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The History of Final Fantasy
Nerezza writes "A new site, Oscuro Destiny, has put up its first feature! Final Fantasy is a feature article series from an up and coming site." Includes info on the history of Squeenix and a look at the MMOG.
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If you had read the article, you would probably know that it was supposed to be their final game before they would have gone bankrupt. But, FF did well enough that they didn't go bankrupt, so of course they had to expand on their new found success.
They left out one of the best in the series, Final Fantasy Tactics. And it's lesser counterpart FF Tactics Advance.
mods, what the heck, funny??
this is serious! ^_^
i remember being about 8 and playing ffa1
for the gameboy over a 10 hour long cartrip..
at the end of this game, YOU KILL GOD.
(now i'm way more accustomed to asian thought,
but at 8, i wondered if i was going to hell
for beating this game... ^^)
still, those gameboy ffa's were so good,
i could remember wanting to go back and
play again just to 'see' friends from
back in the storyline.
hey, c'mon, i was little.
man. where should I start on this one?
It is painfully obvious that Chris St. Pierre hasn't actually played the first three games of the series. normally, this wouldn't be something I'd hold against someone, but one would expect that someone who is writing a history of a certain topic would actually be fairly well-versed in the subject matter.
the reason the above gripe is so important, is because the author starts making more assumptions on the series based on his lack of knowledge ("Some say it resembled an early Final Fantasy V"). to anyone that has actually played the first three games (all fully translated by various romhacking groups), this is a direct assault on their intelligence.
Later sections tend to fluctuate between downright amateurish and passable, but all read like high school essays. Nobody cares about the author's personal experiences with the games. What's worse, in later articles, many of the authors start openly speculating on the motives of Squaresoft's development team, while trying to pass these comments off as fact.
Minus numerous factual errors (Uematsu stopped being the primary composer near the end of FF8, not X2 as one author speculated), and largely sub-par writing styles, it's obvious that the authors actually care for the series. But would it have hurt them to spend at least an hour researching before writing something that's supposed to be a big draw on their site?
if this lack of discipline is what I am to expect with the rest of the site, I don't think I'll ever be going back. and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
It's a real pity this article isn't better. There's certainly room for a good article on the history of the series; the gamespot article was by no means definitive.
But this article was so bad as to be painful at times. First of all, if you're going to produce something of this length, PLEASE get somebody intelligent and literate to proof-read it before you post it. I'm not just referring to some of the obvious spelling and grammar errors in there, but also to the fact that it read like it was written by a bunch of 14 year old fanboys. Yes, I love the series as well, but you don't have to write every section of the article as though it's an advert for the game in question. Tone down the gushing a bit and turn up the actual content. You're not actually trying to make a profit off sales of the games, so you don't need to come over like an official advert.
But please, please, don't then go and spoil the plot to pretty much every game in the series. Final Fantasy games live or die by their plots and giving away the whole thing isn't going to convince anybody to go out and play it. By all means sketch out the background to it, giving a bit of detail about the world, the protagonists and the villains. What we don't need is a breakdown of who does what to who and when. If we want to know that, we'll go play the game.
Also, if you're going to write an article like this, try to actually include some content that the audience isn't likely to already know. Most Final Fantasy fans, even very casual ones, will know the main features of each game in the series. If you want us to read though something that long, you need to do a bit of research and tell us something we might not know. Maybe talk a bit about the public and critical receptions that each game received, compare the numbers of copies they sold with their main competitors or talk a bit about the inspirations for and motifs within each of the games. This information is all out there; if you want us to read and enjoy your article, go find it. Moreover, as a number of other comments have already pointed out, for the love of god, make sure you get your facts right and keep fact separate from opinion.
Finally, where was all the missing stuff? No mention of Final Fantasy Tactics, Crystal Chronicles or Kingdom Hearts? It's a bit hard to see how you can do a complete history of the series withot touching on these. Sure, none of them appeal to quite the same audience as the "numbered" Final Fantasy games, but Square has a habit of using them to test ideas that later appear in the main series.