Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
If, in FFXIII...
- Sahz actually killed himself
- Hope actually succumbed and turned into a Cie'th, thus having to be killed
- Jihl ended up joining the good guys at some point, after seeing the enemy for his true colours
- The final boss was Barthy
- Barthy was more prevelant and his reasoning for doing what he was doing was better explained, and his "co-conspirators" were better fleshed out
- There were better minigames with good comic relief
- You could unlock additional characters
- A non-humanoid character of Pulse joined the party

...it might have been received a lot better. Especially the first parts. I mean, seriously, they would have blown some people's minds (excuse the pun).
AAA games on PS/XB take too much money to produce. To make that money back they have to sell as many copies as possible, so the game often ends up generic and bland by necessity so they can appeal to as many people as possible. I think that was possibly one of FF13's problems. It looked very nice and had lots of voice acting and hit all the AAA marks, but it was a forgettable game. The ideal would be creative game developers taking big chances and pumping out new ideas and new games, until lightning strikes (pun unintended) and some guy's like "Listen, everyone! Time-travelling frogs! Hold on, hear me out..." and we get the next Chrono Trigger. That's pretty hard to do when taking a chance costs 5-10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The solution is find a way to make games quickly and more cheaply. For that reason I think maybe PS/XB are the wrong platform for JRPGs, and they're becoming wronger over time. Which is why I love my 3DS and Vita where I can play tons of niche games, and I love my PC where I can play tons of indie games. (http://www.anodynegame.com/ - A 2D vaguely FF-like RPG made by two people, where your weapon is a broom. A lot more fun than FF13.) The things AAA-ness brings to the table are not the things that make a game good. AAA RPGs could go away and I wouldn't care. I'd rather SE split up the small army of people probably working on FFXV into 10 smaller teams and told them each to go nuts, you have one year to make a a brand new RPG, no voice acting, no motion-capture, no fully orchestrated soundtrack, no 30-minute FMVs, hop to it.

The longer that FFXV takes, the more worried I become. Is it going to wipe out SE if it flops? Is some board of directors telling the dev team "The main character does WHAT? Take that out of the game, it'll hurt sales!" What are the chances that FFXV is going to be an amazing game? I'm sure it'll be an OK, playable game, but what are the chances we get a game that people still love in 20 years? Chrono Trigger is turning 20 next year, FYI.