Absolutely agree. Lightning was the same thing as Sqaull. I dont know if those characters even work in Japan; if we look at JRPGs, FF is not the most popular.

I think Zidane worked as a main character. As did Cloud (Cloud's personality was different in FF7 from Advent Children. It seems they changed his personality to be more like Squall for that film).

I think FF12 was well designed from a gameplay perspective. But the story was almost non-existant for the first half of the game. I mean Vaan has to get a desert rose in the first 2 or 3 hours. If your were playing FF7 or FF9 you would have made serious progression into the plot by that point.

The problem is the writers. I think that FF15 will return the series to greatness, because its not being made by the same people behind FF13, it will (hopefully) be made by FF12 team.

The worst thing about FF13 was the story, this desperatly needs to be addressed for the series to continue a viable medium for storytelling games.

I think i will quote myself here

Gilgamesh is trying trying to start another flame war:

It's wrong saying the leveling system needs fixing cause FF XIII is not really an RPG, it is an rpg / action / tactical game and it fits this hybrid.

The antagonist of FF XIII was made a certain way for the sole reason that it was trying to break from classic anime/jrpg cliches .

Eh, no, don't keep the plot simple, you can pay attention instead.

The whole concept of FF XIII was not to go old school. Old school square rpgs died a decade ago and they already made an open game with XII.

Go on with your lives guys. You too Gilgamesh !

I am a Fan of Square-Enix and I have played Final Fantasy I-XIII-2. I do not share your point of view in several aspects.

*) Final Fantasy does not need to be "saved". Final Fantasy XIII was a huge success and it won several game of the year awards around the world.

*) As much as I liked FF VII-IX i personally think Final Fantasy X was a huge step forward. It is still my most favourite game of all time. It started here that there were no longer a clear Main Character and a clear Villain. The individual party characters got more room for development and importance and from FF XII on you will have problems to name a clear "main character". Square-Enix went from a "black-and-white" scheme and developed into a more sophistacated way of storytelling. And it is not like Square-Enix is "failing at creating an exceptional bad guy"... they just followed a different story-telling approach".

*) Keep the Plot simple? Well, this is the exact opposite of what I am expecting form a JRPG. I like a complex story that makes me think about what is going on. I really appreciated that Final Fantasy XIII had a very complex story because there are not many games left who even try to tell a deeper story or try to challenge your intellect. Final Fantasy was partially an allegory of the events in Nazi Germany and tried to make you think about deportation trains, Propaganda and manipulations. Final Fantasy XII was partially inspired of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Final Fantasy X portrayed the risk of blind belief in religions... These are very sensible topics and they did a real good job in making you think about these events from different point of views.

*) How is it that people have problems with names like L'Cie and Fal'Cie. Nobody complained about names like Chewbacca, Kashyyyk, C3PO etc, in Star Wars.

*) What is the matter with Hope? Hope was there to show how the conflict hurt innocent civilians. He was there on holiday and the next moment he was sentenced to death, rescued by rebels and had to see how his mother died in front of him. Hope was a really interesting character in my opinion since he wasn't really a fighter.

*) Regarding world maps... I didn't miss much in FF X, FF X-2 and FF XII. And with the graphical power of this generation, a world map similar to FF 7-9 would look rather ridiculous in my imagination. I don't think it would work any longer... In the old games you had these square tiles and the surroundings were only schemes (ocean, grass, forest, desert, mountain,...)

*) Exploration: I think exploration was never a main point of FF. It was always a linear story-driven game with a linear structure. Most dungeons had only one path and a few deadends with a treasure chest. The only optional parts were almost at the end of the game, where you could get the ultimate weapons/summons/spells. Ok, you could walk around the simplistic world map... but in most cases only to start a random encounter battle. There was no real reward in exploration of the world most of the time.

All in all, i find it really funny that people tend to hate on Square-Enix on the internet so much. What about EA with their yearly games without much innovation? What about Bethesda publishing games with major bugs? The only problem I have with Square-Enix at the moment is that they are releasing to few games nowadays. But I am really looking forward to FFX HD and FF XIII-3

Square Enix needs to take a long look at what Square did for Final Fantasy VI. Those are the elements that can save Final Fantasy