I know, but sometimes it's easier to understand that the universe holds people with many different points of view.
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Final Fantasy XV - Review Thread [Second wave of reviews coming in]
- Thread starter dc89
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I know, but sometimes it's easier to understand that the universe holds people with many different points of view.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
If you say a game is more coherent, you're essentially arguing that it's more understandable. That's not necessarily a marker of overall quality, it's just one quality of a story. Just because you know how the story gets from Point A to Point B and how Plot Device θ influences it doesn't mean it's a good story.
Having a story where so much happens offscreen pretty clearly disqualifies it from any "coherence in storytelling" recognition.
Having a story where so much happens offscreen pretty clearly disqualifies it from any "coherence in storytelling" recognition.
exactly.
I will agree that I think the story in 15 is simpler than 13, but 15 just feels like it was gutted and that there are important narrative pieces that are just straight up missing
XIII tells a crappy story better than XV, it's better paced and stronger at getting information across. Even if the information is nonsense that it's hard to care for and easy to forget.
XV has some really interesting stuff that's never developed, or requires external media to get the full context, to the point where nothing happens in the first eight chapters and the only characters who get more than one or two beats are the hero and villain.
XIII is competent execution of bad material. XV is poor execution of material with potential. I've always been fonder of the latter, and it's easier to read into XV and find flashes of fun in there.
XV has some really interesting stuff that's never developed, or requires external media to get the full context, to the point where nothing happens in the first eight chapters and the only characters who get more than one or two beats are the hero and villain.
XIII is competent execution of bad material. XV is poor execution of material with potential. I've always been fonder of the latter, and it's easier to read into XV and find flashes of fun in there.
PshycoNinja
Member
I don't want to make this a semantics argument...
When I played XIII, I couldn't understand what was happening, why it was happening, and why people were doing what they were doing.
When playing XV, I understand what is happening, why it is happening, and why people were doing what they were doing.
LordKasual
Banned
The sour experience trigger is entirely true, no argument. There are people who will say FFXV is a 2/10 experience solely for being open world, or XIII was garbage because it was a linear game.
But when it comes to gameplay elements, there's just no situation where I can take Final Fantasy XIII, set it next to any other mainline title since PS1, and not come to the conclusion that XIII was a downgrade in just about every shared aspect that wasn't visual fidelity or music.
I don't think XIII was a bad game, on its own merits it was a fun enough ride. It was just...shallow. Too shallow, uncharacteristically shallow. I can't even really challenge run the game because of how barren it was. There was literally nothing to do in XIII but run down hallways and fight enemies. And then at 30 hours the game "opens up" and you do the same thing, except now with 2 extra directions!
XIII's story is told better because there's literally nothing to do but look at the story.
There is no cutscene that is not the main cutscene. There is no path that is not the main path.
...And you're still required to read a datalog to know what the hell anyone was talking about.
I don't think people remember what XIII's story was like.
PshycoNinja
Member
Agreed
I think people forget that even though it "opens up" there is still only one way in and one way out. It "opens up" and then bottlenecks you back down the path when you decide that you had enough. And we're talking about being there for a pretty short time in all honestly. I was there for all of 30-45 minutes.
well put Eobard
butman
Member
Clearly is so much easier to understand if you watch the movie and the anime. Without them is also understandable.
Did you watch them before playing?
I watched Kingslaive but I shouldn't have to
orthodoxy1095
Banned
I don't see how anyone could make that claim about XIII and not say the same about XV.
If you don't consume all the non-game material like Brotherhood, Kingsglaive and the Prologue, the game is an incoherent mess.
Here are the questions XV made me wonder:
Who is character X? Why should I care about X? Why did character Z disappear and never return? When did this character Y have event β inflicted on them? How do the motives of character J mesh with character M? What does central concept A mean for this story? When did important world event V happen?
And the problem isn't that the story gave me questions to carry me on (any good story should make you curious), the problem is that these are questions that I often failed to get satisfactory answers for. The game fails to explain entire plot points and often shunts them into loading screens. It has central concepts or relationships that go nearly wholly unexplained or are brought into the game so late that they just cause more confusion.
That's not good storytelling, and it's hardly something you could call better than XIII's. It's crappy, in its own unique way.
If your game requires a movie or anime to have basic coherence, context and understandability, you've crafted a pretty garbage story.
This is a great description actually.
This game has two parts.
Part 1:A beautiful open world full of hidden dungeons & enemies.Where you can roam around with a car or a chocobo.This is where this game shines & forges its own personality.
Part 2: Everything falls apart.Fights & level design are worse.This is a linear part which is solely responsible for tanking the game in more ways than one.
I'd wager that the open world being frontloaded somehow saves this game.
XIII's openness is backloaded & most didnt stick around long enough.
Mister Megative
Banned
"Cindys design is laughable, but she draws attention to a broader problem with the game: its overwhelming maleness." 6/10
I agree Cindy looks ridiculous, but isn't it a game about bros on a roadtrip?
I agree Cindy looks ridiculous, but isn't it a game about bros on a roadtrip?
Whompa02
Member
Why not? It's a transmedia release?
That's like saying you watched part 2 of a movie and got confused, and that you shouldn't have to watch part 1 to understand it.
Just because it's in two formats doesn't mean it's not supposed to be a part of the larger narrative.
Also, XIII's story is honestly terrible. Why are people in here trying to defend that thing? There's a compendium within the game just trying to get you to differentiate "Le Cie" and "Fal Cie" religious/racial/whatever garbage. That game was an absolute cluster of poor storytelling.
brandonh83
Banned
I understood XV a lot more than XIII. It was still convoluted and could have been clearer, but I never felt lost. XIII just starts shooting ridiculous jargon at you with no rhyme or reason and the story continued in an even more confusing manner.
XV's biggest sins are that it needed more scenes and to clarify a few things better. The general narrative was much easier to follow IMO.
XV's biggest sins are that it needed more scenes and to clarify a few things better. The general narrative was much easier to follow IMO.
you can't be serious. you're basically saying that kingslaive and that anime are essential to the enjoyment of FFXV. if anyone only plays the game and doesn't enjoy the story it's their own fault?
also re FF13, saying something is coherent is not saying it is good
orthodoxy1095
Banned
Why would that ever be an acceptable thing? The game isn't listed as "Final Fantasy XV: Part Four," it's just Final Fantasy XV. There's a painfully obvious difference between picking up a game that does not denote any clear reliance on outside media in its packaging and going into see The Mockingjay Part 2 and expecting to understand what happened without seeing the other three films. That's a dumb as dirt comparison.
If I go into a Star Wars movie, I have an expectation (whether actually fulfilled or not) that it'll be coherent without reading any books or comics. Sure, maybe those outside sources will provide more context and more enjoyment, but they shouldn't be functional cornerstones to understanding the goings on of a film.
This is especially true in light of XV claiming to be a "Final Fantasy for newcomers and veterans." You don't get to claim to be a game for everyone and then stuff important information into three different pieces of non-gaming media that most people will never consume.
So you choose to downplay the open world section because you skipped all of the open world style content that's there? There's a metric ton of monster hunts, and all the toughest enemies in the game. You can't ignore that just because you chose to ignore it and rush right through. That's on you, not the game.
I actually like the entire plot of the 13 trilogy but I also read all the supplementary stuff. Toriyama pushed too much info in the background, especially the world building components. FFXIII's world is really cool and very deep but a poor translation and weak script certainly hurt it's appeal.
However, the atmosphere of LR is one of the best in the series. It's basically Purgatory.
I think people overestimate the potential the story had.I think this game's story flaws stem from bad direction & an uninspired creative vision.
FFXV had a 2 hour CG film that simply did not tell a good story.
This tells me that more hours of cutscenes wouldn't have somehow resulted in this incredible story waiting to be told.
This project didnt need more time & money funneled into it.It needed better writers & creative direction.
What "open world" content is there? It's the same thing you've been doing for the last few hours, but on a large green map. There's no variety to what you're doing, it's just a vast and empty monster arena. It only works for people who are already invested on XIII's combat at that point. If you aren't, there's nothing to see or do there. I explored and genuinely gave it a shot to see if it could turn my opinion of the game around, but two or three hunts later I was bored out of my mind and just rushed out of the place.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
You could literally make this comment about XV's open world content.
What "open world" content is there? There's no variety to what you're doing, it's just a vast and empty monster arena peppered with MMO fetch-kill quests. It only works for people who are already invested on XV's combat. If you aren't, there's nothing to see or do there. I explored and genuinely gave it a shot to see if it could turn my opinion of the game around, but two or three hunts later I was bored out of my mind and just rushed out of the place.
13 was in no way, shape or form superior to XV but lemme leave it to the meta-score and critics to shit on this one while they praised XIII to high heavens when it first was release just to shit on it later on once a 'general consensus' came about.
XV does have a good story and good lore, execution? there's the problem.
A year or two down the line I expect to see, "revisiting XV: now seeing the positives" or some bullshit like that when XVI is teased and people clamor to hate that as well.
SE did trip over themselves releasing Kingsglaive instead of putting it in the game.
Especially when it really didn't do shit for the complete story and left people still confused.
XV does have a good story and good lore, execution? there's the problem.
A year or two down the line I expect to see, "revisiting XV: now seeing the positives" or some bullshit like that when XVI is teased and people clamor to hate that as well.
SE did trip over themselves releasing Kingsglaive instead of putting it in the game.
Especially when it really didn't do shit for the complete story and left people still confused.
That is not really all of it though.What about the adjacent areas?
What about Yaschas Massif,Mahabarra,Sulyya Springs,and Oerba ?
IIRC,They all had cieth stone missions.
The "open world" at the end of XIII is actually pretty damn sizeable.Its not just the archylte steppes.
There are actually well designed optional dungeons peppered around the world, geographical variety, side content that does in fact not rely on the game's combat system (fishing, chocobo races), some amount of npc interaction and context for your actions (admiteddly not nearly enough to be called good most of the time, but better than shining stones giving you a "yes" "no" option). XV also at least had the Dead Eye hunt which had more of an efort put into it than the side content of XIII.
Obviously a lot of the game's enjoyment is still dependent on wheter or not you can put up with its combat, but the same is true of the majority of games that feature combat as one of its main features. The difference is that within its confines, FF XV does a lot more to spice things up than XIII even tried to.
To me that argument sounds a lot like the "but X was linear too, so I don't understand why people like that but not XIII". Yes, they're similar on a superficial level, but there are many other reasons that contribute to one's enjoyment of what they have to offer.
EDIT: I need to stop writting long posts on my cellphone
PshycoNinja
Member
Wasn't commenting on the quality of storytelling. I was commenting on how understandable and coherent the story is. Which by all accounts, XV is vastly more understandable and coherent than XIII.
And as others have said...
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I derived no enjoyment from the wider area. (I wouldn't call it open world at all, it's an area that gives the illusion it's not funneling you down linear design; Also want to take the time to state here that I don't mind linear FF, but I do mind when people say XIII has an "open world" section or that the game get more "open world" as it goes on.) I derived no enjoyment from the gameplay, so I didn't want to spend my time in an area that was all about it.
Edit: Again with this thread becoming a XIII vs XV thread. I really shouldn't have contributed to this shift and contributing to the arguments. Can we get back on track please?
orthodoxy1095
Banned
Coherence and understandability are an aspect of the quality of storytelling.
Quoting other people's posts about the understandability as your refutation is incredibly and absurdly weak. I'm not sure what else I expected, so I'll just drop it since that's the best you have to offer.
ShadowSoldier89
Member
I'll take XIII's latter section over setting my controller down and browsing the internet on my phone for 5-10 minutes at a time
XV's open world is fucking godawful
XV's open world is fucking godawful
PshycoNinja
Member
Personal insults are fine and all, but I simply used their posts because I am on a 15 minute break at work and did not have time to write a five paragraph analysis refuting you. So I used their posts that elegantly described how I felt. But if you want me to write an entire analysis, I will be more than happy to get home at midnight and write one and give up on sleep. I don't mind.
Edit:
If it annoys you that much there's fast travel?
As for the story, I generally agree with ZeroX03. XIII had a more cohesive narrative structure than XV (pacing, story beats, presentation), but it also shares a lot of the same internal problems. For as much as
were wasted in XV, I also couldn't tell you what was the point of Jill Nabaht, Sephiroth-looking guy, Cid
, and I guess pretty every minor villain once Barthandelus enters the picture
. XV makes you watch a supplementary movie, anime and novel to get the most out of its plot, XIII makes you read shitloads of datalogs and supposedly play the sequels to get an explanation of that asspull at the ending. The latter has the advantage of at least being accessible through the game, but ideally both approaches aren't really desirable. Its convolutedness and the fact that it fails to explain a lot of its lore is also a failing it shares with XV.
So yeah, it's better told by virtue of it focusing exclusively on it, but it's not actually well told.
Luna, Ravus, and basically the whole freaking empire
(I guess he was Ravus with slightly more screentime)
(just like the empire gets shoved aside for Ardyn)
So yeah, it's better told by virtue of it focusing exclusively on it, but it's not actually well told.
ShadowSoldier89
Member
not until you get there the first time
LordKasual
Banned
It was born from the worst of Square Enix's practices, immediately followed by XIV that exploded all over their faces.
But out of the travesty that gave us the Claire Farron trilogy and that terrible fucking talking moogle arose 2 phoenixes!
But, alas, one of the two still was born of taint. And thus it culminated as a festering, infectious reminder of the sins of the past in the form of an entire chapter right before the ending of the game.
And the FNC curse took points off its score evermore
I think the biggest issue with the story is that because of the
I won't bother with the XIII comparison because XV does a lot more right than XIII and I say this as someone who doesn't mind XIII.
brotherhood aspect which I did actually enjoy all four characters quite a bit, it took away from developing any characters outside of those four. I still think the game would have benefited from gaining a larger party in the last half while the first could be left to focus on the four. They leave characters like Cor, Luna and Aranea who all have potential to be incredibly interesting but get dropped so fast that you don't feel much for them. The games goes through major storylines too fast and that makes the whole thing suffer. I love this game and the potential for the story is so good that I can't hate it. It's just made some mistakes with narrative and I wish they could have fixed that before releasing the game.
I won't bother with the XIII comparison because XV does a lot more right than XIII and I say this as someone who doesn't mind XIII.
I've said this on the OT, but warts and all, I still found myself engrossed by XV's narrative. It's disappointing how many of its most interesting elements are only hastily touched upon and never fully expanded, but it does some interesting things, has memorable moments and a few sequences do a pretty good job of setting the mood, be it grand or somber. I'm forgiving of XV's faults, perhaps more than I should be, because I like a lot of its concepts, the visual spectacle and the history surrounding Eos.
I get disappointed whenever I think what could've been had the game not compromised on its original vision, though. You know the one.
But then again that would've required a trilogy and I really want Square to move on from direct sequels and go back to doing stand-alone entries, so I guess it's for the best. Ideally, XV should've kept its spin-off status so it could do whatever the hell it wanted to do without slowing down the main entries nor having to scale itself down.
FingerBang
Member
This.
I put 60 hours into the game, I enjoyed it more than I expected, but the way the story is told is just crap. I refuse to watch an anime and a movie, I refuse to read extra material that came out later because they didn't have time to put it into the game. I am a gamer, I want to play games and be entertained, not having to do homework to The game didn't tell me a lot of basic information, and as a consequence I didn't care for the world and most of the characters.
There's still hope for the game, maybe people playing it in a year will be able to understand it better. It will be too late for me though.
APZonerunner
Member
13 is a game with very safe & largely mediocre, iterative ideas that executes on those ideas incredibly well, for the most part.
15 is a game that has some brave, brilliant and revolutionary ideas (for a JRPG, anyway) but executes on them in a muddled, often confused and heavily caveated way.
Like, they're both fine games, but... pick your poison! I think them being more or less the same score is about justice, tbh.
15 is a game that has some brave, brilliant and revolutionary ideas (for a JRPG, anyway) but executes on them in a muddled, often confused and heavily caveated way.
Like, they're both fine games, but... pick your poison! I think them being more or less the same score is about justice, tbh.
I've said this again & again,but this largely so untrue.
The game is constructed on safely established,hackneyed ideas & story telling devices.It doesnt attempt to brink any new grounds & even falls behind series standard when it comes to treatment of female characters for example.
Look to Kingsglaive to see what kind of ideas this story was founded upon.
There are no hints of anything conceptually ground breaking or revolutionary in this project.
Lady Bird
Matsuno's Goebbels
FFXIII's execution is incoherent. It might have had good scene direction and good pacing (until chapter 8), but the datalog's recaps consistently reveal information that was poorly explained by cutscenes, many interesting story concepts were wasted by poor plotting, and anything after chapter 7/8 climaxes was really bad.
XIII had simple concepts with names that just sounded complex. They were all extremely easy to understand if you paid any attention to the dialogue. I didn't even read the datalog entires, and it made sense. XV's analogs for those terms use easier to understand words, but they're basically the same thing in most of the execution. The hardest words were fal'cie, l'cie, and cie'th. All three of which they explain to death, enough so that I find it hard to not know what those were or even get the slightest bit confused if you just pay attention to the cutscenes.
XV I never really felt like I knew what was going on for a lot of it outside of the intro/basic premise, and the story was not only half-baked, but some of the relationships I was repeatedly told by the game I was supposed to be vested in were all done in media outside of the game; media I didn't watch because I wrongly assumed the game would be able to establish and flesh out its characters. Context for a lot of things were never explained, motivations almost all but missing, and I never really felt like the story was told in a disjunctive, hard to follow manner (likely cut content, DLC plans, and so forth).
When I ask people to describe to me the ending and what the bad guy did and why, I have yet to actually get any kind of consistent answer across multiple people.
I agree with this. I can't think of any seeds it really planted to try and push the genre forward, or anything it did that hasn't been done extremely better by other open-world games.
BlazingDarkness
Member
'Nothing happens in the first eight chapters' is just a plain hyperbolic untruth. I'm only on chapter eight myself, with over forty hours on the clock, and plenty has happened so far.
FFXV's plot exposition trounces that of XIII, which was essentially running through linear paths and triggering cutscenes. I know which I prefer.
FFXV's plot exposition trounces that of XIII, which was essentially running through linear paths and triggering cutscenes. I know which I prefer.
Irishonion
Member
Good lord, you can't tell me people have actually said and believed that.
FFXV's story is disjointed but it's still much easier to understand than FFXIII, and has a solid villain, who sadly is undercooked, but still far better than FFXIII's "villain". I don't even remember the villain in that game.
I'm disappointed in XV's narrative execution as much as the next person but to compare it in any way to XIII's and even try to call it inferior is quite simply laughable in my opinion. Yes, there are a lot of issues with the execution as we all know, but there are good things to take away from it in the end, whereas nothing positive can be said about the nonsensical narrative of Toriyama's trilogy.
I'm disappointed in XV's narrative execution as much as the next person but to compare it in any way to XIII's and even try to call it inferior is quite simply laughable in my opinion. Yes, there are a lot of issues with the execution as we all know, but there are good things to take away from it in the end, whereas nothing positive can be said about the nonsensical narrative of Toriyama's trilogy.
So are you talking about plot exposition, or the gameplay needed to get to the plot exposition? You say XV's plot exposition is good, but then compare that to the gameplay loop of XIII.
BlazingDarkness
Member
Both, of what I've played of XV so far, the exposition largely comes through the gameplay, you're hearing it on the radio etc as you're exploring, your party are discussing events and motivations of enemies, their relationship develops slowly like this. There's far from nothing happening in the plot, it's all there if you go looking for it.
FFXIII on the other hand, has paper thin gameplay, it's essentially designed like a conveyor belt to send you from one cutscene to the next (and often preventing you from backtracking), so it might appear to tell a story better, but at the cost of everything else.
See, i'd argue that good plot exposition would be presenting the story in a cogent, consistent manner when they force you to watch it (cutscenes). If you're going to make the player watch these cutscenes, surely they should have all the relevant information handy, and it should be easy for the player to watch the cutscenes and know what's going on provided you've been paying attention. Confusing world-building elements for plot exposition when it doesn't really have any bearing on your main party's mission is an obvious pitfall to step in, outside of the radio segment/cutscene at the start of the game (which was also arguably a good cutscene introduction to Luna).
Also, i'm still not really sure how you're fitting XIII into this other than to say you hated it. Which is fine (different strokes for different folks), but it detracts from your core argument regarding the effectiveness of XV's exposition when you go off about how much you thought XIII was bad because of the gameplay, but "might appear to tell a story better" (which is what we could call exposition of the plot).
Edit: Oh, you didn't finish XV (didn't see that, which is on me). Yeah, i'll be paying attention to what you write about the latter half of that game if I see you pop into the spoiler thread when you finish.