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Ten Years of FFXIII?
IGN is reporting that the next game in the Final Fantasy series will probably be around for quite a while. If Square/Enix has anything to say about it, we'll be playing the FFXIII family of games for the next ten years. "Although speaking with a Nintendo magazine, Hashimoto brought up Final Fantasy XIII as a comparison for Square Enix's decision to expand upon the FFVII storyline through the Compilation project years after the game's original release. 'Different from something like VII, which we expanded upon afterwards, with Fabula Nova Crystallis FFXIII, we've thought about an expansive world setting from the start. Under the idea of wanting everyone to be sucked into the world for 10 years, we're preparing a number of categories.' He likened this approach to films like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings." Chris Kohler took the time to point out that, in the same interview, the Square folks stated they're still not entirely convinced about this whole Virtual Console thing. "We feel that the Japanese game market still requires [physical] media. Also, FF and Dragon Quest are played by a wide range of users, from children to adults, so there are limitations when you consider the problems that we would have with billing systems."
"Yeah, uh, I want FF XII IV, FF VII VII and FF II XI. Got that?" [ Boom ]
FF7 was only "great" to those that didn't play FF3(6). Even the nerfed American version of FF3 was better than FF7 in terms of everything other than the ability to play FMV.
Seriously, GTA III came out in, what, 2000? It's 2007 and We're just now getting the next installment after: GTA3, GTA3: Vice City, GTA3: San Andreas, GTA3: Liberty City Stories, GTA3: Vice City Stories...
Nobody has any complaints about that. GTAIV probably won't be any more different from GTAIII than GTAIII was from San Andreas.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
It was a lot harder to develop an attachment for the previous games, when all we had were sprites.
Yeah, because, you know, it's was harder to development attachment to characters in books before we made movie version of them, because all we had were words.</sarcasm>
The FF's are a little different than your normal series. They are all (until now, apparently) entirely different games with entirely different settings. Each game is a brand new experience, nd are driven by their plot and battle system.
The main difference in all of the games is usually how you learn your techniques. For instance:
FF1 has set jobs
FF4 has jobs that you can change
FF7 has Materia that you equip to use abilities
FF8 has a finite supply of spells that you collect from certain spots on the map.
FF9 has you learning abilities by using weapons and armor for a while
FF10 has the Sphere Grid
FF12 has the License board
The characters all usually fall into four categories:
- Caster (Black)
- Healer (White)
- Fighter ("Main Tank")
- Support (Abilities)
The way each game is set up, in terms of learning abilities, slightly alters the gameplay. They also all have different forms of super-attacks. Usually you fill up some kind of bar through damage taken, magic, and various other rules. They results of these special attacks are different in each game, and sometimes require a mini-game like challenge to make them more powerful.
Because they all have different settings and characters, they do not get dull and the game is kept fresh. They have high-quality, borderline (if not) epic stories that can really draw you in. They way everything works out is like a great movie that's 40 hours long. But they are not movie games (Xenosaga...) and the battles and gameplay in between are often exciting enough to hold you over. There is certain level of strategy needed (mostly in boss battles) because Square makes the enemies (mostly bosses) so unique. Each boss (usually) requires a different strategy.
Because they are all different, you should not think of them as sequels, but more of a continuation of an idea. That idea being incredible story-telling combined with fun gameplay, that (recently) pushes the envelope in terms of console graphical power. They look pretty and do it in style.
I hope that explained a little bit.
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I'm not sure if I like this idea. The fact that the worlds are ever-changing is a big draw for FF. You never know what to expect next in terms of story, or (to a lesser extent) gameplay. sticking with the same universe for an entire decade seems like a bad idea. I don't want FF to morph into all the other RPGs by loosing the unique worlds it brings with each game.
I honestly feel that the reason that 6 isn't addressed anymore is due to how the game isn't a set of characters and their melodramatic relationships, but rather more of a "group of adventurers from around the globe who group together to defeat evil." The WoR portion is largely what the "aftermath" of most games are, and there are signs of the world recovering. Kefka is largely absent other than the occasional show of power and prevention of any real order developing. When he is defeated, there are no questionable towns, no weird alliances or government programs that could, potentially, continue. The Esper thing is resolved and the world can essentially get back to normal.
Even worse for spin-offs, there's little to really address before the story occurs, and many people in the story have no story-based history. Celes has a minor amount of history in the main story, but everyone else is sort of convinced of the problem and realizes that action needs to be taken.
Compare that to 7, where a band of individuals is fighting a government power. The real enemy, though, is a crazy guy with a mom-complex. When he's defeated, the government programs and all of the technology associated with it don't just disappear. Likewise, there's a huge history of the conspiracies built up in the game. A lot of it is terribly cliche, but it's ripe for expansion in spin-off games.
To me, though, that's also why I really like 6 a lot more. It felt like a full game, and you play the story from beginning to end. You start basically right where the real action begins and where the empire starts to make its moves, and it ends after a hell of a lot happens -- after the climax, after the denoument, at the real "end." FF4 is similar, although it peppers the world with more "mysterious old things from an advanced civilization" which are really just holdover themes from FF1-3. 7 felt like a snapshot, like the story was picked up in the middle and here are the characters. They're introduced and typecast as soon as you meet them, and nothing really changes. There are some twists in the story but the events don't really change the world. In fact, the prevention of any major change is pretty much the underlying element. Compared to 6, where you ride huge changes all the way through (from the discovery of magic, to the use of magic, to the destruction of the world and how it changes past locations, up to people coming to grips with the change and growing past it).
Sadly, it means that it's not a good market for sequels, but I think that's simply testament to how good of a story it was.