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 Final Fantasy XIII was the hotly anticipated thirteenth release in the world famous Final Fantasy franchise. The title was going to be a lot of "firsts" for the series. It was the first mainline title to be a multiplatform release. While previous titles were ported to other consoles, FFXIII was the first to launch on multiple consoles at once. It was the first title to ever grace an Xbox console. FF was originally exclusive to Nintendo, and later Sony. It was also the first mainline title to be released on then-current gen hardware. The last major FF game was released on the PS2. For the sake of argument, it's worth noting that I am not counting FFXI as it was an MMO, not a JRPG. Upon release, FFXIII met a cold fan reception. Fans did not take kindly to the new entry. The game was panned by fans for its level-based linear gameplay, autobattle feature, the ability to start off from the beginning of a fight upon death instead of going back to a save point, and other features unique to this entry in the series. Fans felt, at the time, that the title was too much of a departure from the series' norms and lacked elements considered essential for a "Final Fantasy" game. There were claims the title was a "dumbing down" for mass market and wasn't for "real JRPG gamers." Fans felt the game took too long to get going. There were players saying that the game didn't get good until Chapter 11, which is 20 hours into the game and near the end of the experience. People also disliked the cast and story. The story was panned for being too hard to follow and relying too heavily on the "datalog" to understand. The characters were considered annoying and flat. Even the music received criticism due to the departure of Nobuo Uematsu, who had left in 2004. While this wasn't the first Final Fantasy without him at the helm, and despite the fact the composer for FFXIII Masahi Hamauzu had worked on previous entries, there seemed to be some who felt the soundtrack didn't live up to previous entries in the franchise and cited Nobuo Uematsu departure as why. Despite this reception, FFXIII reviewed well and sold well. Sales were bolstered by the multiplatform release, which helped draw in sales from corners of the market that Final Fantasy normally couldn't access. Overall, however, the cold fan reception severely damaged the "FFXIII" part of the brand. Before its release, FFXIII Was set to launch a line of games based around similar elements, the Fabula Nova Crystallis. This lineup was set to include Final Fantasy XIII, the original Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and Final Fantasy Type-0. After the cold fan reception, the Final Fantasy XIII brand was considered tainted. Square Enix, makers of the Final Fantasy franchise, tried to save the brand by releasing additional games in the FFXIII series, FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns, to try to respond to fan criticism. But, the cold reception of FFXIII (and the absolute failure of the original FFXIV, which forced a full reboot of the new MMO) led to cancellation of Fabula Nova Crystallis. Final Fantasy Type-0 was rewritten and reworked to remove as many ties to Final Fantasy XIII as possible. Final Fantasy Versus XIII was renamed Final Fantasy XV and received similar treatment. The Fabula Nova Crystallis was essentially dead, with the last entry in the planned mini-franchise, Lightning Returns, releasing to cold reception and relatively low sales for the series (however, the title was made on such a small budget it that it actually made a profit, according to Square Enix). I played Final Fantasy XIII at launch back on my PS3. I have also played Final Fantasy XIII-2. I played a bit of Lightning Returns, but I never finished the entry. In all honestly, I feel a lot of the hate is...disproportionate. It's not a perfect game, but it's a good game. A lot of the hate stemmed from the series trying new things that didn't resonate well with older fans of the franchise. However, I thought the mechanics worked well for what they were and made for a fun experience. There is no denying that the title did simplify mechanics and include quality of life improvements, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I also feel that not everything was considered when evaluating this title. The combat system actually has some good depth once the Paradigm System (a form of Final Fantasy's Job System) is introduced in Chapter 3. The autobattle feature seems like it makes the game play itself, until you realize that it exists because the real strategy of FFXIII is keeping the right paradigms on your party for the situation with an emphasis on constant and quick changes of party composition as the situation evolves. The plot actually isn't hard to follow if you pay attention and accept that the point is that you aren't supposed to understand everything at first, with the datalog included for people who can't wait for the game to fill in those details. Also, the music is based and it honestly shocked me to find that some people even complained about the soundtrack. I plan to Let's Play this title with my old college friend, Lady Mapi, as a chance to discuss the better parts of this game and show it really isn't as bad as people say it is. This is going to be an "apologist" run, to a degree. I do plan on being honest about things that suck, but I feel enough videos exist bitching about the title and wish for this video to be a more positive experience. I have, as I mentioned, beat the game before, but Lady Mapi has not. Back in college, a friend once forced them to listen to them ramble about the entire plot, but they don't remember the main points of the story. As such, they will be our "innocent eye." I plan to intentionally hold back from spoiling things so they can show us how easily (or how difficult) the plot really is to follow from just playing the game. I don't plan for this to be a 100% run. I will try to show off as much of the game as I can, but don't expect me to fully show off everything. Chapter 11 is full of sidequests and superbosses and I don't plan to fully complete that, even when we are allowed to return to it before the final boss at the very end. Take this video more as a mixture between "two friends hanging out" and a "book club" where we will casually chat about the game while also taking time to really dissect it at points. I am hoping to get everything recorded by next week and launch videos every week. Why? These videos take up mondo memory on my computer and I need to clear out data. It's worth noting that I am running this title on the Steam Release of Final Fantasy XIII. This release is notoriously scuffed and I am running it unmoded. Issues may arise due to this decision, but I do not have the means to record console games. Lastly, Lady Mapi is having some computer troubles so, at least for now, there is a mild echo in the videos that we cannot fix. I am sorry about that issue. Without further ado, enjoy! ----------------------------------------------- Update 01: The Purge Update 02: The Vestige Update 03: Lake Bresha Covok fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Feb 3, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2022 03:39
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Update 01: The Purge We start the adventure in medias res. The Sanctum has authorized a Purge of the people of Bodhum after a Pulse Fal'Cie is discovered in an abandoned facility near the town. Out of an abundance of caution, all residents are being sent to Pulse to avoid contaminating the rest of Cocoon. Aboard the train, two passengers plot an escape attempt. Both them have more on their mind than just survival. Chapter 1: The Hanging Edge Datalog Entries For Chapter 1                           
Covok fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 03:39
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I may have been a bit too eager to post. Apparently, Youtube needs time to process after you upload. My bad. After waiting three hours on the upload, I thought I was done. Edit: It's good now. I am going to be banking upload so this problem shouldn't happen again. Covok fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 04:03
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For thread participation, I am considering encouraging people to submit their thoughts on the game and we may respond to it in our after video "bookclub" section for some open discussion on FFXIII. Feel free to discuss the characters, plot, and setting and such, but do not put spoilers past the last posted video as this is a blind run for Lady Mapi.
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Dec 30, 2022 00:50
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Interesting. I was hyped for the game, but bounced off of it, and ended up being one of the few FF's I haven't finished. Hard of course to get into why it was. I actually low key liked the battles. However, the fact that there is very little 'explore this place, talk to people' going on made it feel too much llike a drag? It seemed like it was 'go through hallways filled with battle, cutscene, more battles' without a lot of 'cooling down' Compare to FFXIV, which I greatly enjoy, eventhough the base story is also very linear. The world as a whole as I experienced it through the game felt very shallow.
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Dec 30, 2022 01:07
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I remember liking but not loving the game when it came out, which made me something of a defender amongst my friend group.
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Dec 30, 2022 03:18
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This game had decent action and a story worthy of the FF series (though most earlier entries did better). However, I mainly remember it for the awesome graphics and good-looking well-defined characters. Lightning is among my top tier video game heroines, though in the FF series and all characters on the list Tifa & Celes have her beat. Sorry to say there's not a worthy villain or hero to match her from the game, though, in my opinion.
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Dec 30, 2022 04:38
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Shogeton posted:Interesting. I was hyped for the game, but bounced off of it, and ended up being one of the few FF's I haven't finished. Hard of course to get into why it was. I actually low key liked the battles. However, the fact that there is very little 'explore this place, talk to people' going on made it feel too much llike a drag? It seemed like it was 'go through hallways filled with battle, cutscene, more battles' without a lot of 'cooling down' Compare to FFXIV, which I greatly enjoy, eventhough the base story is also very linear. The world as a whole as I experienced it through the game felt very shallow. To be honest, I think the linear nature may be why X and XIII are the ones I find easiest to finish. XIII is actually turning out to be really easy to LP simply because it's broken up into clear levels. It makes a natural cut off point for videos. I don't mind the linear experience because it makes it easier for me to stay focused. I oftem have a problem with JRPGs where I put them down and forget what is going on and get annoyed. You can't do that with FFXIII. Not saying every game should be like this one but it kind of works well for me now that I also have a 9 to 5 to balance. That said, you aren't wrong. The levels are very basic. It really is "hallway, monster fights, boss, location change", with cutscenes and minibosses thrown in. That makes some parts feel like they drag on a bit in places since there isn't a downtime, usually. I find the lore pretty cool but the world does feel a bit emptier than, say, X. I think its the lack of exploring the places you visit. XIII-2 handles that well. MonsieurChoc posted:I remember liking but not loving the game when it came out, which made me something of a defender amongst my friend group. I think this was a common experience for anyone who even mildly liked the game lol. The vitrol around its release is hard to put into words. People HATED this game. And anything it did bad was amped up to 11. I think any positive discussion of it at the time had to deal with floods of negativity. The game isn't perfect, as I said, but it's not the worst game ever. I think people have lightened up now. achtungnight posted:This game had decent action and a story worthy of the FF series (though most earlier entries did better). However, I mainly remember it for the awesome graphics and good-looking well-defined characters. Lightning is among my top tier video game heroines, though in the FF series and all characters on the list Tifa & Celes have her beat. Sorry to say there's not a worthy villain or hero to match her from the game, though, in my opinion. Yeah, I brought up the issue with villians in this game in the first video. The vibe I got is that society is the villian and this game gives that role to mostly faceless grunts and systems. While there are higher forces, they're all in the background until the end. It does leave a hole. I do feel FFXIII is intensely character driven and the XIII crew are strong enough to pull it off.
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Dec 30, 2022 05:15
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Oddly enough, X is one of my favourite Final Fantasies. Because it actually has your 'long corridors with fights' be things that are in between actually getting to meet people, explore the world a bit. And even those long roads are peppered with people to talk to. XIII is just 'run till you get a cutscene' And I imagine that yeah, XIII really has nothing to fall back on except the actual party. And honestly, they're not bad. I don't dislike any of the group. But perhaps because it feels they're kind of out of a vaccuum, with the world they come from feeling so shallow, I am less invested in them?
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Dec 30, 2022 10:34
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Shogeton posted:Oddly enough, X is one of my favourite Final Fantasies. Because it actually has your 'long corridors with fights' be things that are in between actually getting to meet people, explore the world a bit. And even those long roads are peppered with people to talk to. XIII is just 'run till you get a cutscene' There's also how FFX was built where you have most of your party almost out of the gate and you're encouraged to use everyone, the fights in X expect you to rotate everyone in to get a piece of the AP pie. Maybe that means Tidus needs to cheer instead of immediately killing that dog over there so Wakka can get a turn. Not so in XIII where you can verywell just press attack once to let Lightning stab that guy over there 3 times, unless you want to manually choose to stab once and spin around and cut him and some other fool a few feet away. Speaking of... the one thing I ever hear negative criticism about Chrono Trigger is how area of effect attacks in a "dynamic" fight were a gimmick that you could never really actively change... and 20 years later Squenix never fixed that.
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Dec 30, 2022 15:17
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I think my sole experience with AOE effects in FF13 was the party actively bunching up so everyone would get hit by one. I should probably give this another try; just dreading the whole "doesn't matter if you have Phoenix Downs stocked up or someone's got Raise queued up and ready to go, if the character you're controlling hits 0 HP that's the end of the game for you" thing. At least the modern Persona games have reasons for the game ending if you get killed. (To tie into the reaction this game got when it was released, how much of it was "It's just corridors for forty hours" and how much of it was "It's not FF12?" And yes, FF12 is my favorite one. Don't judge me.)
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Dec 30, 2022 18:31
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A part of the "just corridors" criticism comes down to the game's pacing. You're never stopping for a breather, the plot has you constantly on the run with a push to keep moving on all the way until chapter 11. FFX is the main comparison here because it's similarly linear, but it also has plenty of towns, inns and the like on the way where you feel like you have room to take a break, talk to the locals, play some Blitzball and do some shopping. 13 doesn't even have shopkeepers, you just use save points as impersonal portals to online stores. I actually quite like the combat system in this, it's creative and fun, outside of having one character arbitrarily ending the game when they go down. I've observed before that after trying their hands at an MMO with FF11 it really seemed like Sqeenix opened their eyes to the fact that menu-based combat actually sucks, especially for fighting random encounters where you don't need to think about your strategy. So every main game since then they tried to remove tediously picking the same menu items - 12 had the gambit system to do the "pick the normal menu options" part for you, 13 has the AI do the fighting for you and your role as player is to adapt their strategies on the fly*, and 15 went straight for being an action game. *which makes these opening chapters where you don't have access to any strategies pretty tedious, let's be honest
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Dec 30, 2022 18:41
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Count me as someone who actually enjoyed XIII! Sure, it's not perfect, but I actually really enjoyed the battle system once it opened up enough to really let you play with it. The thing about the auto battle complaints, in my mind, is that they're missing that the focus is on setting up paradigms and dynamically swapping between them rather than on individual commands. Edit: unsurprisingly, this was brought up like the moment combat came up in the video. I think it's a kinda novel take on traditional JRPG combat and think it'd be pretty rad if more games took a more strategic method than tactical for combat like XIII does. IthilionTheBrave fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2022 22:51
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So, Lady Mapi approves of the question response. They were just worried no one will be interested. So, I have edited up to Chapter 5. I'll put in your questions when Chapter 5 happens. I'll respond in thread now but Lady Mapi doesn't use their SA account anymore. So, I'll show them your questions in video together then. We'll discuss them in a bookclub fashion. Thanks for all your statements. LPing is a great wY to keep up with my friend. And I am super glad people are interested. It makes it feel less silly and it gives me a chance to replay a game I'd probably never play again otherwise. Thanks!
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Jan 1, 2023 00:37
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I bounced off FFXIII pretty hard, but I couldn't tell you why exactly - I played XIII-2 a lot and liked it a lot, though I don't think I ever finished it. Ultimately I think it was a party I wasn't hyper-invested in, with a plot that was kind of confusing, with gameplay that was just kind of okay, and no real mechanical freedom in a way that mattered, so I just lost interest. I didn't hate it, it just couldn't keep my attention because all of the things that drew me to the FF games - plot, or characters, or what I could do with Materia or Junctions or exploring around and finding secrets - simply weren't there in the way I needed them to be. Paradigms were kind of neat. I think they were my favorite part?
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Jan 1, 2023 03:29
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XIII's got good combat that is absolutely fighting as hard as possible to prevent you from getting to engage with it in a fun way until the last third of the game when it actually lets you have all your toys and has weird mechanical choices that hurt it for no reason other then spectacle. If this was the only thing wrong with it I'd quite enjoy but a lot of the cast is just awful, the plot is incoherent nonsense barely scraped together, and it just feels mostly soulless the whole way through with some occasional exceptions. Lightning is a character I should really like but she's so goddamn boring half the time.
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Jan 2, 2023 22:32
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So, head's up, Chapter 3 is going to be the longest video because I'm cutting them up going forward. A 2 hour recording session is kind of rough. I didn't consider that doing 2 hours of entertainment without break would be that hard. I'm not sure how streamers do it.
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Jan 3, 2023 03:29
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With a decade to contemplate the matter I have come to the conclusion that FFXIII is just... really really weird. It is the culmination of various assorted artistic, technical, pragmatic and cultural threads tangled together at Square Enix, some of which are successes, some of which are failures, almost all of which are anomalies, and all of which are rewarding to pick at if and only if you are coming it as a genuine and honest critic and not because you want to score sick dunks on FFXIII, like, the reasons this thing is the way that it is are manifold and fascinating and hopefully have all been learned from. The vitriol is also a factor of a few things but mostly I think because FFXIII was quite loudly a departure from a lot of previous Final Fantasy norms but all the ways it departed tied directly in to things that people didn't like about the game. But over time, even as the game has gotten the obligatory softer second look, a lot of the vitriol has actually hardened because of the long, long shadow FFXIII's development cast over Final Fantasy, hell, over all of Square Enix. FFXIII had knock-on effects on FFXIV before it was even released, imparting various flawed production techniques that doomed the initial release, ultimately necessitating an extraordinary public turnaround. Its huge investment necessitated two follow-up titles made on the cheap, which made admirable improvements but which look tacky next to XIII proper, which for all the faults of its production is visually impressive even today. It consumed FF Versus XIII, delaying that game for so long it was ultimately rebranded as XV just to create an impetus to get it out the door, and that game itself then demanded a lengthy post-release development cycle just to work at the return on its investment a little longer. FFXVI is, as I see it, and as I have attested in other threads, the first ever fully post-XIII Final Fantasy title, existing from its conception wholly outside the shadow of that one game. Even VII-R is possibly under it, given the timing of its initial development. What FFXIII unambigiously gave us is an extremely good and unique battle system, which Pork Lift and wateyad jokingly but very correctly termed "Pro Menu Navigation", a deceptively intricate real-time multi-build shuffling... thing... where in the true action-RPG tradition as much of the gameplay happens in your brain when you're constructing your Paradigm Deck as does on the battlefield. There still hasn't really been any other game that's made a system that plays quite like it, except, I am told, Christine Love's Get In The Car, Loser!, which is a direct tribute. But FFXIII, famously, and also, unambiguously, takes way too god drat long to let you start playing with this system, and it is not unreasonable for players to conclude long before the 25 hour mark that there just is never going to be any real depth to swim in, even if they can imagine it based on the information they are given. The plot is a different beast in a similar boat; there's a theory here, one that I like even, with a ton of elements that could be great fun to play with, even just the concept of the fal'Cie, the inscrutable machine gods who arbitrarily curse passers-by with mockeries of divine quests and who all of humanity is just stuck with, is gold, but on almost every level the execution is flubbed, it takes effort and dedication just to follow along, the game primes you to lose interest and doesn't seem to understand that you have to both lead the player to story and make them care, you can't just assume that everyone will be reading the datalogs just because the concepts at work in the worldbuilding are good. Also the made up words are bad. It is not possible to use the word "luh-see" and maintain any pretence of gravitas. It can stop any sentence dead in its tracks. Then there are the artefacts of the tortured development; the lavish and intricately detailed and yet utterly barren environments, the almost completely monotonous pacing of plot events, the utter non-sequitur that is the Eidolon system, the overproduced and yet utterly bland menus, the wet fart that is the Crystarium, the ridiculous grind for equipment, and, of course, the complete lack of any connection between anything that happens and the place in which it happens, because almost all of the environments were created before anyone knew what purpose they would serve or where in the game they would appear, with only a handful of pre-rendered cutscenes anchoring anything, so the final scenario was just cobbled together from whatever was finished when they decided to finally write the plot. Infamously, nobody at Square Enix really had any idea how FFXIII was actually going to play until they were forced to put together a demo build, and even then they had nothing of the battle system that would eventually exist in the final game except the battles in Hanging Edge from the very beginning of the game. More infamously, there was "enough cut content to make an entire second game" (because, again, all that content was made with no purpose in mind, so most of it was disposable) (FFXIII-2 is made primarily out of this content). Basically, FFXIII is the product of failures, although some of the input into those failures was good game design work. Overall, and quite uncontroversially to say I think, the production of the game was a disaster, and such failures as exist in the final product are there because the nature of production failures is that they inhibit good designers from doing the good work of which they are capable. If you're willing to work at it, you can see what those designers were getting at, and how it's really just practicalities getting in the way, when you play it, and despite it all some of that shines through. There's good in here, enough to love even, but god drat does it try your patience.
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Jan 3, 2023 04:31
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Update 02: The Vestige Finding themselves within the Pulse Vestige, the heroes of Cocoon must face down the phantoms of the past and the specters of their dark future. All in the hopes of saving love, getting revenge, and defying a god. The Pulse Fal'Cie Datalog for Chapter 2                               Character Datalogs            
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Jan 7, 2023 01:08
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FFVII was the first time the phrase "limit break" was used to describe a limit break. VI had a system in it where when you did a physical attack at low health it would sometimes become a unique attack, but it didn't have a name and I don't think the game ever comments on it. VII had a whole limit break system with a bunch of moving parts. The thing is, this was kind of the only time all those elements came together in that combination and had that name. VIII had a "limit break system" but it was basically a retread of VI's but with a more fleshed-out system where they got progressively more powerful the more hosed you were. IX had its Trance system which was pretty limit-break-y but was characteristically a little removed from player control and didn't play out as a single attack that you can do (and I wish more JRPGs would use systems like it, and build on it). X's Overdrives were extremely limit-break-y but were also highly customisable in how you charged the bar. And then XII and XIII did completely different things, and XV I guess had a bar you filled up and used to bust out a super-attack so gently caress it. Regarding the point you raised in post about Vanille I can't remember completely clearly but I want to say that while Vanille knows that Serah is a l'Cie and about what happens when you complete your focus, she doesn't know what Serah's focus is, so she's not asking why she's turning to crystal, but why she's turning to crystal now. Regarding the totally not a main character in the bar I can't tell if you're joking or not about not being sure if she's gay or not. It's barely subtext. The final image of the game is what really drives it home. Also, the story I heard is that she was originally written to be a man. I see this claimed a lot but I don't know what the original source is. The writers of FFXIII definitely had an idea. That idea is a thing that Final Fantasy has been toying with for ages, which is deconstructing or maybe parodying the archetypal JRPG quest setup, in which some warrior is given some divine duty to slay some great evil or accomplish some heroic feat, only the gods are arcane mechanical entities nobody understands and which seem to regard humans as curiosities but around which civilisation is nevertheless built, so all of humanity treats the gods as the universe's biggest missing step and tries their best not to ever rouse them under any circumstances, because disaster will inevitably follow and the cleanup will be murder. Now, they still need to actually execute on this admittedly fun premise, and show us in various emotive ways what this absurd world is like, and what the bullshit we're getting dragged into is about, and how our heroes cope with being forced rather than divinely inspired into carrying out this grand duty, and getting us to care by doing, like, writing, and we will see how that turns out. But, like, there's a premise here! The world of FFXIII is pretty cool and interesting when you dive into details that are raised in the Datalog and in lore, but for the most part none of this stuff is given much exposition and it's not enough to just put a cool thing in the lore and expect people to like the game. Fedule fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Jan 7, 2023 04:55
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I do plan to respond to your comments. They're just really long. I also want to put them in the viewer comment section, but not sure how. I guess I can sacrifice first impressions by giving yours to Lady Mapi in advance to read. Also, this is my second time ever editing a video. I am worried I overedited it. I am new editing software and I wonder if I overused titles and such? Also, how was the viewer comment section? Were we too rude? Or boring? Or such? Never seen a LP do that before so I am flying blind on it.
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Jan 7, 2023 06:59
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Personally, I usually just listen to videos and usually at raised speed... too much to watch or do and too little time to do it. And since you're going for general discussion rather than deep diving into mechanics I don't think its necessary to do that stuff, or if you really want to bring mechanics into the discussion they should be in the discussion, even if it needs to wait for a later update. Regarding the Bioweapon discussion... I think it might legitimately be We made them wrong as a And regarding lesbianism I think it was meant to be a sisterly relationship. Can't remember the source or if that's just an Achilles/Patrocolus style THEY'RE JUST REAL GOOD FRIENDS thing. Especially since someone is supposed to be like... 14 years old I think? FeyerbrandX fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Jan 7, 2023 14:11
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FeyerbrandX posted:Personally, I usually just listen to videos and usually at raised speed... too much to watch or do and too little time to do it. As long as it isn't distracting and doesn't detract, I might do it as correcting myself makes me feel better, especially since I might not remember later. I do think the "wakka meme" thing might have been too much. I'll probably reframe from that. I was iffy on it but also realized that reference to Wakka's racism and comparing it to Sazh in the moment was too esoteric without some explanation. quote:Regarding the Bioweapon discussion... I think it might legitimately be We made them wrong as a  Considering what we learn about the sanctum later, you may be right. quote:And regarding lesbianism I think it was meant to be a sisterly relationship. Can't remember the source or if that's just an Achilles/Patrocolus style THEY'RE JUST REAL GOOD FRIENDS thing. Especially since someone is supposed to be like... 14 years old I think? When it comes ages, I checked and Vanille is 19 and Fang is 21, ignoring thir crystal freeze. And they were frozen at the same time. So their age gap is actually extremely reasonable. Also, I'm not saying your wrong but playing up a lesbian couple as "they're like sisters or cousins" is oddly enough a common way people used to cover it up, that and "they're just really close friends."
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Jan 7, 2023 15:51
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Well, I promised essays about this game, so here goes. I'm behind on the posted videos, so I'm just going to look at the first chapter of the game for now, and I want to consider the various terms and concepts that aren't explained until later in the game. There's already been some speculation about what they mean based on the in-game dialogue, but there's an important literary concept at work that I want to focus on - the audience avatar. The main feature of science fiction and fantasy (ultimately, the same genre, with varying degrees of how much "a wizard did it" is implied vs. explicit - see Arthur C. Clarke) is that they take place in a world different from the real world in which the audience lives. They generally don't spend years building up the technology or magic in that world, but instead, start the story at a point where the world is already very different from the audience's world and establish those differences as they go. Obviously, that means that there will be things unfamiliar to the audience, and it's up to the author to determine how and when to explain those things. Many authors seem to forget (or deliberately ignore) that the audience will tend to assume that everything in the story is the same as the real world until demonstrated otherwise. That's just human nature - whenever there's a gap, we'll fill it with something familiar. Some stories do a great job of using that effectively - letting the audience make an incorrect assumption, then revealing the truth at an opportune moment later on. (That's not what's going on in FFXIII... I'm just being thorough.) So, once we've established the need to explain something in a story, how do we explain that to the audience? The key is that those differences will usually be familiar to the characters in the story, so from their perspective, there's no reason for them to explain those things - they just are the way they are. In writing, the narration can explain things, but to me, that slows things down. Visual media generally have to be cleverer about it - having a narrator really drags the audience out of the story, especially if there's a lot to explain. Having the explanation embedded in the story is usually a smoother way to provide it, but like I said, there's rarely something in the story that would provoke an in-universe explanation of anything. That's where we finally get to the point that jumped out at me from the first chapter of this game. In some stories, there's a character who's an outsider to the important aspects of the setting, someone whose purpose is to know no more than the audience does so that they can learn those details, and as they do, that information is provided to the audience by proxy. This is the audience avatar, and while there may be an actual literary term for that, I don't care. The audience avatar asks the questions the audience has, and the answers illuminate us as well as them. Probably the handiest example of an audience avatar is Tidus from Final Fantasy X. Yes, everybody hates him because he whines so much, but consider things from his perspective. He's been dropped into a world where some things are recognizable, but nothing is familiar. So, while everyone around him knows how everything works, he's there to question it all because he's the outsider, and through that, we learn about the setting (although it's an inaccurate understanding because all of the characters have been lied to, which gets back to the incorrect assumptions I was talking about before). He's even able to narrate some things that he knows, cutting down on the intrusive dialogue that frustrates the rest of the party and frames things for us beyond what he needs to learn for himself. I don't think the plot or setting of Final Fantasy X was any less complicated than any of the other games in the series, but I've always felt like I understood that one better than most of the rest of the series, because the explanations were provided in an easy-to-understand way. Having an audience avatar can go disastrously wrong, though, because the relationship goes both ways. This was what put me off Torchwood: Miracle Day when it aired ages ago on some US network. It was advertised as an introduction to the Torchwood universe for Americans who largely wouldn't have seen the rest of the series, so I was looking forward to it. I only remember a few details about that first episode, including that it seemed like the series was going to focus on about the worst criminal imaginable, whose death sentence had been canceled because it was impossible for anyone to die, so he was just released from prison entirely. But I distinctly remember one character getting dragged into the events who didn't know anything about Torchwood; just an ordinary person who was there by chance and needed information - a distinct audience avatar. At one point, he asks the head of Torchwood to explain what's going on, and Captain Jack's answer is basically "If you don't already understand, there's no point explaining it to you." In other words, this show is not for people new to the story. The audience, via their avatar, has been dismissed. Also, I'm told the series wasn't all that good from any perspective. So, what does this have to do with FFXIII, asks nobody because I can't imagine anyone's bothered to read this far. I think Sazh is pretty clearly positioned to be the audience avatar in this story. He's been swept up in events that are clearly above his pay grade, he doesn't know why the people around him are doing the things they're doing, and he doesn't seem to feel like any group of people including him have a chance at succeeding at whatever they're trying to accomplish. He's just running along with whoever looks like they know what they're doing and trying to understand why. When he sees someone leap off a bridge, he doesn't say "Of course, this is a normal thing to do in a world where gravity-controlling devices are common." He can barely bring himself to trust the gravity bubble when he has to follow suit. The problem with this is that the questions we need him to ask, he doesn't ask. He already knows what a l'Cie is, although we don't, so he doesn't ask, and the information isn't provided. Think about it. Even a question like "I thought l'Cie were beings mutated by radiation in the offshore prison, Pulse, so what are they doing here, thousands of miles away?" would provide information to the audience that would plug many of the gaps in our understanding of the story, whether it gets an answer or not. The number of theories floated in the video as to what The Purge is shows just how ambiguous everything is at this point, and yet, we're just running from one objective marker to the next, fighting people and monsters along the way without properly understanding why. Sure, there's obviously a military carting people to something like a concentration camp, so it would be good if those people escaped. But we don't know who they are or what tools they have. We don't know whether the escape we're seeing is truly spectacular, or just the kind of thing that would happen offscreen in a TV serial, because escaping from this military is so routine for our heroes, it wouldn't be interesting enough to waste half an hour of script. The soldiers don't seem to be particularly competent at their jobs, at any rate. And the fights don't really add anything by their existence. A boss battle is often an opportunity to size things up story-wise - a significant milestone in character development that corresponds to a milestone in the action. Here, they're just kinda there to be there. Why are we fighting this big thing? Why did we fight the little things earlier? There's literally no difference. Not that every boss in a Final Fantasy game means something, but the first one tends to be pretty memorable. "Attack when it's tail's up! (beat) It's gonna counterattack with its laser!" I don't even remember what the boss in this game was. This might just be a me thing, but I can't care about fictional people if I don't know anything about them, and yet this particular game asks me to invest a full chapter (at least) getting them to an objective of some kind. Sazh is the audience avatar, but not the character you control, and he's also the only one using guns, which otherwise seem to be the weapon of choice in this world. (Snow has some grenades, but they don't seem to be throwable - he always drops them at his feet.) It seems like he's the best positioned to survive against whatever the enemy can throw at him, but it's Lightning and her unexplained powers who takes the lead anyway. Sure, it all gets explained eventually (to whatever extent it ends up making sense - I only vaguely remember any characters aside from the main party), but the story is taking a big emotional loan asking us to trust it until it gets there. I'm not trying to help these people accomplish something; I'm just moving them to the marker on the map because that's how a video game works. I don't know what will happen if they reach that marker, or why they can't go to some other marker if all they're trying to do is escape from the soldiers. I don't feel particularly driven to see more of this story, because I don't entirely know what of the story I've seen yet. Maybe it will have a payoff, but buddy, my Steam backlog is thousands of games deep at this point. It's even worse at that from a gameplay standpoint, but this is long enough for now. I hope I've repaid my own emotional loans by reaching a vaguely satisfying argument, and I hope it's given people enough to think about that it was worth reading to the end. I'll talk about my specific complaints about the gameplay some other time.
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Jan 8, 2023 23:41
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They really shot themselves in the foot with the naming of the l'Cie/fal'Cie/Cie'th. They're like the full bingo of Bad Fantasy Names, between the meaningless apostrophes, unpronouncable syllables and arbitrary capitals. This might honestly be what killed the game for me - the naming was so unworthy of respect that I didn't care about the concepts, which meant I never really engaged with the lore, so I never cared about the story, which compounded with the game design being built around efficiently pushing you through that story. It's a shame because the actual concepts are pretty solid and set up interesting conflicts. And it's not like Final Fantasy as a series is new to inventing names for their concepts.
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Jan 9, 2023 00:09
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Tenebrais posted:They really shot themselves in the foot with the naming of the l'Cie/fal'Cie/Cie'th. They're like the full bingo of Bad Fantasy Names, between the meaningless apostrophes, unpronouncable syllables and arbitrary capitals. This might honestly be what killed the game for me - the naming was so unworthy of respect that I didn't care about the concepts, which meant I never really engaged with the lore, so I never cared about the story, which compounded with the game design being built around efficiently pushing you through that story. I didn't mind it actually, maybe yeah I can accept skipping arbitrary caps and random apostrophes, but maybe if the game fleshed out a bit more (which is loving baffling to say when you get 3 datalog updates every time you blink) to maybe give some ingame translation of "Cie." since they all are related. Maybe Fal'Cie is God Crystal, L'Cie is Imbued Crystal and Cie'th is Crystal Terror or something.
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Jan 9, 2023 01:01
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Shogeton posted:Oddly enough, X is one of my favourite Final Fantasies. Because it actually has your 'long corridors with fights' be things that are in between actually getting to meet people, explore the world a bit. And even those long roads are peppered with people to talk to. XIII is just 'run till you get a cutscene' There's also the fact that, from when you meet Yuna, you're told explicitly that this is a pre-planned, A-to-B-to-C journey. The relative linearity of the game is justified by the plot, cool, that makes sense to me. You can argue whether or not the game should be based around a linear journey (with occasional segues/sidetracks), but that's whatever. Compare that to XIII, where most of the game is spent running away from things, but it's all so vague. We've got no world map, so we can't see any distance or scale for where people are going, no one really comes up with any plans beyond 'we'll work that out when we get there' for most of the game and it's all just so vague. As for the characters... I liked Fang. I liked Snow, until Troy Baker became That Guy In Everything made me fed up of his voice (same deal I have with Kanji from Persona 4, good actor, just over-familiarity), Lightning, I understand comes across better in the Japanese version, but in the one we got, I literally cannot stand her. And the less said about Hope, the better.
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Jan 9, 2023 08:05
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When I played FF13, I was just really unimpressed. It was pretty and I liked their technomagic world, but it was just so barren. Every NPC hates you and baring minimal exceptions you never have a chance to go around chatting with people and just faffing around. When I play RPGs, I go really deep into the exploration aspect, because that's my favorite part, but in this game it felt like there just wasn't anything there. You had no choices, no real respites and were just marching forward to an eventual destination like cattle in a slaughter house. I much prefer FF13-2 which saw all these criticisms and overcorrected to a ridiculous degree. Most of that game is running around directionless, having goofy nonsensical fun with NPCs. They even implemented a totally superficial dialogue choice system. Then, I feel like FF13-3 found the best balance, but I was still a bit of a mess, because it was given the task to conclude a wild plot of contradictory nonsense. Over the years, I saw like two different FFXIII LPs and that just solidified my opinion. Yours seems quite good so far. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 09:07
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Sorry, I'll try to have the next episode edited soon. We recorded but I've just been depressed the last few weeks for no reasons. Sorry again.
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Jan 29, 2023 01:37
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Update 3: Lake Bresha After the Pulse Fal'Cie turns the lake to crystal, the newly branded warriors of cocoon find themselves stranded and without direction. Confused on where to go and what to believe, the fractures of their uneasy alliance begins to show. Chapter 3 - The Quantum Werewolf Of FFXIII or How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Not Record For Three Hours Since this episode was so long, we forgoed responding to the thread comments this time. We'll make up for it next time.                              
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Feb 3, 2023 01:37
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The smoothest JPRG levelling curve I've ever seen was in Cosmic Star Heroine. All encounters are scripted so you not only don't need to grind, but also explicitly must opt in to doing so. Everyone levels at the same pace even outside the main party. By the time your party members get their last abilities you're in the final dungeon or clearing out endgame sidequests. It's not a long JRPG at roughly 15 hours but I do recommend checking it out for the neat design decisions. One JRPG series you neglected to mention is Trails/Kiseki. They started on the PSP, made the console jump from Vita to PS3, and are still going. (I've cooled on them because JESUS gently caress each title has a novel's worth of text, they are not for the faint of heart.)
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Feb 3, 2023 06:34
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One of the consequences of FFXIII's unprecedentedly long development cycle is that for years at a time the artists were just tinkering away at the same handful of assets with nothing else to do, and the result of that is we get maps like Lake Bresha and its vast expanse of complex, reflective, refractive surfaces. It is a completely nuts map. The whole thing is fake, of course, because the PS3 and Xbox 360 would literally explode if they had to do that much heavy lifting with lighting, but the artists just sat there for years hand detailing texture fuckery so that for the exact baked-in lighting in the scene everything just looks perfect even though very little of what's there is dynamic. It is one of the most visually impressive maps of the generation, and its existence is the product of total management failure. FFXIII "plays itself" in the same way FFXII does, which is to say, it doesn't, but the part of the game that you play isn't the bit where you decide whether to do a physical attack or cast fire. FFXII was like a fairly detailed JRPG AI scripting simulator. FFXIII is, as previously joked about, a pro menu navigation simulator. The scripting is all done for you in that each role has its own dedicated AI that can't be changed (although it does diverge between characters depending on what abilities they have) and with the exception of your party leader you can't manually override it at all, but you can put together your deck of scripts (really "deck" was the perfect term here) and flip between them while the party members on the ground carry them out as best they can. It has more in common with something like Football Manager than any prior JRPG; it's all about having the team tactics agreed upon in advance. The best JRPG level curve I've found was very recently, in Chained Echoes, though maybe it cheats at this by eschewing EXP-based levelling entirely and just giving you a big list of discrete upgrades per character and letting you choose one after boss fights. There are some optional fights, so there's some variance in where you can be as you roll through the plot, but for like two thirds of the game I was having boss fight after boss fight where I was just barely scraping through and burning panic contingencies but never actually wiping, just always being like one turn from wiping when I won. Perfectly tuned stuff. Of course, once you know what you're doing, after the halfway point you can jigger things just right and break the back half completely over your knee, if you're into that.
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Feb 3, 2023 08:39
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NGDBSS posted:One JRPG series you neglected to mention is Trails/Kiseki. They started on the PSP, made the console jump from Vita to PS3, and are still going. (I've cooled on them because JESUS gently caress each title has a novel's worth of text, they are not for the faint of heart.) Started on PC, actually! All three Sky games were PC first and only later ported to PSP. Zero was the first developed-for-PSP game.
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Feb 3, 2023 16:44
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That discussion about the many consoles of FF16 was fun.
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Feb 3, 2023 18:11
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I'm surprised that the "only FF that exploits status effects" was FFII.... I mean it is true, but I've always thought of FFV as being the one that you exploit statuses. It also wasn't death that was the spell to use, it was Toad or Mini. The thing about FFII is that it was buried in obfuscated bullshit and the bluff of "things don't work on trash mobs, so they won't work on bosses" but basically everything but death worked as long as you knew that equipment destroyed your ability to cast and that a laser focus on a limited number of spells meant you could just destroy everything.
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Feb 3, 2023 22:05
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There was a fun exploit in FFVI. The spell banish would basically kill anything if it hits. Depending on the enemy, the hitchance varied and it would just always miss for bosses. That game also introduced invisibility. It drastically lowered the chance to get physically hit, but in return, spells will always hit you and can cause status effects, you'd usually be immune to. You could easily turn opponents invisible... When it comes to legitimate usages, I would say that they are really strong in 10. Haste, slow, poison, blind, sleep, stone, silence and all those ways to temporarily lower stats where all incredibly useful. And bosses tended to be unimune to se of those. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Feb 4, 2023 |
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Feb 4, 2023 00:48
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Fedule posted:Regarding the point you raised in post about Vanille megane fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Feb 4, 2023 |
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Feb 4, 2023 06:47
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megane posted:This was back in the second video, but I checked, and this may also have been a result of the aforementioned troubled translation. Vanille’s English line is “Why is she turning to crystal?”, but in Japanese she just says, “Why?” Which is actually rather clever, since to a new player (and Hope) it seems like Vanille doesn’t know what turning to crystal means, but once you know her backstory it becomes clear that she’s asking something else. Oh man, I'm going to respond to this one here because I can't put it in the video since it would spoil stuff for Lady Mapi. That makes so much sense! God, it really is such a simple thing, right? But completely changes the scene.
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Feb 8, 2023 00:56
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Just to let everyone know, we did record part 1 of episode 4, but Lady Mapi is having some issues recording and my toxic work enviroment forced me to quit in frustration. So, expect some more delays.
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May 18, 2023 01:00
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FeyerbrandX posted:I'm surprised that the "only FF that exploits status effects" was FFII.... I mean it is true, but I've always thought of FFV as being the one that you exploit statuses. It also wasn't death that was the spell to use, it was Toad or Mini. FFVIII had a few bosses where you could play with status effects. The first Edea fight could be cheesed with Reflect (specifically Carbuncle). Diablos was vulnerable to Blind and so could never kill you outside of luck. Raijin could be affected by Blind, and him and Fujin could be both affected by Sleep. Bahamut could be Blinded. Even Ultimecia's Castle had a couple bosses that were vulnerable to Blind (Tri-Point and Catobelpas). It's not a 'status to win' game, but there were a few fights where status effects could be handy.
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May 18, 2023 06:55
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