Seriously, though, does anyone have any idea what fundamental change in personnel or ethos could have lead to the kind of "I only understand the surface details of this series" disaster that was FFXIII. Cause I'm drawing a whole lot of blanks.
Do you have any articles at hand that do a deep dive?
It's deeply, deeply fascinating to me. Because XIII was every mistake that was deftly avoided by the previous entries, particularly VII, VIII, and X which it seemed most intent on cribbing stuff from. It's made all the more baffling by the fact that Squeenix seemed quite proud of XIII for a while.
Seriously Lightning and Fang feel like completely vestigial characters.
Sazh is the closest thing to a well written character, Hope has something resembling an arc, and Vanille and Snow have qualities that create dynamics occasionally. But Lightning and Fang are just utter nothing characters. Fang does have one thing on Lightning, though, and that is that she isn't Lightning.
Do you have any articles at hand that do a deep dive?
It's deeply, deeply fascinating to me. Because XIII was every mistake that was deftly avoided by the previous entries, particularly VII, VIII, and X which it seemed most intent on cribbing stuff from. It's made all the more baffling by the fact that Squeenix seemed quite proud of XIII for a while.
Do you have any articles at hand that do a deep dive?
It's deeply, deeply fascinating to me. Because XIII was every mistake that was deftly avoided by the previous entries, particularly VII, VIII, and X which it seemed most intent on cribbing stuff from. It's made all the more baffling by the fact that Squeenix seemed quite proud of XIII for a while.
That postmortem is a refreshing degree of honesty, and I can personally sympathize with getting hamstrung late into development by a constantly changing spec. The main thing is the first they mention -- lack of shared vision and communication breakdown between departments -- is the root of it, but they didn't really go into the gritty details of just how bad it was.
Most of the FF games before 13 (and most RPGs in general) started with characters, then built a world and story around them. FF13 was written backwards, with a bunch of story ideas, setpieces, and even entire scenes written out Mad Libs style, by a department largely independent of character design. Plot happened before the characters that would live it were defined at all, much less the personalities, backstories, and motivations that should have been integral to why. Lightning and Fang feel like vestigial characters because they are -- they're high-def character rigs that just got slammed into slots. Fang and Cid changing sides feels hollow and sudden because their impact on the story was fundamentally cobbled together and they didn't really have much coherent anything to back it up. Sazh's "moment" feels fake because they wanted someone to go through that scene and he was basically inserted into it.
This is also why the writing in the sequels was...at least a bit more believable? By that point they had already established characters and setting, however messily, and things could at least flow and develop from it. But I still can't get behind them because the premise they built on was so flawed to begin with.
I remember hearing that most of the people who liked XIII in Japan were fans of Lightning and her voice actress
And this gets at the other root of the issue. Part of that is just how otakus are -- Lightning wasn't a character at all until the third game, but JRPG core fanbases have a significant fraction that don't notice/care as long as she hit the right notes, and there's a lot of pressure from above to play to that on purpose (and I speak from experience when I say this isn't unique to Japan). But also part of that is local culture, and gets completely lost in translation. If you have a monotone lady who's a total badass but her eyes are obviously full of pain and black is the color of her soul, that goes over really well in Japan because emotional distance is seen a lot differently there. FF7 and 8's protagonists were basically Hot Topic ads. But most of the rest of the world sees a walking cardboard cutout with a sword taped to it unless the writing, VA, and animators completely knock it out of the park with the kind of nuance this game didn't have room for.
The problems seem to me to run a LOT deeper than mixed up character/worldbuilding priorities. Because the world isn't just uninteresting (like Dragon Age: Origins, which had the same bad prioritization). It's meaningless thematic fuckin' goulash.
It wasn't built world first, it was built cutscene first, and even then, most of the cutscenes are just dazzling setpieces that are so pandemonious you can't even appreciate the spectacle.
It wasn't built world first, it was built cutscene first
That's basically it in a sentence. And it's going to happen whenever you have writers that are told to write a story before the concept and character designers have anything.
But also part of that is local culture, and gets completely lost in translation. If you have a monotone lady who's a total badass but her eyes are obviously full of pain and black is the color of her soul, that goes over really well in Japan because emotional distance is seen a lot differently there. FF7 and 8's protagonists were basically Hot Topic ads. But most of the rest of the world sees a walking cardboard cutout with a sword taped to it unless the writing, VA, and animators completely knock it out of the park with the kind of nuance this game didn't have room for.
I sometimes wonder if I might be more receptive than the average westerner to that. Though on the other and I _have_ played about 1/3 of FF7 and I felt it got boring because the gameplay was slow and the setting hadn't really coalesced yet.
The problems seem to me to run a LOT deeper than mixed up character/worldbuilding priorities. Because the world isn't just uninteresting (like Dragon Age: Origins, which had the same bad prioritization). It's meaningless thematic fuckin' goulash.
It wasn't built world first, it was built cutscene first, and even then, most of the cutscenes are just dazzling setpieces that are so pandemonious you can't even appreciate the spectacle.
Do you mean how the setting is dominated by just so many different jargon terms?
I think that this is a problem with a lot of speculative fiction media. I get that feeling from reading some anime series synopses (which are basically premise statements).
It's not just one problem. The amount of jargon doesn't help, but it's not the only thing.
It's too much jargon, communicated ineffectively (the term l'Cie is given within the first thirty seconds and isn't given adequate explanation until a few hours later at which point the mechanics behind being a l'Cie are explained in full several times in the space of about an hour), that adds up to...not nothing necessarily, but the whole is significantly less than the sum of its parts.
One gets the sense of what they're going for thematically but it's not expressed in an emotionally compelling way and none of the world's mechanics ever make sense on an intuitive level nor do they hold up to the level of scrutiny needed to have even a basic idea of what's going on on a scene-to-scene basis.
On a semi related note why tf are JRPGs that have some sort of real time component so deathly afraid of having a combat pause so you're not navigating menus mid battle
Evil Empire, Gus talks to cave squirrels, Leon's an asshole for no particular reason, all the secondary characters die in stupid ways, and you kill David Bowie a couple times. There, that's FF2's story.
FF3 DS was pretty bad too. The entire final dungeon was littered with random encounters that could back attack, fire breath three times in their surprise turn, and murder the entire party before you could input commands, and there was literally nothing you could do to stop it. And when it happened, you had to claw your way back through three very long dungeons and five bosses (at least two of those five bosses could also randomly instagib you between moves) to get back to where you were.
Also I'm still annoyed/amused that about 1/3 of the FF3 bits in Record Keeper are just dicking around in the bonus dungeon because almost nothing else interesting happens in that game.
You could argue that FF3's bullshit were a product of its era (bless you, save points), whereas FF2's bullshit were because it was trying to innovate too much at once (in addition to the stuff that was a product of its era).
FF2's bullshit is also because it was the brainchild of Akitoshi Kawazu. A man who later went on to direct all of the SaGa games, which essentialy use very refined versions of all the FF2 level up mechanics.
The weird thing about FF3 DS is that most of its worst problems were introduced by the remake. The NES version was a lot more reasonable in damage flow and average progression, but the DS version was just grindy as shit and would sometimes kill you unavoidably. Garuda was a gimmick boss you were literally supposed to fight by turning the entire party into a job you got minutes prior, spending 3-4 hours grinding it until serviceable, saving outside, then running all the way up through the dungeon to attempt the boss and pray the random turn order put all your dragoons in the air every turn before a double nuke overkilled them by almost twice their max HP. For a lot of the later bosses, you had to have two healers and pray their random turn order would very precisely interleave the boss's 2-3 turns every round.
The problem with FF2's system was mostly not the system. There were weird consequences like the quickest way to level HP by smacking each other, but if you just played through normally, enemies would be hitting you hard enough that it would happen pretty naturally. You'd spend most of the game being hit for 1/3 of your HP bar at a time (which is if anything pretty light for early FF), and the moment anything hit harder you'd just get more HP. If there was a problem with the system, it was that they cycled your fourth member out so often, but even they came with reasonable default builds.
It was the numbers they plugged into it. They exposed the progress numbers, and you could see Cure leveled up quite respectably, and Element attacks leveled up adequately. But stuff like Esuna that you hopefully wouldn't use very often in the first place was expressly tuned to level up at the slowest possible pace, and basically didn't function at all until it hit the mid-levels. You would have to spend hours grinding a status spell that literally did nothing until it stopped doing nothing.
That, and all the spells started at a completely useless level 1, including the big legendary stuff that prominent characters die to give you. Like, Minwu, I don't know how to tell you this but Ultima seriously blows and the Mysidian cult should probably feel bad. It's level 1 with minimum scaling, starts out doing two digits less damage than the caster's own weapon, I'm at the end of the game, and even if I spent hours grinding it my physical attackers are still going to hit harder for free. You really don't need to heroically sacrifice yourself to get this donkey shit into my hands. Can we just send you home with a pizza or something? Has Mysidia invented pizza, Minwu? They should. Here, take home a delicious Ultima pizza.
Comments
It's deeply, deeply fascinating to me. Because XIII was every mistake that was deftly avoided by the previous entries, particularly VII, VIII, and X which it seemed most intent on cribbing stuff from. It's made all the more baffling by the fact that Squeenix seemed quite proud of XIII for a while.
Sazh is the closest thing to a well written character, Hope has something resembling an arc, and Vanille and Snow have qualities that create dynamics occasionally. But Lightning and Fang are just utter nothing characters. Fang does have one thing on Lightning, though, and that is that she isn't Lightning.
It baffles me that game never got followed up on.
Did Japan really hate that game or something?
Just, the tone and look of IX is so different from all the other 3-D FF games that I wonder what happened there.
Also IX was a deliberate throwback to the 2D games. Some of it straight up references them, like the Four Fiends, and even the music.
I guess I'm just wondering why they didn't do more throwbacks like that.
It wasn't built world first, it was built cutscene first, and even then, most of the cutscenes are just dazzling setpieces that are so pandemonious you can't even appreciate the spectacle.
And none of this gets to the root of my question: what changed?
I can see how the combat became such a horrible bloated mess but the writing really gets to me.
I think that this is a problem with a lot of speculative fiction media. I get that feeling from reading some anime series synopses (which are basically premise statements).
It's too much jargon, communicated ineffectively (the term l'Cie is given within the first thirty seconds and isn't given adequate explanation until a few hours later at which point the mechanics behind being a l'Cie are explained in full several times in the space of about an hour), that adds up to...not nothing necessarily, but the whole is significantly less than the sum of its parts.
One gets the sense of what they're going for thematically but it's not expressed in an emotionally compelling way and none of the world's mechanics ever make sense on an intuitive level nor do they hold up to the level of scrutiny needed to have even a basic idea of what's going on on a scene-to-scene basis.
What a fucking disaster.
ged it?
Imperial ftw