179: The Battleship Final Fantasy

[Smokescreen]

I thought this article was split in two--perhaps because of the awkward metaphor at the beginning. First there was this complaint about the way the stories were told--but then how that would be OK if it was on a handheld, as though there is an excuse for poor storytelling--and then there was a complaint about the scope of the game, notably how sidequests < reward.

The former I don't think can be held up under any standard; you can say that the stories have evolved as the tools have improved, but I don't think the device a game is on gives it an excuse to be shoddy.

The latter however is more interesting to me. If the sidequests all outweigh the main quest, then aren't we just getting Final Fantasy: Sidequest?

One of the things I've been bothered by ever since 7 is that the side quests take a long long time and never seem to add to the story. When you got Vincent's ultimate weapon, there was a chunk of story that was added to you (though small).

Now, since as Clemstation points out, all the characters can do everything, giving those characters something meaningful that is specific to them and adds to the story might be worthwhile. Sidequests that just give you a cool sword-well who gives a fuck? (Someone does, just not me.)

 

[GloatingSwine]

His reference to the Yamato was regarding how the entire concept of a battleship in the late stages of WWII was obsolete. At the beginning of the war aircraft carriers were consider support chips to the battleships and that idea fizzled about mid 1941 when the Bismarck sank to the hands of the HMS Hood on a 'lucky'shot that crippled her. Aircraft carriers in particular in the Pacific where what fleets and armadas were built around. I really enjoyed this article.

Bismarck (and Prinz Eugen) sank Hood, not the other way around.

Hood was even worse than Yamato in terms of rubbish ship design though. Battlecruisers (Cruiser sized vessels with Battleship size armament) were never a good idea, they didn't have the staying power of a Battleship, or the speed of a Cruiser. They were good for scaring commerce raiders, but as the fate of Hood showed, utterly useless against even a smallish battleship due to poor deck armour making them very vulnerable to plunging fire (long range high angle fire that comes down on top of the ship, as opposed to flat fired shells at shorter ranges. (Prince of Wales, the British battleship at the Battle of the Denmark Strait, was still not finished, she actually had outfitters on board finishing the ship at the time. She was later sunk by Japanese air attack along with Repulse, PoW's radar was nonfunctional at the time, and an early torpedo disabled her rudder and part of her AA suite.)

Bismarck, though she was eventually a victim of air power as well, (a Faery Swordfish got a lucky torpedo hit that locked her rudder, and meant that she could only sail in circles.) actually showed what the use of Battleships still was, she took an immense battering from air and surface combatants before finally sinking, probably due to scuttling charges, as the citadel (inner armoured bouyant section of a battleship) was unbreached, though her entire upper structure was gone.)

The remaining virtue of a battleship in World War II was that they were immensely difficult to sink. The raid that sank Yamato consisted of over three hundred planes.

 

[nicholasofcusa]

All games that cater to completionist (sic) share something with the art of building model ships. They're both concerned with monomaniacal attention to detail.

Oh indeed. Final Fantasy plots may be hackneyed, but until the writer can prove that this doesn't apply to pretty much all games, or that many people haven't been fascinated and inspired by obsolete things since before Keats' Grecian vase, nowhere near as hackneyed as the organising analogy of this vacuous piece.

 

[Ro42G]

Definitely a great article that probably needed some more time in the oven. Calling the Final Fantasy series a Yamato is definitely wrong though. You can call Final Fantasy 12 a Yamato because it was a superior game that came out on the aged PS2. Most people consider 12 to be the worst FF ever even though it is arguably the best. No one will forget FF I, FFVI,FFVII,FFIX,FFX, FFXII, and the FF XIII series. No one is going to forget the Yamato either.

Square Enix is slowly turning Final Fantasy into one more myth for Japan. While Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are myths for Great Britain and the U.S., Final Fantasy is digital Japanese mythology. Japan already has solid myths that still dominate the minds of Japanese. Myths don't sink. You haven't sunk Square's battleship.......

If you look at Dissidia, the Final Fantasy VII compilation games, FF X-2, and FF 12: Revenant Wings, and the FF Tactics Advance series (Ivalice), it is pretty obvious that Square Enix is creating a digital Lord of the Rings. Dissidia is probably the most important game despite coming out for PSP because it deals with the gods of the Final Fantasy worlds. One game is going to explain the mysteries of Final Fantasy universe.

Once Dissidia drops, Square is going to be bulletproof. It is going to take more than an article talking about sinking ships and horrible dialogue to even scratch the paint of this monster. This article should have came out 17 years ago in both Japanese and English written by a Japanese bilingual professor of mythology in order to have any lasting effect at all on the Final Fantasy series.

Besides Square Enix, no other game company has created a satisfactory digital mythology. Blizzard and Lucasarts are going strong and will compete with as well as compliment the Final Fantasy brand. I think that it is unfortunate Christopher Tolkien or some other Tolkien have failed to successfully bring Lord of the Rings to a dominate digital position. Sure the movies were fantastic, but video games are obviously the new media that Lord of the Rings needs in order to survive and thrive in the future. Harry Potter has also failed the transition to digital. Marvel and DC have also been unsuccessful so far. The problem with movies, comics, music,and literature is that the stuff gets old too quick. By the time I read Lord of the Rings or Watchmen, I had already played multiple Final Fantasy games and spin offs. The gameplay from Final Fantasy IV is still fun even though it is more than a decade old. The Lord of the Rings book is now dry and uninteresting. It needs a rehaul that the movies obviously couldn't accomplish.

A toy model is good to make and look at and then you put it down. You can only make a toy model once. You make and remake FFIV Advance as many times as you want. You can create as many Warcraft or KOTOR online characters as you want. People want myths. They want to understand life. Online gaming heals people by allowing them to play their many archetypes (read Carl Jung) As long as Final Fantasy continues to exist, people will keep coming back for more.

 

[dalek sec]

My quick-and-easy comment on this topic is 'Pull the life support.' Or at least, refocus the demographic. A simple story doesn't need to be told in the most convoluted way possible, through the voices of troubled teenaged sensibilities.

Thank you! That's how I generally feel about this series.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

Oh snap Gaijin, I think you just picked a fight with the inteir nation of Japan!

Now I will definatly agree with you that Final Fantasy has become a lumbering behemoth of grind and glitz, like a high budget summer movie lacking substance or fun, possessing only over the top action and hackneyed formulaic plot.

The ORIGINAL Final Fantasy was popular because it was endlessly replayable and customizable. You could make a party of everything, build your characters from the ground up. Recent Final Fantasys have tried to capture this with their many obtuse grid systems and whatever, but the experiance is diluted by the plot. It is very difficult to have complete freedom and a strong plot- Final Fantasy needs to move away from it's current linear model if it's going to combine strong writing with customizable characters. May I suggest Fallout 3 as a model? Yes yes let all the failboys cry "NO! NO FINAL OBLIVION!" but screw you. I'm not saying make an Oblivion clone, i'm just saying that perhaps having a main character that is designed from ground up, combined with pre-genned followers with interesting personalities and traits, as well as selectible history for your character (ala Mass Effect) would be a good formula. Sometimes you just need to shake it up. The grind-tastic linear setup of Final Fantays is a dinosaur, and I know they can do better.

Signed,

Someone who wasted 60 bucks on FFXII

 

[Akas]

1. I believe that FFVI could (arguably) have the best story, IV being maybe second or third. VI had you going through many changes, including the destruction of the world, but more importantly it tried to make you empathize with the characters. From the fragile FEMALE main character (a first at that point), to the treasure hunter, to royalty, and even a wild child, everyone had a back story that appealed to people.

2. My theory is that the resulting convoluted plots were a result of the shift that occurred with FFVII. Up until that point, Square had basically ALWAYS worked with Nintendo, and as a result Nintendo's motto influenced their design (although I haven't found hard evidence). The plots might have been convoluted, but they were linked together by gameplay, and it was often about making as simple an epic as possible.

However, I believe it was one of the design team for FFVII that said "when we worked on FFVII, we were having a hard time working within the limits of Nintendo's hardware (i.e. the N64 and cartridges), so we went with Sony instead [for the transition into 3D]". As a result of switching from Nintendo to Sony, Square's philosophy began to change as well. FFVII was meant to be an epic in every sense of the word, no matter how complex, and it worked.

However, the success might have been attributed to the wrong things. The complex plot and stylish characters were thought to be the main draws of success, and as a result of that was FFVIII (which wasn't as commercially successful). Sony, realizing that perhaps they were misguided, tried to return to "classic" FF with IX, but in trying to emulate Nintendo, they irritated their audiences.

I believe that Sony/Square really doesn't know what else they can do other than continue to run with this complex evolution that they started. X had themes of religion, XII themes of politics, and I have no idea what XIII will deal with. The sales/likability of VIII and IX told them that they can neither stay with the same style nor return to it's roots: they have to continually try newer and more convoluted things.

Again, this is just my theory: if you have contrary evidence, feel free to chime in.

 

[camkitsune]

I take serious issue with this article on several different grounds, but for the sake of brevity I'm going to stick to one single point: the way the author addressed the series's plot.

While you are welcome to dislike a story however much you want, once you start tossing about criticism such as 'imitative drek suitable for children' any discussion travels from the realm of well-reasoned argument to a self-indulgent rambling. Using an example of game dialogue written in an era wherein gaming was in its early adolescence isn't exactly fair. At the time the only other genre that offered anything really story-oriented would be Adventure games (unless I'm having a horrible oversight). Any game that was action-oriented had almost no story in it at all, save 'This is why you're beating people up/shooting them' and 'this is what you get now that you're done committing mass murder'. Contrast to today, where ALL games are expected to have a story.
But I digress.
All that really needs to be said to demonstrate the fact that the article isn't giving the full picture: Final Fantasy X.
That game DID make a good portion of players genuinely care about the characters therein. If an ending is capable of moving at least a small portion of its audience to tears, something has very clearly been done RIGHT. The writing for the series has gotten better by leaps and bounds over the years; basing an assertion that the stories are terrible off of the fourth one is a bit like saying that Edgar Alan Poe was a hack and presenting something he wrote in the 8th grade to 'prove' it.

 

[Majere613]

The Yamato thing is completely off-base, imho. Do you know what the American carriers that sank the Yamato had as escorts to defend them from air attack? Battleships. Air-air interception was a very new technology which the Americans were only just getting the hang of by the end of WWII, and so ships that could mount a lot of AA and take a lot of hits were needed to defend carriers. Yamato was destroyed by air power because she was one ship with a few cruisers vs the entire American naval air force, not because she was in some way 'obsolete'.
Likewise, whether the game is on a handheld or a next-gen console is irrelevant if you consider that the vital thing for an RPG is the story. All the stuff about the side-quests and hidden content can be applied to any game that has anything in it besides the main story- either you get a piece of equipment you've proved you don't need, or a trophy/ achievement that just sits there. So what? The important thing was the journey, the satisfaction of getting there.
An interesting article, but not one I found much truth in, I'm afraid.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Final Fantasy is digital Japanese mythology. Japan already has solid myths that still dominate the minds of Japanese. Myths don't sink. You haven't sunk Square's battleship.......

No.

Dragon Quest is Japan's digital mythology.

Dragon Quest sells significantly better in Japan than Final Fantasy, and always has done.

 

[unangbangkay]

Why is it that the handheld is somehow the place for bad RPGs? Is the console the only platform deserving of a game that effectively links gameplay to narrative? For that matter, why is it so critical that gameplay be linked to narrative in the first place, however hackneyed either ends up to be?

Most "jRPG" games are endlessly criticized as grinds wherein the player shuttles characters from one overproduced cutscene to the next, but I fail to see how that's such a terrible thing, outside of the idea that having these games sell like gangbuster (due to brand or legacy or what-have-you) might have a chilling effect on game designers that aim for something new in the same field.

For that matter, let's look at PC RPGs based on licensed rulesets like D&D. The same argument could be made that number-crunching bonus attacks and defense has absolutely nothing to do with the story of Planescape: Torment and that the game needs to be relegated to PC emulators on an iPhone because of the need to play the game between dialog trees being somehow offensively obsolete.

We don't always play games to find gameplay beautifully interwoven with narrative (though finding such is usually a plus), we play games to have fun. Final Fantasy has, in my own experience, proven quite fun to play between the lavish cutscenes and technical brilliance, even though I knew for a fact that there was little relation between my gambit construction and the fate of Dalmasca. Why? I cared about both, that's why. When I wasn't amazed by CG mini-movies, I was having fun hunting down a completely unrelated monster to test out my latest gambit flowchart.

The evolution of design doesn't always mean that previous designs no longer deserve to stick around. Just as new is not always better, there will always be a place for old relics. Besides, if someone likes an obsolete design and is willing to pay, who cares, so long as it doesn't somehow hinder what comes next.

 

[-Seraph-]

tesxt

well said.

I also funny how they say how Final Fantasies gameplay mechanics and such are "obsolete" but...um....what about EVERY OTHER GENRE!! look at FPS games for christ sake, there's no justification to ***** about this franchise and it's "obsolete-ness" and try to single it out as if it was the only one. Every genre suffers from this as I see it.

 

[Ray Huling]

Hi All,


Thanks for taking the time to read the article--and thanks even more for taking the time to reply.

L.B.: don't get me wrong man. I like the Saturday Morning Cartoons! I'll watch The Herculoids any old day, but it would irk me to learn that someone was investing millions to re-make The Herculoids without changing the tone and quality of the program in any way. That's what I find with FF.

ccesarono: I do mention that the Yamato was taken out by an aircraft carrier. You are right that much of what I'm talking about stems from cultural differences. I think it's easier to overcome these differences with a handheld platform, because you don't approach handheld games with the same expectations you have for full console games.

nicholasofcusa: 'hackneyed' means "trite" or "banal" or "unoriginal". I don't think there are all that many metaphors comparing videogames with naval war vessels, but I'm eager to know of other examples.

R042G: You wrote: "Square Enix is slowly turning Final Fantasy into one more myth for Japan."--yup; that's one of the key ideas in this piece.

But I will disagree with your claim that you can only make a model once: you can only make a specific kit once. I was going to extend the metaphor with my experience making multiple Yamato models, but I figured enough was enough (and besides, as nicholasofcusa will tell you, that's a hackneyed metaphor!)

As an aside, is it me or do I draw out the first-time posters?

TsunamiWombat: Yes.

camkitsune: my point is that FF dialogue hasn't grown up. It's really no more natural or sensible now than it was in 1991. There's just more of it, and it has voice actors.

Seraph: actually, FPSs are immensely different from how they were in the days of Wolfenstein. Everything is. Look at Resident Evil; look at Ninja Gaiden; look at Mario!

The big innovation of FFXII, the gambit system, is really a way to avoid the tedium of playing Final Fantasy. The amazing thing about going back to play all those old FFs is that you discover you're still using the same pattern of presses on the D-pad, over and over again. It's disturbing when you skip from game to game, as I did while writing this piece, to find yourself making precisely the same inputs from decade to decade.

When I'm taking the commuter rail, I find this sort of thing soothing, but when I have a $600 PS3 and a $2,000 TV dedicated to it, something seems mightily awry.

At any rate, thanks again everybody. I appreciate your thoughts.


Best,


Ray.

 

[Warchirf]

ive always liked final fantasy, but then again ive never played any of the later versions.

maby what is needed to relight the jrpg torch is another reunion of dragonquest and finalfantasy developers to creat another jrpg wonder game (ie chrono trigger... best. game. ever.)

i also believe that rpgs are more suited to handhelds as the graphics arnt all that important and that its much better to play while during a lecture than sitting in a dark room at your parents house.

the yamatos downfall was that the japanese labelled it as the pride of the fleet (or something similar). by being the biggest, heavily armed and armoured ship in the fleet obviously the japanese didn't want it to be broken, its more of a pride thing. and as ww2 progressed and aircraft carriors proved more usefall in navel combat, the yamato was already at a disadvantage. thats the power of foresight for ya though... if the japanese knew in advence then maby the yamato would be a mix between aircraft carrior and battleship.... to creat a ship of immence awsomness... the 'zero's were light and effective so i cant see why they couldnt mix the designes.

from an australian with nothing better to do during his uni holidays.

merry christmas!!

 

[Syntax Error]

About FFXII:

The License Board was logical when taking the story into context, but if if it includes the basic hats and shirts, it's a miracle that Dalmascans can get dressed. AT ALL. Let vgcats explains [http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=215].

The storycharacters are the only thing I dislike about that game, probably with the exception of Balthier. Its story was grand, too bad the characters were so bland and unappealing. That, and Vaan's painted-on six pack disturbs me.

As for the Gambits, I actually wished that Persona 3 had a system similar to that, because the AI there is prone to making bad (but rarely detrimental) decisions.

About the article:

Sure, the FF series is now merely a shadow of its former glory, but that won't stop it from being any less fun for its supporters.