Support NeoGAF

[HeelPower]

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.

You know the game won't continue like that right ?

Come back when you've played the linear part and seen how the game handles its narrative in these parts relative to XIII's linear parts.

Its worse.

 

[BlazingDarkness]

Yeah I'm only halfway through or so I guess of XV, so I'll see how my opinion changes.

 

[ZeroX03]

'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.

What happens? There's the Kingsglaive stuff after chapter one and then it's mostly fetch quests for a bunch of things in the open world. Chapter 8 especially is an obviously last minute addition to fill for time.

Your forty hours on the clock has been mostly optional stuff. You can get through those first eight chapters in 5 to 10 hours. Actual story stuff is pretty light, and throw long travel and loading times on top to boot.

Later chapters just drop exposition on you. Tell, not show. Just "and this happened and this happened and also we totally forgot about this character etc!"

 

[Supermanisdead]

Yeah, I'm struggling to think of any important plot points from the first 8 chapters. The game is on cruise control until chapter 9. It's just a terribly paced mess.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

I'm struggling to think in the first eight chapters of what could ever be quantified as "plenty." It's pretty barebones stuff and it stands out in obvious contrast when it's put next to the exposition dump-fest that is the final chapters.

What happens?

Jared and Talcott bruh.

The most memorable character duo in Final Fantasy history.

 

[HeelPower]

The car ride with Talcott was pretty memorable.

Conveys sense of time passage really well.

One of the bright spots in the late narrative imo.

 

[Trojita]

I just got to the beginning of Chapter 3. Did some hunts there and got my Chocobo. Having more fun on this than I did with FFXIII by this point.

 

[Lynx_7]

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.

Kingsglaive is not a good indication of what ideas XV's story was built upon, though. It's a product of taking the skeleton of Versus, scaling it down and adjusting whatever was necessary to get the project out of the door, much like FF XV as a whole. There's nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking there to begin with, just a backdrop with some really cool ideas that had a lot more potential than the final product ended up tapping.

This is obviously coming from a subjective place, but I'm finding XV's linear narrative bits pretty engaging despite how disjointed and rushed it all is. It lightly taps into that atmosphere and presentation that made the original Versus trailers enticing to me, and it's why I think this story could've been so much more than what we got. The foundation is solid, it just lacked direction. And yes, I already got through the "worst" part of the game. And I'd still rate the story itself, even in this barebones state we got, above XIII's despite all its problems.

 

[Holundrian]

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.

Dillusional, XIII in no way shape or form executes well. It's fucking garbage ignoring one of the big rules in story telling. Show don't tell.

 

[APZonerunner]

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.

I dunno; I think for a Japanese RPG the things they do with the open world, with some of the world aesthetic and attitude that was clearly injected in the post-Versus times, etc - I think it's all pretty brave considering the context of where this game comes from. It would've been easy, palatable to do another fast-paced, action-looking take on ATB but they decided to chase the big guns, attempt what the big WRPGs were attempting. I do think in the context of the game specifically it was brave, honestly.

As for its story... I think it has plainly interesting ideas to express and in particular interesting themes (though interestingly none of the most interesting themes are those Tabata surfaced as key to the game prior to release) - they're just not well expressed, thus the problems with the female cast etc.

Like, FF15 is in my opinion more than the sum of its parts because stripped back at a very basic level what it's trying to do is fascinating and exciting. It just struggles to do it well. There's not much exciting about FF13 in this regard, but it does almost everything in that unexciting realm well and with a surprisingly even hand considering how plagued and fucked up its development was.

 

[Perfo]

To be honest I vastly prefer the narrative from chapt 1 to 9 than what's beyond that. Mainly because it doesn't rely on ugly directed and confusing cutscenes but tells lots of stories through enviroment, banter, radios and such. I really liked discovering world and characters by actively looking for them. What comes after is what usually you expect from a FF but the quality simply isn't there. FFXIII trilogy, even LR, was so much better at that. Thus I prefer what's fresh and original in this case, and that is the first half of the game.

 

[Myriadis]

Dillusional, XIII in no way shape or form executes well. It's fucking garbage ignoring one of the big rules in story telling. Show don't tell.

The funny thing is that despite the many cutscenes it wasn't clear for many players what the l'cie or the fal'cie was. You had to read the lore in the main menu to get an idea.

I haven't played it yet, but it sounds like FFXII, where people also claimed that it has no story. I just think that it was done more subtle, something that I really prefer over getting the story punched in my face like FFX does.

 

[Holundrian]

The funny thing is that despite the many cutscenes it wasn't clear for many players what the l'cie or the fal'cie was. You had to read the lore in the main menu to get an idea.

Exactly, vomiting your mythology all over players without doing the legwork to make them care is terrible. Like I don't know what mental gymnastics are going on within FF threads, it's like these people haven't played anything with a story in an eternity.

Like I consider the simple stuff we get in shovel knight as well executed, FFXIII is not. I'm almost sure if you swapped the titles between FF XIII and resonance of fate people would have similar arguments trying to desperately grasp at all the few redeeming qualities they could find.

 

[Darkstorne]

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.

I don't even slightly agree that XV's radio and newspaper stories count as "gameplay" plot development. But I do understand where you're coming from by thinking that, so far, the game is better than XIII. You've only just left the open world. From here on out it's even MORE linear than XIII if you can believe it. You'll occasionally be allowed to walk up and down a train. On top of that, so much of the story was cut and unfinished that you'll be thinking "at least XIII's story made sense. This is just ridiculous!"

I consider XV to have fantastically fun gameplay in Lucis (and post-game), and represents the Final Fantasy series at one of its highest points. But I also feel the latter half of the game (which has been so rushed that it SHOULD be the latter two thirds had everything gone according to plan) is so bad, in literally every single way (story, gameplay, presentation) that it's Final Fantasy at its absolute worst.

Without doubt, worse than XIII as a whole imo. And I consider XIII a bad FF game.

 

[ethomaz]

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.

It is more like you need to read a book before watch the movie.

You shouldn't.

 

[Eolz]

For context, here are some movie/TV scores for Metacritic:

Empire Strikes Back: 80
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: 70
The Avengers: 69
Stranger Things: 76
Doctor Strange: 72
Godfather 2:
Gladiator: 64
Shawshank redemption: 80

Bottom line: metacritic has some serious flaws, and their weighting system is just fucked. Kotaku and Gamasutra have written articles on it.

The main flaw here is more that game critics don't dare to use the full rating scale whereas movie critics do since a long time. It's at 82 on Opencritic as well, which isn't using a bad review weight system like MC.

 

[ethomaz]

The main flaw here is more that game critics don't dare to use the full rating scale whereas movie critics do since a long time. It's at 82 on Opencritic as well, which isn't using a bad review weight system like MC.

This.

I don't see any issue with Metacritic or Open Critic... they are review aggregators they have no power to change or give scores for a game... even the MC weight falls max 1-2 points from an absolute average like OC.

There is nothing wrong with these systems.

If you have any issue with the avg. score then you have a issue with the scores that critics gives via reviews and not the aggregator system.