I love when your inner VII Fanboy comes out and you try to spiel you BS revisionist history so you can try to attribute design elements to VII that really deserve to be given to other games. Square was already exploring the idea of making locations and settings different from each other long before VII with games like Secret of Mana trying to give each location a different flavor and geographical feel, Live A Live not only creating visually different scenarios for each character but even different gameplay from other genres, and CT itself also did its best to make each time period visually unique from each other to break away from overused tile sets, even then I would argue the artistry that went into the tile sets were still impressive and showed up in FF all the way back to the NES days to try to move beyond everything looking the same.Originally Posted by Bolivar
You know what they all have in common except XIII? They all make fun games that fans want sequels to.
You certainly kept it to yourself if you did, as my memory recalls you defending the game most of the time.
So basically you're saying that XIII is a poorly developed action game trapped in a JRPG body and needs a "genre change" that it finally received after two sequels? So its Transgenre ( I apologize for any actual transgender members and mean no offense but its a good analogy for his statement) and I'm a hateful person for trying to hold it to the standards of the genre I was told it was?
Honestly I don't even know why SE needs to show off graphics and audio, many developers have proven they can build fun games without resorting to blowing all their time and budget on one of the more shallow elements of the gaming experience.
If you really want to compare this game to a true contemporary, instead of grasping at straws by genre hopping, let's compare it to a highly acclaimed JRPG like Xenoblade. Xenoblade also has you control one character while A.I. does the rest but it also allowed for all the characters to be used by switching between them in battle or using special group combo attacks, and I controlled the movement of the characters which was important for the 3D battle system where attack abilities alter depending on orientation. The normal attacks are automated but special attacks are controlled by me, like the Gambit System Xenoblade made the wise decision to only automate tedious tasks, not remove the player from the experience. In XIII, your a platoon leader at best, in Xenoblade (and FFXII) you can be the General, the platoon, leader or even the foot soldier, switching the level of player control based on the challenge or when you're doing the easy mob battle.
The areas of Xenoblade are linear, in that like mid-to-late 90s JRPGs, you can't really sequence break the order of events like you can in a true open world game like the Elder Scrolls series but each area is smurfing huge with so many elements to explore, optional challenges, and a gameplay achievement system that rewards the players for exploring or achieving silly goals. The environments can be interacted with and they don't feel static because if you can see, it, 9 out of 10 times you can reach it. The third area of the game is larger than the main area of Pulse in XIII, THE THIRD smurfING AREA, IN A GAME ON A SYSTEM THAT IS INFERIOR TO THE PS3, IS AS LARGE AND VISUALLY STUNNING AS PULSE. Later areas are just as large or even larger, you have linear objectives but a sandbox arena to play in making Xenoblade also on equal footing with other sandbox games like GTA.
The game doesn't hold the player back to explore and play around its visual landscapes. Cocoon is an old stuffy museum where you can look but cannot touch, Xenoblade is like a modern museum that recognizes you need to engage the patrons to help them learn by letting them interact with what you're selling. In terms of being a game, Xenoblade is just better, hell in terms of being a story Xenoblade is better but that's because it actually has some legitimate surprises even if most of them are revealed in the game's 11th hour and the final stretch of the plot has world changing plot twist fatigue. XIII is a game that deals with a theme of death and overcoming destiny by largely not addressing one and instead focusing on the party's petty problems (though some are legit) and deals with the other by having a literal Deus ex Machina fulfill it. Xenoblade deals with ethnic fighting, environmentalism, historical racism, genocide, and fighting against fate in a the most creative way imaginable by actually incorporating it into a gameplay feature. This is the Xeno team so you know they didn't half ass any of these concepts.
It has towns you can explore and interact with, townspeople who you actually get to know and have names and back stories you can slowly uncover by doing side missions for them which then unlocks new townspeople and missions, even ones from other towns. It all plays into the games world theme of interconnection. The Bionis makes sense as a fantasy world, as a concept and its world is very interconnected. Cocoon is mostly themed maps which you so proudly touted but they don't really make much sense on how they are connected nor does the game feel its important to make them important to the characters, the plot, or the player. You could switch most of the locations in the early chapters and it wouldn't change the plot much because that's how relevant they are. Pulse is a large em,pty mass of repetitive side content, lots of mystery but no narrative to tie it all together and it doesn't bring any new perspective to the story you go there cause the game mentioned it exist but it serves no narrative purpose, Pulse is practically a giant sidequest for what it brings to the story. The Mechonis? Mothersmurfing Holy Grail of plot twists, epic battles, tricky puzzles, and full on emotional roller-coaster ride from beginning to end. XIII tried to change the JRPG by just cutting all the content that makes it a JRPG instead of really addressing its problems, Xenoblade actually tries to address the problems and found a happy compromise by simply making the tedious aspects of the game more user-friendly.
Did I mention both games had the same amount of development time (five years) and Xenoblade shows it, XIII can try to play with the western AAA titles but it lost the JRPG fight and frankly it's underwhelming compared to The Last of Us, Uncharted and other Western affair. By trying to appeal to the West it lost a lot of its potential fans.
Not true, you can sequence break at various points in the NES titles, FFIII and the SNES entries gave you vehicles that opened up the world with side content to explore and had new worlds to explore opening up the world early to explore and then changing the landscape to create a whole new world to explore of which VI's world map is pretty open ended. Even the PS1 generations pulled this though starting with VII more lengths were made to cut off the player from fully exploring the world until the writers wanted you to as cinematic took more prominence, X began the awful practive of linear maps and small world design which was sadly used in games like Xenosaga and Suikoden but that trend began to end thanks to DQVIII and XII introducing a more realistic seamless world. XIII is a dinosaur that took the idea from FFX whereas Xenoblade took its roots from DQVIII and FFXII and that's partly why it feels like a real evolution of the genre as opposed to XIII that was just striving to be accepted by its western gaming peers despite no one really giving a smurf.The dirty secret is, outside of world map illusions and endgame content, neither were most of the FF games.
Possibly, no game is perfect and I believe in the old saying, and I am paraphrasing, that "there is always someone out there better than you" . Yet I am confident in a battle against contemporaries many of my fave games would come out on top but maybe that's simply because I'm confident I can make the better argument as opposed to any real objective truths.
Why yes Bolivar, I am obviously a closet XIII fanboy because in the past, before I knew anything about the game and actually played it, I wanted to know more to get excited cause I am a Final Fantasy fan, made obvious cause I frequent a FF message board and talk about it. I am so grateful you steel trap like intellect was able to uncover this mystery for all of us.
You're so adorable when you try to troll me.I can show you the receipts.
This is all I'm thinking when we spar.
Bolivar X Wolf Kanno = Best Couple Winter Ciddies 2014!
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) coming mostly from one guy, the whole thread is utterly positive about FF and people like "I hope they go on forever! I love FF" whereas this thread is kind of dripping in utter apathy for the franchise. The shift in tone I feel shows a more underlying issue concerning the franchise than either you or Bolivar are willing to accept.
