The more things change... (Old usenet group posts about Final Fantasy)

[Ayen]

If you go back through the early threads (look for the ones with 30+ pages just around the time of release or after it) for each of the FF releases, you'll find people bitching about each of them. It's what Square Enix gets for innovating. In most series out there today, each game is fairly similar, especially if it's an FPS/TPS. SE however make big changes to gameplay all the time, and the result of that is a lot of new fans, a lot of moving with the times and - unfortunately - a lot of angry fans pissed off at how this isn't FFIV-2, FFVI-2, FFVII-2, FFX-2 (in this context, even FFX-2 wasn't FFX-2 xD), etc.

It's not always the same people complaining and not all changes are 'innovation'. Speaking for myself, I was a big FFI-VI fan but still loved VII-IX at the time of their release, including all the innovations. Yet I was turned off by many features of XIII and anything that has come later. I wouldn't call that complaining about 'innovation'; I would call that complaining about bad game design.

Just because people don't like something doesn't mean they don't have perfectly valid reasons for not liking it and deserve some 'hater of innovation' label. Not that most of these guys have valid reasons. Some of them are absurd.

I agree with Del. I thought the transition from VII - X was pretty smooth despite things like Materia, Junction, and the Sphere Grid. If I played the last one I more or less knew what to expect. But the transition from X-2 to now is all over the place. X-2 gave us more fast pace action, XI was a MMO, XII was MMO lite, and XIII was back to turn based battles but you could only control one character, and then XIV we're right back to the MMO again. Those kind of changes are not smooth transitioning. They're flying off the handle! It's possible to innovate without changing so much from the last game you don't even recognize it anymore.

As for the actual topic, this reminds me of wrestling fans during the Attitude Era where people complained about The Rock almost as much as they do about John Cena now. We are all just living in the Reapers' endless and vicious cycle.