every FF entry with me so we can do a compare and contrast then by all means place your opening argument and let's get this show on the road but let's face it; it will go a few rounds, ultimately come to the same conclusion that all the games are flawed and liking them is subjective, you'll mention XIII's sales for why I should see XIII as being well recieved, I'll point out the sequels did terribly, we'll discuss metascore and both come to the conclusion the internet is a terrible place to get a valid opinion, I'll mention the general resentment the game gets across gaming sites and message boards, you'll say its due to the hyperbole of gaming critics and a vocal minority and then point out the sales of XIII and we'll start over again until we're both too tired to continue this petty argument.

VIII is a divisive game and probably always will be but I bet you there are more VIII fans than there are XII or XIII fans. Fans have been complaining about the quality of the series for years but the backlash of XI, X-2, XII, and the XIII trilogy makes it more noticeable because its been getting bigger and unlike VIII, IX, XI, and X-2 it doesn't feel like fans are going to redeem the others in time. Partly because the fanbase is spread out thin along with the concept of what a proper FF should be. I'm not saying that fans are free of any blame in this situation but SE kind of caused the problem in the first place with their long production times and need to try to "push it to 11" technologically which has created a fanbase that possesses an unrealistic expectation.

It was easy back then to brush off a bad game when they had the next game coming out in a year or two but that era is over and I don't really feel the current generation of FF fans (PS2 Era) would even be able to take the series in stride like we did back in the day. Even if they did get out a bi-annual schedule, they may just as likely whine that the quality is bad because they don't take the proper time like they used to. As far as I'm concerned SE has created for themselves a "damn if you do, damn if you don't" situation and it will only be a matter of time before it reaches a head.