| DigitalDevilSummoner said: forevercloud3000 if i had a penny for every time someone critisised FF XIII for being a bad rpg when it's not really an rpg nor was it developed as one. it's a hybrid between action / rpg and strategy. they didn't even try to make a world for the player to interact in. the very concept was to make something completely story driven and closely directed. yeah, it was meant to be the most spectacular ride possible. that was the concept, after the open XII make the best story driven game there is. final fantasy is not a run of the mill console rpg, they do have the responsibility to push things forward and not fade into obscurity like the good ol 90s square rpgs did because that is what happened to them in the last decade. ff xiii didn't die a cold death, it was the one that did it. for the story for the first time in FF history Motomu tried to escape from the classic anime/rpg theme of protagonist - antagonist confrontation and make something new; focus on the friction between the members themselves against an immovable godly force. It is one of the more complicated story lines to follow and that was the point, not the final confrontation but all the little things in between. and Vanille is great FF XIII-2 is obviously a far cheaper production and they did manage to pull a more than decent experience out of such small places. as a megaten fan i loved the idea of capturing monsters and always going for the stronger ones. dont forget that parts were outscourced to tri ace, it was all about being more productive. so with a 2.5m in sales its no wonder why they are encouraged to go for a proper conclusion. stop critisizing FF XIII for all the things it was not. it's juvenile
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It's not juvenile to compare and contrast a game with other products in the field. The criticisms are valid and I think you're giving the developers too much credit. I suggest reading some articles on the development cycle. For a vast majority of the game's development the developers didn't even know what they were going to do with the game. It was only after the Japanese demo that shipped with Advent Children Blu-Ray that they focussed on actually creating a coherent game experience.Previously they
So saying it was intended as a hybrid "action/RPG strategy" and as "story driven and closely directed" is only partly true. Lots of splinter groups in development had a range of different ideas that simply didn't make it into the game because by the time development ramped up, they didn't have the time to implement them.
I understand that they need to push FF forward, but how exactly did they acheive this with FFXIII? What's actually new or forward thinking about FFXIII? I'd say only the battle system and that everything else they did was backward. The storyline was actually quite dull, not because it differed from the cliche'd anime tropes (I'd argue it actually still adhered to some of them) but because in a character driven plot you need to make the player/viewer relate to the characters. On paper, the events the characters go through should enable this (issues such as father and son, love for a partner/fiance), but when the dialogue is as cliched and poorly written as it is in XIII, it's very difficult to relate to the chracters at all.
The worst part though, is how the story was told. Storytelling has moved on greatly in the video games industry. FFXIII relied on two things to tell the story; Cut scenes and an encylopedia sized datalog. These are normally acceptable for an RPG, but not when they're the only factors used to tell a story. Even previous Final Fantasy games had ways to tell story and impart lore via the world, side quests and exploration. Other games use player interaction to help move the story along (most WRPGs, adventure games) or impart a small layer of control to cut-scenes (MGS4). Even FPS' use the interactive medium of games to tell the story (Half-Life 2 and even CoD4).
Anyway, my point is that the criticisms of FFXIII are completely valid. Just because you enjoyed it doesn't make the criticisms any less true or juvenile.
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This is just wrong. Square-Enix make tons of money on remakes (on DS, PSP etc.). They re-released the 90s games and have had them reach the top 10 downloaded games on PSN, FFVII (released 1997) is the most popular FF game and has spawned a range of spin offs and they even used the game to promote their new PC based digital download service. So... faded to obscurity?! I don't think so.
