FF13 Bosses Respond to Western Review Scores

[RJ Dalton]

As I recall, Half-Life was a strictly linear game. I don't have a problem with linearity itself, as long as the story is engaging and the game is fun to play. It's not the linearity of FF that's made me not want to play the last four FF games, it's the lack of engaging story and not being fun to play that turned me off.

 

[TheRocketeer]

I heard the game really opens up once you get out of Midgar.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

but I can't remember the last time I got a game over in those games (Secret powerful bosses aside.) and that alone tells me the battle system needs a bit of work.

You are correct that FF is in easy mode. I think my last game over (non-superboss) was on the SNES against the Magus Sisters. I just wasn't ready for that battle.

FFX stands heads and tails above all other FF games in sheer easiness though. WAY TOO EASY!

Yeah, the final boss's of the stories themsleve I have always found underwhelming to be honest.

They should track your level and match you strength for those bosses at least.

Seriously, think about F3 or Oblivion without any fan mods. They are steaming piles of horseshit) then I would never play another of their games again.

Sounds like someone is stating opinion on those games like it's fact.

 

[-Seraph-]

but I can't remember the last time I got a game over in those games (Secret powerful bosses aside.) and that alone tells me the battle system needs a bit of work.

You are correct that FF is in easy mode. I think my last game over (non-superboss) was on the SNES against the Magus Sisters. I just wasn't ready for that battle.

FFX stands heads and tails above all other FF games in sheer easiness though. WAY TOO EASY!

Yeah, the final boss's of the stories themsleve I have always found underwhelming to be honest.

They should track your level and match you strength for those bosses at least.

I recall that in 7 if your party is over lvl 80 Sephiroth is a whole lot stronger. The bosses kinda became easier after 7, but of coarse they are pushovers if you know the strategy or if you over leveled/skilled if you put the effort into it. Final bosses only ever came off as hard because they would always pull off some dick move that would compromise you if you didn't reprimand the problem quickly.

I do recall horrible memories where Zeromus would spam big bang, Sephiroth and his super nova, Ultemicia and her just being a *****, ect. They always pull out some super move to inconvenience you and thats as challenging as they seem to get.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

but I can't remember the last time I got a game over in those games (Secret powerful bosses aside.) and that alone tells me the battle system needs a bit of work.

You are correct that FF is in easy mode. I think my last game over (non-superboss) was on the SNES against the Magus Sisters. I just wasn't ready for that battle.

FFX stands heads and tails above all other FF games in sheer easiness though. WAY TOO EASY!

Yeah, the final boss's of the stories themsleve I have always found underwhelming to be honest.

They should track your level and match you strength for those bosses at least.

I recall that in 7 if your party is over lvl 80 Sephiroth is a whole lot stronger. The bosses kinda became easier after 7, but of coarse they are pushovers if you know the strategy or if you over leveled/skilled if you put the effort into it. Final bosses only ever came off as hard because they would always pull off some dick move that would compromise you if you didn't reprimand the problem quickly.

I do recall horrible memories where Zeromus would spam big bang, Sephiroth and his super nova, Ultemicia and her just being a *****, ect. They always pull out some super move to inconvenience you and thats as challenging as they seem to get.

One thing I would like to see a Final Fantasy game do is have a rival/evil party that goes around doing bad stuff plot wise and as a final boss fight you have to fight all of them vs all of you. Kind of like the Delilas family in Legend of Legaia, I gotta admit that would get my blood pumping.

 

[51gunner]

I think that's a pretty weak 'defense': "You're looking at it from a Western point of view!"

Is that some kind of racial slur against the hemisphere? What, am I supposed to try and make myself Japanese as is popular amongst the Japanophiles? You're going to release the game to a Western audience, and now you're griping that western people are ARRRRRRGGGGH I can't stomach that stupidity any more.

 

[-Seraph-]

One thing I would like to see a Final Fantasy game do is have a rival/evil party that goes around doing bad stuff plot wise and as a final boss fight you have to fight all of them vs all of you. Kind of like the Delilas family in Legend of Legaia, I gotta admit that would get my blood pumping.

oh I would love some sort of final battle involving a group of enemies, that would just be grand and challenging if done right. Which reminds me of an upcoming JRPG called Hexyz Force, which you play through the game twice, two parties with their own stories that intertwine, and may possibly clash with each other. I also remember Golden sun having something close to that with Saturos and Menardi fighting you before they became the fusion dragon, had a well balanced challenge I found....despite me owning them first try.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

One thing I would like to see a Final Fantasy game do is have a rival/evil party that goes around doing bad stuff plot wise and as a final boss fight you have to fight all of them vs all of you. Kind of like the Delilas family in Legend of Legaia, I gotta admit that would get my blood pumping.

oh I would love some sort of final battle involving a group of enemies, that would just be grand and challenging if done right. Which reminds me of an upcoming JRPG called Hexyz Force, which you play through the game twice, two parties with their own stories that intertwine, and may possibly clash with each other. I also remember Golden sun having something close to that with Saturos and Menardi fighting you before they became the fusion dragon, had a well balanced challenge I found....despite me owning them first try.

One thing I have always wanted in Final Fantasy is to play a bad guy, and his band of "minions".

Imagine what they could do story wise there, and you'd also see things from a different point of view.

 

[ShadowKirby]

Likewise, games with incredible stories don't need to be told in a variety of ways. Take... any good film for instance.

Games are games, not movies. Linearity is not the issue in itself, but it goes back to a balance between emergent and embedded narrative. Sure, jRPGs are going to put a much bigger focus on the story they created for the player but by removing any chances(or seriously reducing them) for the player to create his own little narrative, you are putting way too much weight on cinematographic language in your game. At a certain point you can ask yourself: "Why are they making a game and not a movie?"

Simple. The story couldn't hold itself has a movie and it needs that little part of interactivity they put in to pace said poor story in order to keep the player hooked.

Okay, now I'm don't agree with you on THAT.

Alright. *cracks knuckles* Looks like I'll need to take out the chainsaw and go through your comments to get some things straight in both your and quite a few other commenter perspective.

Whether or not a video game story could hold itself as a movie without the factor of interactivity is a question which I think is best handled on a case-by-case basis as opposed to the generalization that you seem to be making.

I think there are indeed video games out there that have stories and/or scripts that are indeed worthy of a movie. And interestingly enough there are numerous video games that have film adaptations in the works like Gears of War, Uncharted, inFAMOUS, and Mass Effect (although I find this one rather ironic). And I suppose the recently released Halo Legends also counts. It would seem that as video game stories, scripts, and technologies become more and more sophisticated the line between video games and movies has slowly started to blur. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is Uncharted 2.

I was mostly talking about FFXIII in particular but still, most videogame-based movies don't work as well as their games counterpart for some simple reasons [http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/01/why-video-game-movies-suck.php#more]. You also have to replace interactivity with cinematography, and then you basically loose what makes games interesting in the first place. As for Uncharted 2, [url-http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2010/01/uncharted-2-avatar-and-mistaken-mediums.html]this blog [/url] makes a much better job at explaining some issues with it.

How to best blend the factor of interactivity with a good, movie-worthy story and/or script is a good question that I think a number of individuals and developers are putting some real effort into answering such as Hideo Kojima, Naughty Dog, BioWare, and David Cage. And so far the results have been both noteworthy and promising.

Yes, those and indie developers such as Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow. No question on that.

And if you want an example of a video game story that ACTUALLY HAS been made into a movie then look no farther than Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

Unless you are a FF7 fanboys, there is no way you can think this has a good story.

For the record I believe that the idea of players being able to create their own little narratives as you put it is overrated because it essentially compromises the story. But to be more specific I'll break it down into two reasons.

Overrated? The whole medium hinges around that very concept of emergent narrative. Let's get in the details while I follow your post...

First, their own little narratives can essentially never be more than that: their own little narratives. Their narratives can't be canon. Or they can't be THE official narrative or official story of the game. And the reason for this brings me to my second reason.

This very section makes me think that we don't even know what we are arguing about. Maybe I'm lost. Lets track back to linearity (or over-linearity) as the central issue here. The concept of "canon" has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. In the case of a FF game, the main narrative arc will remain the same no matter the action taken by the player. Nobody cares if what he experienced was canon or not. It's about the potential of the videoludic medium to allow the player to experience their own little story, an emergent narrative, within the context of a bigger embedded narrative. Both are working together in the enjoyment of the game. The fact it's not "canon" doesn't take anything away from the experience.

Second, the reason that their own little narratives can't be THE narrative or story is essentially because their is no official narrative or story to the game. The game essentially is a deliberately incomplete story with a number of blanks carefully placed here and there for the player to fill in. But no matter how the player chooses to fill in those blanks there are going to be a number of other players doing the same thing and doing it differently with ultimately no player's own little narrative being THE narrative. Or in other words because a game is at least somewhat malleable and can be influenced in such a way by the player the game essentially doesn't have a solid identity of it's own. Of course the developer could come along and declare certain ways of filling in the blanks to be canon, but even if they did that it might make you wonder exactly why they bothered to created those blanks in the first place.

Then again you are wrong. You are mixing up two concepts. We could go wild and develop on different genre of gameplay mechanics and how they mesh with narration but lets focus on jRPGs. Those "blank" sections as you call them are still within the overarching narrative of the game. Lets exemplify this.

"Old Sage tells you in a cut-scene that you need to go through the forest to meet the nymph.// You fight your way through the forest with your party and gain loot and stuff.// At the end you are greeted by the nymph in a sexy cut-scene."

That first part is non-interactive and part of the overall embedded narrative put there by the designer. The third one is the same. The second one is more interesting. On the macro level of narration, it is known by the designer that the player will go through the forest. On the level micro level, you have the emergent narrative. Whatever the player experience in that forest, whatever he does and the decision he makes are part of his own little narrative that is his and his alone. It's not the point if what he did in there was canon or not. The important, in the videoludic medium, is that it was his.

Perhaps a decent example of this is Bioware having default and quite possibly canon settings for Commander Shepard's first name, gender, appearance, class, and voice. These things being featured ever so prominently in at least one of the commercials for Mass Effect 2.

This is also the main reason that I find the idea of a Mass Effect movie to be ironic.

See above.

I think this is fundamentally a question of finding the right balance between story and interactivity.

Yes!

And quite frankly I don't think that the BioWare-style method of leaving blanks and having players create their own little narratives is the best way to do it.

No! Wrong answer.
That is totally gaming's strength, to let the player experience his own narrative.

I think a better alternative for example is having a silent protagonist. This way the players are given the opportunity to project their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas onto the protagonist. Or to essentially "make the character their own" as I once heard it put. But this way would able to avoid compromising the story with actual blanks. Although in truth I think this would best be done with an in-story explanation as to why the character doesn't speak. Like a childhood accident or something. But anyway I think that the best example of the silent protagonist approach is probably Gordon Freeman and the Half-Life series.

I?m gonna bring movies here for a second. There are two pretty close but slightly different concepts we can bring here; empathy and identification. I'm not going to go on a big class on cognitivism but identification is, quite simply, identifying yourself to an avatar/character, taking along his moral values and so on. Empathy, on the other hand, is about putting yourself in the shoes of the avatar/character and wonder how you would react in his situation. Silent or speaking doesn't change a thing, it's just a myth. You can never totally identify yourself to an avatar/character, especially if he/she is morally ambiguous. On the other hand, you can feel empathy. You don't identify to a silent protagonist since there is nothing to identify to. But you can feel empathy for Nico Bellic and wonder what you'd do in his situation.

I think that I've said all that I need to say in this post so let me end it with a link to an article which I believe is quite relevant to this topic.

http://www.destructoid.com/the-path-of-no-divergence-why-linear-games-have-their-place-90753.phtml

Jim Sterling? Seriously?
Here's a couple of paper by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan Simons to really get a grasp on narration and games.

http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/
http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons

 

[-Seraph-]

One thing I would like to see a Final Fantasy game do is have a rival/evil party that goes around doing bad stuff plot wise and as a final boss fight you have to fight all of them vs all of you. Kind of like the Delilas family in Legend of Legaia, I gotta admit that would get my blood pumping.

oh I would love some sort of final battle involving a group of enemies, that would just be grand and challenging if done right. Which reminds me of an upcoming JRPG called Hexyz Force, which you play through the game twice, two parties with their own stories that intertwine, and may possibly clash with each other. I also remember Golden sun having something close to that with Saturos and Menardi fighting you before they became the fusion dragon, had a well balanced challenge I found....despite me owning them first try.

One thing I have always wanted in Final Fantasy is to play a bad guy, and his band of "minions".

Imagine what they could do story wise there, and you'd also see things from a different point of view.

I've always wanted to play a reasonable "Bad Guy" RPG where you play the villain or what may be perceived as a bad guy. And I mean something complex that brings into question our perspective on the matters of good and evil, not just being a bad guy for the sake of being an asshole. I'd be all over it if it delved into questionable matters of morality, and delved into the mind of such a character, although some minor "evil for the sake of evil" is welcome. Being able to see the story from the other side would just be made of win if the villain is properly developed.

 

[NeutralDrow]

I have to admit, the Japanese developers do have a point. I've never been fussed about linearity in an RPG, and do find that the linear ones more often have compelling stories.

Whether it's cultural differences or not, I can't tell; I can honestly go for either form.

 

[GeneralGrant]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a linear story. If anything, developers are trying to hard to give games non-linear stories that aren't very good instead of decent linear ones.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a linear story. If anything, developers are trying to hard to give games non-linear stories that aren't very good instead of decent linear ones.

They're trying hard to give something a crap story? That's kinda weird, I mean the story they tell could be garbage but I don't think the person behind it would think so, it's all a matter of opinion and how you take a story.

 

[nagi]

For me, an RPG has to offer you choices. Otherwise it is not playing a role, it is being constricted into one. Hence, open >> linear.

 

[Thaius]

People need to stop hating linearity so much. It's a design choice, not a design flaw: what's with this ethnocentrism?

I see what he's saying: the more control you give the player, the less control you have as the designer. It makes telling a compelling story difficult. It's possible, but difficult. They want to tell us their story, and they are taking steps to ensure it. Linearity is not a bad thing, people. Final Fantasy has always told good stories, but in a different way than we do over here in the west: there is nothing wrong with that.

Yes but you would think now and then the series would evolve by more then just the graphics, linearity isn't the problem so much as having no choice about anything, they could throw the odd option at you now and then.

See though, the Final Fantasy series does change. Maybe it couldn't be seen as "evolution," but it changes. No Final Fantasy game can really be called the same. Even for a while, when the battle systems all followed the Active-Time formula, things worked differently. With "evolution," as we call it, a series adds new things and adjusts old ones with each entry, kind of stacking these changes up as the series goes along. Final Fantasy simply changes, delivering a completely different game each time. The battle system is never the same, the story is always different (and almost always really good), the characters are usually well-developed, the world and atmosphere changes from game to game... Final Fantasy may not evolve as most games do, but to say the series never changes is just not true.

As for choices, I still see nothing wrong with a lack of them. Control over the actual events of the story is not the only way to take advantage of gaming's unique interactive capabilities. Take Final Fantasy VII, for instance, when Cloud was being controlled, driven to kill Aerith. The player tries to press buttons to lead Cloud away, to lower his sword, but each button that is pressed only makes him raise the sword higher. Or Bioshock, how even though the player has full control of his character at all times, the one point where you really, really want it, you're deprived of it. These did not allow one to actually change the story, but they made for moments that were much more effective due to interactivity. Final Fantasy deals in these, delivering set stories with moments of interactivity to drive certain points home. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The battle system is basically the same it has been since FFVII, if not before then, adding in QTEs and the odd new battle command doesn't really make it a new system.

I never said the stories weren't great, they're okay but a little choice cannot hurt the franchise. It would just be nice to see a company that claims it pushes the envelope in the JRPG genre to take a new step instead of just "updating" the game with tweak between each one.

I respectfully disagree about the battle systems being the same. Sure, at their core, they're all turn-based battle systems, but those kinds of systems have never been about the actual systems, but rather about the customization surrounding them. The Materia system from FFVII, for instance, is nothing like the Licenses or Gambits from XII, or the drawing from VIII, or the sphere grid from X, or the simple "learn new spells at certain levels" system of older RPGs. Most of the battle systems may not have differences at a fundamental, battle-to-battle level, but turn-based battles are about customization outside of battle and strategic use of your setup in battle. And Final Fantasy changes that up completely from game to game.

The battle systems are, I said nothing about the levelling up and equiping etc, the way a battle is played works the same. Turn based battles in Final Fantasy aren't all about how you strategize and equip your characters when there's not much difficulty in the games. I am going to be honest, and this may be just me, but I can't remember the last time I got a game over in those games (Secret powerful bosses aside.) and that alone tells me the battle system needs a bit of work.

As for the story stuff, the story be straigh forward, but what I mean by choice that it could have a few objectives in the game you could get to choose which you do first is all.

From what I hear you heal after every battle in the game, where's the improvement there? That makes the game less challenging and less you have to do, taking things out like that aren't a way to improve the game.

I see what you mean there, though you must be really good if you've never gotten a game over. These games (gameplay-wise) are largely about being powerful enough to defeat the increasingly powerful enemies that appear as the game progresses. If you train and level up for hours, then difficulty won't be an issue. Otherwise, it actually gets rather difficult. You have control over how hard the game is, because you have control over how much you level grind. You want the pure experience, don't level grind; rely solely on the experience gained from the story missions. To be honest, unless you ran around leveling up a bunch, I don't see how the games could be considered too easy - and leveling up is your choice, not their mistake.

As for the healing, that would be a new thing in Final Fantasy XIII. I won't judge before I play, personally. I can see pros and cons to the idea, but I won't be able to see how said pros and cons fit together until I play the game. I'll withhold judgement on that topic until midnight on March 9th.

However, personally, I don't find an easy difficulty level to be a problem in story-driven games like this. The main effect that interactivity has on games like Final Fantasy is to make the game fun and to involve the player more in the story than a static observer in a movie. Both of these are accomplished regardless of difficulty: in fact, overwhelming difficulty can retract from both of these. Personally, in a battle like the one with Jenova at the end of disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII (I'm not giving spoilers, but you may remember it: the scene that makes many a gamer tear up at the mere playing of a certain character's theme), I don't want to die in that battle. I was emotionally ready to kill this thing, and death simply breaks the mood and forces you to try all over again. In this kind of game, I'd rather have a smooth story experience than a challenging gameplay one.

Fair enough, I think we both have vaild points, I am going to make an effort to play this game just to see how it holds up then. You've convinced me to try it, and I don't level grind actually. I just haven't found it that hard... Hmmm, Tales of Symphonia has given me many a but whooping so I'm not immune to game overs or anything.

I guess we just have to wait and see how it holds up.

EDIT: Also, I do like to be challenged no matter what I play, otherwise I get bored. So difficulty is a bit of a thing for me.

Heh, I'm glad to see we just had a conversation that didn't end in a flame war or something. Even on a relatively intelligent community like the Escapist, that happens a lot: nice to see it not.

I'm personally excited for the game, but I have to admit that, while I wouldn't call myself a fanboy, my experiences with Final Fantasy have all been so good that I'll buy any new numbered installment (I'll skip on some of the stuff like Crystal Chronicles, but a new numbered entry is always something I look forward to). I trust them to do something good. I'm a little scared since FFXII was kind of a letdown, but I won't give up on the franchise unless XIII is really terrible. And I have high hopes for XIII. We'll see. I see where you're coming from, I guess it just comes down to what we value in our games. Make sure to sound off on what you think when it comes out: I'll be interested to know.

 

[nohorsetown]

I agree that it's easier to tell one good story with a linear plotline than to tell a buncha good stories which branched out from each other somewhere along the way (just kinda makes sense, right?), but the funny thing is these guys consistently fail at storytelling.. in my opinion, of course.

Final Fantasies are not Great American (er, Japanese) Novels. There's a reason they're marketed to teenagers. It's like this: upgrade your wacky sword-thing, charge power levels to 9000, and kill legions of rehashed mythic animals (but "summon" the big ones), traveling from town to town to town until you get every party member's lame "backstory", then take on the big bad guy only to find out there's a bigger one behind him, and oh yeah, you're special and you probably have secret memories you've got to unlock, so you can cast huge world-destroying spells on the final boss, yet emerge unscathed, and believe in the power of heart and friendship and where there's a will there's one wing, for only together can we fly, so take my dreams on a rocket ship to the stream of the soul of a holy girl's teardrop - I promise I'll wait in your smile forever.. ahem.. and a chocobo (and an airship, and a guy named Cid) in every pot.

Still, I thought that stuff was pretty awesome when I was 13, and I guess in a way it kinda was. I wasn't looking for a good story, just one with plot twists and badasses. I didn't wanna read classy shit to begin with, cuz I was 13 and dragons were neat! So I'm not saying this stuff shouldn't exist. But please, Squeenix dudes (cuz you totally care what I think), don't pretend you're telling some important story, or that you're masters of some art form. FF-grade "epic" stuff has been run into the ground so damn much by this point, and frankly, it's easy to write and essentially empty. Western RPGs usually have less linear, generally shorter, more grounded, basic stories, and guess what, those stories are still almost always *better*, even when they're barely there. Uh, in my opinion, of course.

In spite of all that spite, I'm sure I'll borrow the game at some point, cuz I try to keep up on this shit, and hey, I'm always hoping they'll prove me wrong. Not that they need to; they've got one of the best money-making formulas out there, kupo.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

There's a difference between linear and to linear. Some linearity is good in videogames, it keeps the player on a set course so they don't get lost. First time I played Fallout 3, I took two steps out of Volt 101 and went "Where am I!" For JRPGs (and probably most games) they need to have a good balance between exploration and linearity. Yes your going from point A to point B, but it would be nice to check out this or that dungeon on the way, just to see if there's any cool things in there.

I've been a fan of FF for as long as I could hold a controller. I was not a big fan of 10 for this reason, but even 10 had exploration toward the end. FF13 is not an rpg, it's a very elaborate dungeon crawler. Square has taken everything out of the game that is loved by rpg players in general (both western and eastern) Towns, Npc interactivity. Instead they've left us with a story and pretty environments that we can only look at. Square wants to make movies, not videogames.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

Nothing wrong with linear storytelling in my opinion. In fact, I think too many games have gotten the whole 'Sandbox' thing into their head.

If you've got a good story to tell (this, by the way, is the reason I'm not touching FF13), then theres nothing wrong ith being linear. A movie is linear, a book is linear, that doesn't mean I can't enjoy them. Stories should be linear. Beginning, Middle, End. Not much variation there or you don't even have a story.

Also, I guess you could see it as being a symptom of Japanese vs Western thinking. They have that whole visual novel trend, and as we've seen from Fahrenheit, Westerners apparently hate visual novels styles. (this is hyperbole.) If I was to guess though, I would say the problem is less Japanese vs Western stereotypes, it's more what the definition of RPG is (though still from a Western vs Japanese standpoint). I could be wrong, but I think the genral belief of Westerners is that RPGs must have lots of freedom, which jRPGs don't really have.

And I have some interesting questions, before jRPGs became big, and got marketed in the West as Role-Playing-Games, did the Japanese developers refer to them as RPGs? Because it sounds more like a marketing tool that some bright spark American thought up to market FFVII to the plebs. If they were referred to as role playing games, does that entail the same thing in Japan as it does in the West, AND, is the actual Japanese term for these sorts of games one of those untranslatable words, for which 'Role-Playing-Game' was the best and nearest translation?