No, Square damaged the brand themselves.

The games I have or haven't played are irrelevant tot his topic.

No. I never said that. I enjoyed XIII and am enjoying XIII-2.

Let's save this discussion until AFTER Rising is out!

Oh u

I don't know about anyone else but i Think 13-2 is the best FF game i have played in a while. The last time i enjoyed one was FF X so more than 10 years ago.

I can't help doing a face palm while reading some of these posts.

Just what kind of content was cut out from ff13? One would have to be out of his mind to suggest that the cut material was of any significance to the final product. By the time the multi plat was announced the game was nearing completion.

The one and most important thing that is currently wrong with the final fantasy brand is that the games made this gen are not final fantasy material.

Lame characters, incredibly bad voice acting, linearity (in a god damn rpg game, of all games !), no real story telling (when was the last time that you had to find out all the important story plots from a frigging datalog??), a lack of a good story and of course the fact that you could basically play the game on auto pilot.

I swear that there's something wrong with people that are unhappy because of the lack of pre-rendered scenes in ff13-2, these movies are supposed to be few in quantity but well place for proper dramatic effect, not every damn 5 minutes like in ff13. It's a waste of disc space, nothing more.

While some may say that trouble for the series started after ff7, that may be true. Despite that, all the final fantasy games 1 through 9 revolved around a specific gameplay mechanic that was ideal for the series. Starting with ff10 SE began experimenting. While the changes made in ff10 were irritating yet acceptable (no open world exploration, linear gameplay at times, good characters mixed with bad ones) the things done in the later installments clearly shows that SE has lost its way with the series. It's no wonder to me that ff13-2 isn't getting stellar reviews, it tries to improve by giving exploration, NPC's and sidequests when the problem is the world that was created for the main game and the sequel. It's story is fundamentally flawed and dramatically boring.

Honestly i put the blame on SE letting Sakaguchi, the original FF creator, go to make his own company. No matter how you slice it The Last Story looks and feels more like a Final Fantasy game than the crap that SE is dishing out.

You asked about the Final Fantasy brand. FF14 has done more damage to the FF brand than ANY other game. Unless for some reason you don't think that Final Fantasy 14 is related to the FF brand? It is even lower rated than the games that weren't FF games but were given that name in the west. It also has no relation to the 360. So the biggest piece of damage to the brand is purely on the PC/PS3's shoulders. FF11 was a MMORPG and that managed to get reviews that were roughly in line with the rest of the series and really didn't do any damage at all to the brand. 14 though? Urggg. 

If anything a more interesting question though would be did the PS3 cause FF13 to be a worse game? Very hard to develop for and huge amounts of disc space. We then got a game that relied extremely heavily on FMV cutscenes for the first 20 hours or so and had been languishing in development for years. Usually consisting of 10minutes of battles - cutscene - 10minutes of battles, cutscene etc etc. FF13 was designed solely for the PS3 while 13-2 was multiplatform. Taking out the artistic things such as writing etc that don't depend on platform I would say 13-2 has been much better received. 

Yet even then the difficulties of developing for the PS3 don't matter. The problem isn't the systems. It's the people in charge of the creative decisions at Square. They need to get rid of the 3 people I mentioned in my last post. Clearly not enough people made any connection to the characters or story of 13. If they were invested in them they would probably buy a sequel. Get new writers and get a new director.

Ideally a new composer as well. No more stepping into rainbows, clearing away gloom, dancing amoung colours and other such lyrics that I can only imagine were rejected from Sonic Adventure 2 for not being good enough. Also please no more death metal chocobo songs. I don't want to RIDE A CHOCOBO CHOCOBO! 

PS3 fanboys should be happy that FFXIII-2 is also on 360. Now, 360 fanboys have to share the hate this game's getting. If FFXIII-2 was exclusive, 360 fanboys would be attacking PS3, and PS3 fanboys would be defending a game they don't even like.

Im sorry but it still doesnt change the fact that microsoft doesnt make the game. Plenty of other games has made amazing games on one disc and if you can't then its really the developers fault.  Stop being so bias and get over it

That's really all I have to say.