What is wrong with the Final Fantasty series?

[Beautiful End]

You gotta keep in mind Japan is another culture. Japs is into stuff we might be into and that's fine. But just understand that.

Having said that, your list doesn't make sense:
1. The characters are flawed. Every single videogame that has a good plot has a character that is flawed. No one wants to play as a perfect being. They start as troubled people and throughout the game, they improve. If you didn't manage to play a FF game beyond the tutorial then I can't help you there.
2. Again, if you didn't manage to pay attention, I can't help you either.
3. Ashe, Lightning, Payne, Fran...even if you're playing the Japanese version, they're not high.
4. Yeah...they're not all gonna be a bunch of Marcus Fenixes and Ghosts. The buff macho guy works for FPS. You want one of those? Play another genre. Like I said, the protagonists for FF are usually flawed. It's an average guy just trying to get by who is reluctantly involved in a conflict that requires him to save the world. They're not being 'gay' (Yeah, you were trying to say that. We get it.), they're just not being headstrong and gritty and angry. Like I said, it's a different genre. Maybe it's not your cup of tea but it doesn't mean it's not working for the series. People who like the series do so because the characters are relateable. I can identify to one of those FF guys better than to good ol' Marcus with his super gun and his muscles the size of my head, jumping into the battlefield without a care in the world. Sure, I wish I could do that, but I'm not like that in reality.

So I get the impression you're trying to turn FF games into more of a FPS when it comes to plot, characters and gameplay mechanics. So...no. It's not a FPS. But I am curious about how you would improve the game. So far, we've heard complains but no solutions. It will certainly help drive this conversation further.

FF8: The hate from this one I believe comes mostly from the magic system and also because the fairly silly amnesia-related plot point. Squall is a bit emo for most of it. Actually emo, unlike the emo accusations thrown at Cloud who doesn't really get emo until Advent Children.

I hate to sound like a fanboy but...I don't think Squall was emo. Yes, he was a huge loner and had sad thoughts, but for the most part, he kept them to himself. He rarely shared his thoughts because it wasn't the place nor the time and because, frankly, he didn't give a damn about everyone else. it was until everyone else forced him to open up that he shared all that and actually helped him to get over it. The reason why we know he thought that is because the game allows us to see what he thinks as opposed to other FF protagonists. But I consider someone emo as a person who goes around trying to cause pity from everyone else and just doesn't do a damn thing about it. Squall was always on the move, even stepping up after he was reluctantly named leader of Balamb Garden.

I'm not gonna get into the Cloud territory. But yeah, that's what I think.

 

[Moromillas]

Character development and story arcs, maybe. But I don't quite think it's any of those.

I think the main problem would be the attempt to transition out of the turn based combat that existed Final Fantasy 1 (and continued on) and into something more fun and "modern." Honestly I don't know why they would want to drop turn-based.

Edit:

Also, customization -- The Materia system, it was, absolutely amazing. It was just so simplistic, yet the sheer amount of customization was just staggering. I would really like to see something like that again in FF. Everything after the Materia system was just the basic equipping items and spells.

 

[Da Orky Man]

I'm not racist but....

Never, ever use that in a sentence if you ever want to be taken seriously.

I'm not racist, but my foot itches.

What have you got against feet?

You humans are all racist!

I'm not racist but, you see, I'm racist

Anyway, I've only really played FF13, and only bit of that. Why, you ask? Becasue it's the most bloody-minded game I've ever tried. How many cloned corridors does it want me to go through again? And that sort of battle has never really got on with me either. I just prefer more open RPGs.

 

[Twilight_guy]

One of the biggest things to work on is removing cut scenes. A cut scene is inherently non-interactive and thus not good for a game, an interactive experience. That means using them sparingly and trying to figure out a way to make them more interactive. FF seems to like adding more of them and that's a big no-no.

 

[Aeonknight]

Know what's wrong with the Final Fantasy series?

Absolutely nothing.

The reasoning? For every game that has it's detractors, it also has fans. It has it's undisputed great games like 6, 7, 9. But it has a couple that are a little more mixed in opinions, like 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, and most recently 13.

And unless you are trying to look for something wrong with the games (which will ruin your opinion on the series long before any other flaws will), there's a good chance you can find something good in any of the games, provided you approach them with a "glass is half full" mentality.

But what am I saying? It's the internet, and it's somehow cooler to say anything and everything sucks just to get under the skin of some fanboy.

 

[Aeonknight]

It was?...huh...guess that's why some people aren't to happy with square...an MMO...what the frak?

It still has about 500,000 players, so it's not doing too badly.

Yeah, guess it's going better than FF14 anyway. From what I heard that was a freaking train wreck.

Count me among one of those 500,000. SE is even coming out with a new expansion, despite the game being a decade old. new continents, new jobs (despite there already being 20 of them). FF11 is far from dead and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It'll never reach WoW levels, but the 2 were pretty close back when they were both new.

 

[Atmos Duality]

1) Blank-slate characters. Their role eventually becomes meaningless when the game mechanics allow the characters to become homogenized. This has been an ongoing problem since FF7 (with FF9 being the major exception), and it has only become worse as time has gone on.

2) Bland/Annoying characters.
You know, as self-explanatory as this seems, I am going to comment.
Lets see...thinking back. Characters who weren't annoying, stupid, or bland.

Spoiler: The List, and my opinion

FF13: NONE. I didn't find any of the characters interesting. They are all either hideously annoying or tepid and bland.

FF12: Larsa
Competent. Classy. Even a bit cunning. For a would-be ruler, he actually acts the bit.
Seriously. He acts more like a real person than Ashe, who just glowers in the background with the same expression on her face for 90% of the game.
Maybe Balthier to a lesser extent, but for all the babbling he does about being the Leading Man, not much ever comes of it. He still has some of the better lines in the game.

FF10: Auron
Mostly for very superficial reasons. He was a badass samurai with a smooth voice; a Panacea of Awesome to salve all the irritation the other idiots around him cause (trust me, he is SURROUNDED by idiots). Looking at his actual story and motivations, he isn't all that interesting. Better than Kimahri at least, who was the only other character I could stand, but precisely because he WAS boring and bland instead of irritating and stupid.

FF9: Freya
Has a surprisingly grown-up mentality for a JRPG character, and isn't one-note.
Unlike most JRPG "adults" she acts differently around different types of people like an actual person does. Rather than how JRPG adults normally act: Like an old badass Mary Sue, a one-note old-fart pining for the days of youth, or a clueless dolt.

Unlike most people who love FF9, I really did not like the rest of the cast all that much.
Zidane meant well, but some of his antics came across as less rogue-ish and more like "prat who thinks he knows everything". Steiner was probably my second-favorite character, but he was definitively destined as Comic Relief Fodder for most of the game.
Garnet bored and irritated me greatly. I do not know why.
Eiko was irritating in a "little sister who won't shut up" kind of way.
Quina can just crawl back into to whatever Lovecraftian terror-hole he crawled out of and stay there til Doomsday Cometh.
Amarant is just boring. Basically Shadow 2.0
Vivi..."Naive, Existential Crisis with Legs". Good fucking GOD I got tired of his shit quick.

FF8: I'm actually tempted to put Squall on here, even though his man-bitchiness drove me fucking CRAZY. Why? Because I know that it's part of his story-arc, and that's the sole reason FF8 isn't getting the FF13 treatment. Squall is tenuous at best though, and Lightning in FF13 almost made it on similar grounds.

The real star of FF8, IMO, was Laguna. He was a first-class clutz and fool. But he really did have a kind of charisma and attitude about him that I find oddly likeable. Which is strange, because as far as I can tell, he was solely intended to be comic relief. He has a big heart, and a strange kind of courage.
Pity his son is such a whiny futz.

FF7: Cloud and Tifa.
I'm sorry, but if you ever described Cloud as "emo" or that Tifa was just a bouncing pair of tits, you weren't paying attention.
Cloud is, literally, MENTALLY UNSTABLE. For most of the game, he's borderline insane.
It is foreshadowed heavily that Cloud isn't in his right mind. That isn't "emo", it's "crazy".
I'm sorry if you can't the difference, but it really is a mistake that can change how you view the story entirely.

He actually goes insane as part of the plot a couple of times.

People point to him as being a stereotype Mary Sue, but Cloud SET the stereotype for the JRPG Mary Sue, and for no other reason than the fact that he uses a Big Sword and is rival to the most overrated villain in gaming history. I can't hold it against the guy, sorry.

And of course, Cid Highwind is a boss. He is vulgar in a way that cannot be described by science, and I love him for it.
Barret would be too, except I cannot ever get over the Mr.T-like stereotyping.

3) Poor Storytelling.
Usually about bucking some sort of global authority that turns into a bigger quest to save the world. I'm not saying it can't be compelling, but it needs real effort. We've moved on from the days when RPGs were less about story and more about spectacle and exploration.

Unfortunately, even today most of the effort seems to go into making brilliantly rendered cutscenes first, and giving the player a reason to give a fuck second.

3) Nomura-isms.
Aka "Trying too hard to make the visual style of important characters unique."
This was a HUGE problem in the FF7 compendium tie-ins, and it isn't unique to just those games
(FFX. Kingdom Hearts. Several B-list Squeenix titles.)

Making a character dress like a clown with a zipper and belt fetish only works if they have some sort of reason to dress that way. You might get my attention with a character like that, but that doesn't mean I'm going to care about who they are and what they do beyond "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

 

[BrionJames]

I don't consider anything beyond FF X to be a Final Fantasy game. They changed pretty much everything about the game. The way characters look, the way the story progesses, side quests, GAMEPLAY...it all adds up to something unrecognizable in my eyes. Essentially, FF VI was the finest iteration of this franchise, now its something I'd avoid stepping in.

 

[loc978]

What's wrong with it? Overdone focus on cinematic spectacle, the shift in storytelling from choice, consequence and characterization to existentialist bullshit... and the overuse of cliche characters. The slide started in the 32-bit era and hasn't stopped. I'm lookin' at you, VII.

...unlike some, I don't really think gameplay has slipped. It's shifted up and down a lot, but combat mechanics and stats are generally pretty solid throughout the series (so long as you ignore FFII. Seriously, fuck the extreme grind system).

 

[Mr. GameBrain]

There is no Sakaguchi.

That man IS Final Fantasy!

Without him, the series just has no soul.

Compare Lost Odyssey with FFXIII.

Lost Odyssey is far, far, far, far superior in everyway.

If anything, Lost Odyssey is FFXIII. It takes the logical step forward to the series. While it is a bit flawed, the story, the characterisation, the world, the lore, even the mechanics, are just higher quality than in FFXIII.

I haven't played The Last Story, but I sure as hell want to.
(I definately don't want to play XIII-2 or XIV, or even Versus XIII)

 

[Sexy Devil]

Semi-relevant. Heard Vanille's accent a few weeks ago. When FF13 was released I kept hearing endless bitching about how her accent was absolutely horrible and fake as hell. Then I heard it and I heard... a genuine Australian accent.

Silly foreigners thinking they know how we sound because they've seen Steve Irwin.

 

[rekabdarb]

Hmm this sounds oddly familiar. Except in less... elegant words. I think.

Made a thread doing the exact thing you're attempting to do four years ago.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.71121-Poll-Square-Enix-and-what-i-think-of-them#714103

But i guess I'm now a necromancer cause that's what i just did. Although glad to see in four years i haven't changed my stance on the company.

 

[Stu35]

Well, I've not played any since 13, which I did not play for long before it went back to the shop... However as I understand it, every version seems to be removing player input from Combat more and more.

Thats my only major gripe about it. The remainder can be explained away as the fact its a JRPG, and they're always going to have little foibles that don't quite sync with my western sensibilities.

 

[BeeGeenie]

The single biggest problem with the FF series at present is this: If we buy them, they'll think we want more flashy, pointless cgi with no story and bland characters... and if we don't buy them, they'll just throw the series into a garbage bin instead of fixing it. It's a lose-lose.

I loved FF4... it was the first game that made me care about the characters. FF6 was my favorite in the series. Again, memorable characters and interesting story. FF7... I'm not even going into why people love it so much... and then FF8 happened, and even though FF9 tried to pull the series out of a nosedive, it's been all down hill from there.

The FF series has become "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury (and CGI), signifying nothing"

 

[Veldt Falsetto]

Final Fantasy is rapidly approaching a singularity of prettiness and batshit writing. I theorize that by number 17, the game will literally be about a crystal dreaming a timesong into existence in the form of a planet-sized space-station/tortoise. The villain of the game will be Newtonian physics itself.

And the protagonist will be a pile of belts that have achieved sentience. Or at least enough sentience to wangst about things.

Personally, my biggest gripe with Final Fantasy is pretty much the same issue I have with JRPGs in general. In short: they're not RPGs. There is no role-playing. Your actions have no impact on the story.

merrr, not necessarily true with, with Final Fantasy but mostly JRPGs, also this happens in WRPGs only it's all the illusion of choice, no real choice.

Example Final Fantasy XIII-2 has multiple endings, ok it's all about time travel and so it's very possible to see the "proper" ending and then go back in time in the same session to see one of the various paradox endings but it's still a form of choice.

Mostly JRPGs have a lot of multiple endings and some do moral choice MUCH better than some WRPGs do, Chrono Trigger is a great example but newer games like the Star Ocean series does full on choices much better than a hell of a lot of western games.

On the topic of western games with choice and impact on the story, haven't we just come out of the whole Mass Effect debacle in which one of the most beloved IPs this gen, one that promised all of our choices will have a huge impact and drastically change our story, well it turned out the impact on the story was kinda miniscule.

I'm not gonna turn it into one of those threads, I love Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, JRPGs and WRPGS but there's a huge double standard here, people look past WRPGs not giving you freedom because it gives you the illusion, surely a more concise story that doesn't try and fool the player into thinking they matter is better than a story that doesn't work as well because it needs three different paths that the player must pick, all of which end up in the same place

 

[Veldt Falsetto]

The single biggest problem with the FF series at present is this: If we buy them, they'll think we want more flashy, pointless cgi with no story and bland characters... and if we don't buy them, they'll just throw the series into a garbage bin instead of fixing it. It's a lose-lose.

No, they're directly targeting fan complaints with each game.

With X people complained it was too linear and that they didn't like the main character so with XII they made it a HUGE open world and originally tried to pass Basch as the main character, japan hated Basch so they threw in Vaan.

Everyone complained it was too big and that they didn't like the characters or the graphics so XIII came along and we get a strong main character and it's linear again with great focus on graphics. Everyone whines and moans that it's too linear, that they hate all of the characters apart from Lightning and that they want DLC.

XIII-2 comes around and guess what we get? None of the characters from the first game, more exploration (actually they did it right this time) and loads of DLC.

So people still complain, honestly they can't please their fanbase because the fanbase won't let them, they should make the VII re-make, not make anymore games, cut their losses and leave because life isn't getting any easier for them, even if they give everyone who buys the FFVII remake an inflatable Cloud sex doll and free moogle shaped white chocolate and chocolate chip cookies...also the pom pom could be marshmellow....I digress...everyone would just whine and complain that they only got one free cookie and that their Cloud doesn't clean itself...SQUARE CAN NOT WIN