More thoughts..
- First Final Fantasy or maybe RPG ever where I've skipped a crucial story cutscene. I couldn't take any more of that hyper emo thing going on for Snow/Serah/Lightning/Hope.. by now I'm not sure what's happened but am moving along...
- ... because the battle system is incredible! I love it. I love the complexity and the roles, your mind is constantly managing the entire battle landscape; during bosses it is about more conscious switching and conservation, large enemies require you to prebuff and unleash while smaller enemies are about all-out direct assault. The graphics and sfx work very well when you stack amazing combos - very satisfying.
My only question about the battle system is how many players out there Squeenix are alienating. On one hand they're saying they want to keep on this theme and character scheme because Final Fantasy is for teenagers, and on the other the battle system (1) took a long time [about 2 hours into the game] to be exciting (2) is conceptually and mechanically complex. It's like the story/dialogue/characters regressed from FF6 and yet the core systems kept moving forwards. It's definitely a very bad mix if they want to be mass market.
- Hate the frequency of cutscenes. In many parts of the games it's literally TWO battles separating cutscenes.. and other times it's just 10 seconds worth of moving your character on the dualstick from one cutscene to another. Just plain bad.
- Characters are very "Japanese".. in most past Final Fantasies, the characters were 2D or abstract 3D and adopted behaviorisms that were not distinctly Asian. Even FF12 avoided most of this by being set in a medieval-like world with its plot being political intrigue. The mannerisms are very familiar with me as I've consumed a large amount of Jdrama, anime and games but they just seem very out of place in the game.
- Very grindy game as well.. Trying to upgrade my weapons and accessories but the system is needlessly complex AND also requires A LOT of time to harvest the goods.
- One big question I have is that, the game is still relatively difficult even when (a) I wipe out all enemies in the area preceding the boss and max out my crystarium limits (b) I pour as many things possible into my equipment and (c) I have a good grasp of the battle system and strategy. You will also meet large and difficult enemies that require some level of strategy to defeat, and if they're very hard no one tells you that it's out of your league. It's definitely not that mainstream friendly as new players will get caught out and owned.
Overall, I'm on Gran Pulse now and I think this is one of the, if not the poorest Final Fantasy in a very, very long time. In fact, it's probably the worst I've ever played (I've done 6-12).
I think Squeenix is losing it in terms of having good market direction on how their product should be designed. As things are right now, FF will become an increasingly JP-only game and even there it's a weakening brand. If they want to keep pouring money into the FF series, Squeenix needs to:
- Develop the game for a global audience; that means story, scenario, character, dialogue, motion capture should be global. They have good sense of developing a setting (in this case, very strongly Star Wars-inspired for FF13) that could be accepted by players worldwide, but everything else is poor.
- Focus on a product strategy for their target audience and really keep the entire game consistent to that... don't say you want to keep FF for teenagers and install crazy battle mechanics that can't penetrate a large enough base to garner sales to sustain its dev costs.
- Step away from ridiculous cutscenes and achieve a better balance of how gameplay flows and story progression should be achieved. See Uncharted 2 and Half Life 2. I can understand learning from CoD4 but man.. definitely took the wrong lessons. Dumbasses.
I don't think they'll learn though. I think they're at the start of an incredible decline for JRPGs, let's see how Versus is handled.