Since quoting it all would be a huge amount of text, I'll just say that I really liked your analysis of Lightning and her character Crimson, though a few of the things Corvo brought up are ones that bother me slightly. It might have been appreciated if perhaps some of the novellas had been perhaps either flashbacks or perhaps the opening to XIII-2.
Thanks.
And yeah, it's extremely frustrating. There would still be a myriad of problems with The Lightning Saga's story, but having the info from the novellas in the actual narrative would be a big start. If nothing else, it would significantly deepen the cast.
What it truly brings home is that there was a lot of untapped potential with the plot and characters that suffers from the scripting and execution. It's almost kind of amazing that it turned out as it did.
I'm not familiar with XIII's production much, but was that game perhaps rushed or had problems perhaps similar to what happened with XII?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6TXMsvgQg
That song pretty much sums up development on XIII.
From 2004 (it started out on the PS2) to 2008, due to horrible communication, squabbling between teams, inability to agree on the finalized specs of the Crystal Tools engine, and Toriyama's inability to lead his team... nothing really productive was done. Artists were creating assets to areas that had already been cut from the story; assets were being created that ended up not being compatible with the finalized engine; by mid 2008, 4 years into development, they still didn't have a finalized battle system; Toriyama had Wantanabe (and Toriyama himself rewrote scenes) rewriting scenes as many as a dozen times
during production, which made it absolute hell for the cutscene and localization team since the localization team would finally finish something only to be told "No, we ended up cutting that" or "no, that's no longer how the scene goes" and the lip syncers and cutscene animators would have to redo the scene... basically, it was a gong show.
The only reason they ended up finalizing the battle system when they did in 2008 was because someone forced the issue and said "you have to ship a demo on the Advent Children DVD". Had it not been for that, they might have run around for another few month.
The last year, year and a half was spent trying to cobble a game together to ship. XIII was always gonna be linear (due to Kitase's "Interactive Movie RPG" idea), but at the last moment they had to cut entire sections of the game because they just couldn't finalize them in time (Lightning's house; the entire area of Bodhum; a park in Nautilus; Team Nora's secret base; dozens of branching paths, while they wouldn't go anywhere, would have at least given you something to do; a whole extra level on Tajeans Tower, etc). Again, don't get me wrong: The game was always gonna be super linear. But we would have at least had a bit more to do.
You're right, it's amazing XIII was as good as it was.
Is XIII-2 as open as gran pulse?
