I admit, I am disappointed that they just renamed Versus XIII to FFXV, but hey, at least we got some news about it. Hopefully it can pull itself up from being the new Duke Nukem Forever. Also, this is just further proof of the utter failure of Fabula Nova Crystalis.
Uh, what formula? Final Fantasy has only had a few things that have been consistent over the years. The only ones that can be seen as following a common formula are FFI, FFIII, FFIV, FFV, FFIX and FFX to an extent. That's less than half of the series. And even then, its largely graphical aesthetics, stories revolving around elemental crystals and the Job System. Anyway, to answer the question: Yes. It is. Let's briefly look at the whole main series FFI: A fantastic unlicensed adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons. FFII: A decent story hindered by a broken leveling system. FFIII: A great update to FFI with a great new take on the Job System established by FFI. FFIV: One of the best games of all time with a phenomenal story of redemption and sacrifice. FFV: A great update to FFIII hindered slightly by its bland story (which the GBA version makes up for with a near parody translation). FFVI: An excellent story about an oppressive empire and those who try to stop it. FFVII: A good story about identity. FFVIII: Dreadful. A lame story that doesn't know what its doing with unlikable characters and plot holes that you can drive a battleship through. FFIX: The best damn game in the series. The story is the most well built of any in the series and explores themes of life and death, humanity, family and loyalty. Every character (save Quina) is at least decently developed and the villain is the best in the series. FFX: A good story that explores sacrifice and religion, but hindered by a few unlikable characters, but helped by great gameplay. FFX-2: A bad story that throws the returning characters and the entire setting horribly out of character, not to mention being a complete missed opportunity with the establishment of various political factions that are all vying to lead the people. At least the combat worked. FFXI: A solid MMO that completely alienates the uninitiated. FFXII: A very well built world with a decent story about political warfare that is greatly hindered by the unnecessary (and executively mandated) point of view character. FFXIII: An idiotic story that meanders aimlessly for 20+ hours with a mixed bag of characters that drops the player into an endless hallway with combat that plays itself. FFXIV: One of the worst MMOs ever made. But before we begin, let me explain my position a bit. I have been a fan of the series since I was 12 (so about 12 years now). Since then, I have collected every title in the main series except FFXI (but I did play it briefly), FFXIV and FFXIII-2. Final Fantasy helped shape my tastes as a gamer. It helped me appreciate storytelling in games and showed me what character development was. I have no idea where I would be as a gamer if it weren't for Final Fantasy. While the series has had its weak spots (FFII had an atrocious and broken leveling system, FFVIII was all around bad), the games since FFX have had far worse reactions. FFXI alienated anyone who actually wanted to learn how to play the game without having friends already playing, FFXII was criticized for its far more subtle story and use of an "MMO combat system" (which has always confused me as it played far more like Knights of the Old Republic than any MMO I've ever played), FFXIII being even worse than FFVIII and FFXIV being considered one of the worst MMOs ever made to the point where they fired the entire team and rebuilt it from scratch. But let's ignore FFX, XI and XII for now and focus on the only two current generation titles. Ok, I take that back. Sort of. We'll actually start by looking at FFX-2, AKA, the money grab sequel. No one asked for this sequel and it really only existed as a money grab when Square hit a rough patch, so its existence is forgivable. What it did to the series was not. The story was a massive missed opportunity. On the one hand, the story didn't need to exist. FFX's plot was wrapped up nicely and its bittersweet ending worked (even if Tidus is annoying as ****). On the other hand, the setting could be explored much further. After Yevon's fall, three political factions filled the power vacuum and two of them, New Yevon and the Youth League, were on the verge of going to war with each other. There is a lot of room to tell a story of how Yuna prevents that war and gets the three factions to work together to defeat a bigger threat, which sort of happens in the game we got, but not without a bunch of worthless treasure hunting, pop music and bad writing. The success of FFX-2 inspired Square to launch the most overblown tribute to anything ever conceived by mankind: The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. A film sequel, a video game sequel, two video game prequels, an anime OVA based on events in the game and a series of short stories. At best, these were decent, but added nothing. At worst, they made no sense whatsoever in the context of the original and had no reason to exist. However, after this, the only extension of anything in the series was the Ivalice Alliance, which didn't amount to a whole hell of a lot (and the only direct sequel in the Ivalice Alliance, FFXII: Revenant Wings, is allegedly pretty good). On top of the Compilation of FFVII, we have the biggest failure of a project that Square has ever attached to the series: Fabula Nova Crystalis: Final Fantasy XIII. Concieved as a project where each game in the project would bear the number 13, three titles were announced initially: Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Final Fantasy Type-0 (then known as Final Fantasy Agito XIII). Final Fantasy XIII was released worldwide, a sequel to FFXIII was also released worldwide, another sequel to FFXIII was announced, Type-0 was released in Japan with its planned North American release ammounting to nothing and FFvXIII is the new Duke Nukem Forever. The initial announcement was in 2006. It was concieved as a ten year project from its announcement and we're seven years in and one of the games in the initial announcement has yet to be released or even have any sort of significant information released. The Fabula Nova Crystalis project is pretty much a failure and Squares lack of acknowledgement of the project pretty much cements that. And I think that's about it for big overarching projects for the series because of this failure. But let's go back to individual titles. Final Fantasy XIII is easily the worst title in the series. The plot amounts to our designated heroes wandering about aimlessly and going "Should we do something? We should do something!" It tries to be a character driven narrative, which is fine and, in fact, I welcome it as I think characters are the most important part of a story, but there's no plot for the characters to drive. They wander around aimlessly for hours until they Sazh and Vanille are caputured, then they go back to wandering after rescuing them (hell, I don't even know if they do anything after this point as I gave up after auto-battling Barthandelus to death. The characters themselves are a mixed bag that range from unlikable to Sazh. And no, that's nothing against Sazh. He's awesome. He's the only character in the game that isn't either totally forgettable (Fang), annoying (Hope and Vanille), an idiot (Snow) or an unlikable jerk (Lightning). Not to mention the Hallway of Doom and the combat that plays itself. The problem is that there are a few well done character moments. There is potential in Lightning's character arc, the conflict between Snow and Hope was a solid one, if poorly set up and the conflict between Sazh and Vanille is about the only part of the game I actually like. It is a massive missed oppurtunity. Give us an actual story (doesn't even have to be a complex one if the characters can carry it well enough) and make more than one character actually sympathetic and likable. But this is only part of the problem. The Hallway of Doom is a comparitively minor problem I have with the game when you place it along side the narrative and the combat. However, as the Hallway of Doom is something that should NEVER be done in an RPG, even one with a linear story, that should put things into perspective on how bad I think this game is. You put the game in and then you start running in a straight line. And then you don't stop running in a straight line for 20+ hours. You may as well have nothing but cutscenes and combat if all of the rest of what you do is run in a straight ****ing line. And this isn't even getting into the combat, which serves no purpose outside of padding the game out. But before we get into the combat, let's talk about weapon upgrades and the Crystarium. The Crystarium is the easy part. It has no reason to exist. A better system would be to have you level normally, then choose which role your levels go into. Such a system would literally do the same thing as the Crystarium because the Crystarium, which they sell as an open-ended system, is no different than leveling normally and choosing which role the levels go into. Weapon upgrades are similarly arbitrarily complex. Using items to upgrade weapons? Sure, fine, no problem. Giving them an arbitrary level cap unique to each item? Stupid, but not the worst part. Having piles of items with no other purpose outside of selling that give arbitrary amounts of experience that varies from weapon to weapon with pretty much no pattern and literally no explanation? Now we've got a serious problem. Combine all of these and we get FFXIII's weapon upgrade system. It is an arbitrarily complex system that leaves your best option to be to upgrade one weapon and ignore all of the other ones. And this and the Crystarium are the LEAST of this game's problems. Now let's get into the combat. The combat is almost a trainwreck. It almost literally plays itself. All you have to do to win any battle outside of the Eidolon battles is Libra your target, mash Auto-Battle on a balanced Paradigm until they Stagger, then switch to an aggressive Paradigm and continue to mash Auto-Battle. Occasionally you'll have to switch to a defensive Paradigm to heal, but that's literally the strategy for every. Single. Battle. Its terrible and takes absolutely no effort to play. Then we have Final Fantasy XIII-2, the world's most unnecessary sequel. I can't speak for the story (though from what I understand, someone at Square decided that Lightning is the best character ever and Noel and Serah spend the entire game practically worshipping her), and the Hallway of Doom is gone, but the game still uses the god-awful Paradigm system. That alone was enough to tell me not to play this piece of ****. And, from the looks of things, they managed to find a way to keep using the ****ing Paradigm system with Lightning Returns, despite there only being one playable character. Only time will tell if Lightning Returns will also play itself. And finally, we have Final Fantasy XIV, which was so bad and had such a botched launch (where they literally released the beta as the retail release) that they fired the entire team and started over. This has never happened before. The PS3 version has been indefinitely delayed and only time with tell if A Realm Reborn actually works. So, yeah, I think its safe to say that Final Fantasy needs a good kick in the ass. EDIT: Oh, and Bravely Default, which is technically a part of the series (even though by that logic, Chrono Trigger and Bahamut's Lagoon should also technically be part of the series), which is regarded as a very good game, barely got greenlit for a western release and only because Nintendo decided to co-publish it. Square's got their heads up their collective asses at the moment with them blaming Eidos for the failings of their Japanese games and not listening to their customers.
Yeah, not too fond of online activation. Sure its not as bad as always-online idiocy, but it still means that you're likely to be ****ed if you buy a popular game on day 1. Not to mention that there's already a great way of keeping people from installing rented games already in the XBox 360: Requiring the disc to be in the console. At the very least, they elevated me from a "will not buy" to a "might possibly buy if things work out and we never see day 1 outages for any game of any kind."
On the one hand, LucasArts wasn't doing too well with the license in the first place. Though 1313 looked to be turning things around (even if I wouldn't be too terribly happy with a Boba Fett game since I prefer expanded universe stuff to be its own thing), they still did idiotic things like cancel KotOR 3 in favor of The Force Unleashed, half-assed The Force Unleashed II and canceled Battlefront 3 when it was about 90% finished. On the other hand, unless the recent idiocy that lead to their CEO's departure taught them a few lessons, EA will likely not be much better. We'll have to deal with pointless and excessive microtransactions, DRM and, possibly, half-assed yearly sequels and half-assed DLC (and no, I'm not criticizing full expansions that happen to be DLC. I really have no idea where the outright hated for DLC of all kind came from all of a sudden. DLC is a great way to add more content to a game and expand its replay value. Crappy DLC doesn't keep good DLC from being made, after all, just like how crappy games don't keep good games from being made).
Well, so much for getting Darksiders III as Nordic probably only picked up most of those licenses so they can get residuals.
Is that actually Kaz? Damn, its saying something when you **** up so bad that the competition that they aren't afraid to comment using the competitor's name. Yeah, I can't imagine that I'm not the only one who will refuse to buy an XBox 3 if it does have always on DRM.
I get the feeling that this is not the last we'll hear of this guy this month. But not that I blame him, after all, those people who are worried about not being able to play when their Internet is out or when servers are down for maintenance or don't have reliable access to the Internet are just behind the times. No, it can't possibly be that they're in rural areas with limited connection, can't afford it or have other reasons why they can't connect. And on top of it all, no one wants to play a game ten years down the road when the servers are down for good, not at all. Yeah, **** this guy.
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Interesting. From what he's saying, it sounds like Epic themselves don't find it worth the money to make games for the Wii U, but the engine can still be used by others.
Yeah, I was more commenting on the idiotic theory of "Clara is Rose's daughter." Rose being in the 50th anniversary is easy: it falls on the 10th's timeline between regeneration and Rose's departure.
So, none of that screamed "MARY SUE" to you? Really? Yeah, part of why I doubt such idiocy would happen is because Moffat is not that bad of a writer. Rose was an awful character. First season: She was a decent companion with a lot of room for great character development. Second season: Mary ****ing Sue. What development she got from the first season was forgotten. She went back to being a complete ***** to her family. She got pissy at the Doctor and jealous of Sarah Jane simply because the Doctor had traveled with others before. She spent the entirety of "Tooth and Claw" doing a running gag that wasn't funny in the first place. She never fell in love with the 9th, but immediately fell in love with the 10th (likely because he's young and attractive now). She had a longer and more elaborate send-off than ANY OF THE DOCTORS. In season 3, the Doctor spent the entire season whining because he lost Rose, acting like she had died... when she was perfectly fine in another universe. Davies put her on such a pedestal that there was no way that he would allow any companion to be her equal (thus causing Martha to leave because she realized that she couldn't be Rose. How Donna not only managed to be a good character, but the best companion of the Davies era is beyond me). In season 4, she NEARLY DESTROYED THE MULTIVERSE to try to be with the Doctor. When the Doctor's clone was created (using a lot of other bullshit, but this is about Rose), she started making out with him... right in front of the Doctor, because apparently the clone is a good enough replacement. If you really think Moffat is stupid enough to perpetuate this, then you're an idiot.
On Rose: Yeah, I highly doubt that Moffat wants to deal with any sort of backlash of such a divisive character (no, I'm not just saying this because I hate her with the intensity of a thousand suns). That theory is idiotic fan fiction stuff. You see, there's this little problem of ROSE BEING IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE.
Why is this a surprise? I think its been assumed by most people who aren't doomsaying the Wii U that it wouldn't have Unreal 4 support. I assumed that, like the Wii before it, power wasn't going to be the Wii U's focus and, as such, automatically assumed that the Wii U wouldn't have access to Unreal 4. It should have been assumed that Unreal 4 was going to be for PS4, XBox 3 and PC, not the Wii U. Hell, he pretty much spells out what I just said when he pointed out that the Wii U has Unreal 3 support because Unreal 4 is focused on more powerful hardware. tl;dr: Expecting the Wii U to have Unreal 4 support is like expecting the Wii to have Unreal 3 support.
Oh, K-On!, you will never cease to intrigue me. Frankly, the show is pretty typical slice of life moe. It's basically Lucky Star if you took away the otaku bait and replaced it with music. So, really, at best, it's average. There's no real depth to the show as you're basically watching a bunch of cute girls do cute things and that's all there is to it. Not to mention that the characters are largely just moe archtypes designed to appeal to the male audience. Yes, K-On! is seinen, despite having an entirely female cast and having no real objectionable content. The series targets men who would find the characters cute or attractive in some way. Not to mention the yuri subtext. Yui is the carefree ditz who acts like she's half her age, Mio is the shy, quiet and "mature" one, Ritsu is the tomboy, Mugi is the one who lives in her own world and Azusa is the cute underclassman and the serious one. They're less characters and more archtypes. Hell, almost every episode is just the girls being goofy and drinking tea. In other words, K-On!'s not very good in the first place as there's really nothing to it.
Ok, so I've watched the first two episodes and, while enjoyed them and do intend to watch further, I have to ask: Do things pick up later on? So far, it's basically .hack. This is by no means a bad thing and I can't imagine that .hack wasn't an influence on the original novel's writer, but I'm left missing why this was the most popular show of 2012. Did the rest of 2012 suck that much?
Near full price is head scratching, but 1) it is nice for Wii U owners that never played any other version and 2) at least it's not like EA releasing Mass Effect 3 for full price around the same time the entire series was released in one box on the other consoles for the same price.
Yeah, the fact that the article jumps to accusing Nintendo of stealing from Sony throws the entire article's credibility into question. I'd take anything you can get from it with a grain of salt.
I believe it's less that they did it first (I don't believe that Sony has released anything with glasses free 3D as of now, odd considering their support of 3D TV and gaming) and more that a person who happens to have worked for Sony filed a patent for similar technology first. It's misleading for the article to outright say that Nintendo stole Sony's idea as not only is the patent held by one person and not Sony themselves, the tech itself works differently (and then people wonder why there is so much trouble with ethics in games journalism). It's probably just coincidence that the patent holder happened to have worked for Sony.
Well, the trailer did say "Pirate turned Assassin," so this is obviously after Edward joined the Assassins' Order. We don't know how he dressed before. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the end of the game had you playing as Haytham. EDIT: Ok, it says "trained by Assassins." Yeah, I are dumb. However, we still don't know his history before joining the Assassins, so I think my point stands.
