SE to churn out a FF title/year?!

[Vanguard319]

The reason AC and MW get games within a year has a lot to do with the fact that they have interconnected storylines. Each game sequentially adds more story to the series, and in all likelyhood, work on the next game has already started by the time the newest one is released. (i.e. Ubisoft realized they couldn't finsh Ezio's story by the end of AC: Brotherhood, and started working on AC: Revelations while Brotherhood was still in development.)

Then you have franchises like Halo. It'll be another year before we get to see how the new trilogy turns out, (2 yrs after Halo: Reach.) We have the Anniversary edition, which has an HD facelift, and some new features, but it's still the same original game from ten years ago.

Japanese game studios have shown in the past that they can put out great titles in a similar timeframe (the .hack and Xenosaga series being two examples)

I'm not sure a game a year would work well with Final Fantasy though, mostly since every numbered title is essentially a stand-alone storyline. That means you are essentially trying to come up with an entirely new storyline/lore for every title, that's not easy to do. In addition, most titles in the series have different game mechanics. XI and XII had similar battle engines for example, but XII also introduced Gambits and a License board, and XIII was radically different from either of those two titles.

In all likelyhood, there may be further expansion of previous titles, since it is somewhat easier to expand on exsisting canon.
(In a literary example, Ender's game was originally a short story, then it became a full novel that expanded into a tetralogy, not including the Shadow series and Ender in Exile.)

[Betelgeuzah]

Fair enough.
That said, I played my first FFs as a teen, and still enjoy those ones the most. There was that "little something" (best word that comes to mind is '"atmosphere") that could not be achieved with just gameplay or graphics.

That's because you play the "Back in My Day VII".

In my language there is a different word for experience and experience. It is, ironically, much like of a drug in that you can make it occur once but you can't simply reproduce it by experiencing the same thing again and again.

SE's games are much like it, in that they give you an experience and anything after that will not be the same. As far as being games, they don't do that well, but you are mistaken if you think that I don't keep the experience in a higher regard. However, unlike some of you I understand that it is not so simple as to play a similar game to get back the feeling (or as you would say, atmosphere) to return. Right now what makes me play their newer games is only the fact that I think they are more entertaining as games as they were before. When previously you would have been hard-pressed to play an FF title if the story, music or characters were not compelling to you, today it is possible to like the entries for being games alone. I don't have to like the story or characters for it to be entertaining.

I had my experience back then with FFX and to some degree FFXI. I still think that playing those games were the best entertainment I've had in my short life, but that shouldn't stop me from looking at them objectively and with the eyes of now 21-year-old me. When somebody criticizes FFX, I think the complaints are legit. That still doesn't take away what I got out of said game long time ago.

[Seif]

FF: Warriors of the Light (good game to get that classic FF nostalgia on), just gonna leave that there.

I loved that game until I found the auto-battle button. Ok many games have auto-battle and there's nothing wrong with that but in that game the mode is a super computer that can foresee enemy attacks 4 moves away and can basically play better than an actual human ever could.

Auto-battle is good when it's mainly pressing only the attack button for you while grinding but if you implement a mode that eliminates all strategy then I wonder what's the point of setting up those challenges to begin with?

Btw I think that game has the best ever art direction Yoshida has ever done in a game and it's also one of the prettiest DS games I've seen.

[TheVedis]

As I see people talk about how quality has gone down on RPGs over the year, 1 HUGE thing comes to mind that I feel is the cause of most of the complaints.

The emphesis on how good the game looks instead of the story elements and gameplay....

Over the years we have made major strides in technology with graphics for consoles and such, and the further they get, the more downhill it seems some of these games become in many of us old timers minds.

I was there for dragon quest 1, and final fantasy 1.
I thought they were amazing games and it was nice to play along to a game where you grew instead of having to start from scratch every time you turned on the game.

From there Dragon quests expanded out to 2 and 3(never played any after that til the newest ones) and it continued to amaze me.
Final Fantasy(american version) 2 and 3 came out, and unlike 1, they had majorly compelling stories which sold me on RPGs for all time.

Then 7 came out...The leap in tech was apperent with this and they used it wisely, as did most companies who were doing games like this back then. They still focused more on the game itself and the graphical scenes were few and far between, usualy at a major story moment so you could better get the point across.


Now, the use of graphics to tell a story is so overabused, we get games like 13(which btw, i did love, despite what others think) in which people now complain about the overuse of the cut scenes.

HOWEVER, is it even possible to step back and remove these elements from games in order to go back to our older RPG roots? The answer is simple, no it isnt.

People have expecations of games now which are imposible to meet, they want the graphics, they want the gameplay, they want the story. If any of the 3 are missing they complain.

But more of a focus gets put on the graphics cuz in the end, thats the main thing people talk about, "how great it looks". If you can make a pretty product, you get more sales then you do if you make a cartoony game thats more story driven and fun. A good example of this is Saints Row vs GTA.




But back to the topic of a new game each year. I can easily point out that this does NOT mean we will get a new FF rpg every year, chances are, we will get a new "final fantasy" game each year in general.

13-2 this year for instance, next year itl be 13 vs.

Following that we may get a 7 remake(itl count as 1 per year if they do it)

we may get some new handheld console games after that, and so on.

The point is dont sell it short as a new numbreed title each year when it comes to this(i havent read the article, but im guessing it doesnt say its a new numbred title each year)

[Seif]

Good point earlier about Uncharted 2 the people at naughty dog were truly surprised to see the sales drop off so drastically after the launch. This was in a Gamasutra article earlier.

I think the same happens with all Hollywood-wannabe games because they're so shallow that there's not that much more to them watch them through once.

Prior to XIV's launch SE was reporting strong sales not because of XIII but that the re-releases of past FF games were selling a lot better than they had anticipated.

If anyone has played FF III they know it's almost a different game every time you play it because of the job system. XIII however will always be the same soap opera with the same skills on every character no matter how many times you try to re-play it.

And hey it's totally fine if you like XIII. We probably expect very different things from games. Some people like to be passive while I enjoy doing stuff in a game. Different folks different strokes and all that.

[Betelgeuzah]

Uncharted 3 is at least as good as U2, in some aspects even performing better than the predecessor, but most people still say that it "doesn't feel as good as U2" or that it was a "slight disappointment". It's because they can't just play another game like U2 to get similar experience out of it.

I really wish that SE would be the Naughty Dog of JRPG's sometimes. That franchise has everything I want from an SE RPG, with slightly altered gameplay.

Some people like to be passive while I enjoy doing stuff in a game.

SE RPG's have been extremely passive for as long as I remember. You can not control the movement of your characters in combat. All you can do, in practice, is to move between menus, press X and watch the character's animation. Cutscenes have no interaction in them (although XIII-2's QTE's should take care of this) and on the field, pretty much all you can do is walk from one place to the other. There is no interaction with the environment like in say, Xenogears which wasn't that impressive but better than nothing. Also for being "strategy" oriented (at least I hope so), the game does not really do a good job in making use of that mindset like, say, FFT or Tactics Ogre franchise does.

While XIII is fundamentally the same, the franchise is taken to a more action-oriented direction, since you are required to switch paradigms and react to enemy's actions faster than before. No strategic elements have been lost in the process, and in reality the game does a decent job at keeping each role relevant throughout the game (aside from Sentinel, anyway). It is the kind of streamlining that is happening with XIV as we speak, and that doesn't result in "dumbing down" anything as much as it only removes some of the tedious aspects from these games that really don't serve much of a purpose and have been included due to traditions and not because it would make a good game.

And that's just in relation to combat. They would have done better to keep the overall pace of gameplay in XII levels with sidestuff to do in the middle but thats fixed in XIII-2 so no biggie. "Open world", though, serves no purpose anymore especially now that true open world games have become so much better in presentation than they were in 1997.

[Andrien]

I personally don't enjoy rpg games that is linear or have me back stepping into the same environment multiple times. in a none mmo game that is simply not acceptable for me.

[XxOstiaxX]

FFVI>FFT>>> All FF

Please do not mention FFXIII in the same line as FFVI it is blasphemy.

[Seif]

FFVI>FFT>>> All FF

Please do not mention FFXIII in the same line as FFVI it is blasphemy.

umm... like you just did? VI is awesome though, one of the best soundtracks ever. Also dat opening omg.

[Betelgeuzah]

VI made very good use of the open world for a SNES era game, and its story had some unorthodox twists as well. I don't think any FF before or after it comes close.

Chrono Trigger proves that the gameplay still could have been vastly better for a game of that era, but it is one of the best efforts SE has made in the franchise either way.

If you take spin-offs into account not mentioning Dissidia would be blasphemy. They really need to take that serie from the handhelds and use the gameplay in the mainline entries. It is so close to having very very good gameplay almost on the level of fighting games/DMC that it makes me drool for more (you can actually treat it as a legitimate fighting game with tiers and advanced tactics. Too bad it has no online). Kingdom Hearts could also learn something from it.