I really hoped I would put off Final Fantasy for a while so that new Readers and such won't think of this as a Final Fantasy only blog. I really hate thinking of this blog that way, especially considering how lousy Square's been with that franchise these days. Oh well.
Final Fantasy XIII is probably the most troubled game in the entire series. I'm even willing to say it's even more troubled than Final Fantasy XIV, which is an utter nightmare of problems. Still, Square seems to know what they're doing in fixing that abomination of bugs and interface screw ups. With Final Fantasy XIII, however, it's just one stupid issue after the other. As every fan of the series should know by know, Final Fantasy XIII was received horribly for it's ridiculous gameplay. I remember I tried to defend that game when it was the second one I played, and then after going through Final Fantasy III, VI, VII, VIII, X, and XII, I realize now how terrible that game is in the context of the series. FFX actually has the same linear gameplay as FFXIII, but somehow FFXIII somehow takes the linearity and amps it to a point that nobody could even imagine. Somehow, the linearity, while annoying, feels acceptable in FFX. I really have no idea why. I guess it could be because FFXIII has way more and maybe even longer cutscenes. In any case, that really crippled the gameplay. The developers explained that the linearity was meant to coincide with the story, but the story itself really wasn't as gripping or exciting as the others.
I liked the battle system in FFXIII, but that's all it had going for. Square didn't need to make a sequel to the game, but they announced that they would, so it then became a matter of fixing the issues with gameplay. So what happened there? Well, they certainly fixed the gameplay; they made the world widely accessible and their time-travel thing added many possibilities for sidequests and exploration and interactivity with the world and such. It was incredibly wonderful. So how is it that that game managed to fail so hard that I refused to buy it?
DLC. That's the answer to everything wrong with that game, as well as the reason why games these days can end up sucking badly. It's the reason why companies (I'm looking at you, Activision and EA) release games in pieces just for money, to eat away at the gaming community, rather than releasing what I call Gestalt Videogames. What is a Gestalt Videogame? Simply put, it's a video game before DLC was conceived.
I'll certainly bring up that term time and time again, but let's return to Final Fantasy XIII. So in XIII-2, the game ends with your main characters failing. It ends with an ambiguous, "To be continued," as the endgame screen. That is the biggest dick move anyone can pull in anything. If I wrote a short story that said, "To be continued," at the end, I would seriously have to reconsider having Creative Writing as my major. If a movie had a, "To be continued," at the end of the movie, they'd better damn well have at least summed up the main plot of that particular movie. Besides that, you can sort of get away with that in a movie since the audience has a passive role in the events of the movie. In a game, however, gamers are the ones who ultimately control whether the game finishes or not. They are actively engaging with the game to reach some form of closure by the end of its story. When you have someone do that just so that they can die in the end and have to wait for the next thing, you are being a moron. You are pretty much raping the gamer of his experience with your game.
Then, as I said before, a good one hundred and eighty five percent of Final Fantasy XIII-2 consists of DLC. Why bother paying sixty bucks for a game that's just in pieces?
So that ultimately leads me to Lightning Returns. Lightning was my favorite character in FFXIII for being awesome, well designed, well voiced, and well developed as a character. She was able to hold everything together when everyone else aside from Fang was being ridiculous in that game, kind of like how Auron keeps the group's shit together in FFX. The fact that Square has taken that and turned Lightning into a selling point for the FFXIII series just disgusts me in ways I couldn't have imagined. What they did with Lightning is essentially what presumably Activision did Treyarch's division of Call of Duty: they took the best character from World at War, Sergeant Reznov (a.k.a. a Soviet Gary Oldman) and turned him into the reason why you have to buy Black Ops and Black Ops 2. Who does that? Greedy companies who don't care about their games and only focus on what makes money.
So the fact that Square's gone on that road with FFXIII is pretty much the central reason why I try not to have anything to do with that game anymore. But, as much as I hate what they're doing with the game's trilogy, I can't ignore Final Fantasy XIII-3's fine points. I don't really know for sure what they are specifically, beyond making Lighting the sole playable character and increasing interactivity by like tenfold, but from what's shown, they seem like good ideas. But as Blue Highwind had put it, it's not a matter of whether the game will be good anymore. Rather, it's a matter of how Square will manage to screw up the game this time. Blue said he won't play the game unless it gets stellar reviews. I'll probably play it if the gameplay is good, if there's finality to the story, and, most importantly, if somebody says you can play the game without feeling like you were gipped by Square for whoring out the name.
From what I've seen, all I can say is that I like the level/concept designs, but do I really have to say that? Square is known for their detailed worlds and such, even when they are straight lines like Spira or Cocoon. Also, I find it really interesting that the game once again takes place way off in the future, and I would like to see how Square's managed to tie that in with all the characters and such. I also find it interesting that they are writing the game in the vein of Majora's Mask, where you have to compete with time before it runs out. After playing Majora's Mask, I wasn't sure how well that gameplay element could be replicated in another game, but if that isn't criticized too badly in FFXIII-3, I'll look into it.
There's a moderate chance I'll actually get this game. I guess not having played the second one has allowed me to take things into consideration. We'll see what happens when the time comes.
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