And you degenerates need to stop complaining
I think it's hilarious when people harken back to a bygone era of gaming as if it was THE BEST THING EVAR. Ok fine, let's explore all these elements from the mid 90s that people "miss".
Open World Gaming
The above argument stems from the skewed perception people have of things that happened over a decade ago, so this statement is extremely laughable. I actually like Final Fantasy XIII - the whole "linear" argument is dumb as hell, because 98% of all games (ESPECIALLY RPGS) are linear. You can't run everywhere you wanted in Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy VIII - the game had a story. What do people think RPGs are other than a checklist of things to do?
You leave Midgar in Final Fantasy VII, and you HAVE to run to Kalm to watch the history lesson. You HAVE to get a Chocobo to cross the marshes, or the Midgar Zolom eats your face off. You HAVE to play that dumb minigame in Condor tower. You HAVE to take the boat across the ocean. You're going from one point to the next, cut off from going anywhere else.
"Oh snap, Dessert Buggy Car Thing! Let's go ALL OVER THE CONTIN - oh, I can only cross shallow water, and I still get into random encounters? OK. At least I can take the boat back to a continent that doesn't have any content."
You're forced to run into Cid, escape Rocket Town, become stranded on the Tiny Bronco - yet the Tiny Bronco can only go in Shallow Water (Serious, wut dafuq - water is water), so that limits where you can go. Ok, you can go to Wutai and climb the Tower of Pwnage to get Yuffie, but ultimately, you HAVE to go to the North and watch someone die and then head the Temple of the Ancients.
Oddly enough, you get the Highwind LATE in the game (we're talking second disk, here..), so you can *gasp* travel the world map at your leisure - but only like 30+ hours into the game.
13 just places ALL the open ended stuff at the end of the game, when you've gone through and have some background.
Anyone who sticks to the "FF13 is linear" argument hasn't put 25+ hours into it, and honestly doesn't remember gaming in the 90s. As my friend Tim (Google+ Profile Link Here) puts it:
"Games only give you a sense that you have choices. Much like life; who knew? In FFVIII and FFVIII the world map masks this best. Makes you feel like you could just skip something, when you really do have to hit all points. In Final Fantasy XIII, at least the 10 hours I put into it, it doesn't lie to you about your choices. "STFU and go over there. You're too young to be going every where all willy nilly like."
No World Map
This is funnier to me that the first argument, because it is both trivial in nature while displaying the general discourse that surrounds positive changing to the status quo in video games. Furthermore, the EU and NA markets have shown an overwhelming desire for "Western RPGs" in the flavor of Morrowind, FallOut and Dragon Age. For those folks.. I say so stop playing Final Fantasy and instead play Morrowind, FallOut and Dragon Age. Leave my JRPGs and their focus on a definitive story alone.
The PSOne Final Fantasys were beautiful for their time and the benchmark for visual tech available on the console, and Squaresoft displayed (and frankly, still does) their mastery over their canvas by making use of static, pre-rendered backgrounds mixed with 3D elements where appropriate. The limited resources available on the Playstation required this, and breaking up beautiful pre rendered environments with the World Map stretched out the game.
Honestly, it was a nifty programming trick, which Squaresoft excels at to this day by preloading the game behind animated cutscenes. There were many technologically impressive moments, and running through the Balamb Garden Assault while FMV is playing in the background sticks out the most in my mind.
However, considering the hardware at the time, Squaresoft did what they could. Firstly, there wasn't that much RAM on the PSX - you have a CPU running at 33 MHZ (dafuq?), with 2MB of RAM and 4kB of instruction Cache. Even better, the GPU had 1 MB of VRAM for an impressive amount of texture storage. Seriously though, Cloud had blocks for hands, amirite? My point is that a seamless game - or rather, a game devoid of a world map - could not be executed on the PSX to the degree of quality that we experienced in the mid-90s via Squaresoft's methods. A Worldmap breaks up the graphics and spreads the world apart, but is was still only a path in its own way.
X was the first Final Fantasy to forgo a traditional free-range world map, with the town and the subsequent areas in between them benefiting from the PS2's much more advanced horsepower and storage medium. Now we had a game with dynamic camera angles that swept around the screens and showed full pans of the environment (instead of the PSX Final Fantasys where it just panned or zoomed as your character moved), and the game felt like one seamless world. The transition between the Crystal Forest Place to the Giant Chocobo Field Place to the Mountains to Zanarkand actually made geographical sense, and the game felt like a contiguous world with inter-connected regions that were separate while being transitory.
The PS2 Final Fantasy games set the precedent for this series, showing that consoles were technical enough to not need a World Map - which makes me wonder if people complaining about the lack of a World Map have even played Final Fantasy since 2000. But at the end of the day, even Final Fantasy X had an airship which was in effect no different than Final Fantasy XIII's teleportation. This revealed to me that many gamers like the illusion of free movement. Many of these people probably didn't pay attention to cutscenes either, because an airship wouldn't make sense in Final Fantasy XIII, but I digress..
No Pre-emptive Grinding
A good friend of mine is a habitual grinder. He'll spend hours in a good spot in RPGs and power over bosses for about half the game. Final Fantasy XIII debunks that with capping the progress in the leveling up process.. To be honest, gamers never have to grind to beat this game.. Final Fantasy XIII does a good job at testing the skills of gamers, because being held to Max Of Where You Can Go and cutting off Max Level access requires players to make smart Paradigm choices, in addition to conservative usage of the (surprisingly intuitive) weapon upgrade system until you can dump money into it and wisely spend the hard-to-come-by gil for parts.
Besides, I'm spending PLENTY of time grinding post game... At 70 hours and I JUST maxed out everyone's initial 3 jobs.. and the past 3 hours was on Cactuars with the Growth Egg.
Battle System
I'll just state that I HATE item management, and nothing is worse than dungeon crawling like having to burn money on items and go spelunking, hoping to maintain ethers and such to keep my mages alive. In fact, I think Final Fantasy XIII made me a lazy gamer, because now I get annoyed whenever I play a different game and have to manage my mana pool.
The battle system of Final Fantasy XIII was designed to be fast, while also being fair. In general gameplay, I can get into encounters and go all out without worrying that Hope will run out of MP, while not stressing end-to-end fights since the party is healed 100% afterwards. I don't have to carry a 20 different status effect heals and I don't have to burn money on items (unless they're shrouds..). Furthermore, XIII teaches the value of gil and how precious it is.
On the flip side of that same coin, I don't worry about long drawn out fights, because my Medic can spam Cures on my Sentinel, never run out of MP mid-fight, and I don't have to time Ether breaks in between OMGWTFBBQ Mega Pwnage moves.
Seriously, people wanted the battle system to be harder and have a more open-ended world? Every time I see that argument, I remind folks that BioWare makes a fine set of games that would be right up their ally.
Conclusion
XIII is a great game, with phenomenal music, gorgeous graphics and fast-paced gameplay. I don't appreciate the hand-holding for 25 hours (longer tutorial than KH2, amirite?), and no, it's not perfect. But it's not terrible, and I'm glad Square-Enix is making a sequel. Also, I'll add that Lightning is probably my favorite main character, and I'm glad she's so strong while being able to connect to (in addition to Jumping from 30 stories in the air bad-ass-awesome).
I could've sworn Vahn was the main character of XII, but he felt like a side character in the Ashe and Friends Show. At least in this one, they gave all the characters something unique, even if Snow felt like he was overdoing it and Sahz was just pitiful. And the good thing is that at the end of the game, I didn't hate Hope. Talk about friggin character development.
So, if anyone disagrees, I'm more than welcome to discuss it, and I thank you for coming to my site. Feel free to comment, shoot me an email or, do what I did and get your own soapbox at www.myownopinionatedthoughts.givearatsass.com
Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:37AM 