| Scoobes said: FFXIII & Oblivion: I think I'm the polar opposite to you! FFXIII is my biggest dissappointment this gen as I found it lacked the extra elements of previous Final Fantasy games and it didn't have the sense that I was discovering the details of the story through the world like in previous FF convos, towns & shops (e.g. the first time you enter Besaid, or exploring Midgar). That's what I think some of the appeals of Oblivion is (to me at least), the details of the story and lore is told through exploration of the game world. |
I can live with people being not satisfied with FF 13. It is just a subjective matter of taste... What I have difficulties in is understanding why FF13 got so much hate reviews although it was just a continuation of the direction Square took with FF12. There are very much common elements...
Summons are not as important as they were in FF 7-9
No random encounters and the monsters dropped no Gil...you had to sell loot for gil.
You control only one character and the rest is controlled via macros, but you can choose which character you play
There is no real "main protagonist" and the characters are not portrayed as "heroes", but they continually show their weaknesses, they do not always know what to do next and are sometimes unsure,...
The story is rather dark and mature and the situation often seems to be not winnable (and the characters are realizing this and question themselves what to do next). I liked this approach because the characters felt more human and natural... Not everyone likes characters like Kratos in god of war...I didn't like him very much when I played through GoW last month because he just doesn't care for the world around him and I somehow felt it was his own fault what happened to his family. Maybe it is because of such character portraits why so many peoply felt Hope was "whiny"... but I am pretty sure most of us would have cried a river at that age after we had seen our mother dying...
Character development not by a level systems (license bord, krystarium instead)
I fail to understand how FF 12 got great reviews in the West (at least here in Austria/Germany) and was widely praised and FF 13 continued to go in that direction and was heavily critizised without being a radical change.... (not like Devil may Cry or Front Mission Evolved). It seems to me that it were the expectations of the reviewers/community that shifted and not the quality of the game... In the Famitsu it was still voted best game of all time 2009 and rank 3rd in 2010
http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/32228/t1476328-famitsu-readers-vote-ffxiii-best-game-of-all-time/
http://gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=138232
Dissappointment is a function of our own expectations. And since my expectations were formed by japanese RPGs and Oblivion got "game of the year" awards I was heavily dissapointed. It felt more than an action adventure with some roleplay elements than a true (console) rpg. The same with Borderlands or Sacred 2...
The latter 2 reminded me somehow of Diablo, that I had played on the PS1 (is it really that long ago....). I had fun with it because of the coop mode, but after 2-3 playthroughs it was getting boring. I didn't like the story and characters (you can see the pattern...) and the weapon/armor system. Diablo, Sacred and Borderlands have a similar system, where there are no unique weapons. You have basic weapons with various status bonuses and variuos weapon levels. I can remember playing the woman in diablo with a friend and I just couldn't find a stronger bow, because you only have random drops and random items at the shops. I coudldn't get a really strong bow for hours... I never had that problem in a jrpg before... And while playing Sacred or Borderlands, I also had the same problem. You can have millions of different weapons but it is also possible that you are level 36 and still have a lvl 25 smg because you just had bad luck and couldn't find a better one. My wife and I ended up with no longer bother to look what we pick up. Kill enemies, pick up loot and at the next vendor you can see that 99 % of the items are just useless and only there for selling.
So Borderland managed to make me lose interest in what the enemies drop, what you can buy at the stores, what the sidequests are about and what the whole game is actually about. The only thing left is the gameplay... running around killing the same few enemies over and over and running from landmark to landmark until the game is finally over. If it hadn't the coop mode the whole game would have nothing at all and could be replaced by every other random shooter and I will probably not think about the game in the future. (Well, every time I look in my gaming diary aka trophy list I will think why I wasted like 50 hours with that game). Last week I read that FF 4 will head to the PSP and I am really happy about it. I have never played the after years so far and although I already played FF 4 advance and FF 4 for the DS I am happy to get a slightly better Version of that game. That is the true strength of a good story. You can play the game a second or third time and it still has the good story to come back to.
