Further more, many fans and critics praise FFXII as an significant improvement over its predecessor. yes the attacks and spells are identical, but the the way Square went about playing the game was masterfully done IMO. nothing felt better than seeing your gambits work, and it was a lot better than the traditional "walk, random battle, XXXXXXXXXXX, victory song"
179: The Battleship Final Fantasy
- Thread starter Ray Huling
- Start date
i agree about the Zodiac Spear, the game gives no hints to even the most hardcore easter egg finders.
i did find FFXII as a challenging game though, i died on bosses quite a bit and had to do a lot of gambit adjusting. plus the sidequests were beasts.
i dont see myself as a noob here either, but that's my view on it.
i did find FFXII as a challenging game though, i died on bosses quite a bit and had to do a lot of gambit adjusting. plus the sidequests were beasts.
i dont see myself as a noob here either, but that's my view on it.
Oh I'd agree that mechanically FFXII is a huge step up over it's predecessors (let's face it, it's basically Knights of the Old Republic but without having to pause every three seconds because Carth's being a moron again), it's just the wanky approach to random drops that's annoying.
I'm kind of sad to see The Escapist putting up an article like this one, and jumping on the anti-RPG propaganda bandwagon. Like it or not RPGs and more or less turn based games (active time or not) are hugely popular and sell like crazy. While Final Fantasy has had it's failures, it is overall a shining beacon of success. RPGs of all sorts, despite negative propaganda, still continue to sell rather strongly.
The reason WHY the industry tells you that RPGs are bad for the most part seems to be that developing a good RPG (turn based or not) takes a monumental amount of effort, especially compared to producing your typical action game where they can just use an existing engine like UNREAL, GRAW, or HAVOC PHYSICs (whatever version on all of them) and then add new skins and a few tweaks and call it a game. It's easy, it's cheap, and it has a sizable market to tap.
For a similar amount of effort to create a good turn based RPG, most companies could develop an MMORPG, have things respawn, and charge $15 a month for it.
Development costs also mean that when an RPG fails it's a big hit, and when it succeeds it's not as big a success as say when the latest "pew pew" game succeeds since generally speaking it cost peanuts to make comparitively and thus rakes in more pure profit.
RPGs sell, there is a market for them. Turn based games sell when done right, there is a market for them (especially for those with slowing reflexs, like the original gamers who REALLY played on things like the C-64 instead of just claiming it, especially when those gamers were adults who could afford one, as opposed to their kids). Armies of zombie-like nerds moan louder than a game of "Dead Reign" when they don't see a reasonable stream of them, this influanced the 360's new lineup (the PS-2 was kicking the technically superior X-box all around town because partly because of it's RPG line up, and the PS-2 still holds on partially because of the release of games like Persona 3 and Persona 4, as well as a huge back library of RPGs). Games like Fallout 3 despite being released a couple of months ago (a long time for games on some fronts) still reign on the message boards at places like Gamefaqs. Granted Fallout 3 IS a real time game, but it also include turn based elements via the brilliant VATS system that are integral to game play.
The bottom line is that I don't think Final Fantasy is akin to a Battleship. It's apparent sales, popularity, and success show otherwise. All of the screaming about how this is wrong is more or less spitting in the wind.
While it might be one of the rare failures, it seems like a virtual Guarantee that not only with Final Fantasy XIII sell well, but it is also likely to reign in actual user ratings and forum popularity/usage for months over games that are liked better by the anti-RPG crowd. Even if this round kind of fizzles (like say Final Fantasy X-2, which didn't go over as well as many others) it's virtually guaranteed that they will be on top with a formula that works (so why change it?) yet again.
I guess a better analogy would be sort of like that old movie where Final Fantasy is an aircraft carrier transported back in time, dominating all of the other ships in the ocean, despite their belief in technical superiority. Modern jets blowing Japanese Zeros out of the air like slow floating balloons, etc...
Not a perfect analogy (since games like Madden still seem to sell better, and gawd look at the criticism of those), and everyone including RPG fans like me (who are the worst internal critics of the genere) sees a lot of problems with Final Fantasy... but in the end result the Final Fantasy series is the game others aspire to be. Not an obselete "Battleship" at the end of WW II. It has achieved an almost Zen-like perfection that sees little need for change in the formula. A formula like this is something few other games have been able to accomplish within their genere, or even elevate their genere to.
RPGs forever!
(and yes, I do prefer Western RPGs, but that is another arguement out of context here)
>>>----Therumancer--->
The reason WHY the industry tells you that RPGs are bad for the most part seems to be that developing a good RPG (turn based or not) takes a monumental amount of effort, especially compared to producing your typical action game where they can just use an existing engine like UNREAL, GRAW, or HAVOC PHYSICs (whatever version on all of them) and then add new skins and a few tweaks and call it a game. It's easy, it's cheap, and it has a sizable market to tap.
For a similar amount of effort to create a good turn based RPG, most companies could develop an MMORPG, have things respawn, and charge $15 a month for it.
Development costs also mean that when an RPG fails it's a big hit, and when it succeeds it's not as big a success as say when the latest "pew pew" game succeeds since generally speaking it cost peanuts to make comparitively and thus rakes in more pure profit.
RPGs sell, there is a market for them. Turn based games sell when done right, there is a market for them (especially for those with slowing reflexs, like the original gamers who REALLY played on things like the C-64 instead of just claiming it, especially when those gamers were adults who could afford one, as opposed to their kids). Armies of zombie-like nerds moan louder than a game of "Dead Reign" when they don't see a reasonable stream of them, this influanced the 360's new lineup (the PS-2 was kicking the technically superior X-box all around town because partly because of it's RPG line up, and the PS-2 still holds on partially because of the release of games like Persona 3 and Persona 4, as well as a huge back library of RPGs). Games like Fallout 3 despite being released a couple of months ago (a long time for games on some fronts) still reign on the message boards at places like Gamefaqs. Granted Fallout 3 IS a real time game, but it also include turn based elements via the brilliant VATS system that are integral to game play.
The bottom line is that I don't think Final Fantasy is akin to a Battleship. It's apparent sales, popularity, and success show otherwise. All of the screaming about how this is wrong is more or less spitting in the wind.
While it might be one of the rare failures, it seems like a virtual Guarantee that not only with Final Fantasy XIII sell well, but it is also likely to reign in actual user ratings and forum popularity/usage for months over games that are liked better by the anti-RPG crowd. Even if this round kind of fizzles (like say Final Fantasy X-2, which didn't go over as well as many others) it's virtually guaranteed that they will be on top with a formula that works (so why change it?) yet again.
I guess a better analogy would be sort of like that old movie where Final Fantasy is an aircraft carrier transported back in time, dominating all of the other ships in the ocean, despite their belief in technical superiority. Modern jets blowing Japanese Zeros out of the air like slow floating balloons, etc...
Not a perfect analogy (since games like Madden still seem to sell better, and gawd look at the criticism of those), and everyone including RPG fans like me (who are the worst internal critics of the genere) sees a lot of problems with Final Fantasy... but in the end result the Final Fantasy series is the game others aspire to be. Not an obselete "Battleship" at the end of WW II. It has achieved an almost Zen-like perfection that sees little need for change in the formula. A formula like this is something few other games have been able to accomplish within their genere, or even elevate their genere to.
RPGs forever!
(and yes, I do prefer Western RPGs, but that is another arguement out of context here)
>>>----Therumancer--->
The battleship was obsolete because it didn't prove effective and lost. Final Fantaasy is constantly being improved to win -- and it wins every time.
Ray wrote:
> Final Fantasy has never produced a good or even coherent plot, a compelling
> character, a line of believable dialogue or a scene worthy of anything but a
> Saturday morning cartoon.
Not at all.
Final Fantasy has produced tremendous narratives, and those narratives are the reason people have such love for the series. Some are better than others, but the great ones are true works of art. I don't say this lightly - my job is analyzing media narratives 24-7 (film, TV, videogames).
If your vision of a role-playing game is a management simulation of balancing attacks and defenses, that's fine, and there are plenty of games which provide this. But the FF series has its own unique logic, takes narrative risks no other series has done, and has produced some truly great works of story-telling art. (I could write paragraphs about Final Fantasy 12 alone, one of the great epics of the 21st century).
> Final Fantasy has never produced a good or even coherent plot, a compelling
> character, a line of believable dialogue or a scene worthy of anything but a
> Saturday morning cartoon.
Not at all.
Final Fantasy has produced tremendous narratives, and those narratives are the reason people have such love for the series. Some are better than others, but the great ones are true works of art. I don't say this lightly - my job is analyzing media narratives 24-7 (film, TV, videogames).
If your vision of a role-playing game is a management simulation of balancing attacks and defenses, that's fine, and there are plenty of games which provide this. But the FF series has its own unique logic, takes narrative risks no other series has done, and has produced some truly great works of story-telling art. (I could write paragraphs about Final Fantasy 12 alone, one of the great epics of the 21st century).
I haven't played sonic chronicles so i can't comment, but note that I am a fan of JRPGS. It's just most all of them have severe pacing issues that mostly result from the need to provide alot of game length. WRPGS have this problem too. A lot of the game feels like filler. RPGS are not the only genre that can can succumb to this(GTA4), but it is by far the most common one to. I have fond memories of FFX but wen I went to replay to relive those memories, I found myself wishing I could just replay a greatest hits version of the game.Onmi said:
dredmond79 said:
Could you give an example of a scene, a line of dialogue, or a plot from any Final Fantasy that lives up to the qualification 'tremendous'?
Isn't this all based on opinion Ray? How compelling someone finds a narrative largely depends on who that person is. Final Fantasy's narratives have always gotten critical acclaim and have shown immense popularity (you dont have forums full of fanboys talking about the latest episode of the animated Mighty Ducks).Ray Huling said:
By saying FF is comparable to a saturday morning cartoon, you are insulting intelligence and maturity of the audience that does find the stories "tremendous."
Look at the original Star Wars movies. Melodramatic? Sure. Corny dialogue. It's there. Loop holes and silly concepts. Yup. Yet it still manage to express powerful themes through its memorable characters and plot line.
You want him to list a quality scene from FF? So what? You can shoot him down with more of your opinions?
This assumes the quality of translation is equal.Ray Huling said:
Print novels tend to get translated a lot better than other media, because there are no timing constraints. A scene in a videogame has a fixed length, and dialogue has to be matched to the rest of the on-screen action so that the right things get said at the right times. (either by real timing, as in modern games, or the far stricter limit of having an extremely limited memory space to allocate to characters that existed back on cartridge based systems.) Print novels don't have those limitations, and so the only thing that the translator has to worry about is preserving the authorial voice and intent.
You're also neglecting the cultural aspects of translation. Let's look at your ego-buffing novelists. It's not beyond the pale for me to say that you do not understand the novels of Haruki Murakami the same way a Japanese person does, because he explores themes which are only relevant to people who grew up in and live in Japan and the culture of Japanese life, which whilst you may know about it on an intellectual level, you will not understand in the same way as someone who lives it and understands it on an intuitive personal level.
That's going to extend to Final Fantasy, which has a tendency to present stories which tend to revolve around coming of age and the end of adolescence, which means different things in different cultures. Final Fantasy VII, for instance, is mostly about search for and meaning of identity. That's not so significant a part of emerging adulthood in the west, where individuality is emphasised anyway, but for a product of the Japanese educational system, which is all competitive examination and with little room for individuality and working life as a component in a corporate environment it's going to mean something different.
You don't really address the quality of the storylines though, you manage to excoriate them without having particularly considered them, or at least let that consideration seep into your article.
I some times end up writing long- winded, pompous texts that eventually miss the point, too, so you have my sympathy, Ray. But when did anyone play FF games for the challenging and varied control- scheme? Really, what's next - will the Escapist have an editorial dissing the repetitiveness of playing "catch"? Perhaps an exposé on the obsolete and outdated form Football is still, regrettably, played in - while declarinig the next World Cup an overrated flop? And what about the dullness and passé presentations called "books"? Oh, how boring - we've seen it all before, and will be disappointed if nothing new shows up!
*shakes head*
*shakes head*
I enjoy the stupidly complex plots, they're the only reason I play Final Fantasy games. Perhaps you're just upset because you played FF XII for 200 hours to get everything just to find you wasted all your time?
I gave up trying to find everything in those games long ago and I just enjoy the main story and any subquests that look interesting.
I gave up trying to find everything in those games long ago and I just enjoy the main story and any subquests that look interesting.
And here's another thing, building on this for a moment. The reason why an RPG of significant length may well benefit from having a plot like an alpine road is this: Videogame plots are based on player discovery. The active involvement of directing your avatar around the world talking to it's inhabitants is what provides the meat on the bones of the story. That means that each new turn the plot takes is something "discovered" by the player, even if it's a scripted one, because it's up to the player to reach the point of plot advancement on their own terms. Whether they rush there doing the critical path or stop to talk to everyone and poke into corners along the way, they have found that plot revelation "for themselves" because their experience of the game so far has been subtly varied. There's more of a sense of discovery in a videogame plot twist, because the player has a sense of agency as a part of the game.Flunk said:
Of course, there is a limit to how often this works, and it does rely on player presence (Xenogears, for instance, gets it all horribly wrong, it's not that it's plot is slightly more convoluted than a plate of spaghetti, but that the plot is mostly revealed by exposition from one or more Omniscient Council of Vagueness, not to the player by their actions).
No; I'm just pointing out that the fact of translation in itself isn't enough to justify suspending judgment on the dialogue of FF.GloatingSwine said:
Not really. It's true that FF is the way it is in part because it works within the bounds of Japanese culture. That's why so much space in these games is taken up by the angst of a boy who can't tell a girl he likes her.GloatingSwine said:
But there's no reason to suspend judgment for cultural reasons, either. Japanese people don't love FF as a matter of course. FF is sold to Westerners; this leaves the series open to Western judgment. This is especially true because FF games are so heavily derivative of Western sci-fi and fantasy. Or do you think the Japanese have a clear understanding of Dungeons & Dragons and the novels of William Gibson?
I'm not going to address twelve, thirteen storylines in an 1,800-word piece. I took the plot of FFIV as an exemplar and examined it at some length. It stinks. If you've got access to top-secret linguistic and cultural information that reveals the true depth and nuance of the game, I'd love to hear it.GloatingSwine said:
Why? Don't you like Jonny Quest? G.I. Joe? Shmoo?falsealarm said:
It's not simply a matter of disparaging Final Fantasy; it's a matter of assessing it correctly. The Final Fantasy games belong in a category that includes works like the ones I mentioned above. There is no scene in a Final Fantasy game more harrowing than the Invisible Monster Episode of Jonny Quest, no relationship more moving than the one between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, no moogle more adorable than the Shmoo.
I'm just saying that it's important to keep in mind what kind of material we're talking about here.
Ray Huling said:
Well in that case then yes Final Fantasy is heavily based in science fiction and fantasy. Fireballs, summons, crazy hair, crazy villains and a gunblade? Come on.Ray Huling said:
However (and you ignored it), the Star Wars analogy works here. Glowing light stick swords, a group of rebels taking on a bunch of identical dumb enemy guards who's lasers fly around the main characters as if surrounded by some sort of invisible shield. The cartoon silliness is all there, but Star Wars still earns the critical acclaim it has received.
And you may disagree, and you don't have to agree that Star Wars conveys a compelling story, or that its characters are memorable. Silliness aside, it's what people get out of a movie, a book, or a video game that makes it count.
The problem however, is that you do not disagree graciously. You say FF [insert number here]'s story line was awful. You gave reasons why you found them terrible, and it's clear some people disagree with you strongly on that. Yet you don't even respect their words, you merely say, "prove it." What are we supposed to do?
That's the problem I have here. I respect your opinions, but not when you present them as facts and shoot everyone down who tries to point that out.
Oh and sir, please provide us with the literary analysis you found regarding how terrible Final Fantasy's narratives are -- because everything you said came from you own head.
Final Fantasy IV couldn't afford much depth. For much the same reason that your piece could not examine twelve different plots. Space.Ray Huling said:
Remember, Final Fantasy IV's plot was written at a time and on a format where every single letter was a noticable impact on the memory space available to the game. And whilst you were playing the DS version, you should also remember that the plot hasn't changed from the SNES version, because if it had it would no longer be Final Fantasy IV, and the attraction of a remake would be lost. Not much room for nuance when you've got a maximum of ten or twenty words to deliver the next piece of information, and you have to get the gameplay facts across so you don't frustrate a player with random wandering because your signposting is rubbish.
Also, I would say you are assessing Final Fantasy wrongly by comparing it with saturday morning cartoons, and are not making the case for doing so strongly, merely stating it as "just so". It's teenage/young adult fiction, and uses the themes of that fiction, personal growth, identity, responsibility to others, and coming of age have been at the core of Final Fantasy's stories since they got stories back in Final Fantasy II.
