A letter to Square

[Powercow]

Well here is why I like FFXIIIs story (There will be a lot of spoilers in this post)

First I will touch on the overarching theme in FFXIII:
1. Minority vs Majority - Is it morally right to sacrifice a few in order to preserve the majority (The Purge/The world vs La'cie). Thinking about this from the opposite perspective, is it truly wrong to put others in danger to save the one you care most about? If so, then do you just give up on said person? (Vanille/Fang and Serah/Lightning/Snow)

That's not the interpretation I got at all. According to the official Ultimania book, Cocoon was designed to be like the USA, a melting pot of people and whatnot. Given the political climate in the real world at the time, I see Square-Enix making a much more direct insult to their American audience with this game.

The citizens of cocoon are overly-complacent with their oppressive government with the exception of a handful of, let's face it, stupid rebels (you don't go into open conflict with a huge military with no plan, no army, and no real weapons. NORA is stupid like that.) The people are also deathly afraid of a boogeyman they know nothing about that they think is coming to get them, and the government uses that to its advantage to keep the people in line. Seriously, the people actually get into a mob armed with lamps and other things at the mere thought of a L'cie being in their city. They're all agreeable to having hundreds, if not thousands of people sent to their deaths for simply being vaguely near the Fal'cie in Bodhum even though there's no real cause for that action.

Everyone, even Sazh, is under the influence that just because you're a Pulse L'cie you're a murderous psychopath who must destroy Cocoon. Why? You'd think he'd realize that hey, despite his brand, he DOESN'T feel like slaughtering everyone he sees. He still feels normal, or at least he acts normal and rational. Seems to me like the people of Cocoon are so ridiculously brainwashed that the government can simply do whatever it wants and its people will just nod their empty heads in agreement. And remember, this is supposed to represent America.

2. Forgiveness - If one makes a mistake, what does it take to forgive said person, or for that person to obtain forgiveness. It is often said that the use of words such as "I'm sorry" is not adequate enough, but then what is? (Hope/Snow and Snow/Lightning/Serah)

What mistake did Snow make? Hope's Mom could have simply not taken up arms and stayed with the other civilians and her son, or heck she could have taken the gun and protected the civilians when Snow asked. She got herself killed, not Snow. Snow didn't get over to her and say "Get up woman, I need me a meat shield!" She just got up and followed him.

Plus you'd think Hope would understand that without Snow's rather sloppy intervention that they would have all died anyway. Remember, Hope said Pulse was "Hell on Earth" (there's an Earth somewhere?) so he obviously knew that they were all essentially dead. Snow sorta saves them (at least temporarily), his mom gets herself killed, and Hope blames Snow like a petulant little brat. I could understand if he was upset for a little bit, being a child who lost his mother, and he was emotionally unbalanced at the time, but he keeps this attitude up a LONG time, and he actually intends to murder Snow. That goes way beyond being upset at the general death of a loved one and extends into "needs to be seeing a psychiatrist twice a week" mode.

I'm not sure what your point about Serah/Snow/Lightning is and who should be sorry for anything between those three, aside from Serah being kind of an idiot by not telling Snow what was going on for a long time.

Now lets take a moment and consider the concept of Orphan.

Oh let's please do, this is the worst part of the entire narrative.

Orphan is basically the "god" of Cocoon and his one and only desire is to die and have Cocoon destroyed, in order to bring back the true god/goddess known as the Maker to have the world remade. To accomplish this, Orphan gives our heroes their powers, turns the entire world against them, and enslaves their loved ones in crystals. There is also the overlying threat that if the La'cie decide not to follow Orphan's plan, they will be transformed into thoughtless monsters. Orphan does all this just to make our heroes as strong as possible so that they can kill him. I find this story interesting because it literally reverses the usual heroes vs villain story line. Also, the main characters are being put through constant mental stress and moral conflicts. All of this is going on, and this only touches the surface of FFXIIIs story.

I get that he's unable to kill himself. OK, fine, I get that. But he's able to manipulate others into killing him? OK, I can get that too. But why go with such a silly roundabout way of doing it? Given how they can make people absurdly powerful pretty easily, why doesn't he just "level up" the heroes, transport them to himself, and have them kill him immediately? Why didn't he do this years ago if he'd been planning this all along? Why not send them the best weapons possible (like dozens of rocket launchers and whatnot) and billions of gil to upgrade their equipment? Is he not able to? Why not? He's freaking GOD and has a massive following of brainwashed, expendable minions and he's in complete control of the government. He also seems to be perfectly able to move about on his own and manipulate things directly to help out the heroes, so there's apparently no rules against that.

Or for that matter, why not trick some of his brainwashed followers into stocking tons and tons of high explosives right outside his door, then having one of the poor saps "accidentally" blow it up? Is it too simple and he could escape? The dude can't escape 3 yokels with a gun-sword, a spear, and a toy ****ing boomerang and yet he can escape a hundred tons of C4? Give me a break.

Or maybe he can't do that because it'd be too similar to committing suicide, which he can't do. So he can't just blow himself up with explosives, but he *can* get a group of fighters together, directly challenge them to make them stronger, intentionally put them through all sorts of problems to level them up, and then tell them to kill him? How is that any less of a suicide? I understand that in his final moments he's supposed to fight tooth and nail for survival, but if he goes from "perfectly OK" to "completely obliterated by a hundred tons of C4" I don't think there'd be anything he could do against it, similar to how he couldn't stand up to the strength of the heroes in the end.

The tl;dr version of why Orphan sucks: he's poorly defined. He has constantly shifting limits to his powers and what he's allowed/able to do. It creates a laughably unrealistic villain who's either incredibly stupid, or the writers are going to go with the laziest possible explanation and say "he's so beyond us that his plans CAN'T make sense to us!"

The music - Like all of its predecessors, Final Fantasy has always had outstanding music. I personally loved FFXIIIs music, although I agree that the battle theme got old sometimes :P. But as we all know, when there is any important moment FF always uses music that just makes the moment, FFXIII held up to this standard.

Some of the music is pretty good. The problem is that a lot of the general audio cues we've come to expect from the Final Fantasy series, like a victory fanfare after winning a fight, are simply missing. It's one of those tiny details that made the FF series so great that's simply not here.

Of course I have other problems too, but those seem rather nitpicky or are unrelated to the story.

Oddly enough though, I still didn't hate my time playing FF13, and I never felt that I had to beat the game just to see the ending; I kept playing it because I was enjoying myself. Still not really sure why though.

[Abriael]

Oddly enough though, I still didn't hate my time playing FF13, and I never felt that I had to beat the game just to see the ending; I kept playing it because I was enjoying myself. Still not really sure why though.

Permit me to hazard a hypothesis: That's because the game was a pretty good game.

The main problem is that a few factors turned judging games into a matter of black and white, awesome or completely crappy.

Nowadays either a game is exceptional, or if it's just "pretty good" you'll see (at least on the internet) armies of people bashing it into the ground like it's the worst blight upon Earth, especially if it's part of a popular franchise.

If a game gets a 7 or even a 8 (especially if it's a popular franchise, again), it's considered an utter failure, instead of a "pretty good" or even good (in the case of the 8) game.

Nowadays if a studio makes a game that ranks under 8 on metacritic there are high chances that it will held against them by publishers the next time they pitch a game project.

Why is that? several factors. A main one is the internet (try doing your observation on this, and I'm quite sure you'll discover that this doesn't really happen between gamers that don't roam around the internet much or at all).

And within the internet there are two main factors: Press and discussion environments.

Discussion environments like newsgroup first (but at that time they were still small) and forums after contributed a lot in polarizing opinions between "awesome" and "completely crap", because in written discussion hyperbolic and extreme opinions simply are more effective to attract attention on one's position, giving people the impression that they're winning a discussion just by shouting louder than the opposition. In internet forums you'll very often see positions so extreme that if you just sit back and think about it, you'll wonder what the person smoked to get there, but it's very easy to be dragged into it instead.

The internet gaming press is another major culprit. Printed press is a lot less competitive that the internet. Magazines can keep argument more balanced because they don't need to resort to big headlines in order to "sell". Once the reader gets to the headlines he already bought his copy, so the selling point of game magazines is entirely different.

On the other hand the internet press relies a lot on extremes and hyperbole in order to attract readers. An over exaggerated tabloid-like headline or a polarized (either very high or very low) review score will simply draw more clicks on an article than a balanced one.

And on the internet "hits" are money. Straight and direct conversion. The more pageviews you get, the more impressions your ads get, the more you can get higher paying ads.

Of course (unless someone stoops so low as to write misleading headlines, and it happens) the body or the article needs to reflect the headline, so you see a ton of attention grabbing extremized articles. Check places that aggregate articles and rank them by "Hotness" like N4G.com and you'll notice this trend very easily.

Extremized and controversial wins and balanced loses.

Add to that the fact that the internet press often houses a lot of people with absolutely no journalistic background, to which no one even went near to teach the idea of journalistic integrity, and you get the full picture.

As in every environment there are opinion leaders, and when the opinion leaders polarize their opinions, and turn the place into a cesspit of negativity, hate, rage and fanboyism, a large part of the rest will inevitably follow.

(which is, mind you, another large difference between today and the game industry crash. Invalidating the video posted a few pages back further. At that time there was no internet making things look a lot worse than they are)

So yeah. Final Fantasy XIII is (in my opinion) actually a pretty good game. It's production values are exceptionally high and it has quite a lot of likable elements. It's also (again, in my opinion) not an exceptional game.

But telling what a blight on earth it is, and how it's a "slap in the face of the fans" will allow people to feel that they're shouting louder (and more effectively) during their beloved forum discussion.

Just like, if you're a journalist on the internet, giving it a 4 (without even getting anywhere near to finishing it, and I won't name names) gets you a lot more attention than giving it the 7.5-8 it (IMHO) deserves. Especially if it gives you a chance to bash a large and popular franchise or a large publisher like Square Enix. Shouting "the king is dead!" turns a lot of eyes.

Its metacritic score sits at a quite nice 83 (with a still very decent 7.9 user score) yet what are the reviews many remember? the 4s and 5s. What are the opinions many remember? The extremely negative ones on forums and on websites/blogs

Are those artfully (or often not even intentionally) polarized opinions a realistic expression of the actual quality of the game? Not a chance in hell.

[Mjollnir]

Permit me to hazard a hypothesis: That's because the game was a pretty good game.

Game? Yes. Final Fantasy game? Not so much.

Metacritic lists it as the joint eighteenth-best Final Fantasy game. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a new Final Fantasy to hit the top five every time and top ten should be a given. Less than that and the game is surely not up to anyone's expectations.

Now, of course, this is also opinion. I happen to agree with it. A lot of others do too, and I say that not because I'm trying to speak for the majority, or because I look at what people write on internet forums (I don't), but because the physical evidence shows it. Second-hand copies of the game are plentiful and available at incredibly low prices for a game of its age (£5 to £10 here in the UK). Compared to other Final Fantasies and other RPGs released in the same year, this shows that a larger proportion of folk who have bought the game consider it near-worthless.

If you thought that the Paradigm Shift, Crystarium, Item Upgrades and Cie'th Stone missions were good game mechanics then good for you. From the perspective of past Final Fantasies (and present if we include FFXIV here), my opinion is that they are weak and uninteresting, like the characters and the plot. I love the style, the graphics, the music, the lore/bestiary and the UI, but that's not enough to make me want to play it for 100% completion.

As mentioned briefly before, FFXIV is looking to tick all of my 'expectation' boxes and set the FF series back on track, if not at the least for me, hopefully for all fans of the series. Its current Metacritic position at #60 (yes, 1.0) will hopefully be forgotten as ARR takes the #1 slot until the release of XV, and maybe for some time after.

That was the very definition of pretentious and condescending.

I'm fully aware that you have six years' experience in the industry, but in this thread and others in recent weeks, you would do well to consider your own posts if you percieve others have put across their opinions in this particular way.

[Powercow]

Permit me to hazard a hypothesis: That's because the game was a pretty good game.

Aye, it wasn't bad, but for a Final Fantasy game people have certain expectations that this game didn't quite deliver on. I personally would have given it an above average 7/10 overall, mostly due to graphics, environment (visually, I'm a big sucker for things having a large general scale to them and FF13 does have some big set pieces) and combat design.

Oh and I apologize for the length of my previous post. I trimmed it down about 30%, and I could rant about so many more little bits of this game that bug the hell out of me, but that just comes from me being nitpicky when it comes to games. Hell, I did a pretty long rant against FF7's terrible story and still said I liked the game overall. Even FF9, which is one of my top 10 games (largely due to the characters) has a story I can rip apart into tiny little bits. Take any big game and it's going to happen if you think too hard.

[Abriael]

Aye, it wasn't bad, but for a Final Fantasy game people have certain expectations that this game didn't quite deliver on.

A reasonable approach would lead to judging a game according to what it is, not according to "expectations".

It also helps enjoying games a lot more, which is something many forgot in the past decade.

I'm fully aware that you have six years' experience in the industry, but in this thread and others in recent weeks, you would do well to consider your own posts if you percieve others have put across their opinions in this particular way.

Six years of experience were in the voice acting/localization Industry, that unfortunately I had to leave due to the shrinking of the market. I've been a game writer for 15, both on print and web. But again, I don't talk for everyone, nor for "The fans". Regardless of experience.

I write my opinion in a very blunt, honest and clear cut way, and yes, some hate it. They're entitled to their opinion and it never really bothered me that much. I prefer to be disliked by saying things how I see them than to tell people what they like to hear or pandering to irrational rage in order to be liked.

[Abriael]

By the way, thought I'd link a blog post in response to one of the usual "pandering to the rage articles" on Kotaku (the usual suspects for that kind of pandering). It touches on quite a few points discussed in this thread, some directly, some indirectly, and this one is written by a very experienced game developer and not by a clueless writer that thinks he knows it all and that needs hits to survive or by someone hiding behind anonymity (like the one he refers to). It also shares a point of view on the industry that you hear very seldom among the endless "publishers are ebil!" whining.

http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.co...k-you-are.html

Blunt, frank, clear, insightful and very realistic. And yeah, it's not the stuff people like to hear. Just as I like it.

[SkyeWindbinder]

A reasonable approach would lead to judging a game according to what it is, not according to "expectations".

It also helps enjoying games a lot more, which is something many forgot in the past decade.

It's fine judging a game for "what it is" and all that. But the thing of it is, FFXIII was a Final Fantasy title. Fans of the series have come to expect certain things from an FF title. It's really not our fault, it's just what we've been given for years as Final Fantasy fans. You can't not put that there in a big roman numeral production of a Final Fantasy game and expect fans to just "go with the flow". No, we're going to nitpick about reasons why the game isn't "Final Fantasy" enough. Again, it's not our fault, we were given games for years with little repeated details in the series that have come to define the experience of playing Final Fantasy games. Many of those details are reasons that Final Fantasy fans are, in fact, fans of the series.

I, personally, think that FFXIII deserves a 6 out of 10 as an rpg, but as a Final Fantasy, it deserves maybe a 5. It was an okay story (I guess) and the visuals were pretty. But it didn't have the feeling of a Final Fantasy. It was closer to being a Final Fantasy than "The Spirits Within", but only barely.

[Abriael]

It's fine judging a game for "what it is" and all that. But the thing of it is, FFXIII was a Final Fantasy title. Fans of the series have come to expect certain things from an FF title.

Final Fantasy XIII was first and foremost a game. It has to be judged as a game.

If you've "come to expect" certain things from a FF title, then it's only your responsibility if you're displeased when those certain things don't appear.

Game development is (or should be) a creative process, not a matter of going through a checklist of things that you MUST put in your game to avoid displeasing a segment of your fans (notice, you're talking for "the fans" again).

If you think that a series that has given you something "for years" has to give you those same things "forever", then you're just holding the evolution of the series back, that in a market that does evolve, means condemning it to irrelevancy sooner or later.

Yay for creative freedom, mh?

[SkyeWindbinder]

Final Fantasy XIII was first and foremost a game. It has to be judged as a game.

Indeed. Secondly, it was a Final Fantasy game. It must also be judged as that as well.

If you've "come to expect" certain things from a FF title, then it's only your responsibility if you're displeased when those certain things don't appear.

That's a rather irresponsible way of looking at it. In fact, I would deem it a pretty poor copout and very close to White Knighting Squeenix.

If a game franchise is going to include things in their franchise that their fans have grown fond of for almost the entire franchise over decades, then of course it's fair to expect that those things would be in the latter games. It's also fair to complain when they're not. It's also common freakin sense to expect that people are going to be complaining about these things. True, expectations can lead to disappointments. But if elements of a game are absent that have been in every game in it's franchise before it, then you can't possibly even begin to try to tell me that the disappointment consumers feel is their own fault. And if that really is your attitude, then here's a tip: Don't ever, EVER get into the game making business. Your consumers will hate you, and you will likely fail. lol

Game development is (or should be) a creative process, not a matter of going through a checklist of things that you MUST put in your game to avoid displeasing a segment of your fans (notice, you're talking for "the fans" again).

I'm more citing the many words of disappointment that fans have said about the game (myself included) than talking "for them". A parrot can repeat what others say, it doesn't make them the representative of whom they're repeating. And yes, game development is a creative process. But as a Final Fantasy developer, you must also be mindful that you are trying to get people to buy your game. And many of the people buying your game are fans of the franchise, and the familiar things in each Final Fantasy have played a huge part in that.

If you think that a series that has given you something "for years" has to give you those same things "forever", then you're just holding the evolution of the series back, that in a market that does evolve, means condemning it to irrelevancy sooner or later.

That's not true at all. Certain things are staplemarks of a Final Fantasy game. As they have always been. When they're not there, people are going to complain. Not including them is like not including a toy in a Happy Meal. Not necessarily essential for the meal, but do you really think that taking this staplemark out of the Happy Meal will go over well with kids who have been getting toys with their Happy Meal every time their parents take them? Of course it's not. You seem to almost be of the mind that Final Fantasy becoming ludicrously linear, claustrophobic, and rushed in the process or progressing through the game is some sort of "evolution". Well, I, for one, am inclined to disagree. And if "evolution" is what SE was trying to do, there are plenty of other and more successful ways they can do that.

IYay for creative freedom, mh?

Creative freedom is all well and good. But you also have to be careful when you're steering from the formula. Especially if it involves getting rid of aspects of a game that have served it well in the franchise. It's easy to just say "Well, it's the customer's fault for expecting this and that", but if you create expectations with your product over decades then take it away, it's just really pouty, condescending and stupid to blame the customer for having a problem with that.