in this case I’m perfectly willing to go to bat for the idea that it went to shit in between the PS1 and the PS2 – not to say that the appeal wasn’t obviously centred on being 12 in the first place. and the PS2 was the last time that other (which is to say, niche) jRPGs were interesting on their own; it’s been a nothing genre since.
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‘unprecedented failure’ sounds like something i have to play
jrpgs have vacillated in and out of both favor and relevance for myriad reasons largely reflecting the whims of generational marketing strategies. there’s a direct relationship between the moment in time you’re talking about and the trajectory of the perception of japanese game development. not really the conversation i want to have, but i also don’t want that cynicism and conflation unobserved.
if a game developer is taking this at this at face value how are they supposed to navigate it
what if the conversation wasn’t “do i feel about this the way i felt about ff7” but rather
“hey is there something here”
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point well taken – have I been the one saying that this is completely uninteresting and they shouldn’t have bothered at all? because I certainly don’t mean to be and I don’t feel that way. I don’t want my dismissiveness on one hand to be overinterpreted, same as the cynicism you’ve identified.
most of what square’s released in the past decade has been, for me, unplayable, but in an intensely focused way. just as @BustedAstromech pointed out with the FFXIII monster designs.
oh, no, not really. your comments were just a convenient enough throughline for that sentiment.
honestly I think the only real marked decline in quality in the history of the franchise was from 9 -> X and even then there’s an enormous amount of room for arbitrary twelve year old preferences
I had a great time with X. I want to say it was from X to X-2 that the real transition in their design philosophy occurred. the moment they went off into this sub-sequel realm where there are five games in the XIII ‘series,’ was when they officially lost me.
but x-2 was probably as unreservedly and unapologetically fun as the series has ever been exactly because they had the freedom to play within that sub-sequel space
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yeah X-2 was actually a good game. but yes, it certainly marked a strong departure point for the series and it’s real easy to draw a line directly from that game to the XIII stuff
X is just really fucking bad, though. I don’t like IX at all, but it had some good ideas and it was pretty. X just had nothing but a lot of money behind it.
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actually it’s good
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i wish lightning returns had a car in it
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I think it’s pretty hard to pinpoint where Final Fantasy lost its way because until FFXIII we could never point to a FF that wasn’t an examplar of the genre. But it was a piecemeal weakening and slide into design against this community’s standards of WHAT A VIDCON SHOULD BE.
- They got slower. Barely-strategic, repetitive gameplay is easier to take when a battle is less than 30 seconds. We substituted flash for brevity and then the flash wore off.
- They got more realized. As storytelling stepped out of caricature and puppetry we realized how melodramatic and tween-pitched they always were. That stuff is a lot more charming when it’s abstract.
- The gameplay abstractions became more obvious. Tim used to harp on this but it’s true: the battle system looks more ridiculous as fidelity goes up. Bioware saw this coming and got Jade Empire out of the way before nailing it in one (well, 2) with Mass Effect. It’s taken Final Fantasy 10+ years to get close and it doesn’t look like FFXV has a good handle on effective non-abstract combat.
- Most importantly, the best bits were absorbed by other genres. Used to be that globe-spanning adventures with NPC conversations and interparty relationships could only be seen, on consoles, in JRPGs. Since GTA and the rise of the omni-open-world game nearly everything AAA is massive, dense, and piled with micro-progression systems. How many systems will FFXV have that GTA didn’t have ten years ago?
RPG lines that have felt more relevant have leaned into gamey aspects with brevity – Shin Megami Tensei got sharper and quicker in its battles while avoiding narrative, Persona’s time-management relationship-sim aspects keep it feeling different.
But just look at how Final Fantasy has handled storytelling, how much that aspect has changed since X or even VII, compared to the changes in dialogue, morality, party relationships – everything western devs have been poking at. In just the past year, we saw Witcher III break past BioWare’s legible-yet-stifling party-relationship game, where dialogue choices are broadcast for their effect on the other characters by instituting a clear role for the protagonist, clear yet subtly-expressed relationship rules for the core ‘party’ characters (witches and family), and mysterious and morally-puzzling choices in sidequests. They threaded the needle of ‘difficult moral outcomes’ (because it’s normally upsetting when players receive an outcome they don’t expect and want) by casting their character in Batman-marble and reinforcing the world-theme’s cold rules. They echoed the capricious morality of folk tales and pulled it off without becoming rote or alienating.
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team xv
I dislike a great many of the truisms in this post but hmmmm I’ll leave it to tomorrow
X is honestly one of the only FFs I’d ever consider replaying
I like weird game evolution dead ends but they fit a lot better as shonky NES or PSX games than no-sharp-edges hyper-expensive pop-sugar
ooh–another example of cutting against relevancy – Mother 3 is much, much better for sticking to 16-BIT-style graphics and pacing. It landed completely out of time but uses that to prove (even cosmologically!) exactly where and how the mechanics and presentation of JRPGs lives best in that era.
Honestly, I really want to like this game. I’m down with the idea of J-Rock Boy Band Road Trip Simulator. It’s just so aggressively unpleasant to play. You walk through invisible sludge, the camera holding steady as you dodge gracefully to one side, obscuring the enemy whose attack you just avoided. Seeing an opportunity, you order one of your allies to use a special attack and then watch as everyone but you continues moving and acting during the animation, standing still in your idle animation, staring into the distance.
It’s not that it’s really that much worse than any other AAA action RPG of its ilk. It’s just not any good, either.
Is this the Sonic 06 of Final Fantasy?
Is anyone playing World of Final Fantasy? Because I am enjoying that thing a lot actually, for all that it is like a Kingdom Hearts reboot minus Disney plus Pokemans.
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