Final Fantasy has lost its way

[Egann]

happydolphin said:

Egann said:
When I looked at the trailer and the gameplay demo, I saw Dissidia. I even think I saw a couple assists. Even though we haven't seen this in a major title, I have a hard time complaining: Dissidia was awesome, and I have been wantind them to make a party-based one.

Final Fantasy has been cornered by their own reputation. I don't know how gamers started to expect Final Fantasy to be this perfect bastion of JRPG awesomeness that reinvents itself with every title when every Final Fantasy I've played had some critical faults. By the same token, I don't get how people can just hate on it the way they do: Final Fantasy is one of the most ambitious and experimental name-brands in gaming. If you want an RPG that plays it safe and does roughly the same gameplay for sequel after sequel, you should be playing a different RPG series.

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, 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.

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.