Dickman felt Spoony was toxic to his career, so he cut himself off from him. Any Spoony related pictures on his dA page have been taken down, and Spoony is not allowed to use his intro.
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The Spoony Experiment
- Thread starter Shard
- Start date
Dickman felt Spoony was toxic to his career, so he cut himself off from him. Any Spoony related pictures on his dA page have been taken down, and Spoony is not allowed to use his intro.
Typographenia
Member
Gotcha, I figured it was something like that.
edit: I think I still prefer this older one anyways. There's more going on in it than the new one Andy made, and it feels more in-tune with Spoony's content and such.
edit: I think I still prefer this older one anyways. There's more going on in it than the new one Andy made, and it feels more in-tune with Spoony's content and such.
I thought part of it had to do with the way that AJ "interviewed" Geoff Keighley?
Weird timing but TGWTG.com is also doing FFXIII review
MarzGurl Reviews Final Fantasy XIII - Episode 1
MarzGurl Reviews Final Fantasy XIII - Episode 1
Napalm_Frank
Member
I'm afraid to watch this :lol.
Thamauturge
Banned
So... didn't Spoony say he would upload a part weekly? Looks like this will be just like the FFX review where it takes an entire year to get the whole review =/
Yeaaahboi thanks!
Jawmuncher
Member
Nice didn't realize this was up. Can't wait to watch later today.
Cool
Thamauturge
Banned
I do wish he would stop whining about a lack of realism in a Final Fantasy game (what a shock!) and complain about some of the many things that actually matter.
hooray.
it wasn't that bad, but the timing for it is weird, why TGWTG doing FF13 review now,right after Spoony(heck their reviewers don't review a movie if someone else did it months ago) and Marz is anime/cartoon reviewer not games,so it's just questionable.
Thamauturge
Banned
Spoony and TGWTG aren't affiliated with each other anymore.
I know. that why I ask/wonders why they are doing their FF13 review now,hope they are not trying to compete with Spoony on his own game or thinking of taking some steam from his reviews/getting some of viewers riding on his review like the youtube clones videos-style.
Seraphis Cain
bad gameplay lol
You greatly overestimate how much TGWTG works as a cohesive unit. MarzGurl's FFXIII review isn't "their" review, it's her review.
Corleth the Fey
Member
For the record I enjoyed FFXIII and even bothered to grind out all 1000 gamerpoints, but it's true - they really don't explain things very well. Not in the 'main game' anyway. There is a codex that updates constantly, which does explain pretty much everything - but you do have to go through menus to get to it. So I can understand why some people never saw it/couldn't be bothered with it.
Typographenia
Member
Sweet mother of mercy. How can you write characters so stupidly? The whole thing with Serah and that town by the Fall Seal whatever thing... I mean, come on! And the bike escape towards it? Who on earth wrote this mess?
SpeedySwaf
Member
One thing the review reminded me of is that during the game, I half-felt that they should have made it possible to play out the first 13 days. Use that time to do a tutorial on combat (since Lightening and Snow fought monsters around then as well), give exposition about the world, give you a chance to walk around, etc. The train escape and fal'Cie fight would have made for an effective first act climax.
It's an easy target and when he actually writes these things he puts himself under a tight schedule for better or worse. Also, he had a twitter meltdown a while back because he was going to spend a while complaining about how awful and generic the music was but it seemed everyone loved the music so he ripped up an entire script.
i'm glad you now understand why FFXIII's story and characters are shite.
Typographenia
Member
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Yeeeeeaaaaah! Watching this now. Man, these are coming out faster than I'd expected.
Edit:
Ripping on Snow's shitty weapon being the glyphs on his freaking coat. I knew the answer was "because video games" but it certainly is stupid as hell.
Talking about how shit the Datalog usage is in this, because even though FF8 and FF12 had their equivalents, you never had to look for the foundations of terms in them! They were just optional stuff because you could get world-building from NPC dialogue or in-game cutscenes. It made sense. You just looked at FF8's stuff for the SeeD exam, and you built up FF12's datalog and it just added extra information about the world that you didn't really need to know about to get the entire game. It's just extra stuff for the player to look for at his or her own leisure. FF13 and FF13-2's datalogs by contrast just tell you, "hey, pay attention to the cutscenes only because this is a cinematic game whose purpose is to tell a broad story without telling you the backstory behind the story but if you want to know the backstory behind the story you can just read about it because we don't care about using the video game medium to its fullest extent. We just want shit to look pretty. And pretty >>>>>>> narrative comprehension and cohesion. wtf, this is what FF is about, right? Advent Children pretty battle shit. Not a perfect meld of storytelling and gameplay."
Oh shit, he spoiled Chocobo's identity for himself and his reaction. I need him to do FF13-2 next! :lol
This part was good. Addresses a lot of what I didn't like about the game at all.
Welcome to Motomu Toriyama's Universe of Shitty Writing, Datalogs, Shit World-Building, and Lightning-Worship.Typographenia said:
You see, I brought this up to a friend who loves Toriyama's writing and FF13, and he didn't think it would be a good idea because it messes up the cinematic flow of the game.
But I didn't want FF13 to be overly cinematic.
I just wanted a well-designed game. I would've been more accepting (well, probably not) if it had been a new IP, one that they wanted to experiment with, but... I just couldn't get over how much I genuinely disliked how the game was designed. I think it's an average game now, but I still don't like the general design of it. But that's because I go for more gameplay-driven stuff than narrative-driven stuff.
I've become the same, especially as it's easier to deal with a poor story (usually) to get to great gameplay than to deal with poor gameplay (again, usually) to get to a great story. The only reasons those aren't absolutes is that sometimes we get long, terrible, unskippable cutscenes (NiGHTS Wii and to a lesser extent Other M), whereas sometimes the gameplay's such an easy push over it doesn't really matter if it isn't fantastic (LA Noire actually lets it be skipped, ME3 makes a mode easy enough it may as well be skippable, and Nier can be powered through in the end game), but I can usually get the story in another form whether it's an LP or just reading wikipedia, so gameplay always gets the nod.
... And, now that I think about it, this is actually especially true for RPGs despite their initial status as THE place to go for stories in games. They're also designed in a way that lends themselves better to exploration and experimentation, so it's a shame to see that get compromised for some terrible cinematic vision as the case was for FFXIII.
MagiusNecros
Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
ItWasMeantToBe19
Banned
Pretty good. A lot of it is just basic nitpicking that could be done with most fiction (especially video games), but most of the review really breaks down how this universe makes no sense.
I hope he spends a lot of time on how the game later presents Snow as the hero of the game and a guy with the right ideals and a guy that Lightning decides to trust and follow despite Snow getting literally nothing right in the entire game and getting innocents killed. He's almost like an unintentional deconstruction of characters who believe people should act instead of think and the writers never caught on to how much of a fuckup they made him into.
I hope he spends a lot of time on how the game later presents Snow as the hero of the game and a guy with the right ideals and a guy that Lightning decides to trust and follow despite Snow getting literally nothing right in the entire game and getting innocents killed. He's almost like an unintentional deconstruction of characters who believe people should act instead of think and the writers never caught on to how much of a fuckup they made him into.
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
I completely agree. Sometimes I don't pay attention to the story at all, or if a cutscene's going on, I turn around and do something else while it's going on (because I've noticed that cutscenes this generation have gotten rather long).
It's interesting, though, since I don't really go to RPGs for storytelling anymore unless the games really warrant it (ex: Planescape: Torment, Sora no Kiseki, Suikoden, etc.). I've gotten so dissatisfied with the genre in terms of storytelling that I mostly come to them for systems. And if those systems aren't working correctly, and if the story's a complete mess, then I don't think very much of the game. Video games, as a medium can be used to show a myriad of ways to show the game's world and narrative to the player, whether that is via exploration, storytelling, NPC dialogue, enemy encounters (this can demonstrate the ecology of the environment to the player, for example, if enough thought is put into it), physics, technology employed, skills players have available to them, etc. Because video games is the medium it is, developers can experiment as much as they want with regards to showing the player what they want them to see or learn about the universe they've crafted, and this goes hand-in-hand with game design.
When you design a game that, for the most part, is a one-way street, with most of the narrative being placed into the in-game encyclopedia that updates (and has a red update window flashing in the corner after a cutscene) after a cutscene, where barely any of the game's world building being communicated in the games cutscenes which were created to replace simple dialogue exchanges, you've got an issue with melding game design with your narrative!
It doesn't say much about your story when after a cutscene where the characters use their jargon and geographical terminology, there's a red flashing box in the corner that tells you to read the in-game encyclopedia to get all the information you need because you can't be fucking bothered to include that stuff in cutscene dialogue or you don't care to throw around a few NPCs here and there to make the world feel somewhat alive enough to tell you some of these terms that you've just heard. What you're doing isn't world-building. You're simply showing the player that your cutscenes are there to show pretty shit as opposed to communicate proper information to the player.
That's one of the major things I can't stand about this game's design. It's just weird. It's an experiment, yes. But when you carry it on in some fashion to the sequel, it tells me that you haven't learned anything at all, or you're stubborn and don't know how to mix narrative with your overall game design. I haven't even begun to discuss the dungeon design and the fact that the towns in the game are mere setpieces to action sequences and battles.
The game builds tension to a climax, but it doesn't allow the player to rest between these sequences. The experiment was roller coaster game design, which could be fine and dandy, and then you hit Chapter 11 where everything just stops. Some people like this, and I kind of don't. The story begins to go nowhere, and the game design as a whole becomes inconsistent. This is FF13's game design and flow: ==========O==O. If you have to wait that long to let the player do what he or she wants to do in a role-playing game, then you haven't been that successful in adequately building and releasing narrative tension. This could have been remedied by throwing in a group who sympathized with your party's plight, and then you could have done whatever you wanted for a little bit before moving on. To add insult to injury, outside of Pulse, you can't backtrack. Being able to backtrack to places you've been to previously gives them a little bit of significance to the player because if he or she chooses to do so out of curiosity and their own will, he or she may go back to that area to see if it's changed since you've last been there. But since the game doesn't give the player a chance to do so, it gives little significance to the places you were before, and they are merely rendered as setpieces for action sequences in previous chapters.
I just can't stand how that game's designed. I want to learn more about the world, but the game won't let me. Don't tell me. Show me. That's why you've selected a video game as the medium for your narrative, right? Use it to your full advantage, then.
It's in one of Final Fantasy XIII-2's DLCs. If you want you can watch Kung Fu Jesus, Pokecapn and others go through it (spoilers for FF13 and FF13-2, obviously).
Also, the Pokecapn thread is here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=475554
Fimbulvetr
Member
He's complaining less about realism, and more about the believability of the setting. The believability of a setting relies on how cohesive and well established it is, and his problem is that FFXIII has neither. He gets a nitpicky and exaggerates, but this is a problem with the game's universe.
BassForever
Member
*kills self*
Meccanical
Member
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Every fucking time I see that thing that question pops up and never...NOT FUCKING ONCE is it answered.
Goddamn I hate this game.
WHERE DID HOPE GET A BOOMERANG
FUCK
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Why is that fal'cie in the Bodhum Vestige and how did it get there?
Every fucking time I see that thing that question pops up and never...NOT FUCKING ONCE is it answered.
Goddamn I hate this game.
WHERE DID HOPE GET A BOOMERANG
FUCK
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
can't you tell that the boomerang gets really tiny and he can fit it into his pocket? that's why it disappears. because technology.
Realize you can't apply logic to this.
I love how they said that the Boomerang is used for some sort of sporting event in the datalog, but you never ever see that sporting event in action in either of the FF13 games.
Meccanical
Member
Yet FFX did that shit perfectly.
And they can show a whole bunch of other superfluous shit BUT GOD FUCKING FORBID it does some proper world building FUCK THIS GAME
I'm sorry but no, this is unacceptable.
LR and XIII-3 will answers all these questions
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
I dunno about you, but I'd like to throw beach balls at enemies and petrify them.
That sounds cool.
Going by some of the descriptions of some of the weapons in the equipment menu, it seems like, they're used for hunting sports. Like... "Otshirvani - Designed for use in time-restricted competitions, this boomerang both enables and encourages constant activity." Hey, that sounds like an interesting minigame. It gives the player an incentive to level up their weapons and swap between them so they can access them for minigame competitions for Hope if they felt like allying the party up with people who sympathized with them on Cocoon. Gosh, wouldn't that have been a good idea?
Tooooo baaaaaad.
That sounds cool.
Going by some of the descriptions of some of the weapons in the equipment menu, it seems like, they're used for hunting sports. Like... "Otshirvani - Designed for use in time-restricted competitions, this boomerang both enables and encourages constant activity." Hey, that sounds like an interesting minigame. It gives the player an incentive to level up their weapons and swap between them so they can access them for minigame competitions for Hope if they felt like allying the party up with people who sympathized with them on Cocoon. Gosh, wouldn't that have been a good idea?
Tooooo baaaaaad.
oh boy i can't wait
Fimbulvetr
Member
When
Fang/
Meccanical
Member
So they put a fal'cie on this vestige and didn't move it...why?
Was it invisible or some shit?
Actually, I think I remember seeing an answer to that buried deep in the datalog.
Either the thing was always there from the Pulse/Cocoon War, or Barthandelus brought it there somehow.
Edit: Beaten, but I think the villain's overall goal reinforces why it went unnoticed for so long.
Fimbulvetr
Member
Anima was always in the Vestige; the Vestige itself is what got moved from Pulse. The prequel even makes note that Cocoon researchers tried to study it, but couldn't find the entrance(apparently they didn't try very hard since just a crashing hover-bike into it apparently works).
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Ah, I remember reading that. It made the game's narrative sound rather interesting.
And then when I played the JP version I realized that it was their way of segmenting some of the story stuff out of the game so they can begin it in media res and relegate the character backstory stuff to a prequel novel not available overseas because who cares about that shit, right? People want to see pretty cinematics.
To be fair, though, Serah was already assigned a Focus so it likely reacted to her rather than Snow being inept.
Meccanical
Member
The first is stupid and the second is a cop out.
If it was always there why did they not move the damn thing before hand?
Clearly they can, they move it at the beginning of the game!
Pulse fal'cie are bad right? Why keep one near a village of people it could l'cie up?
What was her focus anyway?
To give Lightning and co. a vague message? They do that enough with those shitty visions.
Fimbulvetr
Member
No, not the part where the creepy tentacles grab Serah; I mean the part where Hope and Vanille get in literally by crashing their hoverbike into it. And then later you find Snow's hoverbike(from when he left the rest of NORA back on that floating bridge airship) and it has also been crashed. Actually, now that i think about it, how did Lightning and Sazh get in?
Meccanical
Member
How indeed.
Maybe they also managed to crash a hoverbike completely indoors (with no visible signs of damaged environments) like the other two pairs did!
Meccanical
Member
I guess so, those bikes are always just lying around anyway.
Fimbulvetr
Member
Serah's Focus was
to destroy Cocoon, just like everyone else.
managed to change her Focus by believing hard enough.
Dark Schala
Eloquent Princess
Ohhh. Um. They're the chosen ones? I don't know.
Lightning and Sazh got in because... Lightning talked to a wall?
I'm honestly trying to remember whether or not there was a proper reason for that in the datalog (oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm saying that the reason might be in the freaking in-game text dump rather than in standard game dialogue like normal games).
do those hoverbikes even have keys or car alarms
Didn't it have something to do withMeccanical said:
Ragnarok