Final Fantasy XIV Launches To Scathing Reviews

RogueyWon writes "Now that the massively-multiplayer Final Fantasy XIV has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks, the reviews are starting to arrive; and it appears that the game is the subject of a critical battering unprecedented in the history of the main Final Fantasy series. First it was the Amazon user reviews, then Gamespot weighed in, describing the game as a 'step backwards for the genre,' and now IGN has described it as 'an arduous experience that, in its current state, isn't worth playing.' Given the general dissatisfaction that surrounded the release of the (offline) Final Fantasy XIII earlier in the year, many long-time fans of the series must now be wondering whether the magic hasn't departed."

Comments

Well shit

[elrous0]

I guess I'll have to turn to one of about 10,000 other spikey-haired-hermaphrodites-on-the-rails-rpgs if I want my Japanese game fix.

Re:Well shit

[somersault]

I thought the FFMMORPG has already been out for years.. the fact that I don't really care means it makes no odds though.

Re:Well shit

[Andy Dodd]

This is the second one. As I understand, the first one was pretty crappy too.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

Final Fantasy XI initially launched in a pretty dismal state, but has improved vastly over the years, and is still getting fairly solid content updates.

But Final Fantasy XIV certainly is not ready to compete in today's MMORPG market. I'm not about to pay money to continue a beta test. I would guess it needs about 6 more months of development, at a minimum, before it's really ready to compete. Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

It NEEDS to be remade. But instead of making it in China, make it in Japan or even South Korea.

Re:Well shit

[Frigga's Ring]

Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.

I couldn't agree more. S-E has had so many good ideas that have been mired by some glaring poor decisions. If they had just spent some time before and during development, their games would be released to fewer "WTF were they thinking" comments. They've been such a successful company and still have quite a few successful games that there's no reason they shouldn't have the budget for more marketing research, testing, and player input.

Re:Well shit

[ByOhTek]

Sadly, this one is an improvement over XI. You can actually solo decently in it (excluding one class). There are some good classes, and the scenery isn't bad - that's though those are in line with the previous. You no longer lose XP when you die, very nice. Like most soon-after-release MMOs, the content is somewhat lacking - but that's not a surprise, and sqeenix seems to be ramping that up. Like their previous MMO, and contrary to what a previous user said, this isn't the usual train JRPG.

A lot of good ideas, but the crafting system is overly convoluted, with at least one material in any given recipe of worth being a bit too rare. Sadly, this is still an improvement over XI - less convoluted, but everything seemed to be too rare. Add to that most recipes require a web of ingredients going through many different skills - some of which 10-15 levels higher than the final product... It can be a pain in the ass without a good trade infrastructure.

You know, auction houses and mailboxes. Squeenix, in their infinite lack of wisdom removed these. They wanted to get rid of the RMT problem. Apparently their method of getting rid of the problem was to make it a desirable feature. Now you spend real money on items rather than money, because spending hours going through the user market is so much fun. Guess I should explain that. You can get a "retainer" this individual will stand around in one of about 15 zones in a city (and three cities, 45 zones). A retainer can have up to 10 items for sale, and can also "look" for" items (each look-for counts as two sale items as far as slots go) in his/her bazaar. When you want to buy user stuff, you can either look at the sales of these retainers or of people running around (each player can also have a bazaar, which works identically to that of a retainer). Consider that it takes 5-10 seconds to open and close a bazaar - and that each can only hold about 10 items. Now the busier zones probably have 50-100 retainers. Do you really want to sort through that in the "hopes" that you find what you want?

Oh, and since I mentioned it there. Laggy UI.

What would move this from a rather painful to a rather good game, in order?

(1) Mailboxes, this would make cross character trade a lot easier.
(2) Mailboxes/direct trade with more than 4 item slots - the UI is really laggy, having us need to trade multiple times is just PAINFUL.
(3) An auction house, there are better methods to hinder RMTs (implement your own microtransaction system, in-game tradeable 30-day subscriptions, etc.)
(4) Tweak the UI so it isn't nearly as slow.
(5) More content - only last because Sqeenix is actually working on this, and seems to be putting in reasonable effort.

Re:Well shit

[Thanshin]

Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.

Please elaborate.

Re:Well shit

[commodore64_love]

>>>is still getting fairly solid content updates.

Like a bad TV show, it just goes on and on and on. Kinda like Smallville. Or Voyager. I'd sooner a game be like a movie or book with a pre-designed fixed ending - a goal for me to reach, with a nice wrap-up of the story, and then move on to the next game.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

The laggy UI baffles me. Also, the entire UI is a mess. Like Oblivion, it just isn't made for a PC user and was clearly designed for use with a console. Unlike Oblivion, mouse support is not integrated well at all. All of the configuration options that actually matter require shutting down the game and using a secondary tool.

This is poor game design for the PC platform. Given that this was one of the more irritating aspects of FFXI, I was hoping it would be addressed. Instead, they have repeated many of the same mistakes. You still can't alt-tab without crashing the game if you're playing in full-screen -- one of the biggest things that plagued FFXI until the player base created a third-party utility that fixed it.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

So you clearly have no interest in MMORPGs. That doesn't mean those who like them can't be permitted to appreciate content updates. There is no law that says you have to play the game, but that doesn't mean the game should die. There's not exactly a shortage of games that have proper endings.

Re:Well shit

[poetmatt]

Exactly, XIV is in the same situation as XI was - but this is years later, so there is no excuse for that.

Lots of things have been improved, but I felt no reason or desire to get the game. It's got too many things still substantially wrong.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

If you look at many successful games, you'll find a lot of consistency, both MMO and non-MMO alike. I'm going to focus on UI here, because it's one of FFXIV's biggest flaws, and it's the easiest example.

A user interface needs to be designed in such a way that it communicates information clearly. Furthermore, the interface needs to be designed in such a way that accomplishing any particular task is straightforward, quick and intuitive.

The UI for Final Fantasy XIV is excruciatingly poorly designed and fails on all aspects of this. Everything is accessed through a main menu that has a mess of nested sub-menus. There are no assigning of simple hotkeys for most actions (though you can assign combat and skill related actions to 0-9), and the entire interface responds VERY slowly, often taking 3-5 seconds to open each sub-menu.

Changing options such as screen resolution, detail settings, or controller configuration (if you have a game pad) is done by closing down the client entirely, running a separate configuration utility, and relaunching the client when you are done. Running the game in full-screen prevents you from alt-tabbing, else you crash the client entirely. This is particularly bad because these are chief complaints people have had about their own previous MMORPG, so they should be painfully aware of them -- but they appear to have learned nothing.

Square-Enix is just not in touch with what makes a game good as a game. They have a knack for compelling stories, and they have a solid art-design team, but these aren't enough to make a good game.

Re:Well shit

[_KiTA_]

Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.

Please elaborate.

Both FF13 and FF14 have been plagued by poor design decisions that represent management who are woefully out of touch with their target audience.

For example, FF13's dungeon design was vastly simplified, to the point that 99.99% of all dungeons in the game are single straight corridors, with no side paths nor possible ways to get lost. They're very pretty, but it's also very similar to playing "Final Fight: The RPG" -- walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight... This is indicative of a group of executives who have a very, very poor opinion of their target audience as a whole - "Today's gamers aren't smart enough to figure out a maze, make it a straight line." There's a reason that game was 98% off in stores a few weeks after release, it tanked, HARD. I would be pretty surprised if they made back the absurd development costs.

Final Fantasy 14, amongst other things, implements a "reverse rest EXP system" -- the more you play, the less you get out of playing. Not only that, when people openly started talking about this, Square Enix bold faced LIED about it to the player base -- claiming that it was all made up by "foreign websites trolling for hits." It took 2ch and the other Japanese fansites breaking NDA en mass and saying "no, that's all true" for them to own up and admit it publically. Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks. Similar long cooldowns are implemented in the repeatable quest systems, the crafting system, the works.

These are symptoms of a company that knows their game isn't fleshed out enough to keep people busy, but is out of ideas on how to keep people from quitting before they can fix it.

This has actually been going on for a while, but these latest two have finally put it to the point that the detractors are louder than the fans. FF12, for example, had an atrocious plot, and they dropped the main character in lieu of a 14 year old metrosexual because "gamers can't associate with a middle aged (you know, 20) protagonist." But the rest of the game made up for it - the combat was aces, the open, near sandbox style map was great, the bonus fights were actually fun, etc etc.

FF11 was legendary for taking your characters hostage -- if you ever quit, they "deleted" (read: blocked you from using) your characters. Yes, they fixed it later, but only after the subscription numbers crashed. They still thought this was a good idea at the time. To say nothing about the design of the game as a whole -- the UI choices, especially on the PC, were downright criminal.

There have just been one bad design decision after another over there the past few years, and it's getting worse.

Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.

Re:Well shit

[ByOhTek]

Of course, you don't need full screen anymore, which is nice.

Yes, those are all annoying too. However, at least to me, they don't make it unplayable. Everyone is different/YMMV

Re:Well shit

[Andy Dodd]

Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.

In both cases, you get more XP when rested and less when not rested. Other than psychology there is no difference.

Re:Well shit

[Psmylie]

That's not the biggest problem for me. The biggest problem is the lag when trying to open/navigate through menus. If it happened quickly, then much of the frustration would dry up.

Also, more customization is needed. Being able to move chat boxes around, etc. is a big step up from FFXI, but they still have that NPC-dialog box right in the middle of your screen that you can't move or switch off, which means that I can't put my chat box across the bottom of the screen like I wanted.

In addition, little things like being able to customize font colors and window opacity would be welcome, being able to have separate boxes for chatting and battle/system messages, etc. Not to mention the lack of search-able markets...

There are a LOT of things they did right with this game. It's very beautiful and detailed, the story so far seems rich and compelling, the character development is interesting and very flexible. But coupled with that are a host of minor annoyances that really suck a lot of the fun out of the game.

Plenty of people are playing it and enjoying it, but enough people have either been turned off by negative reviews or have quit out of frustration that FFXIV is going to have a very rough start. SE will continue to modify the game. In a few months, I expect the game to have far fewer frustrations. In a year, this will be a fantastic game. In two, in will be the pinnacle of MMOs. But right now, it's in a late-stage beta.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

> Like Oblivion, it just isn't made for a PC user and was clearly designed for use with a console.

That sadly is the way of the future as we dumb down gaming experiences more and more.

Re:Well shit

[KDR_11k]

The appeal of MMORPGs is 90% psychology so they should pay attention to that.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>is still getting fairly solid content updates.

Like a bad TV show, it just goes on and on and on. Kinda like Smallville. Or Voyager. I'd sooner a game be like a movie or book with a pre-designed fixed ending - a goal for me to reach, with a nice wrap-up of the story, and then move on to the next game.

Excuse me? What is wrong with Voyager? I think when the show started to feel stagnant (~season 3ish) they changed it up enough with things like new characters, new technologies, new allies/enemies, etc.; that it stayed fun and interesting right up to the very end with the defeat of the Borg Collective.

Unlike Deep Space Nine, which was basically the Energizer Bunny of stagnation. In fact, IMHO, DSN should have been condensed to the last 2-3 seasons where all the action took place (read: Dominion War).

I'm a devout fan of TSO, TNG, and Voyager. Overall I thought DSN was a waste and did more to disenfranchise fans than draw them deeper into the ST universe. Finally, I have very mixed opinions about Enterprise... Some parts of Enterprise were excellent, but I think over all it felt like overdone rehash.

Anyway, I digress. Wtf is wrong with Voyager?

Re:Well shit

[simtel]

It is entirely psychology - but the psychological differences between positive feedback (do something right, get reward) and negative feedback (do something wrong, get punished) are coming onto play here.

FFXIV "punishes" players for playing too much by giving them less XP. This results in the perception that it is bad to play for long periods of time. WoW "rewards" players for playing less by giving them more XP. This results in the perception that it is good to play for shorter periods of time. Yes, the end XP result is the same, however the perception differences between reward and punishment give the events a emotive response that is _not_ the same.

That's one of the things S-E needs to learn - the psychology of gamers. There IS a market for people who enjoy being punished. The masses with their wads of cash? Not so much; they tend to prefer being rewarded.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The UI will never be customizable, which in my opinion at least, is reason enough never to get the game. And I don't mean the ability to drag widgets around, I mean full World of Warcraft-style custom UIs.

World of Warcraft ended up adding a ton of features that started as third party UI mods. The UI customization system in WoW is one of the things that made the game great - if you didn't like their UI, there were ways to fix it.

FF14 will never get this ability. The stated reason is to ensure parity between console and PC players. Except, well, fuck that. I don't care about people playing on the consoles. All I care is that the game's UI is unusable and that there's no way to fix that.

I'm also somewhat shocked that alt-tabbing out of the game kills it - supporting Alt-Tab has been a Windows Games requirement for something like a decade. There's no excuse for that, but given that Square Enix never fixed that in 11, I think we can be sure it'll never be fixed here either.

In a few months, I expect the game to have far fewer frustrations. In a year, this will be a fantastic game.

Bullshit. All we have to do is look at 11. 11 never evolved past EverQuest, I can't see why that would be any different for 14.

Re:Well shit

[jbacon]

Sure, but what you fail to realize that the psychology is the entire problem! People enjoy being rewarded, they dislike being penalized. Therefore, people enjoy WoW's experience system, and dislike FFXIV's system, even if they result in the same net experience point total.

WoW has done this for all of its existence - making players feel rewarded, and minimizing penalties for death, mistakes, etc. Look where it is now.

Re:Well shit

[groslyunderpaid]

FF12, for example, had an atrocious plot

Everything else you said is true, but not this. Nothing wrong with FF12 plot. You want a bad plot, look at FFVIII

Re:Well shit

[commodore64_love]

>>>There is no law that says you have to play the game,

There's also no law that says I can't express my disappointment that FF11 and FF14 were online, instead of stand-alones. On the previous consoles we had 3 standalone games each..... but in recent years only 2:

NES == FF 1,2,3
SNES = FF 4,5,6
PS1 == FF 7,8,9
PS2 == FF10,12 (one less standalone Final Fantasy)
PS3 == FF13,15 (ditto)

Re:Well shit

[Zider]

What UI choices in FF11 are you saying is "criminal"? I've played the game for little over a year now on PC (and some on 360), and I find the UI very nice (altho I play with a game controller, not with keyboard/mouse).

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Square-Enix, in arrogance, has decided to completely ignore all the advances to the MMO genre made in the last several years. Their development team even stated that they thought they could steal WoW players away, and their launch schedule reeks of this very delusion. This game was obviously not ready for prime time in any measure, but they pushed a late September release to beat out Cataclysm. This is a game with a ton of potential that was completely destroyed by SE willfully ignoring input from just about everyone. The game literally plays like crap and the UI is utter garbage. Darkfall is less confusing.

This game is basically a barely updated FFXI with better graphics. The only players they are going to be attracting are the FFXI loyalists who by some miracle haven't touched any MMO that's been released in 2004 or after.

Re:Well shit

[Narishma]

Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.

Those games are good probably because Square Enix only published them.
Dragon Quest 9 was developed by Level 5, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 by Tose and Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes of Light by Matrix Software.

Re:Well shit

[Narishma]

I think that has more to do with the fact that games of that caliber are taking longer and longer to make as the consoles become more and more powerful. Especially from the moment they switched from 2d or 2d backgrounds with 3d characters to everything 3d, so they couldn't take shortcuts anymore and have to model everything everywhere the player can go.

Re:Well shit

[interkin3tic]

10,000 other spikey-haired-hermaphrodites-on-the-rails-rpgs

Spikey haired hermaphrodites that you have to rescue from being run over by trains (presumably tied up there by moustache-twirling hermaphrodites)? Man, I have GOT to play that game.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us start with the fact that Square has not made any capacity of a decent multi-player RPG game. Then, we'll take pitstops on "can't compete with WoW's 8 million+ dumbasses" avenue and "have you ever seen a JRPG franchise make a successful MMO jump?" boulevard and our final destination will be 'Final Fantasy was never meant to be MMO in any capacity' lane. I think that sums up the market research that they need to do regarding what players want out of their games.

What I want out of my fucking S-E games is Final Fantasy 3, Final Fantasy 7 or Final Fantasy 12. Innovative single player experiences with engrossing storylines, top of the line graphics (for their respective times) and more importantly solid gameplay. Although all S-E games always had a little bit of a bloated character flashback issue (if not multiple ones), but I forgive them for that as par for the course.

Re:Well shit

[Khyber]

"has decided to completely ignore all the advances to the MMO genre made in the last several years."

What advances? All you get from an MMORPG is incremental updates and a wallet-sucking monthly fee, and non-stop grinding with very little else to do.

Re:Well shit

[bem]

PS2 == FF10,12 (one less standalone Final Fantasy)

You left out FFX-2. So your total is inaccurate.

PS3 == FF13,15 (ditto)

Methinks you're guessing there unless you know the future.

Re:Well shit

[ultranova]

Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.

There is no difference between doing a spreadsheet and playing a computer game other than perception. It's all math beneath the surface.

This is what most of empire (especially space empire) building games fail at: you and your opponents feel like small-time bureaucrats, not Ceasar or Palpatine. Ironically, it would also be the easiest to fix, since - as you noticed - a simple cosmetic change is often enough.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is accessed through a main menu that has a mess of nested sub-menus.

That's because this game, like most PC games now a-days, are just shitty ports of console games, where everything has to be done with a dozen buttons or so. Designing two UI's or updating the one for the PC would cost more money, and thus eat into their profit.

Re:Well shit

[Psmylie]

Having never played Everquest, I can't really compare the two. So, instead, I'll compare XI to XI. The XI I'm playing now is so completely different from the XI I was playing seven years ago that it's almost a completely different game. So, with that in mind, I'll respectfully have to call bullshit on your "bullshit".

No, they didn't change the UI all that much. But they've improved on almost every aspect of gameplay over the years. I can list some of them for you, if you want.

I will agree, though, that limiting PC players to the same functionality as console players is not a wise move on their part. That's behind most of the difficulties that we see in XI: "PS2 limitations". It's going to be the limiter on XIV in a couple of years, when they start to run into "PS3 limitations".

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's see:

1. Customizable UIs.
2. Fast-travel options. (See the GameTrailers review for why the teleport system does not count - you regain enough "anima" in a single day to teleport within a zone once. Teleporting between zones will take a day and a half to recharge.)
3. Multiple character slots. (A default subscription gives you zero characters. It's an additional $3/month for each character. And, no, I'm not bullshitting, activating you account nets you a $10/month fee and zero character slots. You have to sign up for "character options" separately to be allowed to create characters, and each character costs $3/month.)
4. Sane billing options. (You pay for this game via a PayPal competitor. Not joking.)
5. Local servers. All the servers are in Japan, there are no North American servers or European servers. So if you want to play on a server with a low ping - tough.
6. Voice chat. They've already said they will never add this.
7. Playing with other players. Creating groups with other players is currently broken and will prevent you from completing quests or earning XP. Seriously!

I could probably go on, but I think that's enough for now.

Re:Well shit

[Psmylie]

That all comes down to personal preference. I like the simplistic, almost minimalist UI style of FFXI. When I tried playing WoW and Guild Wars, I found the UIs to be far too cluttered and distracting.
But that's why UIs need to be more customizable, because everyone has their own preferences.

Re:Well shit

[DarkXale]

Not sure I would agree about the necessity of point 6.

One thing I've seen consistently is that built-in voice chat almost always gets ignored in favor of more solid and 3rd party solutions (Mumble, TS, Ventrilo, Skype).

I think my old WoW account totals some 500 total days /played, with perhaps 150 or so on Wrath. I don't remember the specifics since I haven't actually played the game in 9 months - but I know I don't even have an hours worth of time spent on the built-in voicechat; and everyone I knew had the same impression/attitude. A minority uses it, the majority ignores it. And whether it is present or not is virtually never a factor for most people, and generally at best - a luxury.

Re:Well shit

[CronoCloud]

I think that's what he's referring to, that even on the PC, people play with dual-shocks or equivalent controllers. Every long time player knows that the optimum is dual-shock + keyboard, t hat mouse control/movement doesn't work very well.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he does know the future, or maybe he is from the future and has a PS9 already (Teleport yours today!)

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

making a hard-core game easier may appeal to the masses, but dumbing down a game is only an improvement in the eyes of crappy gamers.

Re:Well shit

[bonch]

WoW has done this for all of its existence - making players feel rewarded, and minimizing penalties for death, mistakes, etc. Look where it is now.

There has to be punishment for failure, though. WotLK removed all difficulty in questing, and entire tiers of content were skippable. For months, the end-game content was a single room with bosses who come to you. There wasn't even a reason to be in a guild anymore. You could get end-game gear tokens from random 5-mans.

The lack of challenge was a real problem. Cataclysm is revamping nearly everything and introducing difficult questing and heroic dungeons again as a reaction to WotLK's total lack of difficulty.

Re:Well shit

[CronoCloud]

not using a mouse does not equal dumbed down. There are some very complex games that never used the mouse at all on both consoles and PC's.

Re:Well shit

[commodore64_love]

>>>You left out FFX-2.

Sorry never heard of it. I've also never heard of Star Drek Voyager or Buffy Season 7 or Star Wars Prequels, even though various persons have claimed they existed. (shrug) Maybe my Crap Perception Field prevents me from seeing them

But seriously: 10-2 is just 10 with a new mission package.
Like Zelda Ocarina of Time Original versus the Remix.
It's not a different game.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what most of empire (especially space empire) building games fail at: you and your opponents feel like small-time bureaucrats, not Ceasar or Palpatine.

So... you're saying you'd rather feel like a big-time bureaucrat, which is clearly better?

Re:Well shit

[IICV]

Final Fantasy 14, amongst other things, implements a "reverse rest EXP system" -- the more you play, the less you get out of playing. Not only that, when people openly started talking about this, Square Enix bold faced LIED about it to the player base -- claiming that it was all made up by "foreign websites trolling for hits." It took 2ch and the other Japanese fansites breaking NDA en mass and saying "no, that's all true" for them to own up and admit it publically. Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks

And people are absolute idiots if that pacifies them, because the everything works out exactly the same either way. Seriously, if you actually care about this sort of thing what Blizzard did is equivalent to saying "well it wasn't rape, it was surprise sex!"

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

There are certain core elements in FF11 that are the same now as they were 7 years ago (or however long). The same is true of EQ and of WoW. The only MMO I can think of that actually did change core elements over its lifetime was SWG and you saw where that got them. FF14's core elements are deeply, deeply flawed. There's a lot of superficial things they can do to make the game less of a drag (like fixing the UI, controls, crashes, or even adding more quests with plot to alleviate grinding, and implement the transportation system), but it won't help the flawed core elements at all. This is a 2001 MMO in a 2010 world. If they fix all the glaring surface issues, it may find a small niche like the people who still play EQ or UO, but its fundamental flaws will prevent it from ever growing beyond that.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks.

Even more amusing is that they didn't change anything. Initially, there was a 50% penalty for EXP earned beyond a certain point based on how long you were logged off. Players were outraged that playing too long was being penalized. So Blizzard doubled the EXP requirements across the board, gave players double EXP for being offline for a while, and retitled it as Rest EXP. It literally changed nothing aside from wrapping it as a positive benefit instead of a penalty. And the player base loved it.

Re:Well shit

[mark72005]

I saw the major issue with the previous FF MMOPRG as being the absolutely insane level of timesinks built into the game.

There seemed to be a lot of cultural disconnects in the game as I played it. For one thing, you had a huge population of Asian players who were on totally different time schedules, spoke little or no English "no abc la~~", and who seemed on the average to be much, much, much more hardcore than the average American gamer.

I think these cultural differences played into the way the game was built. These players didn't mind obscene levels of timesink built into the game, but for US players, it was a very steep hill to climb in the game and not in line with what we expect. (quests, interesting events, other types of advancement beyond endless grinding)

Re:Well shit

[t4inted]

FF8 had probably the best plot of any FF I've played. Much better than FF7 with the freaking huge sword. But FF8 is also the most ambivalent FF of all of them, so I see where you're coming from. (But really, play it it rocks).

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Also I want to make the following additions/notes regarding my comments, as well as a correction: Final Fantasy 3 (US)/6 (JP) -- and it should be noted that two of the games I listed (FF3/6 and FF7) were made way before Enix ever became involved in Square's affairs. It is NO coincidence that this is the last time the series was relevant.

Enix has a lot more focus on the DQ Series of JRPG releases due to their popularity in Japan. Kids aren't skipping school on FF release day like they are on DQ release day, which is comparable to what English adults do when the world cup is on tv. Lots of hooky being played.

S-E is probably purposely trying to diverge FF from the 'single player' experience AS their multiplayer franchise, something it has never been, and will never be capable of being. FF is STORYLINE DRIVEN. Meaning that it has a definitive start and definitive end. Outside of the very early FF, they were all designed with a cast of characters already chosen -- a full story written that complimented all of them, and a clear end boss and goal.

None of these things exist in an MMO setting and therefore there cannot be a Final Fantasy MMO. It simply can't be accomplished. WoW was based off a game that depicted war in its truest essence, setting up plenty of room to script the brainless, endless style of fighting you find in MMO games like WoW.

Would FF7 have been anywhere near as awesome if 5 minutes after you kicked Sephiroths ass at the end, you had to hurry up and get out so the next group of adventurers could run his dungeon and kick his ass? I doubt it.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

haha Blizzard didn't change anything. They just changed the terminology. Going from 200% to 100% is the same thing as going from 100% to 50%. They changed the base values to they could fool idiots like you.

Re:Well shit

[snkline]

And people are absolute idiots if that pacifies them, because the everything works out exactly the same either way. Seriously, if you actually care about this sort of thing what Blizzard did is equivalent to saying "well it wasn't rape, it was surprise sex!"

That just isn't the way the human mind works. We get pleasure not just from a thing, but from the context of the thing as well

People can be given the same food, and if it is delivered in fast food boxes vs. fine diningware, they will tell you it either tastes so-so, or GREAT! Give people generic cola in it's generic container and they will tell you it isn't as good as Coke or Pepsi. Put that same cola in a Coke or Pepsi container and they can't tell the difference between it and Coke or Pepsi.

These are not delusions people have, we are not just being shallow, the exact same stuff really tastes better to our brains under different circumstances.

The same reasoning applies here, even if the end result is the same, being rewarded for playing less feels better, than being punished for playing more.

Re:Well shit

[drsquare]

There has to be punishment for failure, though.

No, there doesn't. Otherwise WoW wouldn't have kicked the shit out of Everquest and all its ilk. All that matters is fun.

Re:Well shit

[gorzek]

It's probably worth pointing out that Final Fantasy I-IV used most of the same graphics assets, although they got color enhancements for IV in the move from 8- to 16-bit. As far as I'm aware, no graphics assets were reused once the series went 3D. Given that they improved the poly counts and texture details each time, it wouldn't have been possible to reuse the graphics anyway.

FF IX-XII each cost $40 million-plus to develop. VII had a budget around $30M, so presumably VIII was somewhere in that area. I can't find budget figures for the (S)NES entries but I seriously doubt any of them cost more than a few million to make, and the original was created as Square was near bankruptcy and might have been their last game had it not sold well.

XIII is already being touted as one of the most expensive video game flops of 2009/10. If only they'd spend some of those tens of millions focusing on solid gameplay rather than seeing how much pretty CGI they can pack into it.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Figuring out how to use VI prior to getting angry enough to smash your own skull doesn't count.

Re:Well shit

[ByOhTek]

Oh, there is difficulty and skill involved in this game.

But when the difficulty is due to UI screwups or simple, tedious, grindfests, then the difficulty is more a problem for the non-crappy gamers than the crappy gamers.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Bliz is pretty upfront about these things. The developers spell out what they do and the reason they do it. They'll make changes exactly like the EXP one you describe and say "Its the same, but feels better this way" and most people agree.

You forget one thing about rested EXP - You have to be in certain areas when you logout to get the bonus. Like an inn, or a major city. This brings the players 'back home' before they log and really establishes the towns and cities as population centers, which I think is a really important part of the game. Otherwise people just logout anywhere and the population is just sparse. Or ad-hoc gatherings form around dungeons, etc.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, removing the auction house because they thought players didn't like it for some reason, effectively destroying any chance of an in game economy because there is no way (other than manually searching players bazaars) to find anything for sell.

Re:Well shit

[ultranova]

So... you're saying you'd rather feel like a big-time bureaucrat, which is clearly better?

Given a choice between small- and big-time bureaucrat, then heck yeah!

But even more I'd like to feel like the Emperor, the guy who gives orders like "colonize that planet, conquer this solar system at all costs, crush the Endurean Empire if reasonably practical, gather a strong navy in this star system and inform me when done" and then let the bureaucrats (AI) deal with the details. That way the game could have complex economy and politics and consequently more depth, yet it would avoid getting into micromanaging some farm world's production. Distant Worlds is a step in that direction, but the UI is still insufficient.

I'd also like to see internal politics in a Civ/Orion-style game. Why don't I have allies, supporters, enemies, even covert rebels? The games keep track of each citizen (population unit) anyway, so why not model them a bit more deeply? That way, when my internal agents learn that there's a Rebel in my small colony world, I Caligula the Second could decide to bomb it to smithereens rather than send the secret police down there and risk the rebel fleeing.

The throne of Orion sits empty, and whoever defeats the Guardian and takes it recovers ancient and lucrative markets, gaining a definitive edge over their competitors. But I guess the Bad Game Rays are still too powerful for current generation designers to overcome...

Re:Well shit

[Dunega]

The major difference between the two:

Exhaustion penalty - Eventually you earn 0 xp for killing a mob.
Rest Bonus - You always earn xp for killing a mob, maybe not as much as when you were rested, but still some.

Rest bonus doesn't penalize you for playing "too long."

Over a short timeframe I agree, the difference is minimal, but you can't say there is no difference as one of the two systems has a hard limit on how much xp you can earn before the limit resets.

Right now FF14 has absolutely no end game content so SE is stuck with the Exhaustion penalty as they need a way to hard limit how much people who are still playing can advance before they add some content for them to do once they reach the level cap.

Re:Well shit

[Dragoness Eclectic]

I have not played FFXI or FFXIV, but I play Everquest 1. Except for graphics , it sounds like this game would fail next to today's EQ1. (EQ has been quietly evolving over time, picking up useful features from other games. It's not the game you or your parents played in 1999).

Their Market area with retainers sounds as retarded as EQ's Bazaar (I have to keep to a character logged-in to sell stuff? WTF?), but at least EQ's bazaar has a good solid Search function. EQ also was one of the first MMORPGs to introduced custom UIs; for a game not to have a customizable UI isn't promising. Even EVE lets me change color schemes and scale fonts! (EVE also has a menu-happy interface, but it works in EVE, possibly because all the click-delve is handled client side.)

Re:Well shit

[sabt-pestnu]

works out exactly the same either way.

Not true.

...For the subsequent seven thresholds, players will earn skill/experience points at a gradually decreasing rate, eventually reaching a rate of zero. Nobuaki Komoto

Whereas in World of Warcraft, "Rested XP" is a resource that provides entirely additional XP - on top of 'base XP' - until exhausted. That is, there is a base experience reward level.

More, the Rested XP applies to only particular kinds of experience gains, where (as near as I can tell), FFXIV fatigue affects all experience gains equally.

Re:Well shit

[bigstrat2003]

WotLK removed all difficulty in questing...

I can't agree with this at all. Questing in WoW, from the day I started playing (which was March '05... I feel old), has always been easy as fuck (with a few notable exceptions like the Rhok'Delar quest). So have 5-mans (both normal and, post-2.1, heroics). The only content that was ever really hard was raids and pre-nerf heroics. WoW is a great game, but it's never been a hard game at all.

Re:Well shit

[bigstrat2003]

You must live in opposite land, sir. FF8 had an OK plot (although not great), but not terrible. On the other hand, FF12 really did indeed have a terrible plot. Nothing interesting ever happened in that game, I only finished it just so that I didn't have the shame of not finishing FF12 before FF13 came out (and I only made that mark by a couple of weeks).

Re:Well shit

[bigstrat2003]

I don't find FF8's plot all that great, but the gameplay was so good. Yes, it made all your characters essentially homogeneous, but the junction system was so damn much fun to play with.

On the other hand, FF7's plot was amazing and the gaming gods will be smiting you for your heresy shortly. ;)

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I understand, the alt-tab thing was an anti-cheat. Originally, FF11 couldn't be played in a window, and they never bothered to fix the alt-tab thing after adding a windowed mode. Completely braindead, but that's Square-Enix for you. They've really suffered these last ten years..

Re:Well shit

[Chardish]

For example, FF13's dungeon design was vastly simplified, to the point that 99.99% of all dungeons in the game are single straight corridors, with no side paths nor possible ways to get lost. They're very pretty, but it's also very similar to playing "Final Fight: The RPG" -- walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight... This is indicative of a group of executives who have a very, very poor opinion of their target audience as a whole - "Today's gamers aren't smart enough to figure out a maze, make it a straight line."

Look, I'm not a fanboy - I hated FF8, never touched FF11, and thought FF5 and the NES titles were largely forgettable. But I've got to say something about this "linearity is bad" mentality.

Look at the FPS genre: the earliest examples were very nonlinear (W3D, Doom, Quake, etc.), providing the player with very little information about the environment. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 come along, providing the player with a completely linear experience with very little real choices for exploration, and get lauded as some of the finest games ever. Those who originally thought that exploration was a necessary part of the genre were proven wrong.

FF13 was an attempt to see if the same principle worked with RPGs. The answer is: it's mixed. On the one hand, the path forward never seems confusing or unclear, which is a mechanic consistent with the narrative (the protagonists always have a clear mission and destination in mind.) However, the lack of meaningful actions to take during the non-battle sequences (your choices are basically "advance to the next battle/plot point" or "open the menu") makes time in the field seem wasted or unnecessary. I hope future entries in the series (and JRPGs in general) take lessons from the game - the compromise seems to be "have a clear path forward, with optional activities available down alternate paths that clearly indicate that they are asides from the main quest."

Re:Well shit

[Khyber]

"1. Customizable UIs."

Hi, most FPS games would like to have a chat with you, since they've had adjustable and removable HUD elements and interfaces for a LONG time.

"2. Fast-travel options."

Hi, Fallout 3 called and said "step over."

"3. Multiple character slots."

I can get unlimited character slots across multiple servers for Maple Story, no charge.

"4. Sane billing options."

See Maple Story.

"5. Local servers"

See my FPS argument above.

"6. Voice chat. They've already said they will never add this."

Almost every UT2 and idTech4 and Source game has built-in voice comms.

"7. Playing with other players. Creating groups with other players is currently broken and will prevent you from completing quests or earning XP."

Overall, it sounds like most MMORPGs suck. I think I'll stick with my FPS games and pray for an actual story instead of having to grind my ass off in order to see the lack of a story.

Re:Well shit

[nschubach]

I always hated voice chat. Sure, it's nice for cooperating in raids, but it detracts so much from the world of the game.

I also feel the same about fast travel. I'd rather the devs work on content from newb to max in a particular area and "restrict" people to playing in the same general vicinity their whole playtime while not allowing them to port all over the world because their guild is doing X. You should be able to travel to a new area, but it should be dangerous/expensive/both. Items/resources should be commodities from one area to the next. If someone is going to risk there neck to get an axe from X dungeon to the other side of the world, they should be able to sell it for a sizable chunk. The same applies to resources. Certain spells should require components from the top of Mount Omgithurts, but they should be powerful spells because of that.

Re:Well shit

[vlueboy]

Regarding the configuration screens on the PC side: that's a very old design flaw.
I own FF7, their first FF series PC game. I bought it about 3 years after its launch, but it seems complaints had not been raised loudly enough. I wasn't bothered back then because it was one of my first 3D PC games.

I played FF11 (online like FF14,) and remember the installer and the menus taking long. Around the same time, I got City of Heroes, and remember that everything regarding resolutions and so on, was done in the client. Heck, Unreal Tournament (1999 or so), saw wise to not "geek out" forcing us to configure it from the OS.

Another thing I hope they're not still doing is playing old MIDI files for background music. Back in FF7 / PC they botched the final boss theme because their orchestrated, song for the end of the world with magnanimous vocals was just a MIDI missing the vocals and the original reverb and feeling. They did force you to install a Yamaha Player, which is how they emulated the feel of the original, but didn't sound like the raw WAV renditions from the playstation vocals, required processing power, and I remember had some licensing expiration date.

Square Enix's Japanese development needs more American devs. Not in the game idea teams, but in their usability and GUIfication teams.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you the rest, but FF12's plot was actually pretty strong if heavily compressed. Also, Vaan wasn't really the main character, and wasn't intentionally metrosexual. He's supposed to be a street urchin. he's also the Ishmael of the story. Basically once you get the rest of your party assembled, Vaan fades into the background, and (unfortunately for everyone who liked her,) Penelo stops talking altogether. I wouldn't be surprised if they added him in for "youth appeal" but playing as an outside observer is kind of a motif that Final Fantasy has been using a bit lately. Now in Revenant Wings you play as Vaan and his scrappy young band of sky pirates, he's definitely the main character there and the game has a totally different feel to it.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

But seriously: 10-2 is just 10 with a new mission package.

AND blatant Japanese-style fanservice! That makes it WAY more important than anything else you mentioned! Why, those others aren't even Japanese!

</sarcasm>

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you misunderstand: everything listed are advances that every MMO out there has.

Except the two Final Fantasy ones.

Those would be the advances that Final Fantasy XIV is ignoring.

Re:Well shit

[tsm_sf]

Square-Enix is just not in touch with what makes a game good as a game. They have a knack for compelling stories, and they have a solid art-design team, but these aren't enough to make a good game.

I think every one of SE's games has come with a moment when I wondered if any of them actually play video games.

Re:Well shit

[Cloud K]

It's not the game your parents played in 1999

That is how I read the sentence (without the "you or") and felt suitably old!

In some ways XIV sounds very much like EQ from 1999. Basic interface (clunky and non-customisable at the time), no clear definition of where to go or what to do etc. Thing is most of the rest of the MMORPG world including EQ itself has moved far far along since then!

The UI issues don't surprise me too much. Square(Soft|Enix) have never exactly been great at PC stuff, as I remember from the bug-ridden VII, VIII and the hours of hell I went through making XI not look like an old Amiga game or control like whoever ported it never once sat in front of the keyboard and tried it. They should probably stick to the consoles.

Re:Well shit

[_KiTA_]

Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.

Those games are good probably because Square Enix only published them.
Dragon Quest 9 was developed by Level 5, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 by Tose and Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes of Light by Matrix Software.

Actually not exactly, at least for the DQ games. The same "dream team" -- Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Koichi Sugiyama headed the DQ9 and DQMJ2 projects. They did have other teams do the grunt work programming, but the executive decisions were all done by the same team that has done every Dragon Quest game since DQ1 on the MSX/NES. They've been using other teams for the "grunt work" for years now.

That's why they're all so traditionalist and, no coincidentally, why they're all so good.

Re:Well shit

[Shadukar]

yeah where is it now ? at the top a giant pile of money that's only getting bigger as subscriber numbers are actually increasing (even at a low point in the expansion - ie, just before next expansion)

Re:Well shit

[milamber3]

I played EQ from release in 1999 and I would actually say the UI in FFXIV is worse. The lag between opening menus and the need to back out of multiple levels of menu just to access a different area of that menu is unforgivable. It's like something I would have programmed in 6th grade. Also, just because I haven't noticed anyone mention it, the battle targeting and spell casting mechanics are ridiculous. To cast a spell I should not have to click on a mob, wait a second, click on the same mob again, wait a sec, click on the spell, wait a sec, and then click on the mob again.

Re:Well shit

[DaVince21]

It is, it's just a much worse one.

Re:Well shit

[Anonymous Coward]

10-2 doesn't play like 10 at all. It would actually be a pretty good game if it weren't 1) Ridiculously, absurdly easy 2) Filled with J-pop and teen girl drama that makes me roll my eyes and turn it off.

Re:Well shit

[_KiTA_]

Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.

In both cases, you get more XP when rested and less when not rested. Other than psychology there is no difference.

Actually, since the penalty hits 100%, there is a very BIG difference between the two.

In WOW, you run out of Rest XP, you can still progress. (From 200% to 100%.)

In FF14, you run out of Fatigue, you can't gain XP until the timer runs out. (From 100% to 0%.)

You can switch jobs, but good luck trying to explain to your regular party why you can't go out and do anything tonight as your melee class, but if they all want to switch to other jobs so you can level your ranged combat class that's 10 levels lower, that'd be cool. You know, instead of actually progressing at the game.

Which is the ultimate goal here. They don't want people hitting endgame immediately, so they're trying to slow people down.

Re:Well shit

[TriezGamer]

Have you ever played an FPS that is one giant corridor? That's what FF13's design is like. It's not just that it is linear in a broad sense, but linear in a literal sense as well. In this regard, your comparison has no point.

Re:Well shit

[makomk]

Exactly. If there's one thing Half-Life and Half-Life 2 did well, it's concealing the fact that the gameplay is, in fact, completely and utterly linear from the player and giving them the feeling they're actually exploring.

long time vet

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been playing online RPG's since MUD's in junior high and FFXIV was the first time in my game-playing history that I've ever desperately wanted a tutorial.

Re:long time vet

[rainmouse]

All the reviews seem a bit premature to me. Its early days and most MMO's start of crippled by bugs. FFXIV seems to be buggered up by an amazingly counter-intuitive UI and extensive learning curve without any form of tutorial. It seems likely that these will be fixed after reading the feedback that really should have hit them in beta. The reviews of people who actually went to learn the game seem to be enthusiastically positive though those could well be from A&R or marketing of Enix Square.

Re:long time vet

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, these are problems that typically hit MMO's in beta. However, this game is being presented as a final release --- and as a Final Fantasy game. It's a finished game that plays like a beta, so it's being panned. Makes sense to me.

Re:long time vet

[poetmatt]

FFXIV would do "you can't move until you do X action" tutorial though, which basically means that the tutorial would have a minimum amount of time it'd take to go through (probably an hour).

square really fucked menus by not even letting people move around with a menu open.

Re:long time vet

[Yosho]

Premature? If it's ready for a price tag, then it's ready for a review. If I'm going to pay for a game, I expect it to actually be fun. If I wanted to help somebody test something, there are plenty of free games and beta tests out there. Maybe I'll give FFXIV another chance after a year or two, if it's still around.

By the way, there's more against the game other than the terrible UI and learning curve. There's also the terrible player economy, the lack of anything to do other than grinding, the needlessly complex crafting system, the poor graphics optimization, the copy-and-paste environments...

Re:long time vet

[Anonymous Coward]

SE has little excuse. It's not their first MMO - they have eight years of hard lessons from FFXI, though they seem to have chosen not to apply that knowledge to FFXIV.
They also had their public beta, tons of feedback....and they went ahead and released it anyway without addressing hardly any of the issues/concerns people had.

There are the reviewers that -want- to like the game because it's gorgeous, or because they want to be "fair" given that it's an MMO. Doesn't change the simple fact that it was released prematurely, which any observer of the MMO marketplace can tell you is a monumentally stupid thing to do.

Re:long time vet

[Tridus]

If they're selling it, then it's ready for a review. If it needs more time in development, they shouldn't be asking for $15/month to play it.

This is a buggy mess with one of the worst UIs the genre has ever seen. Nothing more. Six months in development won't fix it because they don't seem to understand just how terrible the UI really is.

Someone needs to buy Square a copy of World of Warcraft so they can grasp what a decent UI actually looks like.

Re:long time vet

[RogueyWon]

It's astounding, isn't it? The manual tells you absolutely nothing about how to play the game. It talks you through the process of setting up an account and it has a keyboard command reference guide. There's a tiny bit of lore. But that's as much as you get.

This is not the kind of MMO that walks you through everything from the start. In WoW, when you create a character, you have a bunch of tips pop up on the screen as soon as you log in, and your first quest-giver is right in front of you. Other modern MMOs like Lord of the Rings online follow the same pattern. Older MMOs, like... well... Final Fantasy XI don't help you out like this. But with those games, the flow of what you're meant to do is pretty much readily apparently and an hour or two of exploration and trial and error will get you into the flow of things. FFXIV, however, is just mystifying. Now that it's been out for a couple of weeks, there are third party sites that will help you through the worst of the learning curve, but you will still spend a substantial portion of your time utterly mystified. And not in a good way.

It's not helped by the fact that the UI is an absolute atrocity. FFXI's interface has dated badly. It was always designed for cross-compatibility with consoles and it feels awfully shabby compared with the slick experience you get from WoW (especially with some nice - and fully ToS-compliant - 3rd party addons). As somebody who has been a hardcore player of (but subsequently kicked the habit of) both FFXI and WoW, what I wanted to see from FFXIV was an game that took the core strengths of FFXI, such as the rich combat system, the job/subjob system and the willingness to trust the players to manage the economy to a greater degree than in WoW-clones, and marries it with the improvements that WoW made to the genre, such as accessibility, interface and variety of gameplay. FFXIV spectacularly fails to deliver anything like this. It sacrifices FFXI's strengths (the subjob system is gone and there isn't even an auction house), while learning next to nothing from WoW and its clones.

Re:long time vet

[ADRA]

Oh man, I got open beta and quit after 2 days. Thank the gods that I never paid for it! Once I got the painfully frustrating patcher finished, and once I got to the point where I could figure out the damn controls (after caving to get a damn gamepad for my PC RPG), I was confronted with a straight-forward kill quest. The map was poor, but I eventually figured out where to go. Oh, look there's a squirrel. I'm going to kill it. Fire fire fire, I die... .. . Nothing happens, and there's no indication of how I can respawn if there even is a respawn in this. Wow, deleted.

This was pretty much the worst gameplay experience I've had in years. There's no wonder it was such a short dance.

Re:long time vet

[Torvac]

but ffxiv is not crippled by loads of bugs, its just that there is not a lot to be buggy at all. its just unfinished. a nice tech demo/alpha. and yes i took the pain and played a botanist to 22 before i noticed i cant finish the story quests as a botanist and gave up. this game needs at least 1 year full time feature completion, not live team fixes. dont know if anyone mentioned the stupid multi class system yet, that allows you to change your class, but NOT to your attributes with a change. im the strongest mage now with little mana. thats just one of the many things ingame that are in theory nice, but done in a braindead fashion, done by complete mmo game design nubs.

Re:long time vet

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. Pretty bad when I'm upset there's no tutorial to sit through.

Y'know...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

I haven't even bothered with FF XIV. I do have XIII, and it hasn't captured me like the previous games have -- even X. I love the hell out of Final Fantasy, and my favourite games of all time are pretty much all of them up until X.

The point of my post, though, is that they could make another 16 bit version of the game like FFIV or FFVI, and I'd still play it because those games had amazing story lines. The story in XIII was more confusing than anything for quite some time. It took me a while just to figure out WHAT was happening, much less why I was interested in playing it.

I spend most of my time searching for good old SNES RPGs on the Internet because most of the new ones spent more time making the special moves look pretty and less time making the story interesting and in-depth.

Re:Y'know...

[ooshna]

Come on the story in VII was like a crazy Quentin Tarantino flick mix with M. Night Shamalan.

Re:Y'know...

[neumayr]

XII seems to be missing from your list. If you haven't already, you should check it out.

Re:Y'know...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

I have it in a box somewhere. I've played it, and intend to play it through, but the battle system is just infuriating.

And a story I cared about still hadn't jumped out at me after a fair bit of gameplay -- I figured it would given more time, like X did, I just never got there (yet).

Re:Y'know...

[Smauler]

FFXII is probably my favourite (been playing since VII). It starts constricted, but once you get gambits set up, it becomes great. Before you get far, though, check online for which chests not to open, so you can get the Zodiac Spear (in the history of SE stupid design decisions, this rates as no. 1 IMO). I _loved_ the story and characters, and _loved_ the fact it was so open (after a certain point). I also loved the battle system, your mileage obviously varies though. FFXIII was way too linear for my liking.

Graphics over gameplay

[koreaman]

Haven't played FF XIV, but the issue plaguing XIII was the insistence of the developers on having a beautifully-rendered world full of gorgeous eye candy.

Turns out you don't have enough space on a standard PS3 DVD to make a beautifully-rendered world full of gorgeous eye candy that is as open and expansive as FF players have come to expect. Result: one of the most boring, linear games I've ever played. In fact FF XIII is more like watching a several-days-long film than playing an interactive game.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[ProppaT]

I don't think that's the reason for FFXIII's relative failure at all. You can always multi-disc games, so space isn't an issue.

The issue was the convoluted story. The game was intentionally linear through most of the game because of the way they tried to push the story. I'll give them a little credit...I see what they were trying to do and it might have worked if the story and characters were stronger. Instead of being excited about the characters and having the linear gameplay push a sense of urgency, most disliked most of the characters and got tired of trying to figure out what l'cie, fal'cie, etc. was, who you were, who you were routing for, etc. You went far too long without really developing any skills, as well.

Linear doesn't have to be bad, it just has to be interesting and have a strong story and battle system to follow. Both of these put me to sleep. And, while the game was beautiful, very little about it screamed Final Fantasy to me.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that PS3 games are on Blu-ray, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[zegota]

I loved Final Fantasy XIII, thank you very much.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[tygerstripes]

FF XIII is more like watching a several-days-long film than playing an interactive game.

Ever played Dreamfall...?

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[supersloshy]

The PS3 uses Blu-ray discs, which hold WAY more than your standard PS2 DVD or Wii disc. For a comparison, note that the game was also released on the Xbox 360 in multi-disc DVD format, and that DVDs hold about 8GB of data, while Blu-ray discs usually hold around 50GB (dual-layer). The problem with XIII's linearity wasn't the disc space, but rather mis-guided direction. Prettiness over playability, storytelling over customization, linearity over non-linearity.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[frosty_tsm]

I second this. I feel like FFXIII did what FFXII tried to do with the gambits (which ended up not being enjoyable for me). In a battle I can focus on strategy instead of tactics. I'm curious to see what they take from FFXIII when they do FFXV.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

And the 360 managed to fit this onto 3 DVDs and it still looked good, so I don't think space was the issue at all.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved Final Fantasy XIII, thank you very much.

Not everyone has taste. Anyone who liked FF13 is an idiot, pure and simple. I'll give you a pass if you claim to like the story or the visuals, but the gameplay part is just plain bad.

Even the most linear of JRPG allows for character customization. FFXIII didn't, but made you go through the motions ANYWAY. The whole "crystillium" thing was a joke. Either you followed their predefined path, or you got nothing. The "other options" cost so much CP for so little benefit that there was just no reason to use them. We're talking things like "500 CP: +200 HP" versus "3000 CP: +10HP". Not a hard choice.

But back to the main point, what has caused Final Fantasy to lose the magic?

That's simple: none of the people that made Final Fantasy what it is are still at Square. They've all moved on.

And so instead what you have are a bunch of people trying to cash in on the corpse of a dead series. None of the people who knew what they were doing remain.

Hell, Final Fantasy XIV isn't a Final Fantasy - there are NO Final Fantasy elements in it. The job system? No. The magic system? No. Standard items? Nope. There's just nothing in the game that says "Final Fantasy" other than things like chocobos thrown up as static background elements. Nothing you do says Final Fantasy.

It says a lot that Final Fantasy XI is a superior game to XIV when all XI did was take EverQuest and replace things with Final Fantasy names.

Oh, and add cat girls.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[c-reus]

If it doesn't have a character called Cid, it's not Final Fantasy game. As simple as that.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[DrXym]

Turns out you don't have enough space on a standard PS3 DVD to make a beautifully-rendered world full of gorgeous eye candy that is as open and expansive as FF players have come to expect. Result: one of the most boring, linear games I've ever played. In fact FF XIII is more like watching a several-days-long film than playing an interactive game.

The GTA series managed to cram a detailed city in a DVD so I don't believe that. Then you have Oblivion and Fallout 3 which do pretty much the same for RPGs. The reason Final Fantasy is so linear has less to do with available resources than the genre. Japanese RPGs are virtually by definition linear, expository, cutscene heavy, repetitive and turn based (for combat). Frankly I don't see why the series is held in such regard especially outside of Japan.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Idiomatick]

360 uses hd dvds which hold 30G(dual layer)...

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It wasn't flawless, but the story and characters were quite good, the art direction and music stellar, and the battle system probably the best in the series. I think a lot of people didn't give it a proper chance since it's so different from what you'd expect from a Final Fantasy game.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Khyber]

"Turns out you don't have enough space on a standard PS3 DVD"

That's why they put it on a Blu-Ray disc, duh.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[ultranova]

The game was intentionally linear through most of the game because of the way they tried to push the story. I'll give them a little credit...I see what they were trying to do and it might have worked if the story and characters were stronger.

Final Fantasy has three elements: exploration, battles, and story. Story determines what areas you can explore at any particular time, and key scenes are usually associated with area transitions. This makes the overall structure like a series of large halls (story states, where you can explore) connected by corridors (key events) populated by orcs (fight marathons, boss fights).

The thing is, if you remove exploration, you are left only with a bunch of cutscenes connecting a series of fights together. That might work as a game if the fight system was good, but Final Fantasy's system has traditionally been pretty boring, to put it bluntly; it hasn't really evolved since NES times. The fights simply aren't interesting enough to carry the game on their own; with no breather areas to be explored, the only thing to do besides watching cutscenes is to select "attack" or "magic" from a menu over and over again.

Disclaimer: the last FF I played was IX, so this might have changed since then. But I don't think it has; and even if it has, removing exploration would still cripple the game compared to leaving it there. Exploration helps pace the game, by letting the player decide when he's ready for the next Big Dramatic Moment, rather than forcing the game designer try to guess how many undramatic - and thus by definition pointless - fights he has to go through before the next cutscene happens.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who takes something as subjective as the enjoyment of a game and attaches the word "idiot" to anyone who disagrees with them is... well, honestly, an idiot. I enjoyed my time in FFXIII. No, it wasn't the best in any fashion other than visuals and music, but it was still an enjoyable ride.

To clarify, I don't consider you an idiot for not liking it. I consider you an idiot for labeling other people as idiots based on whether or not they agree with your opinion of the enjoyability of a video game.

As to whether or not FFXIV is a Final Fantasy, I disagree. Final Fantasy elements? Besides Chocobos, there are Moogles, airships, crystals up the wazoo (both dropped crystals and the humongous aetherytes at the camps and cities) and monsters (I just saw a malboro the other day, looked pretty cool). And complaining that the job system is different... What, seriously? Because all the other Final Fantasy games had such incredibly similar systems of jobs and character progression, right?

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved Final Fantasy XIII, thank you very much.

Not everyone has taste. Anyone who liked FF13 is an idiot, pure and simple.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. (Did I really say that?)

The idiot is the one calling someone an idiot for their opinion. Personally I disliked FF13 for many of the reasons posted all over this thread but if someone else likes it, good for them. I myself can enjoy a "bad" game simply because it is simple and it passes the time.

captcha: hateful

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Psmylie]

If you're talking about XIII, there was Cid Raines. If you're talking about XIV, I haven't seen a Cid, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[thrash242]

I did too. I think most of the people that "don't like it" probably didn't play it for more than a few hours, if at all.

It's linear, yes, but citing that as a criticism in a JRPG is akin to citing "too much punching and kicking" as bad in a fighting game. It really boggles my mind that people are saying a JRPG is bad because it's too linear. JRPGs are, by and large, very linear. In fact, I would say extreme linearity is a defining characteristic of a traditional JRPG. Most admittedly have more of a perception of openness than FF13 did, but that doesn't change how linear they actually are. To me, being able to walk around and explore a static world and find optional treasures and do some mini-games doesn't make a game less linear, it just means it has distractions from how linear it is. That said, the game opens up a lot later on. Gran Pulse is a huge open area with all sorts of side-things to do, most of which I didn't bother with when I played it.

Another thing is that FF games have changed drastically in every incarnation. Some people seem to want FF7 over and over again for some reason.

I played through FF13 when it came out and enjoyed every minute of it, and I should point out that I've been playing JRPGs since Dragon Warrior/Quest 1 and FF1, lest I be accused of being a neophyte. I very much liked the story, the characters, and the battle system, and to me, those are the things that make a JRPG, not mini-games, optional dungeons, and getting lost in a static, mostly empty world full of random encounters.

In short, I think many people went in with a preconceived idea of it being bad rather than just playing it and enjoying it for what it is. FF13's existence doesn't nullify FF7 or whichever installment you prefer. If you want that experience, go back and play that game. FF13 is something different (like each game is), and it's a perfectly good game for it.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[lkeagle]

Final Fantasy has three elements: exploration, battles, and story.

WRONG! Final Fantasy does have three elements, but they are: Magic, Chocobos, and some dude named Cid!!!

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Totenglocke]

Actually, from what I heard it was the limitations of the 360 that caused FFXIII to be so trimmed down because since Square released the game on both platforms they had to shoot for the lower end 360's storage capacity and leave PS3 players shafted. Why they didn't just target it for the PS3 and for the minority buying it on 360 have a 4+ disc game, I'll never understand...

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[ultranova]

WRONG! Final Fantasy does have three elements, but they are: Magic, Chocobos, and some dude named Cid!!!

Those are story elements, not gameplay elements. And you forgot the girl who's actually a half-Esper/Ancient/Summoner but has forgotten her heritage. Yup, FF owes a lot to bad fanfiction :).

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[bigstrat2003]

Besides, it's not even like FF13 is the first game in the series to be very linear. It's not much more linear than FF10 was.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anubis IV]

You're seriously arguing that size limitations with Blu-ray discs is what held that game up? First off, no. Second, PS3 games haven't even reached the point where they're using multiple BDs yet (a standard BD holds 50GB, last I checked), though Kojima has publicly stated he ran into some limitations with capacity for MGS4, so it'll likely happen eventually. Third, there's nothing stopping Square-Enix from using multiple discs, as they did with the 360 version of FF13, which used three DVDs.

That game had issues, for sure, but lack of capacity on the BD was not one of them, and using that as an excuse for the piss-poor game design is misleading.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[mister_playboy]

Disclaimer: the last FF I played was IX, so this might have changed since then.

The battle-on-field-map/Gambit system in XII made combat much more fun. The characters in that game were a bit lacking, but I got several hundred hours of enjoyable gameplay out of that title. Lots of interesting locations to visit and items to collect/grind for.

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[lkeagle]

I was joking about the elements that (I believe) are found in *EVERY* FF game!

Do you think magic is a story element? I tend to think of it as a gameplay element as well, while chocobos and some dude named Cid are character elements. You can ride chocobos, so they're gameplay elements (they rarely have anything to do with actual plot/story).

Cid has been the element that changes around the most. Sometimes he's a NPC, sometimes you get to tell him to bash things with a hammer, sometimes he's a jackass bad dude... But he's always there!

Re:Graphics over gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kotaku.com/5415295/final-fantasy-xiii-gets-its-cid

Buddy of mine picked it up

[Pojut]

It feels like they just plain gave up and didn't want to take the time to polish it. The now-infamous Gametrailers review is pretty much spot on.

If this and pretty much every Final Fantasy game since VII have proven anything, it's that this series needs to just go away. It's far too late for a graceful death, but put it out of its misery.

YMMV, just my opinion, etc apply.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[koreaman]

Come on, 9 is still fun :)

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[jandrese]

Hell, even with the story and minigame problems X was still pretty good.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Pojut]

Eh, it's ok...I just feel like the "Fantasy" has been ripped from the series. I find there is far too much focus on technology. I realize the older games had a focus on technology as well, but it just felt different.

It's a shame, because the imagery and character designs since Final Fantasy went 3D have been stunning...but the games don't really go past eye candy for me. Everything just seems to be style over substance when it comes to Final Fantasy.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[ProppaT]

Well, the joke has been since we learned that the PC version was going to pre-date the PS3 version by half a year that the PC version was nothing but a giant beta test for the real PS3 version. It looks like this turned out to be true. I played the beta for a couple hours and gave up. Hopefully they can salvage the rest from this train wreck. It has potential...it just still feels like a beta.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Swarley]

I couldn't get into 9. The protagonist is just such an asshat. I'm assuming that he "grows" through out the game as always, but I just couldn't stomach it long enough to get that far. FF protagonists always start the game as something of an asshole/douche bag/whiney brat/etc. and then grow up during the game, but 9's was just petty and annoying.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[MBGMorden]

I don't know. Despite starting the series with 7, I actually enjoyed 8 through 10 more. YMMV I guess. It's been downhill from there though. I only got about halfway through X-2 before giving up due to the general silliness of it. 11 I skipped because I wasn't interested in online play. Played 12 for a few hours, gave up on it. Did the same with 13.

I think to some degree, it's culture clash. Not saying they're wrong, or mocking them, but certain things that end up in Japanese games just seem incredibly odd to my western mind. In X-2 I don't want to have a concert and play dress-up while saving the world. It just comes off as something I would be embarrassed if any non-gamer types saw me playing. There's also the oddity that so many of what are supposed to be strong male characters are portrayed very effeminately. Kuja from FF9 was the worst here. First time I saw him it was hard to take the character seriously. It almost felt like I was watching a parody or something.

Like I said, it's just a cultural divide, and neither side is right or wrong, but I just don't find the games appealing as I once did. Particularly as I've gotten older my ability to suspend disbelief has waned, and I just can't accept certain oddities anymore.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Was 9 the one with the sword gun thing or the protagonist with the tale? I can't remember. I never played any of the old ones before 7, but I thought 7 was epic and played through it three times. The third time getting Knights of the Round or whatever it was.

I enjoyed 8 except didn't like the ending or how the enemies leveled up with you. I think 9 was the one where it just jumped back and forth all the time and I never finished it. I loved 10 and played through it twice. Haven't played one since.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Spatial]

Ha ha ha!

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[TriezGamer]

I fully agree with this. Final Fantasy games in the 8-bit and 16-bit era always had a little bit of a steampunk flavor in their settings, but never enough to remove the 'fantasy' feel from the game.

Final Fantasy VII dropped you in the middle of Midgar, and didn't feel like a fantasy at all until you were well outside of the city, approximately 1/3 of the way into the game. Even afterward, it never settled quite right with me.

Final Fantasy VIII had the gardens -- massive, mobile behemoth-cities that felt far too modernized compared to the majority of the game world's setting. The pseudo sci-fi last 25% of the game doesn't help in that regard either.

Of the single-player games, Final Fantasy IX was probably the heaviest on the 'fantasy' scale after the SNES era, but it suffered from generally unlikable characters, a story that was passable but nothing spectacular, and a final boss that didn't seem to make any coherent sense in the context of the plot.

Final Fantasy X left a bizarre disconnect between various aspects of it's plot -- it seems to have modern technology mixed in with a lot of magic -- which is alright, I suppose, but it never 'felt' fantasy-like to me. The additional mind-screw of a storyline didn't help it one bit.

Final Fantasy XI played high fantasy pretty much completely straight, had an epic storyline that shamed all of the recent Final Fantasy offerings, and no one cared because it was an MMORPG that took several hundreds of hours to actually experience the plots it offered. Based on my experiences with the beta of XIV, it appears to be the same way.

Final Fantasy XII was a decent attempt at making a fantasy game again in places, but giant fleets of modern-looking mechanical airships ruined it, even if those airships are supposedly powered by magic. The airships in the older Final Fantasy offerings were more like zeppelins than aircraft.

Final Fantasy XIII ... ugh. See FFVII.

It's not impossible that I'm just getting jaded, but it feels like the fantasy left this series a long time ago.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Wonko the Sane]

protagonist with the tale

Every Final Fantasy protagonist has a tale but not all of them have tails.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud's gunblade was in FFVIII and Zidane had the tail in FFIX

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[elrous0]

here's also the oddity that so many of what are supposed to be strong male characters are portrayed very effeminately.

Every time I see a male Japanese game character, I can't help but think of Xandir from Drawn Together. He's a Link-esque videogame character who starts out the series proclaiming that he's on a "Never-ending quest to save my girlfriend!" only to quickly admit later that he's actually gay (much to the surprise of absolutely no one).

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Securityemo]

I haven't played through 9 either, but he's "warm", almost like a foil to to cloud and squall, who where a psychotic emotionless stoic and a neurotic emotionless stoic respectively.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? Learn to think you subhuman, censorship-loving piece of shit moderator.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki]

Zidane was imo one of the more tolerable main characters among the modern games since FF7 came out. I think only Cloud is as good as him, really. Squall is utterly boring and a complete annoying... Argh. Tidus is bland as hell and wth his outfit is ridiculous. I haven't played FFXII and FFXIII though so they might change my mind...

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Theoboley]

Cloud's gunblade was in FFVIII

Squall's Gunblade - FTFY

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Jaysyn]

If this and pretty much every Final Fantasy game since VII have proven anything, it's that this series needs to just go away.

Aside from Crisis Core, Dissidia & Final Fantasy Tactics, I agree completely.

I guess FFVIII wasn't too horrible, but I lost interest in it quickly.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Idiomatick]

I think that has to do with the 3d era. I mean ... When the graphics and characters are less realistic you don't expect the same level of human.. ness. Past laugh scenes didn't have great acting either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63Zyimc9VAs&fmt=18

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[neumayr]

Dude, I am a gamer and would laugh at you for playing X-2.
You have a point with Kuja though. Though Sephiroth isn't any more macho than him. I suppose having androgynous villains shows how far removed from humanity they are. FFXII, at least as far as I can tell, has no such characters.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Pojut]

Sorry, should have specifically pointed out numbered entries in the series. I agree with you about Crisis Core, Dissidia, and Tactics :-)

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Hatta]

If this and pretty much every Final Fantasy game since VII have proven anything, it's that this series needs to just go away. It's far too late for a graceful death, but put it out of its misery.

It's not dead yet. It just needs to be put in some younger hands. Look at how well Dragon Quest did in the hands of Level 5. There are plenty of developers out there who can make a badass JRPG. Give the project to someone who grew up on the SNES Final Fantasies and it can be saved.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[loufoque]

FFVIII, FFX, FFX-2 and FFXII were very good games to me.
But then, I've found the FFXII battle system to be the best ever in the series, so I'm probably not the norm.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Jaysyn]

I'd love a new FFT, but I'm afraid they'd just ruin it.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[loufoque]

This is what you get when you play a game dubbed.

Real gamers use the original audio.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[OldeTimeGeek]

You're right. It didn't seem right when I typed it, but I left it anyway. Should have looked it up rather than rely upon memory...

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[bolthole]

Go play valkyria chronicles.
In a way, even better than ff tactics.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[genner]

I think that has to do with the 3d era. I mean ... When the graphics and characters are less realistic you don't expect the same level of human.. ness. Past laugh scenes didn't have great acting either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63Zyimc9VAs&fmt=18

The first scene called for the characters to practice fake laughter and suck at it. The acting was perfect and Kefka was meant to look like a deranged idiot.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[genner]

Zidane was imo one of the more tolerable main characters among the modern games since FF7 came out. I think only Cloud is as good as him, really. Squall is utterly boring and a complete annoying... Argh. Tidus is bland as hell and wth his outfit is ridiculous. I haven't played FFXII and FFXIII though so they might change my mind...

Tidus wasn't the main character. Final Fatasy X was really about Yuna. Tidus was more of a playable narrator.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Theoboley]

Plenty fine. Being that there are *93 different Final Fantasies, it's easy to get names mixed up. High Five on remembering the Gunblade though.

*no, not really.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[ultranova]

Come on, 9 is still fun :)

9 is fun to a point, but at some point the battles start being based mostly on luck, because there's an ever-increasing lag between giving characters commands and them actually doing anything.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[ADRA]

NO, the bedrock of the series is great. What they need is fresh pumping blood from new people to say, hey, we're going to take the series in a *gasp* new direction. As derivative Nintendo rererereremakes are, at least they still make them fun. Final fantasy needs a reboot Fallout style.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Jaysyn]

Looks cool but I don't own, nor do I plan on getting, a PS3. About the only console I play any more is my PSP. Everything else is a PC game.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[butalearner]

About the only console I play any more is my PSP.

Valkyria Chronicles II, then.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Fallingcow]

There's nothing wrong with that scene in X.

The initial laughing's supposed to be bad. They're forcing over-the-top laughter. At the end they laugh for real about how stupid they sounded and it sounds like actual laughter, as it should.

Pretty farking sad scene, actually.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Fallingcow]

I disagree. Yuna is important because she drives many of Tidus' choices, but she's not the main character.

We're with Tidus (more or less) the whole game. Most of the backstory that's focused on any character is focused on Tidus (by way of his dad--the memory sphere things, or whatever they're called, and frequent flashbacks) and Tidus' dad is the end boss. He's the one who grows the most, largely through his interaction with Yuna.

If you're fighting a character's dad at the end of a game, odds are that's the main character.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Luke has no name]

FFVI and VII were the best, IMO. V was -ok-.

Lame post, but I'm at work... I just felt like chiming in since these games meant a lot to me in my younger days.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Shikaku]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi96ucB7ZdI

Edited to be much better.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Dr.Boje]

When the graphics and characters are less realistic you don't expect the same level of human.. ness.

I have to disagree. Even a book, which has no graphics, can make you feel attached to its characters. The trick is capturing the character's essence with words and reflecting that in the graphics. I always feel that a character is more real when the story is well written, not because she may have big hooters or cool-looking equipment.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Jaysyn]

Thanks, I will check it out if my local used games store has it.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[bigstrat2003]

Wait. With an enormous asshat like Steiner in the game, you even had time to think another character was an asshat? Damn, I hate that guy. I almost quit the game because of him.

Zidane wasn't that bad, imo. I thought he was kinda cocky, but he was generally a good-intentioned and likable guy.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[bigstrat2003]

They do take it in new directions (FF12's battle system, FF13's battle system and general departures from accepted series canon like having a complex leveling system and random sidequests in small towns). The problem is that people just don't like those directions. No amount of new blood will protect against that.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

>I think to some degree, it's culture clash. Not saying they're wrong, or mocking them, but certain things that end up in Japanese games just seem incredibly odd to my western mind.

i think this is exactly it. I love the ones people tend to hate. FF10 is easily my favorite with 9 being a close follow up. I've never understood why people hate them.

actually, my favorite is Tactics, but I was talking about main entries only

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Anonymous Coward]

If you go back and look at the first 8 games with an eye toward metaphor, you'll note that there's actually an overarching progression.

The games have the same theme that Lord of the Rings does (the books, not the film): technology provides the easiest means for bad people to do bad things, therefore humanity should move back toward coexisting with nature.

(It's a shame that the films didn't show the final chapter; Sharkey's Revenge. If you haven't read it then you should. Saruman, a beaten old man without true wizardly power, still retains his intelligence and the ability to convince people. He sets evil men to build factories in the Shire, polluting its waters, instilling fear into the hobbits, etc. It also touches on the "you can't go home again" problem that is often experienced by people who go to war. Real storytelling with a real meaning. The movies, not so much.)

The Final Fantasy series began in a totally rustic/medieval themed setting. Very little technology. As it progressed, technology became more and more interwoven with the world. And for what was the technology used? Always for evil. Also the storytellers at Squaresoft became better at telling epic stories with practice. That huge part of FF VII in Midgard you were talking about? The whole purpose of it was to show how evil technology is. And it serves that purpose well, don't you think? Remember meeting "Red XIII"? He was a surgically enhanced dog who begged you to change his name because he couldn't bear to keep anything given to him by the people who did cruel experiments on him. I never change the names of JRPG characters from the defaults, but I did for him. Because he ASKED me to.

The saviour of the world is always magic as derived from Gaea - there's a very strong "back to nature" sentiment.

Then the original creators started leaving...

FF9 was released almost as a publicity stunt - "Hey, we're getting back to our roots! Yeah! Medieval Fantasy!" but as I understand it (haven't played it or any after it except briefly) the arc was broken. Maybe it was finished in the movie "The Spirits Within." ...which is obviously a Final Fantasy movie if you had noticed the arc in the games beforehand, contrary to the howls of YouTube commenters.

But since then I've seen no reason to play them. The overarching theme is gone. Perhaps when "The Spirits Within" tanked, the spirit within the Final Fantasy series died. Its twitching corpse has provided enjoyment for some, but it's almost done.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Megane]

Actually they released it about 3 months early because they thought they had to to compete with the next WoW expansion... which got delayed. And the PS3 version is planned for 6 months after the PC release, but they better get cracking to meet that deadline.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[g_rampage]

Have you tried FFT Advance or A2? From what I understand from die hard fans of the original, they did actually ruin it. I personally did enjoy A2 although it was the first one I played.

Also definitely pick up Valkryia Chronicles 2.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Jaysyn]

Nah, I don't have a DS or whatever those play on.

Re:Buddy of mine picked it up

[Fibe-Piper]

I have to agree with you.

FF7 was garbage and never came close to the hype that surrounded it. I played the "F" out of it though. Grinding needlessly through quests that never tied into anything in the overall storyline. Watching the endless boring & maudlin cut scenes, all with no payoff.

I remember feeling like a straight-up sucker for buying the game, but one positive thing that came out of the experience was that I found out how to upgrade and eventually build my own PCs out of a desire to improve the game's performance. Sadly this was an impossible task.

To each his own

[tomzyk]

Apparently some people feel ripped-off because they paid for something and they ended up not liking it. So they write a bad review.

The rest of us that like it, just play the game. (NO TIME 2 RITE REVIEWZ!!!!! MUST LVL!!111!)

Re:To each his own

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you are one of those nerds who likes to feel superior to or at least different from most other nerds by joining a tiny subculture inside of a shitty game and sticking with it. Then you enjoy defending said shitty game, while everyone else just plays games that aren't shitty. Just like people who stuck with Everquest after WoW came out.

Re:To each his own

[KovaaK]

Then you enjoy defending said shitty game, while everyone else just plays games that aren't shitty. Just like people who stuck with Everquest after WoW came out.

That's fairly short sighted. Aside from all of the people who invested months worth of playtime in their Everquest characters and didn't want to re-do it in a new game, Everquest's raiding game actually challenged the players to think and be creative. On top of that, if you have large amounts of people not leaving EQ due to the above reasons, then going to WoW means leaving a portion of one's social community behind.

WoW certainly improved upon EQ in many ways, but you are completely failing to understand the situation. I can't believe you got modded up.

Re:To each his own

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Everquest was shitty. It was extremely shitty. WoW fixed practically everything wrong with it. They were responsive to players, unlike the people in charge of EQ. I played both games extensively. I know what I'm talking about.

Do you know who annoyed me most in WoW? The elitist ex-EQ players who couldn't let go of their past. They always talked about their glory-days playing that shitty game. They always implied that they were just better people than everyone else, because they put up with such a shitty game for so long. It was pathetic.
 
And the vast majority of the time, they weren't that good at WoW, but they thought they were awesome. My guess is that they used their EQ past as a crutch for their ego.

Re:To each his own

[tomzyk]

So, you are one of those nerds who likes to feel superior to or at least different from most other nerds by joining a tiny subculture inside of a shitty game and sticking with it. Then you enjoy defending said shitty game, while everyone else just plays games that aren't shitty. Just like people who stuck with Everquest after WoW came out

heh, sounds like you have some issues there buddy.

But to retort:
1. "feel superior" - when did I say anything like that? I just said everyone can have their own opinion and I've only seen negative feedback on those sites, while I know plenty of people that still play the game.
2. "sticking with it" - dude, the game has been out for like 2 weeks. most wouldn't consider "sticking with it" until you at LEAST get out of your initial trial period from when you bought the game.
3. calling FFXIV and EQ "shitty games" and WoW is NOT a shitty game - yeah, you called me "one of those nerds who likes to feel superior" and then you start slinging this. mmmmkay.
4. name-calling - yeah, very mature. (sounds like flame-bait but i'll bite. also, my initial post was marked Troll, and this was marked Insightful. curious.)

I really like FF, but...

[supersloshy]

...this game just never made sense to me the very moment I heard about it, as well as FFXI. I've played I, II, V, VI, VII, IX, X, and the incredibly awesome XII (which people didn't like for being "too different" and "too non-linear"; peh), and it has always boggled me how they could ever translate the Final Fantasy experience to an online game; you can't! You can have the general look-and-feel, but it just isn't a Final Fantasy game, nor a good RPG in general, if the game's an eternal grind-fest. XII, for example, had so much strategy that I rarely saw in real-time-ish RPGs that it didn't feel like a grind-fest at all; I wanted to level up because there were more challenging boss fights and hunts ahead, and that alone, besides the awesome (and thankfully non-overly-melodramatic) storyline, was worth the money for buying the game.

I've tried many MMORPGs, and they're all the same to me. Loosly-jointed quests, repetitive grinding, almost no strategy whatsoever, and high monthly fees that add up to a lot of money compared to your usual $50 100-200-hour single-purchase RPG. If you remove everything that makes a Final Fantasy game good and make it a needlessly-expensive grind-fest with no redeeming value whatsoever (not even a linear storyline), how would you ever expect it to be a good game?

Re:I really like FF, but...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Try NWN2 online play - no monthly fee, so many different custom worlds that you're sure to find something to taste... and both are now dirt-cheap. (And both have decent single player campaigns and expansions.) [Full disclosure: I'm a sometime NWN2 persistent world admin, and I've done some work on NWN2 itself.]

While you won't find many massively populated worlds -- the top servers have ~60-90 online, and the bottom servers have 0-1 online players -- I personally find that's part of the appeal...

Re:I really like FF, but...

[Fallingcow]

this game just never made sense to me the very moment I heard about it, as well as FFXI. I've played I, II, V, VI, VII, IX, X, and the incredibly awesome XII (which people didn't like for being "too different" and "too non-linear"; peh)

Not why I didn't like it. They're all pretty damn linear even compared to other JRPGs, let alone Western games, and they almost always change a bunch of stuff in each new one.

I didn't like it because:
-- The main character, in the sense of the one we're experiencing the story through, was awful. Like, worse-than-Tidus awful.
-- WORTHLESS summons. Lots of work to get them, only to find out that they aren't ever worth bringing out.
-- A boss fights were based 99% on how lucky you were with your super-attacks chains (I don't remember what they were called), with small interludes of "Basch, attack, two others do nothing but heal him" every now and then.
-- Every character, including the worthless main one, had enormous potential, but the writers failed on the follow-through. How do you make Balthier/Fran boring? Somehow they managed.
-- Too-long dungeons with no payoff at the end. Oh, we got five lines of wooden acting, zero character development, and news that something interesting happened--a couple hundred miles away. Hooray. On to the next three-to-four-hour dungeon.
-- The only character that I (barely) gave a shit about by the mid-game disappeared a bit later, never to return to my party.
-- *wooden* "you're being tempted by power", *even more wooden* "oh hey, so I am"; where the hell did that come from? Show don't tell, you incompetent writers!

My wife and I quit playing a couple hours from the end when we discovered that the game was almost over and we were still waiting for *any* story-related payoff for playing. Just watched the end on Youtube, since there wasn't time left for anything else to happen.

On the plus side, the opening video was badass. Had me excited as hell to play it, until about 15 hours in when I realized I'd been tricked.

A step back?

[Bieeanda]

I heard from a friend in the beta, that it was basically Final Fantasy 11 with a fresh coat of paint-- and this was a guy who enjoyed Final Fantasy 11. Given that 11 launched during the Everquest era, when players were treated with total contempt by devs, soloing was a grind almost as agonizing as waiting for a group, and it was easy to lose days' worth of progress in an encounter gone bad, it's not surprising that something in a similar vein would go over very poorly today.

Re:A step back?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't like XI. XI is better is every way except graphics.

The interface is a step backwards, the gameplay is a step backwards, the world is a step backwards.

I always complained that each zone in FFXI was a monotone single-color area - well, FFXIV does this TOO, but the zones are fewer and even larger. So instead of being stuck in a single boring zone for brief periods of time, you're stuck in a boring zone PERMANENTLY.

There's nothing to see. There's nothing to do. You can't group with other players, because that's broken. Leveling up (er, "ranking" up) is broken. Crafting is broken. There's no auction house, so there's no player economy, so even if crafting worked, there's no reason to do it.

The game's been out for less than a month, and there's already absolutely nothing to do in it, and Square Enix has already made it clear that they don't give a shit about player complaints.

No forums, no community feedback, no answers from developers, no acknowledgment of bugs, nothing.

Thank God the open beta was free, otherwise I might have wasted money on this turd.

Re:A step back?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has the feel of 11, but it's EXTREMELY different. Combat is totally different, as is crafting, and hell....even material farming is different. Combat is no longer a "Click attack then sit back" affair. You have to pay attention. Crafting and material gathering are mini-games in and of themselves that require you to pay some sort of attention and in some instances use logic.

As for the contempt by devs, for starters you can't de-level like you can in 11. And the penalty for death? A debuff that sticks on you for 3 minutes. So if an encounter goes bad, you just get up and try again without losing much of anything (time it takes for buff to wear, time it takes to travel back to the spot).

Soloing is actually easy to do now in XIV, and is encouraged now as much as partying is! I'm surprised how easy it is to just pick up and go, once you know what you're doing, without needing a single other person. But a part of me thinks this is a double edged sword. I'm a social person, but with everyone soloing, I'm left activly trying to seek social interaction from the vast majority of people who have taken to soloing. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. :P

It has a long ways to go though...it almost feels as if they released it TOO early without many of the features being ready/active.

Re:A step back?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not at all FFXI redone. FFXI has, over time, been adjusted to be a more player friendly game than it was at launch. FFXIV, if anything, is trying to appeal even more to casual players.

Being too hardcore isn't really the issue. It's a lot more that the game just plain was not ready to be released, but was pushed out the door anyway.

They had a lot of elements of FFXI that should have been moved over, but weren't. As a current player of FFXI, with friends from that game who tried/are playing FFXIV in beta and release, the game isn't FFXI. It has familiar elements (intentionally), such as basically the same races, but the structure is very different.

Re:A step back?

[Lapine]

It isn't like XI. XI is better is every way except graphics.

If your system is a few years out of date, the graphics aren't better either. I could tell there was more detail there, but I had to tone down settings to get the game to run decently so that it ended up actually looking worse than how I could've run FFXI. It also seemed muddier and more bland than FFXI. It does have a more featured character creator though.

My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[dominion]

What happened to Final Fantasy? I grew up with it, the original Final Fantasy was my first RPG, and then Final Fantasy 2, and then, what I believe to be the greatest RPG of all time, Final Fantasy 3/6 came out. Final Fantasy VII was great, and breathtaking, but since then, it's been downhill. Nine was a quick breath of fresh air, but VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour. Ten was super linear (geez, *another* cutscene?), and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls). XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration.

It seems to me that the problem, more than anything, is the failure to dream up a really compelling setting, characters, and plot, and then let the player loose in it. Earlier games had those, but it seems that lately all that they're interested in is new systems of combat and leveling up. There are no villains like Kefka, no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide, no big reveals like Cloud's backstory, no tortured protagonists like Cecil.

In a lot of ways, it's as if they've substituted "cool" for "good". They want a cool story, a cool main character, a cool setting, not good ones, not well developed ones. The potential for storytelling in videogames, from a technological standpoint, it's all there. There's nothing really holding anyone back, but instead, we get flashy graphics and a new battle system, instead of characters we care about. When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff, or Terra almost decide against saving the world, or even the NPC orphan teenage couple obliquely considering an abortion because Kefka had turned the world into a wasteland, that was good storytelling, and I expected it to only get better as technology improved, and it really didn't, at least not for the Final Fantasy series.

It's a shame, and maybe this is harsh, but I consider the Final Fantasy series to be like M. Night Shyamalan movies. Sure, "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were epic, and "Signs" was pretty decent, but at some point you have to give up on things and count yourself as no longer a fan, but a harsh critic.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Anonymous Coward]

Celes, not Rosa.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Rosa from FF2(4) attempt suicide by throwing herself from the cliff? I thought that was Celeste from FF4(6) after the Cid died.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Rydia that did that, not Rosa. Just so you know.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Thrymm]

Well said! I pretty much stopped playing them after VII. VIII didn't play for more than an hour either, and then watched my brother with IX periodically. Have found myself playing the NES original as well as the SNES 2, 3/6 over on the emulator though again. VII deserved a true sequel, or could have ended on the first CD and continued from there. Not some CGI movie sequel or some off shoot Vincent game.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Applekid]

What happened to Final Fantasy is, well, money. The quality you remember and describe is now a "brand."

Aside from a few Japanese directors and producers, the game itself is now almost 100% outsourced from Square. Square-Enix is a publisher and no longer really a developer. The dirty little secret in Japanese game development these days is the top tier names are all outsourcing their stuff to smaller unknown and unproven companies simply to maximize profit. Lousy games that might get released anyway on their own now get a Final Fantasy label slapped onto them to turn a game that ships 500K units into one that ships 5M units. If they spent 4 times the development money for a quality in-house production, sure, they'll ship 10M or more, but it's the law of diminishing returns in action.

It's the same reason why Hollywood right now just pinches off turd after turd of "inspired" movies that are basically movie remakes familiar comic book, television, and even old movie properties. In an increasingly crowded marketplace it's cheaper to get noticed with a familiar name that buyers will recognize than have a critically acclaimed game that the average schmo and his gift-giving grandma won't know about.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[shish]

VII deserved a true sequel

I think that would be really hard to pull off, as the plot wasn't designed for a sequel (thank god -- plots that deliberately don't end are enough to make me boycott a series); A high-def, bug-fixed, otherwise unaltered rerelease however, I'd preorder 10 just to help it happen :-P

(And ditto for FFVI)

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

, and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls)

FFX-2 was not made for tween-girls. It was made for people who like to look at girls in revealing dresses. And for the record, this did not change the fact that it was probably one of the most fun and enjoyable RPGs to be released in years--and not because of the revealing dresses either. Once you get over the farcical setting, it's a great game.

I'm not going to pretend that the FF series hasn't launched some beached whales over the years (FFVIII I'm looking at you), but in general they've usually delivered an enjoyable 50+ hour adventure. Though I've noticed a secular trend towards younger and younger characters and ever more angsty or shallower storylines; or maybe I'm just getting old. It would be nice to get an RPG built for an older demographic every now and again--and no, playing a walking camera in a prescripted world of D20 stats does not count. I want a video game, not a game on a computer.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Millennium]

Nitpick: Celes from FFVI was the one who attempted suicide, not Rosa from FFIV.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Millennium]

This is also true. FFX-2 is actually quite a good game, if you can get past all the friggin fanservice. Unfortunately, said fanservice is so pervasive and damaging that many people can't bring themselves to play, and it's taken to such a ridiculous level that it's hard to blame them for not being able to do so. One of the characters actually wears more clothing during the hot-springs scene than she does for most of the game.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Daetrin]

"XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration."

You know, reading your summation (which i totally agree with) makes me think that perhaps they would have had another stellar game if they'd just taken the gameplay from 13 (minus the 10 hour long tutorial!!!) and combined it with the story and open world of 12.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[brkello]

Everything seems better when you were 14. I don't know why people haven't figured this out yet.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[HawaiianToast]

Signs was not decent - you take that back...

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[ADRA]

"I grew up"

You answered your own question. Besides this sassy response you do have a point, though i must say that the end of Disc 1 FFVII was the most emotionally jarring scene I've ever experienced from a video game.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[dominion]

I've replayed Final Fantasy 6 at least once a year every year for the past decade. I've recommended it to kids who are teenagers now, and grew up on God of War and GTA, and they loved it.

Some things really do stand the test of time.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Draek]

The problem isn't with the games per se, it's just you aren't 14 anymore. Play FFVII again one of these days and you'll be surprised at its incredibly strict linearity, its terrible writing (thanks in no small part to its awful, awful translation) and, overall, how little many of the characters' choices throughout the story make any sense were it not for "Rule of Cool" and "Rule of Drama". Good game? sure. Great, even. But certainly not perfect, and without the rose-colored glasses I don't think the newer installments have anything to envy from it.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[dominion]

As I said earlier, I replay games constantly. I have a PS3 I use almost exclusively for PS1 games, and I put my emulators through 10x as much use as my Wii. Final Fantasy 6 stands the test of time, it is an extraordinary game, and that's why even generations who didn't grow up on it, discover it, and list it on their top ten list. Even Final Fantasy 7 is infinitely more profound the second time through than anything that came after it (even just the basic plot concept of being an eco-terrorist group, with sympathetic goals combined with abhorrent methods), so I'm not just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.

Just recently, I played the demo of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I really wanted to like, I was all ready to go to amazon.com and buy a copy, but the demo was so lackluster, and was missing so much that made Castlevania great, that instead I just paid $10 for Castlevania:Symphony of the Night, which was totally worth it, and is 100% as fun as I remember it.

I've replayed games like "A boy and his blob" or "Dragon Warrior", and recognized how things can be more fun when you're a kid, but some games really are classics for a reason.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[bigstrat2003]

I have a hunch that most people who hated FFX-2 didn't play more than an hour. It gets much better after the first hour or two, although there are still moments that are cringe-inducing.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[bigstrat2003]

I don't really agree that FF6 is as good as it gets held up to be. The story is kind of weak overall, and there are certainly memorable characters... but there are also awful characters. Kefka is a completely one-dimensional character who somehow regularly gets held up as a good example of a villain? Yeah, right. Then you have shit like Ultros (who is just fucking annoying). For every Celes in the cast, there's a completely unmemorable Gau.

Yeah, it's a good game. It is possibly even a great game. But I don't think it's as good as it is commonly said to be. Then again, lots of FF6 fans will leverage similar complaints against FF7, which I consider to be the greatest game of all time. Personal preference, I guess.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[dominion]

I played through the whole game. It didn't get any better.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[bigstrat2003]

See, I can't agree there. I thought it got much better over the course of the game, and at its best was on par with all but the best FF games. And the combat system was a hell of a lot of fun.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff

Wait what? I think you have confused Rosa from FFIV with Celes from FFVI

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[Anonymous Coward]

no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide

watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff

Rosa doesn't throw herself off a cliff or attempt to commit suicide, so I think you are talking about Celes from Final Fantasy 3 (3 in US, 6 in JP). This really bothered me and caused no end of emotional anguish as though I somehow forgot a critical plot point in final fantasy 2, my first ever rpg.

Re:My impression of the Final Fantasy series

[brkello]

I still think that is just you seeing it through the eyes of when you were 14. Don't get me wrong, I love 6 as well and am not saying it is a bad game. But I think there is just more wonder when you are young at something like this. I mean, I compare it to say Starcraft 2 and it is blown away in almost every aspect. Now we are old and jaded and remember the good ol' days. But I think gamers have it much better now than then.

Yogscast Covered it pretty well

[siegesama]

Yogscast covered it pretty darn well on their youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BlueXephos#p/c/561514793F6CB99F/0/aF7vrQ04_q4

Lots of play time and commentary, showing just how amazingly boring this game is. Also: cutscene. Cutscene. CUTSCENE.

I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[eldavojohn]

Every time a new MMO launches, I've got this baggage of playing WoW for 2-3 years. I expect the game that comes out to be as polished and as good as WoW. It's unfair but my logic just ends at "why don't I just play WoW instead." I hope other people are different but that's what I keep thinking and what leads to my termination of game play. I don't go back to WoW until an expansion comes out and then I just level max my characters and drop it after a month.

I played Darkfall and it was very unpolished. I've played a lot of MMOs like it. It gets into development and then it feels like the source of funding forces an early release and the thing falls apart. If I think back before WoW to my first MMO which was Star Wars Galaxies, I can recall the complete lack of a tutorial, the completely unpolished game play and the glitches right off the bat. But I stuck with it for a long time right up until the combat upgrade because I didn't know that there was a World of Warcraft. FFXIV lacks any tutorial or basic guide. It lacks polish. And I scrutinize it unfairly and don't give it a chance. I was in the beta and the lag killed me. I'm told that got better but I wasn't giving up another $50-$60 for a month of a game. I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.

I have given up on FFXIV unless my friends inform me otherwise in the future and I now away The Old Republic. For me, it's just looking for that next MMO to sweep me off my feet like SWG and WoW did. Unfortunately, it's going to need the interesting and immense world of SWG with the refined and polished combat of WoW before I dive into it forty hours a week for over a year. So far, there's been three or four candidates that have fallen short. FFXIV is just the latest. I'm starting to feel like it will never end. Please, game publishers, do not release an MMO before it's ready just to make some quick bank only to drop it like a prom night dumpster baby on the pavement. You are killing your developing team's vision.

Side Note: FFXIII was terrible. What a linear game! Have they forgotten how much players like to customize their characters to their own desires and goals?! I think there was maybe one dimension of that game that allowed me to customize my characters through their skill spheres and even that was a no-brainer-everybody-has-to-take-this-path style of game play. I gave up after five levels of "now you must go here, you cannot grind, you cannot do anything interesting, you cannot explore, you can not investigate." What a stark departure from a franchise I have loved!

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree. I actually stopped playing WoW because I don't have the time (or inclination) to deal with all the B.S. required to run the dungeons. All I want is a solid PvE experience with reasonable grouping and some enjoyable BG-like PvP for quick fun. WAR came really close but just became an unfocused mess and imploded, it almost had it all.

Looking out on the horizon, I'm not seeing much either. I may just give Cataclysm a whirl and see if I can just be happy playing casually. Rift/Telara seems kinda cool, and maybe GW2 but I have my doubts there (I still do not understand the PvP-only character or how to play it in GW1).

It seems like everyone is always so focused on end-game and hardcore PvP that they miss a huge market of those of us that enjoy MMo's but don't want to dedicate our lives to them. I'm still happy to pay monthly, so I never understand what it matters.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Aladrin]

WoW had to fight that same baggage. All the other MMOs (especially Everquest) were really well dug-in.

The thing is, WoW had them beat out the gate. It was prettier, smoother, and had less grind.

New games just have to be more fun.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[delinear]

I don't think you're being unfair by comparing the game to an established, polished brand at all. It's not like there haven't been plenty of MMORPGs already to make the mistakes and allow others to learn from them, and it's all well and good releasing a game that requires some polish and live development if they developers drop the price to reflect this and only up it to match the competition once they have a game that can compete. Either have extended beta testing and iron out the bugs, or give players a monetary incentive to play (after all, they're the ones helping make the game better, they shouldn't be deoubly punished with high prices and a poor experience). Totally agree on FFXIII, too - it felt like I only had freedom in one area at one specific part of the game, and that came about 60 hours in! And I hate the mechanism of forcing characters on the player - if I've gone to the trouble of honing a certain group of characters into an elite fighting team, let me use them, don't keep switching people out, and definitely don't switch people out without warning me so I can swap equipment around. XIII was my first FF game since VII, and I'd been warned the series had gone downhill badly over the years but I wasn't prepared for how tedious this game was. I'll be avoiding the franchise in the future unless they pull something spectacular out of the bag.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

Every time a new MMO launches, I've got this baggage of playing WoW for 2-3 years. I expect the game that comes out to be as polished and as good as WoW. It's unfair but my logic just ends at "why don't I just play WoW instead." I hope other people are different but that's what I keep thinking and what leads to my termination of game play.

Actually "why don't I just play WoW instead." is exactly the question the games devs/execs should ask themselves. Because their games don't exist in a vacuum, they exist in a world where WoW has 12 million subscribers. If they want any share of that market, they have to give players a reason why not just to play WoW. And just "different" does not cut it if the game is basically beta or worse on launch.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[twoallbeefpatties]

I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.

Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[VGPowerlord]

If I think back before WoW to my first MMO which was Star Wars Galaxies, I can recall the complete lack of a tutorial, the completely unpolished game play and the glitches right off the bat. But I stuck with it for a long time right up until the combat upgrade because I didn't know that there was a World of Warcraft.

I can't fault the ideas behind Star Wars Galaxies, but its execution was just terrible. It turned out to be a lot of pretty graphics (for its time) and very little substance.

So, of course, SOE patched out the old gameplay mechanics rather than adding substance...

I don't go back to WoW until an expansion comes out and then I just level max my characters and drop it after a month.

At least with the next expansion, the old world is changing, too. I'm thinking about returning to WoW for a month just to level up a new character from scratch (likely a Troll or Gnome just to see their new starting area). Preferably by having a friend that still plays WoW use a Scroll of Resurrection on me.

Speaking of WoW, patch 4.0.1 goes live today. It's a 4.8GB patch that appears to have updated a lot of the games sounds and graphics, as well as changed some class and game mechanics.

Such as:
There now being 3 types of Glyphs rather than 2.
Talent points are awarded every other level, so that at level 70, you only have 31 talent points at level 70 and 41 at level 85.
You must choose a class specialization at level 10, then spend 31 talent points in that talent tree before you can spend any of the remaining 10 in either of the other trees. This means you are restricted to one talent tree until level 70.
Hunters now have 5 pets with them at a time, with storage for 20 in the Stable.
Hunters no longer need to find/buy/craft ammo. Instead, they have an unlimited supply that they get from... well, somewhere. HammerSpace maybe?
Warlocks no longer need to carry around Soul Shards, as they're no longer used in most spells... instead, you have 3 that work like DK Runes.
Soul Shards are used for the spell Soul Burn, which modifies the spell cast immediately afterwards.
DKs Blood talent tree is now their tanking talent tree.

and a bunch of other changes I can't recall right now. I was reading over all these yesterday, but of course, the WoW site is blocked where I work.

Actually, now that I mention it, the new WoW expansion sounds like it's seriously going to limit customization, particularly on the talents front.

P.S. If you want to experience the new version of the old world, it'll be released in another huge patch: patch 4.0.3.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Tridus]

But it's a fair comparison. Nothing will come out as polished as WoW is now, but stuff also has the benefit now of learning from what Blizzard got wrong (and what they got right).

But they don't. FFXIV is a lot like XI. Which might have been okay, back in 2003. It's not acceptable for a modern MMO to have a UI this bad, a patching system this slow, or basic things not functional like ALT+TAB.

The developers need to ask themselves "Why would people play this instead of WoW?" Square's answer is obviously "because it's Final Fantasy" and has nothing to do with gameplay. Because as a game, XIV is terrible.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[mdm-adph]

I'm playing WoW instead of reading your post.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW has so many obvious shortcomings, it's strange other MMOs can't surpass it. It's like other game houses try too much in too few different fronts.

Nonexistent world PvP since Blizzard actively tries to prevent it: sanctuary zones, flying mounts, teleports everywhere.

Opaque windows, ladders can't be used, NPCs can't sit on stools, static content and world, pansy devs abhor any hardship the supposed war between factions could cause. Which means there's no war in warcraft: villages can't be destroyed nor conquered. Ditto for resources for which there aren't any since lumbermills and mines are just props and don't actually produce anything.

So many simple things that could be made better instead of obsessing over ultra realistic graphics and other pointless crap.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Kharny]

To be fair, this had more to do with the incredible succes they had, blizzard was unable to keep up with demand on their servers for quite some time.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[ildon]

WoW's problem was that it had server issues because too many people wanted to play it because it was great. FF14's issue is that no one wants to play it because it is awful. I hope you can recognize the difference.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[ildon]

Oh, and despite WoW's server issues, at the time it was still considered the most successful, stable, polished launch of an MMO in the history of MMO's.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[DarkXale]

They're cutting down on customization on the talents front a bit - but keep in mind that in the current state of the game, there are very few talent choices that aren't on the border of 'retarded'.

The new system instead makes each talent far more meaningful, since it does away with many of the terribly minor ones like adding a 1% more critchance or increasing damage by 2%, in favor of more potent talents instead.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Rayonic]

To be fair, most of WoW's launch problems stemmed from the fact that they had demand unheard of in the MMO industry. They were expecting Everquest numbers and got... well, WoW numbers.

Penny Arcade eventually reinstated the award, by the way.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[brkello]

I don't think you can create a game and have it better than WoW from release. There is just no way. Why? Because WoW was good when it started and has been polished and polished ever sense to be more fun. Sure, people who have played for 3 years are going to quit for some dumb reason. But any MMO that comes out has no way of matching the current level of polish that WoW has. And now with the new expansion, the polish from the newer areas will be in the starting zone. I really can't see anything replacing WoW. I can't even see there be a WoW 2. They just keep updating this one.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

If you can't create "WoW, just better" from release, then stop trying. Create something different, cater to a different audience, create distinguishing features. WoW is good, but it's not the be all end all of the genre. I can imagine games with more interesting combat mechanics, or more interesting class systems, or a better PvP, or a richer crafting/trading experience than WoW. But whatever you do, remember to lauch good enough to be worth "not plaing WoW".

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Chris Burke]

Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.

That's actually a big part of the problem with competing with WoW. At the time of its launch, yeah it was buggy and the servers were overloaded and this only got worse each week before the "maintenance" reboots so playing on a Monday was awful etc etc. Now it's a well polished machine with minimal technical problems. Anyone looking to play a new MMO today is going to be comparing it to WoW of today, not of five years ago. Which is rough for anyone hoping to repeat what Blizzard did -- release a nice but buggy MMO and then fix it up over time. They don't have that time anymore.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[VGPowerlord]

If you can't create "WoW, just better" from release, then stop trying. Create something different, cater to a different audience, create distinguishing features. WoW is good, but it's not the be all end all of the genre. I can imagine games with more interesting combat mechanics, or more interesting class systems, or a better PvP, or a richer crafting/trading experience than WoW. But whatever you do, remember to lauch good enough to be worth "not plaing WoW".

I've seen plenty of games with better PvP than WoW or richer crafting/trading experience than WoW.

The problem is, if you don't cater to the lowest common denominator, you'll never gain a large player base... this is something that WoW excels at.

Also: PvE servers in WoW outweigh PvP servers by a large margin... to the point that WoW recently turned a PvP server to a PvE realm (don't remember which one... De[something] I think), allowing free server transfers to three other PvP realms for the players that wanted to stay PvP.

Why bring that up? Well, it's an example of how the majority of people don't want PvP, and forcing PvP in your game is intentionally limiting your target market. Example: EVE Online.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Draek]

Calling WoW's launch the most stable and polished out of all MMOs is a lot like calling IE9 the most stable and polished out of all Microsoft browsers: just because it sucks marginally less than the trash before doesn't mean it doesn't still suck.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Yosho]

Why bring that up? Well, it's an example of how the majority of people don't want PvP

I don't think that's the right conclusion at all. Even on WoW's PvE realms, arena and battlegrounds are very popular, and there are always people dueling outside Orgrimmar. I think the right conclusion is that people want to be able to control when they PvP.

On a PvP realm, you can be out in the wilderness, minding your own business, and then some level 80 guy with a 6000 gearscore comes along and murders you. And if he's bored, he'll sit there and murder you over and over. On a PvE realm, I can go out and kill monsters and do quests all I want, and then when I want to compete against other players, I can turn my PvP flag on or go join in the designated PvP events.

WoW isn't successful because it caters to the lowest common denominator; it's successful because any "denominator" can have fun. I can log on and do quests for an hour, or I can work on earning acheivements, or I can grind dailies, or I can do random dungeons, or I can do battlegrounds, or I can join an arena team or a raiding guild and do 25-man ICC... Those things appeal to different crowds and they're all designed to be fun. In FFXIV, your options are to either grind XP on killing monsters or beat your head against the obtuse crafting system. That's it.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Heretic2]

I have a rather good idea of what game will take your breath away, it's been in development for about 6 years and is still 1+ years out. Hasn't been announced so I can't talk about it but yea.... There's a real, "I've played it" WoW-killer coming that will specifically give people that love WoW a reason to play another MMO. This is coming from someone that played 3 WoW betas and has a almost 300 days worth of played time on characters *face palm*

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[ildon]

I purposefully used relative terms rather than absolute.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[Golden_Rider]

WoW has so many obvious shortcomings, it's strange other MMOs can't surpass it. It's like other game houses try too much in too few different fronts.

Nonexistent world PvP since Blizzard actively tries to prevent it: sanctuary zones, flying mounts, teleports everywhere.

pansy devs abhor any hardship the supposed war between factions could cause. Which means there's no war in warcraft: villages can't be destroyed nor conquered.

And the lesson we learn from this (and from the subscriber numbers for "real pvp" games like EVE, L2) is: most players do not like unlimited pvp with major consequences. Unrestricted pvp games are niche games. And that's why Blizzard made WoW the way it is - they earn more money this way.

Re:I Am Damaged Goods from World of Warcraft

[CougMerrik]

By the time WoW came out, basically everyone I knew who had played EverQuest were really interested in jumping ship. EverQuest was dated, people were pissed at the direction the game had taken (more hardcore) and basically the game had begun to really strain and break under the weight of all the baggage of a billion expansions. There were whole classes that just didn't have a unique place in the game. Not even marginally unique. There were whole zones, whole continents, almost, that were just deserted. Not because people weren't playing, but because there were a dozen zones for the same level range and the old ones were uniformly worse, not fun, etc. WoW's launch was basically like what Warhammer or Age of Conan was for WoW PvPers, except that the game worked for more than 6 months.

WoW is doing something smart with cataclysm by removing a lot of baggage they've created for themselves and getting the game back to a more simple, core fun experience that has optional depth. This seems to be something they learned well from EverQuest's wanderings in the desert of shitty expansions after Velious. Major change now will piss some people off, but if designed with the right mix of fun, simplicity, and optional depth, it will probably set the stage for further dominance in the genre.

The game ended at 10

[CodePwned]

Whoever did 10-2 should be shot... and from that point it just tanked. I'm not taking into account the MMORPG... but the normal serious completely tanked. The story was confusing, if not completely lost... and the target audience changed vastly. It's not Final Fantasy anymore... it's a Uwe Boll made movie now.

Get back to original storylines and release a game that's worth playing. Not just for cash.

Re:The game ended at 10

[revlayle]

I argue it was dead at 10 too... however, I never played 10 fully all the way. I never played 11. I got 12 for a great price, but about 3/4ths of the way though I was 1) confused by the story 2) didn't care about half the characters 3) and started to hate that tower of never ending suck. That was over a year ago, I never went back. I looked 13 for my PS3 and just remind myself of life lost during playing 12. 12 was pretty... and I thought combat system was "interesting", but that was about it. 10 had a great story, but the grinding in that game is just as bad as any of them and prevented me from finishing it.

Re:The game ended at 10

[slyrat]

Whoever did 10-2 should be shot... and from that point it just tanked. I'm not taking into account the MMORPG... but the normal serious completely tanked. The story was confusing, if not completely lost... and the target audience changed vastly. It's not Final Fantasy anymore... it's a Uwe Boll made movie now.

Get back to original storylines and release a game that's worth playing. Not just for cash.

The reason, at least in my opinion, that this happened is because of the core people behind FF. Final Fantasy 9 was really the last one with a decent number of the core people that created / made the series. After 9 it felt like a change in director or change in author. It had some key elements but it just wasn't the same. At this point I'm going back and trying the dragon warrior/quest series. I doubt I'll ever play another FF after what happened with 13.

Re:The game ended at 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Until we start voting with our dollars none of this is going to change.

Wait, wait...

[tygerstripes]

I'll weigh in on the debate when I finally finish FFVII

Re:Wait, wait...

[neumayr]

:) Same here - it's not a bad game, it's intriguing story is worthy of the name Final Fantasy. But it's also so very, very long, with so much of it just traveling to the next scripted event..

Re:Wait, wait...

[digitig]

Heck, I'm still stuck in FFIV.

Dissatisfaction of FF13?

[Anonymous Coward]

"General" dissatisfaction? Huh? I mean I know some reviewers took a swipe at it for some things like the linear game play (like other FF's haven't been like that ::rolls eyes::) but my impression was that the "general" reception was that it was a good game.

Re:Dissatisfaction of FF13?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a great collection of reviewers whose reviews should never be trusted ever again.

Re:Dissatisfaction of FF13?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many of those reviewers spent 60 hours farming the same giant tortoise repeatedly as opposed to just playing through the key sections of three or four pre-loaded level saves.

XIII

[santax]

Man that game sucks. Bought it right away. Looking forward to it. Even my girlfriend was looking forward to it (it's true, i have such a thing with titties and a complete lack of logic running around here) after 24 hours of hitting the A button to fight something, taking 1 step forward in the only direction there is, and repeat... i just put it away. The game is fucking boring as hell. And I tried... I really tried... any other game this bad would have been put aside in 2 hours... let alone 23. My girlfriend managed to take her savegame to 26 hours... before she finally said something that actually made sense: this is boring :')

Re:XIII

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not defending the linearity of the game, it did open up much later in the game, although that did feel like something they added on when they realized the map was a straight line. The story was quite good but did require reading every entry in the datalog in order for it to make any sense.

The most fun I had with it was post-game where I was able to go back and do all the unlocked quests and complete the character development. In fact, I spent more than 50% of my total time playing in the post-game world. It was there that FFXIII finally turned into a game that felt like a part of the Final Fantasy series.

Oh, and one last thing... If you spent 24 hours hitting the A button you were playing on the wrong console. ;)

Well, in a word:

[HeckRuler]

Enix

GameTrailers Review

[motang]

GameTrailers isn't a fan of the game either

Re:Compared to FF7?

[revlayle]

I could not get through 7... Again, like some of the "super classic FFs" - I thought the story was pretty good, just so annoying to play. I have finished only 2 FF games in my life: 6 and 9 Every other one I would start I would get 3/4th of the way through (mind you I have only played, other than 6 and 9: 7, 10 and 12) and just perplexed why I wasted my time grinding for hours just to advance the story and just quit and never return to it.

the magic

[shish]

many long-time fans of the series must now be wondering whether the magic hasn't departed.

There is nothing to wonder about; the magic left when Square merged with Enix and many of the key staff resigned, and they started putting out sequels, expansions, MMOs and totally linear games rather than anything like FF1-9 :(

-- a long time fan of the series

Re:the magic

[Anonymous Coward]

Same happened with WoW I think. There supposedly was some other team behind vanilla WoW after which it's been downhill ever since and I don't mean financially.

It's like WoW dev shack was invaded by moron clowns; stupid bright neon colors everywhere, player driven spontaneous world PvP was turned into arena e-sports and monsters started dropping tokens instead of treasures.

Re:the magic

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like WoW dev shack was invaded by moron clowns;

Yup, they're called "Activision"

Just as a quick headsup

[Moraelin]

Just for a quick bit of info, from what I understand in the Japanese culture the effeminate looking bishounen (prettyboy) with the heart-shaped face is actually an ideal of masculinity. The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.

So, yeah, those spikey-haired hermaphrodites are Real Manly Men.

Yeah, it makes no sense for me either.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[superdana]

Yeah, it makes no sense for me either.

It only makes no sense if you're committed to believing that our ideas about gender are innate and in no way cultural despite all evidence to the contrary.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[twoallbeefpatties]

The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.

Cho Aniki suddenly makes 1000% more sense.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Millennium]

Just for a quick bit of info, from what I understand in the Japanese culture the effeminate looking bishounen (prettyboy) with the heart-shaped face is actually an ideal of masculinity. The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.

Not quite. Although bishounen are considered an ideal of beauty, they aren't considered an ideal of masculinity, per se. That has a different archetype with its own name (otokomae), and it's much more similar to what most Westerners consider manly (though there are still some cultural differences, of course). To give some examples in FF terms (specifically FF6), Edgar is a bishounen while Sabin (Mash, if you go by Japanese naming) is otokomae.

You're right about hyper-muscular bodybuilders being a gay stereotype in Japan, though.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right about hyper-muscular bodybuilders being a gay stereotype in Japan, though.

just in japan?

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Millennium]

Maybe elsewhere too, but I can't be as certain. It's got very strong associations in Japan, though. The Cho Aniki series is probably the most famous example outside Japan of how this works, but Persona 4 also has an interesting example, and Wii fans can get more than they probably ever wanted to see by downloading Muscle March.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[MaWeiTao]

Perhaps more recently that's been the case. But traditional samurai hard-asses sure as hell don't look like pretty boys. And Japanese gangsters only in recent decades have been adopting the more effeminate styles. A lot of it is due to foreign influences, particularly Europe. The west does have the metrosexual.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear in America the stereotype for gay is republican politicians.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[bonch]

That's not really accurate. In Japan, a prettyboy is considered pretty much what a prettyboy is considered here, an effeminate guy with the face of a model who 12-year-old teenyboppers love. Granted, there is a little more history behind the archetype in their culture, but their culture is also older than ours. Muscular bodybuilders hanging out with each other in speedos is a gay stereotype here, too.

American and Japanese cultures aren't that different. Most of the weird ideas make sense when you find out there's historical context behind it (e.g., Mario's Tanooki Suit is bizarre until you read that a tanuki is a Japanese raccoon that was often a shapeshifter in folklore). I'm sure someone not familiar with European mythological archetypes would find elements of Lord of the Rings strange and arbitrary.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[bonch]

It only makes no sense if you're committed to believing that our ideas about gender are innate and in no way cultural despite all evidence to the contrary.

What evidence to the contrary? There are certain gender archetypes that span all cultures. Specific gender roles are very much proven to be innate.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't suppose it could vary from person to person, as it probably does here in the US?

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[thrash242]

The super muscular body-building look being seen as "gay" isn't that bizarre to me. I certainly don't see it as a ideal of masculinity.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[GameboyRMH]

Not quite. Although bishounen are considered an ideal of beauty, they aren't considered an ideal of masculinity, per se.

Actually not too different from western cultures then? The women dig prettyboys and the men recognize that they're considered attractive, even if the look doesn't fit their ideal of masculinity.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[StikyPad]

You're right about hyper-muscular bodybuilders being a gay stereotype in Japan, though.

Which isn't so strange.. in the US, they're the stereotype for "in-the-closet."

Work those gluts!

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[RCGodward]

*Rimshot*
Hey that was pretty good, let me try.

I hear on slashdot the stereotype for gay is Anonymous Coward.
...
...
Nothing?

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[AmberBlackCat]

I have a friend who is into "androgynous men". She says in the 70's and 80's, in the United States they were considered sex symbols and not the least bit homosexual. I also recall a skit on the Chappelle show in which Charlie Murphy says [back then, the men who looked the most like bitches got the most bitches]. So maybe it's not just Japan.

Re:Just as a quick headsup

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people overstate the androgyny quite a bit. Most of the main characters look sufficiently male, even the extremely pretty side characters like balthier aren't so effeminate that you'd mistake their gender. The original character designs for some of the older games done by Amano look very feminine, but that's less to do with fan appeal and more to do with Amano's tendency to make all his character portraits completely white-skinned (as in clown makeup white,) with ruby red lips. And of course these characters looked totally masculine anyway with their hulking armor and ornate horns and whatnot. The newer Nomura stuff just tends to have young looking characters, and they tend to take more risks fashion-wise (like Tidus' half shorts half pants thing. What indeed.) Balthier is a dashing thief, and looks appropriately like one, and Vaan just looks like a child because he is. I mean, he's as old as most other JRPG heroes, but in this game he's actually supposed to be a child. That half-vest thing he's sporting was supposed to go with the whole arabian thing Dalmasca has going on, but it just looks a lot more fruity now than back in the 90's when Aladdin wore one, I guess.

Video Games are Dead, Long Live Dwarf Fortress

[kenp2002]

The Video game industry followed the movie industry down the rabbit hole. They are dependent now on blockbusters and are always one bad game or expansion away from bankruptcy it seems. Bad release? Time to lay off half the studio.

The EA\Sony\Activision nonsense of the uber publishing house has run its course. Eve Online continues its slow lumbering growth by rejecting the contemporary model. Minecraft outsold SC2 for a couple of weeks, with 1 guy as a developer. Dwarf Fortress soliders on and grows. Indie games are making a comeback and all that the big 3 (here in the US at least) can do is more reboots and sequels... just like Hollywood and we know how well that worked out for them for quality... blegh....

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Dwarf Fortress

[Anonymous Coward]

Mount and Blade: Warband may be the best single player game I've played in a decade, and it has its own share of bugs / lack-of-fleshing-out. It comes from a relatively indie studio, and I bought the game for like 4 bucks on a steam deal weekend... sadly it's one of the few games I've bought in the last year or two that really deserves a full 40-50 dollars.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Twinbee]

Since my post was modded flamebait (oh noes!), perhaps I should explain it more clearly.

I know nothing of the classic FF3 original (which from what I've heard was excellent), but for FF7 on the Playstation, here is what you did:

When you meet an enemy, press the same button over and over and over and over again. Caan you guess what happens when you meet the next enemy?

Rinse repeat. I'll repeat again, there was ABSOLUTELY ZERO CHALLENGE. It was the same button again and again. What the heck?!

Oh, for f***'s sake

[tygerstripes]

No spoilers, god dammit! You've just ruined 5000hrs of gameplay for me.

While poor now it does have potential

[Orga]

I've been playing for awhile now and will say that no mmo to date has actually made such a successful game out of crafting/harvesting. If you'e familar to EQII crafting it's somewhat modelled after that, with skills to react to certain actions (colors) but adds a very complicated system of needing multiple crafts to make one finished item. You can imagine the headaches however when everyone starts a game only being able to produce component materials.. yarn, nails, string, sticks, handles... They've designed the game to depend on a large number of component mats to get thrown together to make an actual functional piece of armor/weapon/tool. Only after a few weeks now are you starting to see some of this stuff flush out. The market system for for buying/selling materials, items between people is obviously horrible as stated in a multitude of reviews, and on top of this if you actyually try to do everything yourself.. which you definitly can.. you run into silly bag space restrictions, even using your npc retainer just to hold materials. They need to put housing in (to store stuff), and hopefully follow the EQII method of actually being able to put in crafting workspaces. I imagine they will do this before too long. I think the fighting/combat class system is solid, being able to mix skills from multiple classes into the one you're playing. While there isn't enough story right now I have enjoyed what I've been through, I find it a bit more intriguing than what other MMO's have produced, especially when you look at free plays (Aika, Allods etc.). I'm going to give them time, I think they've laid a solid foundation for something more with the crafting system, more than just watching a progress bar for 5 seconds to deplete to nothing. I know they have some mechanics as far as multiple member combat skill usage as far as figthing as well, that's going to require more than 111111. People need slow down imo, people say well when you get high level blah blah blah.. well if you're high level already... you haven't played the game as was intended, go pick up another tool/weapon relax and have some fun. It's not a race, it's a game.

Re:While poor now it does have potential

[lgw]

EQ2 had my favorie crafting system of any MMO. Sure, it was quite lame to play, but it was great to write automation for, and then tune the effectiveness of the AI of my crafting bot. That was a blast - I never even knew you could make multi-threaded AutoHotKey scripts before that.

AC2 had an all-player economy. Everything had to be made by players from the simplest of raw materiels, and no one started with the skills to make anything useful, and anything good took rare drops and many crafters. AC2 cratered harder and faster than any MMO I've heard of, dead faster than Hellgate IIRC. Too bad, really: I had more fun just running around the countryside in AC2 than any MMO I've tried since - if they had only added some content to that landscape.

Re:While poor now it does have potential

[Orga]

I also enjoyed AC2... of course my gf and I both played Lugian tacticians...we'd run out intot he wilds and make mass walls and turrets :) Beautiful game for it's time, had a lot of promise.. and yes died out fast, I forget what we left for but we did leave AC2 for something else. FFXIV crafting system is completely not macro'able, you actually need to base decisions off the color of the current craft, white/flashy = stable, red quality, yellow rapid I think and along with the fact you learn usable skills to equip from other professions that "proc" on occassion and become available in the next move making potentially difficult crafts substantially easier with use. mmm AutoHotKey.. used that in the first AC myself :)

Re:While poor now it does have potential

[lgw]

EQ2 also had you make decisions based on stability and how close you were to completion - an icon woul appear on the screen, and you'd take one of three acitons to respond, with a tradeoff between how fast you'd advance the crafting process, how much risk you were taking, and so on (I think there were skill-based "recovery" actions with long timers, but it's been a while). That's what made writing the "AI" fun, to screenscrape that stuff as input, and then act on a strategy to maximize quality output.

Missing the most basic things

[Bardwick]

Finding gear on the "market" is ala EQ1. 500 toons standing around in the market area. Have to go to each one and "browse" and hope they have the gear your looking for. I spent just close to an hour last night looking for one piece of gear (no luck). To make level 6 gear, you need items from level 20 crafters... There is no "bank". So you are very limited on space. Can't transfer items from one toon to another. No mail system. Tab always selects you first. Graphics kick ass, no doubt. Been an avid gamer and participated in most Beta's through launch since EQ1. This game is two gens behind at least.

Re:Missing the most basic things

[Megane]

I don't know why people are modding you down. This is not the first time I've heard this gripe. (Except you're the only one to use that lame WoW term "toon".) The bazaars from hell are bad enough, but someone went totally batshit insane on the crafting system design.

And the worst part is that SE seems to be adamant about not implementing an Auction House, even though so many are screaming for one.

I've been playing FFXI for a while now, and I could see this train wreck coming for months... it just turned out to be a bigger wreck than I expected. The best part is that whoever the jerks were that insisted on keeping the fun out of FFXI seem to have been reassigned to keeping the fun out of FFXIV. FFXI has been pretty fun the past few months, what with lifting the level cap and other changes.

Beta for everyone

[drej]

What is everyone complaining about? Square-Enix has given us all an opportunity to get into a beta of a huge, anticipated game. With Halo, Medal of Honor etc. everyone was desperately trying to get into the betas, but with Final Fantasy XIV it's now as easy as picking it up in stores. Isn't it great?

Wake up call

[Draconi]

This should be a wake up call to every 1st tier MMORPG developer:

Money and a strong IP do not equal success!

How many of us felt intuitively that Square Enix has been losing its way with the FF franchise for years? How could FFXIV be anything other than what we're seeing right now?

Just like the offline industry that spends hundreds of millions now to develop offline AAA titles, the MMORPG market is suffering the same, eventual fate: to be usurped by quickly built, fun, disruptive games discovering new monetization models ala Minecraft. Yet, we're seeing the big boys approach development with the same WOW-killer attitude again and again, instead of innovating.

Some might say: well look at FFXIV's switch up from the auction system to player markets! Sorry, that's as old as Ultima Online and finding items you want is just as frustrating.

It's so very disappointing to see Final Fantasy XIV hit the shelves like this, I can't even believe it.

You lucky barstard

[Moraelin]

VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour

You lucky bastard. Sometimes I think I must be the only person in the known universe who actually played VIII until the end, just out of morbid curiosity if it gets better. It actually kept getting worse. After the first CD the plot twists started going from stupid to surrealistically stupid.

Re:You lucky barstard

[drinkypoo]

You lucky bastard. Sometimes I think I must be the only person in the known universe who actually played VIII until the end, just out of morbid curiosity if it gets better. It actually kept getting worse. After the first CD the plot twists started going from stupid to surrealistically stupid.

I suspected that the only way to win that game was to stop before you got off the first disc, and I did; I'm glad to see that I was right.

I know liking FFVII is somehow supposed to be wrong, but it still feels so right. VIII just felt boring.

Re:You lucky barstard

[Carnildo]

I've played through VIII twice. The first time was morbid curiousity about the storyline. The second time, I ignored the story entirely and concentrated on seeing how badly I could break the game mechanics (answer: the game mechanics are so unbelievably breakable, I was half-expecting to one-shot the final boss).

I find it enjoyable, but it isn't for everyone...

[Wornstrom]

I have been playing since it was released (not the collectors early release) and I have found it quite enjoyable. The main thing I have a problem with right now is the bazaar-only system. They really need to implement an auction house. I've left my game logged in overnight several times just to sell off some inventory, because the market wards just seem too cumbersome to actually use them. I'm sure my video card loves that... and high pop servers probably appreciate the associated lag of loading everyone's character model etc. Another thing they ought to do is give us recipe books. The crafting system is intricate enough without having to go to a 3rd party website to look up mats for everything you want to craft. Love how crafting damages your gear too.

I figure they have until WoW:Cataclysm comes out to sink or swim, at least for me.

BATTLE ON!

[Anonymous Coward]

DOUBLE STRIKE! *Pow* -66 dmg *Pow* -64 dmg

Final Fantasy has been defeated into the ground! The series is over!

You gain +120 gold, +431 exp. Level Up!

Re:Compared to FF7?

[paziek]

Yeah, but you can always go extreme the other way round. For example Dragon Age was simply too hard for me. Perhaps I'm not cut for this kind of games, not sure... but I always had to be extra careful, always had to push to my limits and often... just load game after death. I played it until I came to place where I had to load like 10 times and still no dice. Game had pretty good story and gameplay, but was just too hard for me and I gave up. Lowering difficulty would probably just make it too easy.
I don't know how easy was FF7 on PS, but perhaps for most folks it was fit right. You know, they tend to be more casual.

Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[Viewsonic]

The problem is people keep buying the sequels. I think I'm the only person who doesn't really get into buying sequels at all. I want a new experience every time. There has been a lot of original games lately, but you are right about the sequels. Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space, Mirrors Edge, Gears of War, etc. I played them and found them really great games. I haven't and don't plan on, buying any follow ups, prequels, or whatever else they come out with. I usually only break that rule if its a new generation of console and it's the first game for that system like Halo 3. I know I'm missing out on good games, but I much prefer NEW directions over more of the same, even if that same is really really good.

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[Blakey Rat]

Bioshock 2 is far superior to the original. FYI.

Mass Effect 2 might be worth buying *if* you're interested in seeing the story continue-- I didn't buy it because EA took over the studio, and fuck EA. Halo games, again, worth it to see the story continue. Gears? Waste of money, it's not different enough from the first game. I haven't played Dragon Age, Dead Space, or Mirror's Edge, so I can't comment on those.

The last sequel I bought was Crackdown 2. Pacific City was rundown and depression, the vehicles unnecessary and unfun, and the story consisted of (believe it or not) fighting ZOMBIES! Much like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within before it, they decided the best way to make a sequel was to remove everything fun about the first game. Ugh.

But Bioshock 2 was amazing.

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[Raenex]

Bioshock 2 is far superior to the original.

I haven't seen that opinion much. What was so much better about it? The appeal of the first game, for me, was the clever setting (love the takeoff on Atlas Shrugged), the artwork (throwback art deco), and the characters (Lilly Poppies!). The gameplay was decent. I avoided the sequel, because like the poster you replied to, even if they ramped up the gameplay the novelty of the original setting wouldn't be there.

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[Blakey Rat]

I haven't seen that opinion much. What was so much better about it? The appeal of the first game, for me, was the clever setting (love the takeoff on Atlas Shrugged), the artwork (throwback art deco), and the characters (Lilly Poppies!). The gameplay was decent. I avoided the sequel, because like the poster you replied to, even if they ramped up the gameplay the novelty of the original setting wouldn't be there.

The novelty is gone, given, but the art design is incredible. The levels where you have to walk along the bottom of the ocean are spectacular, as is the level where you play as a Little Sister. (Seeing the world through Little Sister eyes is a complete mind-fuck!) The combat is far superior; you can now use a plasmid and a weapon at the same time. The Big Sisters are a much greater challenge than the Big Daddies of the original.

I dunno, it just was better in every way... better graphics, better sound, on-par story, better art direction, more diversity in levels, etc. I never tried the multiplayer mode, but I can't imagine it's any good... I could be wrong.

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[Smauler]

Are you one of those people who bought Super Mario Brothers, and not Super Mario Brothers 2?

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[lgw]

I played BS-Too for less than an hour before deleting it. I felt weak, slow, and vulnerable - not the experience I want from a FPS, and not what a Big Daddy should be (except maybe slow). I found it a very lame experience indeed, with nothing really new. Dammit, the drill should have been cool, but even that: drill fuel? Really? A hacking tool gun? Really? And what a lame hacking minigame.

The first game had a novel art style, and a bit of a mystery to hook you - what was this place? What I played from the second seemed like shit they had left over from the first, with worse mechanics.

Re:Video Games are Dead, Long Live Minecraft.

[xhrit]

You want a new Experience every time? Don't make me laugh, your list is nothing but a shameful array of cheap copies of great games. System shock, Knight of the Old Republic, Neverwinter nights, Deus Ex, Portal, and Time Crisis were all far superior then the cheap derivitive games they inspired.

Kotaku's log/reviews

[Misch]

Kotaku has been posting a log of their in-game experiences.

Final Fantasy disconnection

[zerocommazero]

I totally agree. My main issue with the Final Fantasy series is a disconnection I felt throughout the sequels.

Final Fantasy was the first RPG I ever played as well. I've been a big fan of all the 8bit and 16bit sequels up to VII on the PS1.

FFVIII was the first one that I quit after playing for only 6 or so hours. The repetitve summoning cutscenes and the grinding necessary to advance spells was a total bore fest. The story and environment were boring as well. I didn't care about any of the characters nor did I care for the futuristic feel (gun-swords?!... c'mon!). I tried to give it a shot but couldn't muster more than 6 hours.

I did enjoy IX thoroughly. The traditional art style worked for me as I felt the ultra-realistic look of VIII was a complete turn-off. But after that, my interest in the series was waaning like a bad relationship.

I tried Final Fantasy X and couldn't get past roughly six hours again. The focus on ultra-realistic graphics and drawn out summoning scenes just sucked the fun out of the fantasy for me. And I haven't even bothered with any sequel since.

I guess there is something to Nintendo's style of the "quiet protagonist" that holds a certain charm. When you over-develop a character you risk alienating the player and I feel the recent sequels suffer from this. I really think that is another reason besides the other points I mentioned above that caused me to feel disconnected to the games. I really didn't care and no changes to the core system could help that.

Problems summed up

[abigsmurf]

Here's an overview of the issues with FFXIV:

Laggy menus. the vast majority of menus are server side. You have to wait for them to load (1-3 seconds normally, 5+ seconds for vendors)

-Awful interface design. No keyboard shortcuts. To interact with a crystal I don't double click or right click it, I have to open up the main menu and select a menu that only displays near a crystal (I actually had to look up how to interact with crystals).

-Crafting requires you to go through 4 or so (laggy) menus and confirmations. You then start a (slow) crafting process where you're given no information what to do and how to lower the chance of failure. Most crafting requires materials only made by other professions

-No AH. Instead you've got to manually visit dozens of player stores and hope one of them has the item you're after. Laggy menus make this even more of a chore.

-Worthless maps.

-NPC do not give any directions at all. They'll say things like "go get some materials from xyz". You then have to open a help website if you want to know where XYZ is because the game gives you no help at all.

-Limits to the number of guildleves (quests), XP and skill points you can get. All on different counters, all reset in different ways, all punishing the player for playing the game they've paid to subscribe to.

-Worlds are filled with copy and paste scenary.

-Nowhere near enough content. Only story comes from story quests you get once in a blue moon. Other than that it's solo grinding or guildleves.

-Even creating an account is a mission in itself. You have to deal with stupid amounts of unexplained jargon even at this stage, you have to sign up to some paypal clone (with its own cumbersome registration process). Oh and they put on a leaflet in big letters "YOUR REGISTRATION CODE", silly me, I thought that was the code I should use to register. 30 Minutes of wondering how I enter a code with that format, I discovered that wasn't the registration code, that was a code to enable me to use the forums. The code I really wanted was on the back of the manual.

Re:Problems summed up

[Anonymous Coward]

-NPC do not give any directions at all. They'll say things like "go get some materials from xyz". You then have to open a help website if you want to know where XYZ is because the game gives you no help at all.

I have to expand on this because it's actually so much worse than you're saying. First off, they in fact do show you where the next NPC is. For story quests. And nothing else.

Which means the feature is there. The game supports it. It works. They just don't allow you to use it for your every day "only thing there is to do in the game" quests.

But wait, it's worse!

So you've decided to go look for the NPC yourself. You've searched every nook and cranny, but failed. So finally you look up where the NPC is. Wait, but you've been there. WTF?!

Well, see, it takes a good four to five seconds for NPCs to load when you - well, stop moving, basically. So the only way to find the NPC by yourself is to basically walk a "square" forward, then stop and wait for five seconds to see if the NPC loads in.

And then repeat. And these zones are massive.

-Worthless maps.

This also needs some expansion - there are a ton of obstacles that block you while you travel from one place to another.

These are not on the map.

However, there are obstacles on the map that simply do not exist in the game world.

Then there are the roads on the map that are drawn between areas. These roads do not exist in the game world, and exist solely on the map. Combine this with obstacles that do exist but aren't on the map you've got an incredibly worthless map.

But wait, it gets better! The map is also subject to the four-five second load time before it adds the overlay that displays useful things like the location of quest "camps" (although not the NPCs in the camp).

To recap: the map doesn't cover things that do exist in the game world. Some of these are slightly important like paths between zones. However, it also includes things that don't exist in the game world. Some of these are slightly important like paths between zones that aren't, in fact, there.

Re:Problems summed up

[loufoque]

All the issues you've listed are actually advantages to me that doesn't make it yet another crappy MMO.
I guess it is a matter of taste.

Re:Problems summed up

[Anonymous Coward]

I played the beta and I pretty much agree with all of the things your saying. I don't know what they were thinking. Sometimes I don't think developers like this sit down and play their own games and ask themselves, "is this fun?". At least they didn't pull that "preorder the game and get into the beta" bullshit that so many others are doing now.

Re:Problems summed up

[basscomm]

Even better is the crafting interface. Crafting is such a huge part of this game, and yet it's so tough to use that it's borderline imbecilic. For instance, you get a recipe for something as a quest reward and it's displayed in your log. Once. Unless you wrote it down or have perfect recall, you're going to have to consult a fansite, on another computer, because alt-tabbing away from the game currently crashes the thing. And actually crafting a thing for a quest? You have to go to your main menu -> select your crafting option -> click 'requested items' which brings up a box with the items in it -> click the item you want to craft -> click 'OK' (I forget the verbiage since I'm not in front of it now) which fills in the materials on your crafting screen -> then click again to bring up the 'crafting minigame' where you have to pick from a few different actions that will impact the quality of the item you're attempting to make. And if you want to make multiples of the same thing? You have to go through all of those steps again. Every time! How fun!

Or the loading screens. When you're sitting there trying to log in or when you teleport somewhere, you're greeted with a black screen with "now loading" and throbber in the bottom-right corner. Wow, excitement!

Oh, and that teleporting thing? That lets you go to one of the locations around the world that you've already visited? Yeah, that uses another resource called 'anima' that regenerates at an abysmally slow rate (and I couldn't find a gauge for to see how much I had left).

I never did get the payment thing set up right. For whatever reason, Square-Enix outsourced their credit card processing to an outfit called Click and Buy that I've never heard of. Turns out that you have to create a separate account with them to handle billing, which means that I have to give some third-party my credit card information, and if I terminate my FFXIV account, I have to terminate my Click and Buy account separately, which would involve writing and sending a letter. To London. I couldn't actually get the process to complete, though (some problem with the Verified by Visa, and it was a Saturday evening, so everyone who could help was closed), so I looked at other options, I can pay with Crysta (which are like Microsoft Points or Wii Points), which are available in increments of $5 (or 500 Crysta), but to buy those, I have to register my account through Click and Buy, so it's the same stupid thing! Or I can get a Playspan 'Ultimate Game Card', which again is similar to the Crysta (with the exception that you can supposedly use the points for dozens of other online games, too), but, bafflingly, though I live in a city of almost 200,000 people, the nearest place for me to get the things is nearly 40 miles away. And, for those of you keeping score at home, the account fees (for one character) are $12.99/month (or 1299 Crysta or Ultimate Points), so if you get these ridiculous 'points', you're always going to have a surplus of them you can't use. I was able to eventually tell them that I wanted to pay for my first (free) month by using Crysta instead of my credit card, but I will not be jumping through these ridiculous flaming hoops any time soon just to continue playing this mediocre mishmash of a game.

Re:Problems summed up

[rcuhljr]

So you're being purposefully stupid? Here's a list of these 'advantages' you really want to see in your mmorpgs. "Laggy menus, Awful interface design, No keyboard shortcuts,Crafting requires you to go through 4 or so menus and confirmations. You then start a (slow) crafting process,manually visit dozens of player stores and hope one of them has the item you're after, Worthless maps, You then have to open a help website, Limits to the number of quests, copy and paste scenery, Nowhere near enough content, solo grinding or quests (which are limited)." Gosh I really hope you start your own mmorpg so the whole world can enjoy your innovative game design methodology of 'make the shittiest user experience possible.'

Re:Problems summed up

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you never read any of the text in the gam, so, good going there, sport. And man! Reading the whole piece of paper!? That must have been difficult!

I am going to go ahead and give you a clue: there are tutorial leves, they teach you how to do things. Reading the quest text is usually helpful when you need to know where to go. Additionally, levequests are not intended to be the main form of exp. Go explore and kill monsters while you do. Team up and massacre them. Just remember that every time it gives you a reccomended rank, it is talking about your class level.

I hope you enjoy the game now that you can read! I don't disagree with you about the menus being lagy, but then I am assuming you played something like WoW at some point, and even that game had infernals outside areas that weren't done at release. Oops!

Re:Problems summed up

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better is the crafting interface. Crafting is such a huge part of this game, and yet it's so tough to use that it's borderline imbecilic. For instance, you get a recipe for something as a quest reward and it's displayed in your log. Once. Unless you wrote it down or have perfect recall, you're going to have to consult a fansite, on another computer, because alt-tabbing away from the game currently crashes the thing.

Run in windowed mode, and you can alt-tab away. Which removes the excuse for alt-tab not working originally, which was "it allows people to cheat." Not supporting alt-tab means that Square Enix can't call it a Windows game, because you must support alt-tab to be able to say "runs on Windows." This is why it says "PC DVD Software" on the package and NOT "Windows." Seriously, check out their website, no mention of Windows, because the game fails the Windows quality standards. (Try and digest that one - the game doesn't even live up to Microsoft's standards of quality.)

But, ugh, the crafting UI is awful. There's no reason for it to exist the way it does. Do it WoW style - list the recipes you know, with them listing required/available items, and just select that to enter the crafting game.

If they offered a customizable UI, this would be fixed in an instant, but... oh well.

Yeah, that uses another resource called 'anima' that regenerates at an abysmally slow rate (and I couldn't find a gauge for to see how much I had left).

You couldn't find one because there isn't one. The only way to see how much anima you have is to attempt to teleport. (Which is Main Menu -> Teleport -> Region -> Zone, for four layers of menu.)

Or you can just select Return on the main menu, since that's a teleport too. It's the easiest way to see how much anima you have. Did you know that you can Return even if you're not dead? You can, it costs 2 anima. This is documented nowhere!

I never did get the payment thing set up right. For whatever reason, Square-Enix outsourced their credit card processing to an outfit called Click and Buy that I've never heard of.

And that right there is the biggest bullshit ever. Turns out that Click and Buy sells themselves as Europe's answer to PayPal.

But wait, Square Enix ALREADY ACCEPTS CREDIT CARDS for FFXI. There's absolutely no reason they can't accept them directly themselves other than sheer asshattery.

Re:Problems summed up

[loufoque]

So you're being purposefully stupid?

If having different tastes from you means I am stupid, then I guess I am, yes.

What you call an awful interface design, I call the right one. I despise all those keyboards shortcuts and hotkeys MMO players seem to love, and I really like Final Fantasy-style menus.

I like not being told what to do and where to go and having to find that out by myself, be it by looking it up online or not.

I like that you can't just get items from anywhere and you have to seek someone that has it. It makes it that much more special and more worthy to collect.

Mistwalker...the new Square!

[freak0fnature]

They have declined in quality over the years...I loved 7,8, and 10. I never finished 13...just got bored. I'm hoping that the FF creator, who is over at Mistwalker now, will come out with something new. I really got into Blue Dragon.

Another problem

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that game seems to be annoyed you want to play it. They seem to be more interested in making a really long, boring, movie than a game. the interactivity keeps getting dialed back. Battles are largely auto-mode and involve mostly you watching massive animations of attacks ans do on.

I think part of it is they are unclear on what they are supposed to be doing. They've forgotten that game makers are supposed to make games, not movies and games mean interactivity, and lots of it. Also as a practical matter they'd need to get way better at movie making if that was what they want to go for. Their story telling sucks and their visuals get repetitive, even though that's what they want to focus on.

The other part is that padding gameplay seems to be big with JRPGs. The number of hours of play seems to be a real selling point. "Oh this game has 400 hours of play, it must be great." Eh, that may just mean it is really padded out with stupid shit. I'd much rather have Mass Effect any day. Yes, it is "only" 40-50 hours even if you do all the optional missions but it is a damn fun 40 hours. You are very engaged. Even then there's a bit of padding going on, but at least it is interactive (like roaming around on planets). Also it makes that kind of shit optional, you can just stick to the core story stuff, and still have 20 hours of game to play.

It isn't just Final Fantasy that is afflicted with this, though they are by far the worst. It seems like JRPGs in general have really been suffering from it. I'm a huge RPG fan and watch all the time for new ones, and all the ones that seem to come recommended are US and EU made games. Perhaps that is some reviewer cultural bias, since I live in the US and read English publications. However back in the past there were no problem with JRPGs getting heavy recommendations, FF3 (FF6) still routinely shows up on the "Top XX games of all time," lists for the US. Also the JRPGs I've tried have been as you and I have talked about.

It just seems like the RPG developers over there, particularly Square who is the largest, aren't doing such a good job anymore. They want to cram in a ton of visuals without consideration for if they really are worthwhile or not. They want hundreds of hours of boring gameplay rather than 40 of good gameplay.

Re:Another problem

[bolthole]

I think part of it is they are unclear on what they are supposed to be doing.

I disagree, I think they are VERY clear on what they are supposed to be doing, and doing it well:
putting together an experience that forcibly maximizes length of real-world time required, to maximize subscription revenue.

Oh, what was that? they're supposed to be making an ENJOYABLE game, you say?
Hmm, I guess someone forgot to tell them that :-}

Re:Another problem

[Fallingcow]

Perhaps that is some reviewer cultural bias, since I live in the US and read English publications. However back in the past there were no problem with JRPGs getting heavy recommendations, FF3 (FF6) still routinely shows up on the "Top XX games of all time," lists for the US. Also the JRPGs I've tried have been as you and I have talked about.

All the JRPGs on real consoles this generation have been mediocre at best. The only good ones have been on handhelds, which seem to be where the action is for most genres this generation, for some reason.

Unless things pick up, this will be remembered as the worst generation of consoles in--well, since before the NES at least. Not one has a great library yet, especially if you only consider games that are exclusive to or superior on a given system. The last three generations had a clear winner in the "best library" category in the SNES, Playstation, and PS2, with other systems excelling in some niche (Genesis--sports games; N64--multiplayer; Gamecube--multiplayer again; X-box--Halo).

None of this generation's consoles stand out yet, IMO. A couple are good as media players, but as gaming consoles they're all falling pretty flat, and if you're in to JRPGs you're probably playing your DS and PSP more than any of the actual consoles.

Re:Another problem

[MasaMuneCyrus]

I'd recommend Lost Odyssey if you haven't played it, yet. Also, the Persona series. They don't suffer the "I'm a bitchy kid that turns into a bitchy adult at the expensive of everybody around me, and then after I've turned into a bitchy adult, I take all of the credit for saving the world!" mechanic that JRPGs have suffered from since the end of the PS1 era. I'd also keep an eye out for The Last Story. That one looks (hopefully) to be good, coming out on the Wii next year.

Xbox 360 Only Hold 6.7GB Per DL DVD

[RingBus]

What?

The Xbox 360 uses standard dual layer DVDs which only hold about 6.7GB total. Smaller than the PS2 and Xbox last gen.

An absolute nightmare for developers.

Re:Xbox 360 Only Hold 6.7GB Per DL DVD

[Idiomatick]

Ah it was an optional thing. I thought they switched their standard model up to hd dvd to compete. Thats kinda sad.

Re:Xbox 360 Only Hold 6.7GB Per DL DVD

[damien_kane]

What?

The Xbox 360 uses standard dual layer DVDs which only hold about 6.7GB total.

I've seen many (including the FFXIII ISOs) discs use the full 8.4gb available on a dual-layer disc (aka DVD-9)

First Fantasy I

[digitaldc]

Why not just end the 'Final' title and come up with a new game and name altogether?

Might steer people away from the inevitable comparisons to the previous 13 versions of the game. Just a thought.

Re:First Fantasy I

[Superdarion]

They're going to do it. Once they're near bankrupt and on their last title, they'll release the next milestone and stick with it for over 20 years, abuse it, destroy it, make it a laughingstock, rinse, repeat.

Re:First Fantasy I

[Yosho]

Why not just end the 'Final' title and come up with a new game and name altogether?

Might steer people away from the inevitable comparisons to the previous 13 versions of the game. Just a thought.

Because there's no point to that. For one, the prior 13 FF games were actually different games, not just previous versions of the same game. Surprisingly, the same is true of video game series in general, with a few exceptions.

Also, the reviews for FFXIV have nothing to do with comparisons to previous games in the series and everything to do with the fact that it's a bad game, regardless of title.

" You Defeat You"

[Guppy]

For a pithy summary of the game, might I suggest the Somethingawful Goon reviews?
http://frontblog.ffgoons.com/2010/10/01/ffxiv-review
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3353297

Also... CATGIRLS!

The magic died with the snes

[Anonymous Coward]

final fantasy vii was a fine game, but it wasn't really a final fantasy game. ffvi was the last of the glory days.

Battle Regimens and Damage to Body Parts

[PmanAce]

I don't know if the folks that review the game actually play the game. I find it pretty cool and inovative the damage to body parts and less-so battle regimens (skill chains FFXI). Damage to Body Parts:

Among the enemies found throughout Eorzea, there are those with body parts susceptible to damage. Sustaining a certain amount of damage will result in those body parts becoming incapacitated. For example, an aldgoat’s horns may be broken, or a diremite’s stinger lopped off. This is achieved through the use of specific weaponskills that automatically target these body parts whenever they are present. When the body part of an enemy is incapacitated, it will suffer the following effects:

Weaken the monster
Prevent the monster from using its special attacks
Influence the type of loot dropped

Also yes, there are some things that are annoying like no AH and mailing stuff to players, but I am sure this will be resolved soon. Just the fact that one can use almost any skill from any job is pretty cool, you can customize your character how ever you wish.

Re:Battle Regimens and Damage to Body Parts

[Tridus]

How do you fix stuff like "no mailbox or AH" soon? They put this retainer nonsense in to replace those. It's a fundamentally bad design decision, not a bug.

Until someone beats Square with a clue-by-four, these problems won't get fixed. The fact that it got out of beta in such a state says all that needs to be said.

Re:Battle Regimens and Damage to Body Parts

[PmanAce]

Well it gets fixed with an AH type global market search and mailbox system. They will bend to player pressure sooner or later.

Re:Battle Regimens and Damage to Body Parts

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it pretty cool and inovative the damage to body parts

Tangent time! The "Warrior of Ras" series games like Dunzhin and Wylde had damage to body parts 30 years ago. You would tell the computer to swing your sword at the skeleton's "balls" or "butt" and it would attack the ABDOMEN. Ah, the memories of being young enough to find that funny.

Oh, on the contrary

[Moraelin]

Oh, on the contrary, I'm a ferm advocate of 99% nurture and 1% nature in just about any cultural thing. I'll be the first to say that gender roles are purely cultural constructs, and not even constant in any time or place.

But, yes, a lot of other cultures make no sense to me. I'm not saying it's innate or anything. I'm saying a lot of those stereotypes and choices seem illogical to me.

If it makes it any better, though, I think half the western culture is illogical too.

Re:Oh, on the contrary

[bonch]

I'll be the first to say that gender roles are purely cultural constructs, and not even constant in any time or place.

It's a biological fact that males and females behave certain ways and are attracted to certain things across all cultures. We know how male and female brains work differently from each other.

Re:Oh, on the contrary

[Abstrackt]

We know how male and female brains work differently from each other.

Male brains have an overwhelming tendency to be distracted by breasts, for example.

It's not at all unfair

[Sycraft-fu]

MMO developers need to man the fuck up and start making better games. MMOs have a long tradition of sucking. If you took the same quality of game and made it single player, it would be a universal bomb in most cases. The reason they got away with it was because they are MMOs. People really want that experience of playing in a large, persistent, world with others and thus would put up with crap if that was what it took to get it.

That shouldn't be the case. MMOs should need to be good like other games. For it to be considered a good game it should, you know, actually need to be good, to be fun, to not have massive amounts of problems, etc.

The reason WoW sold MMOs to the masses is it was the first MMO to be good. Not perfect, not without flaw, but good. A well designed game on its own. It was easy to get started in, fun to play, inviting, etc.

That is the standard people need to meet. It isn't just about getting the bugs out before you launch, though that is part of it, it is more about game design. You need to design the game to be inviting to new players, fun to get started on, plenty to do for everyone and so on. A very simple example is the very beginning of WoW. You watch a little movie and then gain control of your character. You are in a colourful world with an inviting NPC with a bigass ! over their head. It is the only thing that really draws your attention. They set you off in the world, and in one fell stroke teach you several things like how to communicate, how quests work and so on. Things are very easy and go at your own pace, you have all of two or three abilities to use, and you get a nice sense of achievement each time you kill something and the experience bar ticks up.

Basically it very slowly eases you in to the world. It makes it easy to accomplish something right off. No sitting through tons of boring "training" no feeling like a fish out of water, having trouble coping with what to do. You get in to the world and can have fun right away.

There's a lot more than just that, but it is design like that. Actual, good, gameplay things that are more or less required for non-MMOs to be considered reasonable games.

So while I don't want new games to be "another WoW" I do want them designed to that standard. I want them to be good games. That is not unfair at all.

Re:It's not at all unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the first mmo that you thought was good? Because uh... the people who continue to play UO or FFXI or EQ may think you're a total idiot! The reason WoW succeeded in America is because it was for the American/western market, instead of being made by a culture that is totally different from yours. Unfortunately, American gamers need everything explained to them in detail. It is a really sad state of affairs that Americans can't explore something on their own and enjoy learning a new environment and feeling joy to have figured out how something works.

It is not the Final Fantasy series that has failed, it is just your lack of appreciation for another way of looking at the world.

That is, I think, where all this bad blood is coming from. Square-Enix has made a game that is trying to create a world for us to explore, and all you guys can think to do is complain about it being to complex ...

Note: Not all Americans are like this and not all of the people that are are American.

Re:It's not at all unfair

[cyber-vandal]

The best thing Blizzard did with WoW was to prevent pricks hanging around the newbie areas harassing new players. I've left plenty of MMOs because my first experience was being killed repeatedly while trying to get the hang of the game.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Twinbee]

Okay, that's fine if you want a more film-like experience.

But I meant literally when I said about using the same button/magic/item against the enemy. I'm confused, because it gives you a host of different weapons/magic to use against the enemy, but you only need to use one of them to actually beat the game (well I lasted up until the bike ride section). Because of this, one may as well skip the battles (impossible of course without doing the usual single button press) and just watch it as if it were a film.

I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[Greyfox]

It seems the beta testers were doing a pretty good job of communicating the problems up to the developers, but the developers never gave much feedback about those messages and did not really address most of the problems that were pointed out. If they fix that feedback loop in the future, it would surely lead to a better game.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[truenoir]

That's pretty much how FFXI has been since it was released. I wouldn't hold out hope for SE changing its MMO development strategy anytime soon.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta testers yelled out loudly for "hardware mouse support." And at launch, Hardware mouse support. Hmmm...they are listening. But they apparently have selective hearing. There was a yell for "auction house!" and we got "we'll be updating the market wards." Now that could mean a search function, which would honestly fix it. I don't need the AH of WOW or FFXI, I just need a searchable list of items available by people. I kind of like being able to buy from one person...i always hated learning that I bought something on the AH in FFXI from a gillseller...now I can actually avoid those people when they are discvoered. So that promise is coming, but unless they give us the details about what is coming, it's not going to be enough for the majority of people to hang a hope on.

They can fix this...by offering free subscriptions until they "fix" things. It would be a huge financial hit but it would greatly help their PR... well it would also put Fantasy back into the series...

Whoever did FFXIV didn't want it to be a WoW clone, didn't want it to be FFXI either, which I appreciate...I'm going to give it it's period of true beta test to get the kinks worked out and the "doh"-like optimizations in place...just this time I'll have buyers remorse during so >.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's a great point.

community feedback has always been a big selling point for WoW for me. the CMs and devs have enough of an e-presence that I don't feel like I'm interfacing with some monolithic corporation who doesn't give a shit about player feedback (even if I really am). that definitely wasn't my experience with FFXI.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[medeii]

You can definitely blame this on the majority of the beta testers. I was one.

While there were plenty of other problems with the beta test itself -- abysmal build quality and unnecessarily limited playtimes were two big problems, the primary downfall was the total lack of direction from the developers and moderators. I brought up many of these same issues (particularly the UI mechanisms, as I'm a UI guy professionally) on the beta forums; a few posters agreed with me, but the majority of the replies came from slavering, rabid fanboys. These idiots took umbrage at mild suggestions or observations -- to say nothing of real, rigorous, and honest feedback -- and essentially drowned out anything useful. The most commonly repeated aphorisms were along the lines of "It'll be fixed by launch" and "How dare you suggest that anything Square produces is less than perfect."

Given that not a single one of the issues I brought up appears to have been fixed, it appears Square listened solely to the yes-men. It's also plausible that they really didn't learn anything from FFXI, as others are saying, but they did at least solicit user feedback this time.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny - both of those comments sound exactly like the beta boards before World of Warcraft launched.

Yet, somehow, Blizzard was able to ignore the idiots on the forums and release the best MMO ever created.

Any developer that doesn't know how to ignore the fanboys to find the actual valid criticisms (and, dammit, if you read the reviews, there are reams of 'em) is - well, fucked up.

So, yes, Square Enix fucked this up, plain and simple.

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[medeii]

It's certainly "fucked-up" -- but I'm not suggesting that the beta testers get ALL of the blame either. Blizzard isn't a perfect analogy here, because they're a developer that has an established history of listening to fans, and they're speaking the same language. Square seems to be dipping their toes into the shark-infested waters of usability testing, so I was trying to be constructive. It's worth analyzing what might've gone went wrong, no?

Re:I Talked to a Couple of Beta Testers

[rfunches]

Pretty good job? It was hard enough just pulling down patches and logging in during the limited alpha/beta windows, usually only 5-6 hours at night a few days a week, with the game blacked out the rest of the time. I tried to file bug reports and the form gave me an error, with no secondary way to contact them. Then they only wanted to solicit certain types of feedback per testing period, and if you didn't post within a few days you were SOL -- they locked the discussion thread. It was like going down a checklist: we've asked about item x for two weeks, now we'll move on to item y, we don't want to hear about item x again.

I played FFXI for several years after the North America launch. The game wasn't perfect, but eventually I got the hang of the controls and could navigate the UI without looking. Even with the lack of English-language sites documenting the quests, missions, jobs, weapons, etc. at the NA launch, most of the game mechanics made sense. With FFXIV, it's like they tried to come up with a more in-depth, customizable version of FFXI and ended up with a horribly complex and convoluted system. The XP system was unclear, they were offering job classes which were unplayable during the early stages of beta (and not warning people or removing the class option), and then there were the laggy menus with laggy submenus containing laggy submenus leading to laggy submenus ending in more laggy submenus, etc. In FFXI, attacking a monster with the keys was simple: tab to it (target name in bottom-left corner, monster highlighted with an arrow above it) and then Enter x2 (confirm target & issue attack command) to attack. I could keep my left hand over WASD and my right over the arrows and still comfortably play thief -- a class which required a lot of positioning and timed macros to play effectively. The controls in FFXIV just never made sense -- this coming from a PC gamer who has never felt the need for a gamepad.

I was appalled by the beta. It looked and played like some piece of concept code. At least in its day, FFXI was a notable contender in the MMO space, with its international reach (auto-translate was vital for playing outside of your region's peak hours) and broad player base (console & PC). FFXIV just looks like something S-E threw together to meet a deadline.

Re:I find it enjoyable, but it isn't for everyone.

[VGPowerlord]

I figure they have until WoW:Cataclysm comes out to sink or swim, at least for me.

If it's really as bad as people say, I don't think the 8 weeks until December 7th is enough time to fix it.

I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[The Living Fractal]

I bought two copies of the collector's edition for pre-release fun... That's $150. Just so my gf and I could play early and 'enjoy' the less crowded newbie zones, etc.

A few hours later and we've got all the patches downloaded on one computer, but the other one refuses to download much of anything through the torrent-only source method. So, I find a way to trick the patcher into using the other computer's files, which is a complete hassle but eventually we get it working. At this point my excitement is pretty high because I still haven't even logged into the game once. I just registered through their highly suspect payment method and managed to figure out how to login, and I've created a character.

Time for the fun, right? Wrong.

After finally getting into the game I immediately get a bad feeling. I can't jump (what is this, 1999?). In a game where you can't even jump you can forget about flying, as in WoW or Aion and others. I can't bind keys to do anything .. like opening my inventory on the fly. Nothing is intuitive. Combat is slow and the lag is terrible. I come to find out through research on the net that all of the servers are located in Japan and that there are no plans to change this. Great. I press on. I find myself running through some random map area. I finally find something to kill, and do so pretty easily. I figure heck I should be able to check out the next area. The monster looks like a tiny squirrel on steroids. It one-shots me. I die, and respawn 20 minutes from where I was. So I go somewhere else... find an area with some mushrooms that I can kill. Great! But the lag is so bad that other players are seeing the mushrooms respawn seconds before I do, and they are getting first hit on the mob. I can't get any kills.

It goes on and on like this for a few hours until I log out, disgusted. I will never play it again. Well played, SE, well played. You made $150 off of me for 3 hours of gameplay (if you can even call it that). I should've learned my lesson from FFXIII. I blame only myself.

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[Anonymous Coward]

But in SEs perspective your experience is success since for 3 hours of gameplay you paid over $150 dollars. So they made better profit than Blizzard WoW (players play over 100 hrs a month) sincethey saved in bandwidth or support. All SE has to do is keep pumping out more FF MMO to get suckers like you and live on box sales for $$$.

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to what Oceanic players experience every day in WoW, Aion and every other US-hosted multiplayer game on the market!

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[The Living Fractal]

I fail to see why this is true. I have played on Oceanic servers from Alaska, in WoW and Aion, and not experienced nearly the amount lag I experienced in FFXIV from Alaska to Japan. We're talking a difference of at least 2x.

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[Anonymous Coward]

I come to find out through research on the net that all of the servers are located in Japan and that there are no plans to change this. Great.

That is actually great - this levels the playing field between Australia and America. USA has had it too easy in terms of MMO latency. I eventually gave up on WoW because the PvP was unfair to the point that it was unplayable 85% of the time.

-AC.

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[Zarath]

The Oceanic servers in at least WoW are still located in the US. They're just labelled Oceanic for the players to use from that region.

Re:I'm disgusted with FFXIV

[Anonymous Coward]

Retard!!! every MMO that comes out, something like that that happen, you have thousands of people logging in at the same time and in the same area!! of course you will have lag!! of course everyone is going for the same mob as you, and of course everyone want to do the same us you... and what do you expect? to go around the game world without any though mob?
lol have you played any MMO Game before?

The game is much better now, faster, less laggy, and here are some news

The development team is currently preparing two major version updates for release in late November and mid-December. Some of the changes planned are as follows:

Late November Update
Adjustments and additions to the user interface
Adjustments to the Markets and retainers
Lowering of Teleport and Return costs
Adjustments to overall battle balance
Adjustments to class balance
Adjustments to party battle balance
Adjustments to monster placement
Adjustments to levequests
Adjustments to synthesis
Addition of new synthesis recipes
Alleviation of lag issues

Mid-December Update
Addition of notorious monsters
Addition of new guildleves
Addition of new synthesis recipes
Addition of new items

In addition to the above changes and additions, several seasonal events are planned to begin starting in December.

the Game will be much better every month, like many people say, you are still playing an open Beta, just take it easy and learn the game.

eq

[bhcompy]

Sounds a lot like Everquest(which is good). MMOs are too easy these days. Wah wah kill the same creature over and over again. None of these kids know anything about difficulty and repetition. They've never killed Aviaks, Frogloks, etc for weeks on end to get through one hell level.

Re:eq

[Yosho]

MMOs are too easy these days. Wah wah kill the same creature over and over again. None of these kids know anything about difficulty and repetition.

You seem to be making the same mistake as many other FFXI veterans and FFXIV players, which is that you're confusing tedium with difficulty. It's not hard to kill the same monster over and over again for weeks in a row. Anybody who can push a few buttons can be trained to do that. Very few things in FFXI or EQ were actually hard, you just had to be willing to throw yourself at it over and over until you got the result you wanted.

Maybe you should go play Demon's Souls, or maybe Ninja Gaiden (on Master Ninja mode, of course). Those are hard.

Re:eq

[bhcompy]

Tedium is difficulty to the current generation.

Re:eq

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Everquest isn't like that anymore. Mercenaries, Defiant armor, Tutorial zone, NO MORE CORPSE RUNS... it's far easier to level up than it used to be. Also, there's a gazillion zones, so you rarely have to kill the same mob twice if you don't want to.

Re:eq

[bhcompy]

And this is true, but it's not really EQ anymore either. It's EQ+16(almost 17) expansions. The game is so drastically different at a fundamental level it's not even the same game anymore. And it really hasn't been that way since Velious

It has one flaw....

[Shads]

... the UI. Which is partially stored server side and manipulated only serverside, which causes major lag for ANYTHING using the UI.

The combat I enjoy (it's far slower paced than say wow or eq2 though), the crafting is ok, the class system I really like, etc... but the UI is just hideous, it's designed for a controller and using one alleviates 50% of the issues... but not the lag. Until they can fix the lag (and the only fix is moving the ui clientside completely... which I doubt they're willing to do.) there are going to be no good reviews, the ui is so bad it overshadows EVERYTHING.

The slower combat and old school style are definitely not for everyone, but the UI pushes it towards "not for anyone."

How did this get past beta?

[rs1n]

For there to be so many flaws (and I actually spent a good 30 mins searching for other reviews), you have to wonder what the hell happened during alpha and beta testing. It almost seems as though all their beta testers were using PS3s and not PCs. How else could such a clunky interface have been overlooked? Or did they not really take their beta reports seriously?

Re:How did this get past beta?

[ubojica]

The 10 or so friends that I know that actually were part of the closed beta tell me that there is little difference from this garbage and the beta. Write them a long enough report and you get a free copy of the game and some free months, ya know, kinda like hush money.

But uematsu wrote the sound track

[genner]

I had a perfect system for telling if a square enix game was going to be good. All the ones where Uematsu wrote the soundtrack were awesome. This may make me loose faith in the system.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Khyber]

"I'll repeat again, there was ABSOLUTELY ZERO CHALLENGE."

Then you're ignorant of the challenge modes other people came up with in the game.

For example, winning without using materia, or winning while only using your base default starting equipment for every character.

Your lack of imagination is what made the game into a non-challenge.

I liked XIII...

[ExtremePhobia]

I understand why a lot of people didn't like XIII but just about the point where I was getting fed up with the party limits, the game finally came around and I was quite pleased with it. Yes it was very, very linear. It was very tube like. But it was also a beautiful game. The graphics were great and if you didn't want to go backwards and could get beyond the occasional cliche one liners, you'd find a very fast combat system, a decent story, and a lot of things to look at. No it's not like the previous entries in the series, but it's Final Fantasy and that's how they roll. It's still a quality game if it came from any other developer.

Course, I had XIV pegged as a failure since day one.

FFXII was the a peak

[toxonix]

FFXII was the best to date IMO. I'm talking in terms of art, and mostly in terms of Fran. FF needs more Fran. I've never actually played the game.

My biggest complaints

[Arcaeris]

1) Like everyone else says, the interface is atrocious. When you see something, half the time you can't click on it. There is no excuse in today's GUI-driven world, to have things where you can't click on it to interact with it. You open a menu (by clicking a button), then click the new submenu that appears only when you're near the thing you want to interact with, and then you have some choices. And all of this takes forever.

And then there's the map. Totally useless, doesn't show anything about resources (they're just glowing lights you can see around), no idea how to get back to town or another town or between maps or anything. I started in a forest and it was more like a maze of little tiny rooms than any kind of forest. I felt like I was playing Metroid.

2) For a game which promotes "change your class/job by simply switching weapons/tools" as a feature, it is a freaking pain in the ass to try and figure out how and where to get these weapons/tools. I made a Fighter, and wanted to try out being a gladiator. Could not find a sword to save my life. I had to look up a wiki to find where a merchant was, and then use the map on the website to get there because the game map flat out sucks. I never even tried out crafting because I couldn't find tools for most of them.

And then on top of that, when you do want to switch, the inventory screen is flat-out archaic. You can't grab an inventory item and drag it to a spot, you can't click an item in your inventory and equip it, you have to open the character equipment, click the item, then click the item you want in the inventory list. And that's not to mention, it's an inventory list. Everything gets thrown in this big ass list and God knows what you've got because you might have seven entries for "animal hide," "animal hide +1," "animal hide +2," and on and on.

And if I'm wrong on any of this, I wouldn't even know, because all of this is how I figured out how to do things. There's no manual or information showing you how to do anything.

Re:My biggest complaints

[Megane]

I started in a forest and it was more like a maze of little tiny rooms than any kind of forest.

One thing I noticed about the later FFXI expansion areas (except the ones based on original zones) is how they made "outdoor" levels be essentially dungeon areas with sky on top. The whole zone gets divided into little tiny rooms for no particularly good reason other than lazy level design.

Naturally, they would keep this same trend on FFXIV.

Re:My biggest complaints

[Yosho]

The whole zone gets divided into little tiny rooms for no particularly good reason other than lazy level design.

Actually, it was so that the PS2 could handle it. You may have noticed that in the earlier zones that are wide open without tiny rooms, they frequently have fairly little actually in the zone and have a very short draw distance (compared to normal PC games). The game has a very large PS2 user base in Japan, but the PS2's RAM is incredibly limited compared to any modern PC, so they have to take lots of short cuts in order to make the game playable.

Not premature at all

[orthancstone]

Its early days and most MMO's start of crippled by bugs. FFXIV seems to be buggered up by an amazingly counter-intuitive UI and extensive learning curve without any form of tutorial.

The biggest problem is that this game is plagued by terrible design choices that would require fundamental redesign (read: more than just a simple patch) of key portions of the game. Better put, they would've been well served to look at what other MMOs are doing right as opposed to ignoring the entire genre and creating something that mires the player in unnecessary garbage just to learn the game let alone try and get deep enough into it to enjoy it.

FF14 can be summed up this way: They created an amazing world and then decided at the last second to have a developer meeting to figure out what the player would actually do in that world. Since they didn't have time to examine competitor's design choices, they went with whatever sounded best and crossed their fingers. The results are as bad as one would expect rushed, uninformed development would be.

In the meantime, FFXI continues on quietly

[sandytaru]

Those of us in the FFXI community are quite pleased that the XIV development team returned our good content creators (i.e. the battle team) and took away all the bad content creators as their directors. We've had two mini expansion patches in the last six months that raised our level caps to 85 and added a ton of new content. FFXIV will be the EQ2 to FFXI's EQ.

...Why did you bother posting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad that you know what you're talking about, rather than relying on other people to do the review for you. Oh... wait...

I kinda doubt that Square Enix really cares what you people think, considering they are a Japanese company that continues to be a huge success in Japan. Cultural differences are so hard to understand, don't you think?

You Americans are so critical of things... and since you don't like it. How can anyone on the planet? Give more absolute statements about things, Americans! It has clearly worked so well in the past.

Re:...Why did you bother posting?

[Golden_Rider]

On one of the FF14 player forums, I read that on the Japanese Amazon site, FF14 had about 130 reviews 1-2 days ago, with about 100 of them being "1 star". So I guess the Japanese players are not all that different to western players when it comes to liking FF14 or not.

Re:...Why did you bother posting?

[Yosho]

To be fair, the mob at 2ch likes to flood amazon.co.jp with 1-star reviews for anything they don't like. On amazon.co.jp, Dragon Quest IX was flooded with 1-star reviews immediately after it was released. It's a fantastic game, but the 2ch decided to flood it with bad reviews just because it had multiplayer. It's only back up to 3 stars now after the people who've actually played the game have left reviews. Note that on the American Amazon site, it's been sitting at 4.5 stars for quite some time now.

I'm not even talking "boring"

[Moraelin]

Dude, I'm not even talking "boring". It starts boring, sure. Then it gets stupid. I'm talking plot twists of the caliber of, and spoiler warning: these are actual plot twists from the game:

- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)

- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)

- oh, they're shooting ICBM's at our school, but they don't know that our school can move. Seriously, it's like a freaking iceberg with the visible school on top and a giant mechanism under it for, umm, moving the school out of the way of an ICBM attack. (What, your school wasn't built with such a mechanism?)

- Rinoa getting kidnapped again and again until it turns into a running gag taken to absurd extremes. Like when a whole country who was A-OK with Edea, the big evil sorceress who had attacked them and nearly caused a world war, now arrests Rinoa for having received basic padawan training (so to speak) from Edea in the sorceress business. And you have to rescue her again. And I mean, seriously, it's on par with being ok with Hitler but trying to off some guy he trained in skeet shooting.

- the final twist when your party gets to travel in time and convince Edea to, umm, adopt their baby selves and start a school dedicated to hunting witche. Err... sorceresses.

And don't think some elaborate mind-fuck or subtle philosophical arguments to convince her to throw her life away just to train some guys who'll hunt her and her kind down. Think a poor young woman sweeping her back yard, and a bunch of strangers crash onto her lawn. And it kinda goes like:

"Are you a witch?"
"Umm, yes."
"I want you to found an orphanage and school dedicated to training kids to hunt down witches."
"Umm, ok."

Not an exact quote, but, really, _that_ fracking stupid.

Re:I'm not even talking "boring"

[Yosho]

- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)

- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)

I'm not disagreeing with you that FFVIII's plot had some serious problems, but they didn't just "somehow" lose their memories. Another one of the game's twist is when it is revealed that using Guardian Forces literally removes a person's memories. None of them have heir childhood memories because the GFs removed them.

Re:I'm not even talking "boring"

[Moraelin]

Yes, as I was saying, I've played it. I know the rationalizations they use. I still found it an incredibly stupid premise.

If FINAL Fantasy were really FINAL...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

then how can there be more than one, leave alone the question of fourteen?

This reminds me of my puzzlement of "The Never Ending Story II" and III.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII

[Grandim]

I am waiting for Versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Versus_XIII to come out before judging single player Final Fantasy done. It has several elements that should produce a quality game: a setting that can only be described as the spiritual successor of FFVII, the standard features of Final Fantasy that were lacking from XXIII(towns, exploration) should be back in, some of the most gorgeous graphics available on the market and the fact that Square knows that it can't botch this one and get away with it again. I don't expect a miracle but I would be suprised at nothing less than strong title to bring the series back in line.

Re:Final Fantasy Versus XIII

[Cloud K]

I'm with you there. vs.XIII sounds potentially great - if they can get it right.

But it's the last chance with me as well. After XI, XII, XIII to an extent (at least it had interesting characters again) and XIV, it's in desperate need of a good game to prove that its magic didn't die when the founding folks left to create Mistwalker. If Versus turns out to be a flop, I think we can stick a fork in the franchise. Quina style :P

It could not get worse...

[raijinsetsu]

I had started this reply by writing four paragraphs about what I hate about FFXIV and what I like. I then realized that I could sum up all of my complaints in a single statement: it sucks the big one.
I have been a FF fan-boy since I picked up the original when I was 9, so please do not attack me for my opinion on this particular incarnation. I do not believe many FF fans out there will find FFXIV to be worthy of the games lineage. If I were to compare XIV to XI, I would have to say that: in areas where improvements should have been made, there were none; in areas where improvements would have made players happier, there were few (and most had anything to do with the actual game - goodbye PlayOnline); and in other areas, the development/planning/whatever team has taken significant measures to guarantee I will not play the game for more than 3 days.
Maybe the whole plan was to sell lots of copies due to hype, make $60 on the initial sale, and then $15/mo for 2 months for all those schmucks that held on hoping "it'll get better soon, you'll see". That's gotta be several hundred thousand dollars, easy.

For now, I go back to playing my good, old, non-MMO, standbys of FF's I(1) through VII.

I was a beta tester for this game.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a beta tester for FFXIV myself, and I can attest with absolute confidence that the devs did literally -nothing- to respond to some of the more serious gameplay-related complaints.

The only complaints from beta testers that seemed to get any attention were graphical glitches, driver technical problems, and things which impacted visual quality.
Many of the beta tester feedback items were suggestions such as "the menus lag forever, are you implementing them server side? You may wish to reconsider that, when I'm lagging I can't even gracefully quit the game" and got no attention at all. An example of a specific issue I reported was that when you initiate combat (after you figure out how) there was no visual indication that you are too far away to attack your target with a weapon ... you stand there like a dumbass doing nothing, wondering why, and nothing tells you that you are just a few pixels too far away, all the while the monster is smacking you around. So you struggle with laggy menus wondering if you missed something to turn on auto-attack, wasting tremendous time and frustration. I even gave a few specific suggestions such as a visual indicator hovering above a target that was out of range or something like that. Not a single dev response, despite over 100 other players agreeing with my post. However the next post on the forum would be something like "pretty looking doo-dad is the wrong color" and there would be a thread of 4 or 5 devs on top of the problem within an hour. They obviously are stuck in a mindset where they think we buy the game for pretty eye candy, and are just trying to get nice looking screenshots into reviews/mags rather then actually make the game fun (possible) to play.

Begging for failsauce. It's a failure of internal project management priorities, little more.

Made in China!

[Anonymous Coward]

One aspect of the game hardly anybody is talking about, which I feel is significant, is that allegedly the entire thing was developed in China.

The game has been filled with Chinese to Japanese translation errors on an enormous magnitude. And it limits online gameplay in such a way to be compliant with Chinese rules on online game duration. Even the collectable goodies (a mug) were shipped filled with mold and have a note saying you can't use it to store liquids or drink from.

In Japan, the users have amassed a ton of evidence that points to the game being developed in China with almost no assistance from Square of Japan, and have called on Square to answer this claims.

The short answer is that Square got lazy and farmed the game off to Chinese devs, and that's why the end result is so poor.

Reviews much worse than "scathing".

[Jartan]

I think it's worth pointing out that the reviews are far far worse than the blurb implies. Currently on metacritic it's at 56. Even worse both Gamespot and IGN have slammed the game with numbers below 60%. In the game review business these sorts of numbers are never really used on a big AAA publisher. Even if the game is the worst game ever it's pretty rare for it to go below 65% from Gamespot or IGN.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[maugle]

Unlike you, I could deal with the repetitive gameplay. However, I still couldn't play through to the end. The reason is that I have a very low tolerance for controlling characters that are doing something utterly retarded. It's been several years, but I believe this was the scene that made me mutter "What the ****?", drop my controller in disgust, and remove the CD to let it gather dust on the shelf:

Good Guy A: Oh, no! There is a meteor heading towards the planet that will kill everyone!
Good Guy B: The evil Shinra corporation is gathering Big Materia, in order to destroy the meteor and save the world. They may be evil, but at least they have their priorities straight.
Good Guy A: Those evil bastards! Let's steal their Big Materia so we can save the world instead!
Good Guys B-G: : OK
Me: Did I miss a scene where my characters all suffered brain damage?

That's actually quite recent

[Moraelin]

Actually, from what I've been reading, it seems that women started liking guys that look like women basically only after the pill got in heavy use. Apparently being pregnant -- or on the oestrogen pill which gives the body the same signal -- flips one's preferences around. Pregnant women are sorta programmed to want to be more with other women than with the macho guy, which I suppose it makes sense for the ape tribes we evolved from. So it's more of a curious side-effect of messing with body chemistry than either nature or nurture.

Downside: only those on the pill.

Bigger downside: when she gets married and stops taking the pill, well, then the normal body signals kicked in. Mostly along the lines of, "eew, this guy totally isn't a turn on" (any more.)

Re:I find it enjoyable, but it isn't for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the truth of the matter that most of the haters really can't wrap their angry little heads around: a lot of people like the game. You can't say the majority like the game, but you can say that there's evidence a strong minority of about 25-30% of the players like the game (e.g. Metacritic or English Amazon user review breakdown). The server I've played on has been at about 1900-2600 consistently from the start.

The game is actually retaining a lot of its numbers, it has a definite appeal for a certain niche of folk who don't mind ponderous (not nearly Battlecruiser hard) interfaces and having to look up where to find things on third party web sites. The raging you hear from the majority is mostly people frustrated that FFXIV turned out not to be the drug of choice for them, and they're hoping that by changing a few things here and there, it will be... sorry, I really don't think so, the core design philosophy itself differs from your average World of Warcraft clone.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Smauler]

[Dragon Age] was just too hard for me and I gave up. Lowering difficulty would probably just make it too easy.

What? You gave up because it was too hard, and did not try the easier difficulties because they'd _probably_ make it too easy? Seriously?

Re:Compared to FF7?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Come on; that's hardly fair. You can't judge the game by what it could have been, had you had the imagination. It was created to be played a certain way, and that's what it should be judge upon. Otherwise, even the worst games of all time probably should get higher scores:

"I give Dreckfest 88%. If you played the way they say in the manuals, the tutorials, and the pop-up hints, the controls were horrendous, the graphics were utterly broken, and the AI would frequently walk into walls. However, if you played the game with your eyes closed, and tried to navigate the game world by listening only to the sounds (e.g. your footsteps, enemy footsteps/voices, projectiles from your guns on various surfaces), the game became atmospheric and fun."

Re:Compared to FF7?

[bigstrat2003]

For normal grunts, sure. For bosses if you went grinding so that you overpowered them, sure. For a lot of bosses, if you were at the appropriate level, that wasn't true at all. For example, the boss in the Shinra Mansion safe, and the boss at the end of the Temple of Ancients, are hard as nails if you aren't fairly leveled up.

Re:Well

[nobodylocalhost]

I don't think making the game in China was a bad choice. The matter of fact is there are a lot of talented programmers in China. However, GUI design as well as art concept and story line should never be outsourced. Further more, I think there are a lot of management issues inside of Square-Enix. In short, this game is horribly rushed and thus forced some bad choices.
The dev team for ff14 is relatively new. They are not experienced as the original ff11 team. With a team like that, the company really should give them some time to do research. FF11 has extensive research behind it regardless of its flaws. At its core, it was and still is a sustainable economy that you can scale.
ff14 team made some horrible choices as to what to keep from ff11 and what not to. Starting from the network core of the game. It is a port over from ff11. Now ff11 network core was written to accommodate Play Online, a small company that doesn't have much of network infrastructure. It constraints large bandwidth usage into a small pipeline by implementing a long queue. Why S-E would want to go cheap on network usage is beyond me. However, the matter of fact is this game has trouble keeping up with having over 100 players or npcs at any given location. This is a problem for a game that has a lot of subscribers since it makes the game utterly unplayable.
The dev team also doesn't want people to think they ripped off of ff11. That by itself is understandable. However not bringing over the auction house was a horrible horrible choice. When virtually every mmo out there on the market have an auction house, it doesn't make any sense to remove such feature. It is a natural evolution from using bazaar to auction house. You don't go a step backward just to be different.
Lastly, leve quests make the economy unsustainable. This is due to the fact it introduces a lot of money and items into the economy. Without a proper money/item sink, the following is going to happen: common items will devalue to the point where they can't be sold. This is because common items will just be farmed by the individual players in large quantities instead of buying from others. When there is self sufficiency, there is no need for commerce. On the other hand, rare item prices will hit the roof and continue to increase in price. This is because continuous devaluation of currency due to inflation.
UI issues are already covered by most other users.
Game is also insanely unstable. It crashes at least twice every 3 hours of play time.
All in all, this beta grade software that needs to be redesigned. Most likely some middle management lied about the state of readiness of the game.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Twinbee]

Okay, well tbh I thought the idea of using the same button over and over was so insane that I thought to myself "it's going to get harder soon, much harder". That 'soon' never came. And by the time I played around 5-10 hours worth, I was bored with the repetition (I think the story is what saved it to that point), and certainly didn't want to go back to the very beginning to try one of the 'hidden challenges' you can apparently use.

Funny, because I actually sometimes like to make a challenge for myself in a game (for example when I complete it on its hardest mode).

Now compare FF7 to a real RPG such as say, Mysteria on the Saturn. That actually had you thinking "now should I use up this turn on defense, or attack, and if so what kind of attack would perhaps score a hit against 3 enemies at once instead of just one. Or *maybe* after all, I should concentrate on one for now, if it's particularly deadly". That kind of thing. You get *none* of that in FF7. Even Plants versus Zombies had more tactical gameplay, and that's almost purely an action game.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Twinbee]

Was that really part of the story? You're right that's super dumb if it's true. Good guys turning not just dumb, but also seemingly evil.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[trytoguess]

You could've make the game both faster and harder by running away from the random battles...

And who the fuck are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about some million-plus-selling titles you've put out since the mid-80's. Please. I want to know from someone who OBVLIOUSLY knows how to 'make a good game'.

Dumb mothefuckers here on this site - +5 informative my ass

Hated XII

[rxan]

Really? Gambits ruined XII for me. You know something is wrong when you enter a boss battle and don't have to press a single button.

I didn't like the XII's story either. The characters, while not stereotypical, were incredibly hollow. Nobody really drove the story forward for me. *SPOILER* I hated the story twist. I found out that that dark ghosts behind people were actually Gods who had been controlling the destiny of everything for some time. After that I said "This is bullshit" and turned the game off.*SPOILER*

I've been playing since VI and this was the first one I quit.

Re:Compared to FF7?

[Cloud K]

Haha... yes, in an otherwise superb game and story (IMO) that part did seem a bit retarded.

In my head, I always pretended that after Cid actually spoke some sense on the subject (that hey, it's science, do we really want to steal that materia just because it's Shinra?) and ultimately says "do whatever you feel is best" that Cloud decided not to take it. The game does leave you with that option and leaves the story ambiguous enough that it works either way. As the player though I still nab it.. need that Master Materia later on ;)

What the heck?!?!

[xmorg]

They never released 13 for PC gamers yet they want to shovel us yet another failed piece of mmo garbage?!?!
there are 9999999 cute asian RPG's out there, and most of them are free. You cant have an epic RPG story in an MMO with doods coming up to you asking if you want to join their guild just as Aerith is getting killed by scyther!

I know you want that steady subscription money like WOW and EQ got but sheesh, Give it up.

Re:What the heck?!?!

[Yosho]

They never released 13 for PC gamers yet they want to shovel us yet another failed piece of mmo garbage?!?!
there are 9999999 cute asian RPG's out there, and most of them are free. You cant have an epic RPG story in an MMO with doods coming up to you asking if you want to join their guild just as Aerith is getting killed by scyther!

I know you want that steady subscription money like WOW and EQ got but sheesh, Give it up.

The only non-MMO FF games that have been released for the PC were VII and VIII, which sold quite poorly compared to their console counterparts, so you really shouldn't be surprised that there's no PC version of XIII.

On the other hand, you may have missed FFXI, an MMORPG that has actually done quite well by non-WoW standards, and it has a reputation for having a very good story. That's not even qualified by "as far as MMOs go"; the story was arguably better than the last few single player FF games, even.

Everything WAS better when I was 14.

[MasaMuneCyrus]

After having suffered through an entire generation of console games and console gamers, I was beginning to think that, too. And then I played Okami, and Persona, and Lost Odyssey, and branched off to some more lesser-"mainstream" games. I found out that I was still capable of enjoying myself like a child.

I realized that the mainstream game companies nowadays are no different than anime companies.

Throughout the 80's and 90's, anime was awesome. It was a new medium and everyone had their own idea of how it should be; there was tons of creativity, and love and care was put into each series. Nowadays, after a few decades, anime companies have the next "hit" anime down to an almost mathematical formula. Love and care are replaced by cheap Korean illustrators. Storylines are often painfully forced to be different, yet they always seem to follow an almost identical structure.

If you want a really good anime, it's mostly done by small company startups; and they're usually founded by some old-time veterans that are disillusioned and want to be creative for the sake of being creative, again, not creative for the sake of being profitable.

And now look at the game industry. It's the same thing.

Re:Everything WAS better when I was 14.

[brkello]

Everything was new when you were 14...not really better. I agree with you on a lot of what you wrote though. The games industry was new so everything had to be creative because there was nothing to copy. But there were a ton of crap games. A ton of impossibly hard games. Lots of bad writing. But we put up with it because we were kids and this was all new and cool.
 
Today the most popular of those games became genres. While there is still innovation, it is at a much lower degree because certain things are just inherently defined by the genre. But since it has been refined, they have become very good. And like you said, there are still great games out there being made like Lost Odyssey. Some of our old favorites are getting a bit long in the tooth, but there are still more great games out there than I have time to play.
 
That's why I think people are looking too fondly at the past. We have it really good right now.

Sequels aren't bad

[MasaMuneCyrus]

There's nothing wrong with sequels. There's only something wrong with too many sequels. And, of course, "too much" varies depending on your game/franchise.

Square-Enix are has beens

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I lost what little respect I had for Square Enix after they started badmouthing the PS3 shortly after its release stating its not a dedicated game console and Sony is disrespecting gamers. I think Square-Enix has been more successful producing movies rather then games as of late and probably should shut up now. FF13 was hotly anticipated 5 years ago, and firmly ignored today.

Final Fantasy XIII - no good unless you pay for it

[grikdog]

It's like aromatherapy. FF13 finally cracked me up in the Narthex, when I realized I'd spent real money on this unsmiling drivel. Although it was nice to look at, never did find time (or inclination) to jump through 30 hoops just to ride a chocobo. A pity too. FF12 was great, and the cleared game left a plethora of unbeatable beasties scattered around for the so inclined. But the main attraction was appealing characters and a fate to avoid, in an undirected landscape that felt exactly like a sidequest. What did Square-Enix do? Fire the FF12 development team, or just burn them out? The reek of smouldering brain cells is all over FF13, and if that extends yet another klick of radius into management's turf, it's no surprise at all that FF14 has turned out like Okefeenokee -- a buggy, stagnant, slow-moving mess.