I mean Tabata was put on the game and it became XV in 2012, four years before it was released, so “eleventh hour” is overstating it a bit. Also I think its only real connections to XIII are with the whole roughly linked mtgology shared with XII and XIII, right?
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yeah I don’t think it’s fair to call XV a XIII spinoff lol, it’s pretty much completely it’s own thing
squeenix is certainly capable of making a new final fantasy and I am confident that they will.
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xv is still thematically connected to those games, they just distanced xv from the fabula nova crystallis shit in the marketing after it stopped being versus xiii and it was clear most people hated xiii anyway
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I played a couple hours of 13 today. Aside from the corridor thing, the story jumps between three sets of characters with initially mysterious motives and a lot of nouns are thrown around that the player doesn’t understand (pulse, l’cie, fal’cie, focus etc). And the battle system is similar to 12 in that by automating the tedium of an RPG it comes off as shallow and simplistic until you get further in and they actually start introducing mechanics. With 12 it was gambits, In 13’s case it’s when I realized fights are actually in real-time and require timing. But what a weak way to start a game.
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yeah XIII keeps throwing jargon at you until like
hour 12 when they decide to finally let the player know what they’re actually talking about.
it’s a weird choice, for sure!
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I recall reading lore in the pause menu or something a lot when I played 13 like half a decade ago
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The quick’n’dirty XIII<->English dictionary is
Cocoon = Rich City
Pulse = Slum Planet
fal’Cie = Gods
l’Cie = RPG Protagonist
focus = quest
Cie’th = Gameover Zombie
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yeah the only way to make sense of XIII’s story is to read the lore in the pause menu lol. it’s actually very well written and not boring! but pretty much required if you want to understand why anyone is doing anything.
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When not running around underground tunnels, sewers or industrial tubes, the art direction in this game looks very cool. Especially the shiny stone and cool swirling green smog outside the windows of Shinra HQ and the way night glows blue with mako.
Maybe this is low IQ criticism, but I like the way this game sometimes looks.
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wild that the absolute first gameplay they show was the shimmy between/crawl under stuff tech
all the non-planning 2015-… stuff was handled by CyberConnect2?
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I’ve given up trying to piece apart the relationship the handful of remaining banner Japanese studios have with contractors and subsidiaries, it seems like a much more fluid gamedev relationship than the sort of asset outsourcing you expect from western studios
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The last word on CC2’s involvement I heard was that they were doing full development, and that version of the game was cancelled and development restarted. I have no source for that, however.
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Shinra Middle Manager definite highlight of the game so far. I noticed his family greets him when you get off the train, nice touch
Interminable Sephiroth premonitions are the lowlight
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More and more it feels like the stars were aligning on me finally getting into both .hack and FF7
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Saying that Tabata just did a search-and-replace for FF13 terms in XV is really dismissive imo.
Nomura’s direction on Versus XIII was disastrous and he was fired off of it because in all likelihood all they managed to do in 6 years was create art assets and not much else. (Much like how XIII 2 was pretty much made from unused assets from XIII’s development hell). Tabata took 4 years working almost from scratch to make XV.
Like, here’s an actual quote from an interview:
“Because the game itself was incomplete, there really wasn’t a whole lot brought over, if I’m speaking honestly,” he admits. "It’s pretty difficult to compare apples and oranges in this case. You have something that was incomplete and never really fully formed. [Versus] was more an idea that an actual game, whereas what we’ve created here is a complete, finished product.
Yeah that sure sounds like tying up loose ends. Versus XIII was vaporware with some character designs and a trailer.
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like the whole conceit that it was semi open world didn’t exist until Tabata became the director
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For some reason I just remembered this
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I heard they were pulling people off of Versus XIII to fix XIII and later XIV. SE also has that terrible habit of making CG trailers every couple years for games even when they’re in the concept stage, so it’s hard to pin the blame on “lol Nomura” and I also feel bad for Tabata taking the fall for XV in online discussion when his job was to pick up the pieces.
curious which dub you settle on as I think you’re fluent in all three
I’ve only tried Japanese so far.
One thing I noticed is that the English written script tries harder to be colorful/funny than the original, which plays it more like naturalistic casual speech. For instance the English script plays up the implication that Jessie has a crush on Cloud. One example that anyone can pick up on is that Jessie says “thank you!” in katakana English while the translation says “my hero!”
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