LordKasual
Banned
"I hate that this Final Fantasy game has fantasy and worldbuilding in it."
Seriously. XIII asked you to remember, like, 4 terms, and two of them were nearly the same, and they get beaten into your skull over the initial hours of the story.
It's not even like they're incredibly alien, abstract concepts, either.
Fal'cie are physical gods. L'cie are their often involuntary thralls. Cie'th are "damned" L'cie who've failed their Focus, that being a quest given to them by their Fal'Cie master.
Boom. Done. It's SUPER fucking straightforward, honestly. It's just pretty standard fantasy tropes and concepts with a new set of titles applied.
How is it any different from any other series having a fictional language, or naming fictional races?
Is it because the terms you have to remember aren't English? I don't remember people complaining about, say, X or XII throwing terms around and expecting you to remember them, but they generally stuck to English or Latin-rooted terms.
Hell, XII throws archaic English around without apology and just expects you to keep up and use context clues, and it's considered one of the greatest localization jobs ever. (And rightfully so!)
XIII may have had a lot of issues with character motivations shifting seemingly arbitrarily () and sometimes failing to adequately present context, but a tiny handful of vocabulary terms you have to remember is NOT a failing of the game's storytelling."You'll never make us kill Orphan! ...Everybody kill Orphan!"
It's such a "bitching for the sake of bitching" argument and I can only assume that the people I hear it from don't have the attention span for a large RPG, anyway.
The problem with XIII wasn't it's lore. It was the fact that the game just ASSUMES you give a fuck. The game basically throws you into its universe as if you're already familiar with it, and makes no attempt to adequately fill you in because it's trying its hardest to rush you into the juicy parts.
"Okay im a L'Fal who just got marked by a Pulse L'see on Cocoon and PsiCom is trying to send us back to Pulse (wherever that is) too because now i'm a L'see too but i wasn't a few minutes ago? Well i fell onto Pulse and my sister has fused with the crystal lake, but no time to cry because we need some Focus so we don't turn into L'Seeth and wow, Shiva Bikes, k sure why not"
"I'm flailing my arms through the forest singing about Hope but he isn't even here right now"
*READS DATALOG FOR AN HOUR*
"Wait a sec, i'm still on Cocoon? I thought we fell onto Pulse already? How did the Pulse Fal'Cie get on Cocoon? Why do they hate Pulse so much? Okay now i'm on Pulse, but literally everyone is fuckin dead, there is not a single living soul down here, why do they even care about Pulse L'Cie if everyone is dead?"
"so they want me to kill them, so that everyone will die, and then they'll get what they want, but we're not going to follow their orders, because we choose our own fate, so lets go kill them, so that they'll die, and then...everyone else will die, and....then....uhh"