FinalFantasyXIII said:
I'm with you on that. I also hate what sandbox non linear games do sooner than later. You eventually get lost (RDR,Oblivion/Skyrim,FarCry, FFXIII-2) I love all those game but what FFXIII did was take out most of the confusing/getting lost/annoying aspects out of the game which I appreciated very much in a JRPG. I also think the battle sytem and plot are way over people's heads in FFXIII. (Sorry there's no your princess is in another castle here, smash stuff, or just shoot bad guys) If you don't like George Orwells 1984, and Science Fiction then the FFXIII story might not be for you. Even if the story seems convoluted it is all right in front of you, but it requires you to play FFXIII-2 and experience time travel through time gates that go into the future to understand why Hope created machines in the future to save Cacoon from what happened in the 1st FFXIII, and those machines of Hopes became sentient and created infinate time loops with the Adam and Eve cyborg brain chips, and are fucking up the future timelines and creating paradoxs to control the future. So Noel is sent from the fucked up future by Lightning who is trapped in Vahalla (a place that has no sense of time) to help Serah fix the past and future. I coulda just made up all this shit too. :) Maybe they sent a terminator through a time gate too. I don't care it's freakin awesome send Arnold through, send Marty Mcfly, send the Spaceballs, screw tha haters. It's a really nice story so far I haven't made it to LR's just yet. I have like 62 fragments outta 160 in FFXIII-2. They're both great games, it just takes more brains imho to play and understand than the average person has available in todays world. Devo-lution was right. Youtube it. |
Yes and no. I do like XIII-2 and I admit that I don't really like open sandboxes either for that exact reason, but Final Fantasy has typically balanced linear and more open sequences quite well. I mean, FF VIII gave the player several opportunities to explore Balamb Garden in the first half hour of the game, and cut another exploration sequence in between the linear sequences in the Fire Cave and Dollet, then ANOTHER opportunity to explore when you had to walk back to the garden.
I understand WHY they opted for the corridor in XIII. The characters are under time pressure and can't go back, ergo a linear corridor which disencourages backtracking. Except that was the wrong call. When you're running, you don't only have one path; you have to make split-second calls and hope you don't get caught in a dead end. The level design tried, but ultimately failed.
Think how different the game would have been if the map was three or four paralell and cris-crossing paths with a few dead-ends thrown in, now imagine powerful enemies making their way down each path looking for the party. Players would absolutely dread running into a dead end because they would be forced into a difficult and possibly game-ending encounter.
To me, though, the real offender with XIII was the story. There were a few subtle and touching moments in there--pay attention to when Lightning smiles or touches Hope, for example--but Snow ruins Light's character in most scenes and the larger narrative is basically an ungodly mess. Even the best FF titles often felt like the script could've used a redraft to smooth out plot holes and give better foreshadowing, but XIII felt like it needed to go back to the drawing board and have some of the core themes rethought.
