I honestly have no idea what I was watching either. I still think it will be good though, I just hope the battle system plays better than it looks.

That's funny. When Square originally wanted to change the formula, they created Seiken Densetsu (Final Fantasy Adventure) and Mystic Quest (SNES), as well as future Crystal Chronicles and Warriors of Light games.

You don't know what you're talking about when you're saying Final Fantasy always just changed whenever it wanted to. Sure there were fundamental gameplay mechanics that changed (Espers, Materia, Junctioning, Sphere Grid, Classes, Weapon upgrades), but not gameplay architectural differences (like changing the genre altogether).

This answers Ryuzaki and others who have no long-time knowledge of the series' history.

Man i cant wait for this Final Fantasy. When they showed the trailer 7 years ago i immediately knew that this Final fantasy fix the brand. I'm so happy to know that this game is not canceled. Kitase on the other hand just Fucked up the final fantasy direction. It started with Final Fantasy X. The story was good but it was linear as f*ck just as FFXIII was.
There is no way that Nomura will f*ck this up. He didn't screw up the kingdom hearts series and has a good track record.

You are playing Final Fantasy X. The Final Fantasy game that started this trend.

I might agree gameplay-wise but all the rest was amazing and very much what I expect from a Final Fantasy game. You can't really have strict expectations from Final Fantasy games because every new one is always so different from the past one. That's also why the FF fanbase is so divided.

/thread

The only thing different with  X is that it's level exploration is linear (level A to level B to level C in one direction). Other than that the levels are very similar, there are branches (like in all FF games) the only thing is that though you can go back in levels (C -> B -> A), you can't easily go all over the map (unless I'm not far enough yet, still right before Zanarkand graveyard, wanted to do some monster capturing first, and yes I play games very slowly lol).

^

True, and I confess, I haven't been playing Final Fantasy since the beginning--nor care to--but Final Fantasy also started out when turn-based combat was almost a necessity out of hardware limitations, and as XIII proves, the gaming industry has grown up around it. I must have been one of three people who liked paradigmed combat.

So the real question is what do you expect them to do? They tried the conservative thing with XIII and failed, and with Gen 8 coming on another conservatively designed RPG will look outright archaic. Branching out into another genre is exactly what I would expect, and I have no complaints, seeing they've done action-RPG hybrids well in the past.

I'll be fair, I don't blame them, they're doing what they can to survive, but in the process whatever link I had to Final Fantasy is gone.

As for bold, you might want to take a look at Secret of Mana. It was a great game on the Super NES made by Squaresoft that was an RPG that was not turn-based. Here's a gameplay video.

Also, the failure of XIII may not be around it being conservative. I've never played it but something tells me that there was something about XIII that was unlike those prior and people started to give up on FF already. FFXV seems to be where I personally disconnect.