Wired: Final Fantasy Isn’t Dying. It’s Already Dead

people hate v, people hate viii, people hate ix, people hate xii, people hate xiii. the fact that ff's are so different from one another is what makes them great to me. it just sounds like people want the next ff to be like [insert fave ff here]. and if that happens to be x-2, or xiii-2, then you have bad taste or something.

I agree however I think the reason it's so bad right now is because we always had another Final Fantasy to look forward to if the recent one was a disappointment. I don't think XIII would have this much vitriol towards it if we had just gotten it and moved on to XV. Instead, we got two un-needed sequels and still no new mainline.
 
Oh no some Internet critic (lol) told me that Final Fantasy is dead.
Guess all that fun I've been having was fake and artificial.

Fuck off Wired.
 
Okay it's time to clear all this crap up.



Yes this is real time and in game.



No. These are in game to as you an see the rendering engine clipping and screen tearing. Also at the behemoth part Noctis' hand is clipping into his jacket. Up the pre-rendered cutscene people totally missed that. ( ._.)



No this is in game too.

Everything being said here is false. It's all assumptions based on a false comment off record by an unknowledgable PR representative from SE. Plus half those PR guys at E3 were temps anyways. What would they know.

Thank god.
 
FF will return back to the shitty Toriyama formula once Tabata and Nomura are finished with FFXV. XV will be a great game, the greatest FF since X, but the XIII team will return at the helmfor XVI and fuck up the brand once more.
 
History is repeating itself in a lot of ways. They're developing Luminous along side XV which is what they did with Crystal Tools and FFXIII...
On the non-FF side of things, they announced another big title way too early in the form of KH3. I won't be surprised if that game is the next Versus XIII.

As much as I loved KH3 announcement, when I saw Twilight Town PS2 assets and a more than evident target render I was shaking my head.

Edit: We know that the combat video was real-time, that's not the problem, the problem is it still looks very early. And as a reminder they still change engine at some point....
 
FF will return back to the shitty Toriyama formula once Tabata and Nomura are finished with FFXV. XV will be a great game, the greatest FF since X, but the XIII team will return at the helmfor XVI and fuck up the brand once more.

It's a cycle like the Reapers in Mass Effect.
 
Japanese developers in general have this weird thing where they attempt to chase Western aesthetics and modes of gameplay instead of what they should be doing, which is chasing Western modes of management and organization that make it easier to make high-quality games at a faster speed (largely due to giving employees more autonomy instead of micromanaging the process). It's pretty much had the worst results imaginable.

Also doing some substantial copy/paste of content to fill up the games which often last about 10hrs.
 
Been pretty much dead for me since what, 2006?

Doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the FFXIV beta, but the 'proper FF' died for me with XII.
 
replace Final Fantasy with any other franchise that's been around as long as it has and you can probably write a pretty compelling argument.

Metroid isn't dying, it's already dead.
Mario isn't dying, he's already dead.
Castlevania isn't dying, it's already dead.

etc etc...

so much hate.
Metroid is pretty damn dead; it was already a low seller and its latest big budget release got a huge backlash.

Mario sells like hotcakes. It's nowhere close to being dead.
 
Japanese developers in general have this weird thing where they attempt to chase Western aesthetics and modes of gameplay instead of what they should be doing, which is chasing Western modes of management and organization that make it easier to make high-quality games at a faster speed (largely due to giving employees more autonomy instead of micromanaging the process). It's pretty much had the worst results imaginable.

Ehm wait a sec. Western developers and publishers are almost all having serious difficulties making profits while eastern companies are quite healthy when they focus on local markets. I don't think we really serve as the best example of efficiency when you develop a game and if that bombs (darksiders II) you close the company. Reconsider.
 
My favorite moment in all FF games was finally getting the airship and having a big world of secrets to find. FFX killed that and I have always held a secret grudge for that.

Funny thing is, I really liked the game play in X-2, but it wasn't a game I would want my wife walking in on me playing.
 
I was expecting some "But Type-0 is fantastic" input from Japan-GAF. =O

Did nobody love this game?
Game was pretty good.

ARR is a game that would've been considered great had it come out when it originally did. The game is not good where it is now. Well... not great.

Not to dimiss your opinion , but did you at least play it during on of the beta phases ?
I just don't see what make the game "not-great" based on what i've played in phase 3.
Especially when they are doing all they can to put everything they can to make the game great.
 
Couldn't be a more random time to read a poorly written opinion piece about FF. I'm not a big fan of the XIII series (though it pretty much has my favorite FF combat system by far), but how on Earth is Final Fantasy dead? Because Kohler doesn't like it anymore?
 
the only problem with FFX-2 is that the first two words of the title are "Final Fantasy"

If it was a new IP people would hail it as the Crono Trigger of the PS2 era.

laughter.gif
 
Game was pretty good.



Not to dimiss your opinion , but did you at least play it during on of the beta phases ?
I just don't see what make the game "not-great" based on what i've played in phase 3.
Especially when they are doing all they can to put everything they can to make the game great.

They're achieving the impossibile with that game, delivering a funny polished mmorpg experience on the console market. And to add more to this, it's also a very cool promising "offline Final Fantasy".
 
Yes, they are.

VIII does not have major plot-holes. The battle system was thought out however it still needed some tuning. Even then, it has ton's of customization options which makes it very easy to keep fresh when replaying. The only flaw is the draw system which you literally never have to use.

Ice-burg in the shoulder
 
Well, for me, FFXII is still my favorite game of all time. I enjoyed XIII and XIII-2, though they are flawed. FFXIV was really bad, but what I played of ARR is really great.

I think the whole PS360 generation has been a huge downpoint for the FF series, with the general disinterest in XIII, and the flop of FFXIV and the delays.

I think they have a good chance of revitalizing the series, I mean Nomura is still there, Ito is a bastion of hope, and they were doing good on the PSP with Crisis Core and Dissidia, though Type-0 I hear is suppose to be good as well, but I haven't had a chance to play that.

I think they started burning the Final Fantasy fan bridge, but I think they have a chance of putting it out, they just cant screw up with XV and ARR, and they really need to put Toriyama out to the pastures.
 
The series is not dead, is just a cat in a box with poison

But frankly, we need fans calling out some of the awfulness than getting defensive. Square is not fine, both creative and finance wise, and their creatives create more snark than genuine appreciation. Doesn't mean that cannot create good or excellence, as many handheld games can attest, but that is also truth form most Big publishers

I don't think Wired is the judge and executioner of FF (or other media franchises) but is just a biased witness, like us. Lets try to be fair.
 
Well.
People were saying FF was dead, since it was abandoning Nintendo and 2D.
Guess it wasn't.
People were saying FF was dead, since it was abandoning World Maps.
Guess it wasn't.
People were saying FF was dead, since a numbered entry was to be an MMO.
*yawn*
 
My favorite moment in all FF games was finally getting the airship and having a big world of secrets to find. FFX killed that and I have always held a secret grudge for that.

Well good news, FFXV is taking airships back to the formula. Plus while waiting you can enjoy train rides in Lightning Returns!
 
Didn't they already do that on TWO consoles with FFXI?

It was not a good offline FF though... just a pain in the ass, grinding farming fest.

ARR plays like any other offline FF and ALSO it's played with other players. It's a fast, smooth, arcade-like, relaxing, exciting experience. COOL AS HELL. I had a blast with the BETA.
 
Game was pretty good.

Not to dimiss your opinion , but did you at least play it during on of the beta phases ?
I just don't see what make the game "not-great" based on what i've played in phase 3.
Especially when they are doing all they can to put everything they can to make the game great.

As an MMO it's pretty vanilla as vanilla goes. I got the game ordered, but I'm not going to call it a great game yet. It does do some relaly good things:

1. Art/world is fantastic
2. Music is great.

A pity they didn't use such a great world for a single player game.

ARR plays like any other offline FF and ALSO it's played with other players. It's a fast, smooth, arcade-like, relaxing, exciting experience. COOL AS HELL. I had a blast with the BETA.

You're straight up lying now.
 
It's true , ff died with x-2

ff12 with the international zodiac patch was one last sigh of breath and ff13 and everything after it is just enix fucking the corpse.
 
Game was pretty good.



Not to dimiss your opinion , but did you at least play it during on of the beta phases ?
I just don't see what make the game "not-great" based on what i've played in phase 3.
Especially when they are doing all they can to put everything they can to make the game great.

I did play the beta actually. Beginning is extremely boring and paced very weird and the game plays much like other MMOs in ways. It feels too familiar.
 
They're achieving the impossibile with that game, delivering a funny polished mmorpg experience on the console market. And to add more to this, it's also a very cool promising "offline Final Fantasy".

Even with that incredible large team and all they managed to remake a MMO in 2 years, ARR is a NEW game, way more of a new game than XIII-2 and in 2 FUCKING YEARS. How many years took GW2 to be released or how many years in development had ESO behind it?.

What Yoshida and his team made and nothing short of a miracle. (and let's not forget they keep adding 1.0 content for several months)
 
10-2 , as he already noted, had plenty of girls in skimpy outfits and yet FF11 went on to be big for SquareEnix and FF12 seemed to be fairly popular in the west. FF15 should do fine.
 
FF is not dead.

It simply lowered to the level of the current absolutely utter mediocrity of the genre.

Take Resident Evil: it peaked with 4, 4 killed the series, now survival horror genre is pretty much dead and RE6 is awful.
 
The series is not dead, is just a cat in a box with poison

But frankly, we need fans calling out some of the awfulness than getting defensive. Square is not fine, both creative and finance wise, and their creatives create more snark than genuine appreciation. Doesn't mean that cannot create good or excellence, as many handheld games can attest, but that is also truth form most Big publishers

I don't think Wired is the judge and executioner of FF (or other media franchises) but is just a biased witness, like us. Lets try to be fair.

See I'm all for that, calling devs out on mistakes is fine, the problem is a neverending stream of blindness, vitrol and making elephants out of molehills. The entire article is based around ridiculing that one interview point. I don't need to explain how bloody stupid that is and how bloody wrong the Wired writer is in every paragraph. There should be balance and objectiveness in criticism, and most people are incapable of that, for them the emotion of enjoyment is binary, they either enjoy the product, as a whole, or they don't. Not many have a critical mind to actually discern what worked and why and what's sad is that these people are allowed to be journalists. Some actually appear to have that critical mind but don't, that results in them getting the positive/negative reaction first, then trying to justify it, that's not good enough either, that's prejudice in a nutshell.

Final Fantasy isn't dead. It's just not good enough at the moment for many people.
 
Goto and Toriyama were talking about Lightning's cup size and jiggle because they were asked about it in that interview. They didn't bring it up.

Chris also states: "But if in 2013 this is what a Q&A session about Final Fantasy has become, then any claim that the series once had something approaching mainstream respectability done gone and caught the train out of town." He's using one interview and casting a very wide judgement about the franchise because of it. Meanwhile, there are literally dozens of perfectly normal, non-boob-centric interviews about Lightning Returns, Final Fantasy XIV, XV, etc.

Concludes with: "At this point, it’s tough to see a path back to relevance for Final Fantasy, if the caretakers of the series are spending their creative cycles thinking about the particulars of breast physics." Yes, I'm sure all they are thinking about are breast physics. They go into work every day, work 12 hour days and do nothing but think about breast physics. Give me a break.

This is a poorly thought out, inaccurate hit piece based on someone who got all flustered a dev dare talk about sexuality of the characters in his video game when asked about it. I expect way more from Chris.

Exactly.
 
I'm not the biggest fan of 9 but the main series lost me with 10. I'm seeing absolutely nothing from XV to change my mind, is it even gonna be an RPG? Looks...Kingdom Hearts-y? I'd do my own damn research but like I said, I find it hard to give a damn about this series nowadays much less dissect trailers to try and find the snippets of actual gameplay.

As much as I love Atlus' way of doing things part of me does miss when JRPGs could be and often were those big graphical showcase titles, and Final Fantasy is one of the few brands in the genre that can sell enough to pull off AAA development costs. But they just handle it in such a fantastically stupid manner, not even Capcom can approach their level of insanity.

My favorite moment in all FF games was finally getting the airship and having a big world of secrets to find. FFX killed that and I have always held a secret grudge for that.

Hell, no secrets here about that. I don't know who decided that world map exploration needed to go but fuck them.

It was one of the few features about 'versus' I was looking forward to, and the only source of a thin strand of care I maintain about XV.
 
I did play the beta actually. Beginning is extremely boring and paced very weird and the game plays much like other MMOs in ways. It feels too familiar.

Beginning is just different from the usual FF, instead of starting with a bang as a plot devise it starts slow and then gets more rhythm by moving forward. It doesn't play like other mmorpgs I played. It plays like an offline Final Fantasy that – whenever you want – you can suddendly enjoy with your friends. People dismissing the FFXIII series and claiming for the next big main offline FF should stop looking around: A Realm Reborn it's already the next big Final Fantasy and it's just one month away. You can't ask for more, trust me.
 
The article is like an outraged gamer telling his exgamer friends about FF. This is sounding like he just doesn't like JRPGs. He isn't even interested in the fact FF is rejuvenating itself for the modern era. Maybe if him and his gaming cherubs would support SE more than criticize, then the general public wouldn't have to read this garbage.

How about how they fixed XIV and made it decent/playable? The fact that XV looks fantastic, Lighting Returns has a lot of charm, plus the fact they'll add FF characters to KH3?

This guy is completely biased and shouldn't be publishing this garbage.
 
I think Sony would be wise to assemble a new studio to make first party JRPG's. Microsoft and Nintendo can't compete with them on this front. Microsoft has no japan presence and Nintendo can maybe pacify their own cosnole loyal gamers but that is it. Sony could take hold of japanese JRPG gamers and try to unite western JRPG gamers under one umbrella. The other side to it is simply making sure the genre remains alive and vibrant. The genre has simply been mismanaged by many company and only a strong hand can make it healthy again. They can at least try.
 
My favorite moment in all FF games was finally getting the airship and having a big world of secrets to find. FFX killed that and I have always held a secret grudge for that. .

Hah, me too, I loved landing on every small island, mountain-top and out-of-the-way pixel hoping to find a secret, it's exactly the same for me with Secret of Mana and Skies of Arcadia too, the moment the world opens up and you have that sense of real freedom. I miss that, even if its hard to render with more intensively-rendered graphics, and also isn't in vogue with modern game design that hates sequence-breaking, and a director that wants to control exactly the order we see things.

I think that's one thing I dislike about modern FF games- the story isnt any more or less linear but I miss being able to mess about with the airship. It allows the player to bring their own 'downtime' into the story arc and help manage the pacing to something they prefer or that fits their gaming time better.
 
With a fantastic "A Realm Reborn" less than one month away claming something like that really tells alot about the writer.

Embarassing article.

What kool-aid are you drinking? I get it if you are a Final Fantasy fan, all the power to ya, but to try and sweep under the rug the fact that the Final Fantasy brand has been tarnished is wrong.

When Square Enix announced they were making an MMO the gaming world collectively shit itself with excitement, thats how pumped people used to be for FF content. People said goodbye WoW, its been a nice run. Look at the result - as of today, FF11 has less subscribers that Age of Conan, Rift, Warhammer Online and Second Life. Can you imagine that way back when it was announced?

The fact is, FF lost what made it special to a global audience. Instead going overly anime, japanese centric basically alienating people with these j-pop stars and annoying as fuck characters like Vanille.

Point is, Im sure there are plenty of people on gaf who "used to be" FF fans, myself included.
 
Reminder: the creative genius behind legendary titles like Final Fantasy V wasted dev time on creating octopus monsters that only attack female characters.
Ultros was anything but a waste of dev time.

You're right , but this flaw is shared on all the rpg battle system out there. I can play FF , Star ocean , atelier , tales of and many others can keep the same routine for regular ennemies on the map and adopt a difference strategy for the bosses. it's not that your point isn't true ...it's the fact that all rpg have the same flaw ..

i honnestly don't remember a rpg battle system where you don't stick to your strategy , except for the bosses and NONE OF THEM encourage you much to change unless at those points.
Shin Megami Tensei IV just came out for 3DS. If you either don't keep up with fusing demons or don't master the Press Turn battle system, you will get destroyed constantly by random encounters and destroyed even harder by bosses.

The series in general tends to keep you on your toes. Give it a shot.
 
I did play the beta actually. Beginning is extremely boring and paced very weird and the game plays much like other MMOs in ways. It feels too familiar.

ok fair enough ..just wanted to know.


I do think it get Much much better after the prologue is finished (lv15) and that's where the magic trully is cast on the player.. but that's another debate.
 
Thank god.
If you want further clarification

This is Target Render. This gif is from the E3 trailer
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This is real time. This gif is from the gameplay trailer.
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The only reason i see for them to use the Target Render is because they wanted to show flashy moves and scenes that they wanted to implement in game.
 
XV has been the game most of us have been looking forward to even before XIII came out.

Toriyama is shit, and Nomura can actually make good games. Just look at The World Ends With You.
 
I did play the beta actually. Beginning is extremely boring and paced very weird and the game plays much like other MMOs in ways. It feels too familiar.

That's standard in MMO. ARR is a very standard MMO, that's what Yoshida wanted (and in 2 years try to reinvent the wheel is insane) but with the FF flavor and characteristics. Plot starts slow but writing is leagues beyond Toriyama and Watanable could come with and the early levels (well basically until you lvl cap) is divised as a tutorial so when you reach lvl 50 you would have learned all the necessary to start the true game: The end game stuff.
 
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