In the late 90s I started a website on GeoCities that included an early version of this page: an abortive first-crack at a Final Fantasy encyclopedia. I was once a kid who cared enough about these games to waste a couple evenings trying to put that together, and it was in his memory that I decided to give Final Fantasy XIII a try.
“Frustratingly slow, and yet exhausing.” That response adequately describes both the narrative pace of the game, the player’s engagement with the game environment, the difficulty curve, and the characters themselves. Despite my negative response, I was able to wring a few drops of enjoyment XIII; Cocoon was as impenetrable as it was implausible, but I trudged along nonetheless.
Near the end of the game, the protagonists descend to the “surface world”, Pulse: a part of the game that most of the reviewers and discussion seemed to suggest would mark significant qualitative improvement in the FFXIII formula. Except… what had initially been a progression of labyrinths (in the traditional sense—winding paths which do not fork) gives way to a vast and directionless network of connected fields and other enormous landforms. Where combat encounters had been a parade of quickly-resolved optimization puzzles, it now becomes one megabeast endurance marathon after another. The plot’s still one part cosmological conspiracy theory, one part nonsense fantasy soap opera, but at least in the Cocoon chapters, getting from one puzzling and arbitrary story set-piece to the next was relatively easy, if tedious. Once Pulse promised hours and hours of more of the same, only now it’s actually fucking difficult, I checked out.
After that experience, XV’s gonna need some pretty sterling recommendations before I’m willing to give it a chance.
there are very few encounters designed to take longer than ~2-3 minutes max (most are closer to 30 seconds). any time you experience a protracted battle in ff13 you are meant to come to one of two conclusions:
1.) i’m missing the trick here and need to reconsider my strategy
2.) i’m not quite ready for this yet.
both are easy pitfalls to stumble into once you get to Pulse, depending on how you approach it.*
*you don’t actually have to approach it; gran pulse mostly exists to be endgame muck to roll around in. you can cut through the brush taking a path similarly paced and constructed to cocoon if you just want to smash through the inexplicable cutscenes
there’s a direct correlation to this in ff13 in the form of just letting auto battle sort things out for itself and it’s a huge contributor to the above perception of its combat only existing in the extremes of being either ineffectual or oppressive
Yeah, that’s one of the aspects of FFXIII’s battle system that are neat and progressive but don’t really pan out – they want a difficulty system that lets anyone get through but allows skilled players to opt in to higher challenge. But they don’t message “you’re doing it wrong” clearly enough, or teach you how to do it less wrong. It was frustrating watching my wife slog through this, not getting fast battle completions but never shown how to do it better; she just thought the rating system was arbitrary (it really doesn’t help that each battle seems to have a hidden par time).
You know after the awesomeness that is Hitman and the beauty and non-Drake qualities of Rise of the Tomb Raider, I’m going to say I’m now down to go full Squeenix for the rest of the year. They have a good pedigree and sure this game may be crazy as hell, but that is what America needs right now. The idea of a bro boy band fighting monsters and buying dresses is interesting, I wonder how the rest of the story will play out.
I still want to play lightning returns based on the good time I had with its demo, but I remember hearing it kind of fell apart as things went on?
15 isn’t all just holding two buttons. Different stuff happens when you press the buttons at different times, but it does feel pretty loose and unwieldy. I’m admittedly just kind of into the spectacle at this point, which may end up wearing off, but it’s fun to be excited about something.
I did, finally, just in time before this will be (officially™) out on Tuesday. A friend of mine has been warning me not to expect too much, approach it like it’s a trashy movie, etc.
Maybe I did that job too well, because I actually … liked what I saw, tbh. I also spotted
some movements of … things … that reminded me very much of Pacific Rim. Which, I suppose, can be the highest praise anyone !japanese can ever get for a Kaiju/Giant Robo-movie.
So, all in all, I guess I am _ready_ now to enjoy this game, whatever it will turn out to be:
good or bad game, train- or shipwreck, sword- or shark-jumping, Moogle or Chocobo
(… scrap that: fvck both Moogles and Chocobos. Neither enjoy bullsh!t-kupo'ing after each sentence, nor those obnoxious pesky birds … still, take my money SQEX and let's get on w/ it!)
So the reviews are coming in and it sounds like it’s pretty good? Like, with a caveat (of course). Basically, it seems like Squeenix are able to make a fun open world game and a good Final Fantasy Narrative but not necessarily both at the same time. Apparently the last third of the game’s story takes place in linear corridors and often with only one party member and the levels you go through aren’t really as cool as the ones you explore up to that point.
Also, and this seems like a concession on Squeenix’s part, during the last part of the game when it goes linear you can hop back to the open world part and go back to road tripping and side questing and stuff which seems kind of… weird? Like, I don’t know how exactly that works narrative-wise since I haven’t played it.
So it sounds like it’s mostly good! At this point I just want to know what people in general think about the story so I’ll be holding off for a few months probably so I can read what everyone says about it.
what I’m reading is actually fairly similar to XII – great production values, tasteful nostalgia, good environment design and postgame content marred by uncharacteristically (and often bafflingly) bad storytelling and a useless supporting cast. weird that the 2016 post-final fantasy has such similar strengths and failings to the 2006 post-final fantasy.
Was hoping it would be at least of the caliber of any of the three PS1 games, which I consider to be when the series plateaued with the storytelling and narrative setups (probably a heavy dose of nostalgia in that opinion but ya know). Oh well, I’ll check it out when it’s cheaper for sure though.
I liked the setup for XII (and I like what I’ve heard about the backdrop for XV) I just didn’t like that there wasn’t really a big payoff in the end like you get in the PS1 games.
I used to believe that Final Fantasy games came in sets of 3: one would break new ground in storytelling, one would break new ground in gameplay systems, and one would play it safe and familiar. So FF went kind of overboard with an unexpected time travel plot, II tried to make dynamic stat growth work, and then III was mostly just a refined approach to what FF was initially doing. Then we’ve got the over-the-top melodrama and disposable characters of IV, playing-it-safe V, and then the fusion of a job system with magicite-granted spells in VI. Next VII takes the science fantasy setting that’s always been lurking in the background and runs hard with it, adding more contemporary concepts and settings than ever before; VIII is infamous for how systemically experimental it was, and IX is narratively and mechanically much closer to the early games than either VII or VIII.
While I think the subsequent games fall even more into a pattern than the earlier games do, I don’t know that the roles I’ve picked out really fit with the next games. X / XI / XII clearly resembles XIII / XIV / XV, but what even are the triads now? Game with too many sequels / MMO / open world game that doesn’t know how to end?
mediocre, aggressively-linear echo of PS1 titles / MMO / open-ended game with novel battle system that has serious production troubles and can’t tell a story as a result but otherwise feels pleasingly final fantasy-ish
i’ve been meaning to watch a playthrough of ffs beyond 9 because, uh, aside from 14 i haven’t played any of them and don’t really feel up to it personally!
my experience of ffxv so far is scouring jp twitter for bug videos
