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New Final Fantasy XIII Details, Website Launched
Square Enix has launched an official website for Final Fantasy XIII. At the moment, it contains screenshots, game music, and brief character bios written in Japanese. Square also launched a site for Final Fantasy Versus XIII, though it doesn't have any content on it yet. A fan site has translated new details about the game from Weekly Famitsu, including information on the battle system. "Players select the 'Action' (the five buttons near the bottom left of the screen) they would like to use, which is then moved to the Command Stock slots (three slots above the Action buttons) to be executed in turn. Some 'Action' buttons seem to have several layers behind them, which means you'll have more than five actions to choose from. Each of the 'Actions' has a number attached to them; this is the 'Cost' or the number of slots that particular 'Action' will take in the Command Stock. For example, you can have three Fire commands in the list since its 'Cost' is only 1, but you can only use Firaga, which costs 3, if you have three empty slots in the Command Stock."
I'm really looking forward to this game, but I'm not looking forward to buying a Playstation 3 in order to play it.
Don't. I bet you could rent one from someone or something. But if you buy a PS3 to play FFXIII then FFIX will only come on PSwhatever, too.
Don't suck Sony's cock. They won't respect you in the morning. They'll just come right after you again in the next generation, still with no lube.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because Square Enix likes money and Final Fantasy fanbois are stupid enough to buy anything with the name "Final Fantasy" in it. (As an example, look at the 300,000+ people still playing Final Fantasy Online despite the fact that it's a crappy EverQuest clone and that it costs about as much to play as World of Warcraft, an infinitely superior game.)
Someone always points out that the world the games take place in is always different, which is true.
Now if only the gameplay varied from game to game in any meaningful way.
Nintendo gets away with throwing Mario into everything they do because the games are all different and new. Square Enix's version of "innovation" is seeing how many more polygons they can stick into their models. It's all about the graphics.
And there have been way more than thirteen Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy VII spawned something like four sequels. Final Fantasy XII also had a sequel, and I'm not counting Final Fantasy Tactics.
They're well beyond twenty "Final" Fantasy games if you bother to count them up.
Oh, and don't listen to the idiots saying that "Final Fantasy" was to be Square's last game. It's not true. The real story is that the guy who designed Final Fantasy was retiring, so it was HIS last game. His Final Fantasy as it were. The game sold well, so Square Enix decided to rape it for the next two decades.
Maybe it's just my western tastes, but Final Fantasy is dead to me. VI and VII were OK in my mind, but not nearly as great as some people claim.
XII caused reviewers to gush all over themselves and suck SE's cock like a bunch of little whores. Like a moron, I gave in and bought the game. What a mistake.
First, I do not, for the life of me, understand why the Japanese have such an affection for storybook games. It's like being read a book by horrible voice actors.
Second the whole stop and go of XII drives me nuts. Stop here, listen to 20 minutes of dialog, go here, fight this, stop here, listen to 20 minutes of dialog, etc... It's repetitive, predictable, and just downright boring. Why can't the story be a part of the game play? Instead, it's a "reward" for killing difficult monsters. Believe me, the way some of these stories are written, I couldn't give a shit about it.
Third, uber-power is boring. By the time I'm halfway through one of these games, I'm tearing my way through left and right, eliminating almost any strategy these monsters were supposed to force me to create.
Fourth, why the fuck does SE continue to put in these annoying fucking mini-games into FF? In XII you, at one point, have to go around and talk to everyone in order to advance. Why? why is this shit in a game? Spreading gossip is not interactive game play - it's fucking annoying.
Finally, the guys at SE have no imagination. I mean, none. Can we get something other than flying continents, underground cities, and someone trying to take over the known universe?
I'm not asking for an open world, or even changing the core game play mechanics (although, in the long run, I think FF would be better serves by dropping the walk-story-fight-story cycle) but something else needs to be done to this franchise before I'll ever buy into the hype again.
Shit, give me mutated squirrels that are trying to destroy a village. Even if they just change the goddamn story from "evil guy (and it's always a guy) from evil entity X wants more power to take over the known world" to "a group of misfit elephants has decided to stage a protest, disrupting your supply of elephant leg lamps, forcing you to find an alternate supply chain"