I have decided not to spend my time playing XIII-2. Since I'm in college now, which is why I haven't been here often, I cannot find the time to play something unless I know it will be worth my time. Final Fantasy XIII-2 appears to be fantastic with the new and improved gameplay, but what about the story? Stories are what makes the Final Fantasy series unique, and unfortunately I have found out too much of this game's story to even wish to play it anymore. It's sick. It's disgusting. I am in shock, I really am. The original game's storyline was confusing, but it made sense and it had a sense of finality. This game's story is demanding that you wait to pay for a whole new game or for DLC, and I refuse to do that.
In Fallout 3, you die in the end as the main character, and you can't do anything after that point. It sounds horrible, but the good thing is that your efforts throughout the game resulted in saving the Wasteland, by purifying the irradiated water throughout America. Sure, you died, your father died, everything seemed like it was over. However, you still know that you completed the game, and that everything in the game's world will now be okay. You don't need to sit around and wait for an expansion.
Now, in another game, like Kingdom Hearts, this would be different, because that game is a series of games that are related to each other. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn't relate to each other, and therefore each game should have a complete story. This is where XIII-2 fails. There is no ending for XIII-2, it was all just a lie. This has me fearing for the storyline of Type-0, because Square wants to make that game into its own spinoff series, and it seems to imply that there won't be a real ending to the game. At least it hasn't been advertised as a game of finality, and they say that the DLC is free, so there shouldn't be a problem for that game. I am keeping my hopes up for Type-0. I honestly must admit that I wasn't expecting XIII-2 to be all fine and perfect, it just seemed a little too good to be true. And where's Lightning? Why isn't she playable?
It's one thing to write an unfinished story. It's another thing to advertise it as a complete product, and what Square did is unforgivable. Maybe it wasn't all of Square, maybe it was just the writer of the story. Hopefully, we won't hear too much from him in the coming future of the series. A lot of people seem to believe that the series has gone to hell just because of one numbered title that has ultimately struggled. Sure, there's FFX-2 and Dissidia that are ultimately real nightmares as well, but they are spin-offs. XIII-2 is a spinoff as well, but it was Square's chance at redemption for the first game's bad gameplay, and since they ruined it, it counts against them. However, again we only have one game here. I cannot stand everyone saying that the series is going to suck forever now and that FFX will be the last decent Final Fantasy they ever release. It pisses me off that FFXII is overlooked and has been released relatively recently in context of the series's lifespan.
It's just one game, guys. Don't give me no nonsense about XIII-2, it still falls under the same production so it classifies as part of FFXIII. We still have Type-0 to check out, and we still have Versus XIII (which will probably be the best of the FFXIII spin-offs given that it's mostly Tetsuya Nomura's doing). FFXIV is another MMO, and I suppose that also has grounds for pissing off fans. It pissed me off, I'll give you all that much. If they were really going to release another Final Fantasy MMO, they could've at least made it several ways different from FFXI. But that's not what's important here. What's important are the numbered titles that you can actually place in your console device and play through without connection to the internet. We have the original five Final Fantasies that were as bland as a stale cracker, but in the end they're ultimately better and more well loved that FFXIII. We have FFVI and FFVII, games that cannot be argued with. Then you have FFVIII, which I hate the living hell out of, but enough people seem to like it. It certainly did not seem to portend that the series was reaching a state of hell. FFIX is loved by a lot of the fans, and I am still longing to check it out. FFX has some... mixed views. People seem to be willing to admit that it was a decent attempt. FFXI doesn't count for being an MMO. And last, there's FFXII, which was one of my best video game experiences ever. A lot of people hate it for no reason; I assume they're just new fans whose first Final Fantasy was FFX (or worse, FFX-2). So maybe Square is being very greedy and disgusting trying to shell out money from the pockets of their customers. Personally, I don't give a damn so long as the game they release is a game I don't play, like FFXI and FFXIV. If they want to make people pay monthly to play an online game, fine, whatever. However, I have to care when they release a game with promises of being great, and then in the end it turns out that I had wasted my money and that I would have to waste more money for the finished product.
I was fine with FFXIII, but that was because it was the game that I needed in a time of despair over whether video games will ever be as good as they used to be (because I was playing all the first person shooters on the Xbox 360, all of which suck minus the Halo series). Anyway, so my point is that this game shouldn't worry people about the future of the series. When you look at FFXIII by itself, you will freak out and think that Square will never be able to get the next Final Fantasy right. However, when you take the game and put it in the grand scale of the series as a whole, it looks nothing more than a small blotch on a beautiful person's skin. For now, I want to see what Versus XIII and Type-0 will be like, and I am sure that they will be better games than FFXIII, allowing for fans to forget about the game and laugh it off as a silly mistake. When FFXV comes around, I am sure things will be different. My guess is that FFXIII's failure is attributed to the division of the company, since they divided into three groups to work on three different games at once (though I really wonder what the hell Nomura's been doing all this time with his group on Versus XIII). Perhaps the next Final Fantasy will have its story written by a different guy. Perhaps there will be different people in charge of the design of the gameplay. It seems pretty likely that that will be the case if the whole company returns to working on the game together and not split up.
I'm sure that, in the end of its run, the Final Fantasy series will feature more good games than bad. Only fourteen numbered titles have been released, and only three (the two MMO's and FFXIII) have turned out to be total wastes of numbers. I am sure that there will be quite a lot more than twenty numbered Final Fantasy titles in the future, regardless of what people think of that right now. So if you are a long-standing fan of this series hyperventilating over its future, calm the hell down. As I said before, ignoring the MMO's, it's just one game. We have a lot of previous titles to fondly reminisce of, and we have plenty of future titles waiting to be conceived. So just calm down, take a deep breath, and pop in FFVI, or FFXII if you are beginning to think that Square's greatness is lost in time. Then, when FFXV is released, we can all forget that FFXIII ever happened.
Now, shut the hell up about Final Fantasy's future. If you are a damn true fan, you would've already had in mind everything that I just said.
