Done With Final Fantasy

[Egann]

I'm torn with Final Fantasy.

See, people keep saying there hasn't been a good FF game since X. If we're talking about main-line games I would push that further, all the way to VIII, and even at it's best FF is hit or miss. But at the same time most of the FF spinoff games have been really REALLY good. War of the Lions was incredible. Dissidia was good fanservice. Duodecim was amazing fanservice. Crisis Core actually (mostly) redeemed VII in my eyes, and XIII-2 is the fantastic FF game nobody played.

And Kingdom Hearts is absolutely amazing.

The one real exception is Lightning Returns, and in retrospect it was bound to be a clusterfuck when you put a graphics designer who doesn't understand jack squat about game design in the director seat.


I think there are two problems with FF.

1. There's probably WAY too much developmental oversight. Considering the huge difference in quality between XIII and XIII-2, I imagine XIII was spoiled by executive meddling rather than letting the dev team make a game. Lower budget FF games don't have this problem.

2. Square Enix directors by and large DON'T PLAY GAMES. To those of us who play games it's obvious giving bosses a billion HP is a stupid way of making things difficult because we unconsciously understand the difference between difficulty and tedium. Directors who don't play games don't understand this, which is why they unconsciously deflect things in the story-telling direction.


But when these problems aren't there--and they appear to be gone with XV--Square Enix has shown they can really make some great games. I won't be preordering XV or anything, but I will keep an eye on it.