The Shrine

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/07/f ... y-is-dead/

Sigh.

Err, Final Fantasy 7 had Tifa Lockhart. It's hardly something new.

The problem with Final Fantasy is that they can't decide if it's supposed to be like serious or Dead or Alive so it just ends up being a turnoff for all the people they thought they're catering to. It's basically the opposite of what happened to Typemoon that started out as porn and then actually thought people bought their games for the story. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a FFX2 strategy and the problem is that they didn't have the right assets to do so. There's really nobody truly interesting in FFX to build a Dead or Alive kind of game from. Likewise Lightning isn't really that impressive either. I don't know why they thought she's supposed to be the second coming of Cloud and Sephiroth put together.

I"m cautiously optimistic for Final Fantasy XV, I hope the story is as dark as it appears to be teased, and is a bit more serious. The writing in the XIII saga is downright juvenile and a huge step back from FFXII, which quite honestly was probably the most mature FF yet. It's such a shame that game gets ignored in these types of discussions because in a lot of ways it was ahead of its time and did the open environments thing a whole lot better than Lightning Returns seems to be doing.

That being said, I like the look of Prince Noctis.



I expect a Japanese release date and gameplay demonstration @ TGS.

FF12's plot seems to be too serious for it to be popular. It's also another example of not going enough because if you're supposed to have a serious game then characters like Penelo and Vaan don't even belong in there. In fact they literally have nothing to do with the plot and yet they're supposed to be the main characters. Would a game that started Bosch sell? Probably not but it's not like anyone's buying the game for Vaan and Penelo either. Again you either have to go all the way and say put some Dead or Alive kind of character in there, or not at all.

Don wrote:Err, Final Fantasy 7 had Tifa Lockhart. It's hardly something new.

Sure, but there wasn't this casual conversation with the audience about how to make her boobs bounce more:

TFA wrote:Q: Has [main character] Lightning gone from a C cup to a D cup?

Goto: Well, Toriyama-san said he wanted them bigger, so…

Toriyama: Hey, don’t try to escape responsibility for this!

Goto: Yes, we made them bigger.

Q. Was it a C cup, up until now? Are her breasts going to jiggle, this time?

Goto: Yes!

Toriyama: It depends on the clothing. Like if she’s wearing corrective underwear.

Dengeki Online’s report of the event noted further that since players can choose Lightning’s costume and weaponry, they can ensure their preferred amount and duration of boob jiggling through judicious equipment selection. If you want to get a better view of all those mammarial undulations, one developer noted, just have her hold a smaller shield!

Really? Talk about the fucking game, not about how you can entertain 14-year-olds in their mom's basement. Oh, right, these developers are the 14YOs that give a shit about boob jiggling in such great detail.

But, but, but.....FFX, FFX-2, FFXI, FFXIII, FFXIII-2, FFXIV, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerebrus were such FANTASTIC games! :-)

The only good thing to come out of Final Fantasy since the PSX days (other than maybe 12) are remakes. That's never a good sign for any franchise when you can't put out a good game in over a decade

If Tifa had advanced breast juggling physics back in PSX, FF7 wouldn't have been any worse of a game. She's likely the sexiest character in a FF game, which is ironic since the later FFs try to sell a bunch of decidedly unsexy girls.

The problem isn't that they try to sell sex, it's that they don't even know which of their characters can be considered genuinely sexy (see FFX2). Lightning is also not sexy. I don't know why they even think people would be attracted to her. It's perfectly fine if you want to sell a game just on sex, but you got to have the right assets. I'd say FF7 has the best assets to work with even on this regard (at least based on character designs), which is pretty funny since the game obviously made no attempt to actually sell it.

That retarded anime/j-pop idol crap has invaded Final Fantasy for the most part, so they just go off of that for attractive females.

I can't think of any other game that succeeded that went that way, so what makes them think this JPop model stuff could possibly work? You take something like Dead or Alive and I'm sure nobody there looks like a JPop model.

Don wrote:If Tifa had advanced breast juggling physics back in PSX, FF7 wouldn't have been any worse of a game. She's likely the sexiest character in a FF game, which is ironic since the later FFs try to sell a bunch of decidedly unsexy girls.

There's a big difference. Tifa was along the lines of:

"Hey, we're playing with polygon characters now. Why not throw in a big boobed character to show off the graphics engine? It can serve as a bit of fan service along the way."

Now, this shit is more like:

"Let's design a game around boob juggling fan service."

Ivy from Soul Calibur is probably the most extreme example, and that's pretty bad, but at least she isn't the main character. Besides, I'd expect better from the company who used to continue to push for story-driven RPGs.

Dead or Alive works out reasonably well. Soul Calibur sells decent too. DotP 2014 put Chandra on the cover even though I'm pretty sure Jace is the most iconic planewalker.

But at any rate I think it's incredibly naive to even think this kind of stuff would sell well. The whole FF13 design seems to assume that they got a character as popular as Hitsune Miku (who isn't exactly well endowed), except Lightning is nowhere close. There's nothing wrong with the philosophy of fan service + ultra popular character = $$$. Problem is they're kind of missing the second part and you got to be in some serious denial to not realize Lightning just isn't that sexy.

I'm going to respond to this thread, and focus on FF12 and FF13 rather than the sulky over-dramatic article about how an entire franchise is dead because one fictional character in one of the games got breast enhancements.

So,

Final Fantasy 12 had some brilliant ideas, and lots of potential... but the game reeked of incomplete/rushed development. A good symptom of this could be seen in the towns that had huge wide open areas with lots of buildings and literally nothing to interact with; the background art was probably done, but they didn't want to put the resources into foreground models, and any sort of quality approval passes. FF12 also just plain suffered from the transition from overhead 2D into full 3D; it highlighted the biggest flaw with PS2/PS3 RPGs... That is, the world's were gigantic and had nothing to do except walk and fight lots and lots of battles.

Luckily things did improve, but I couldn't help but to feel that this could have been done way back with FF12. The answer to the problem with FF13 was just to make an incredibly linear world where users really could only go at one direction, and while this model does allow better control on the pacing, it doesn't seem like FF13's pacing was really all that much faster than FF12's. The linear model also created new problems, most notable was preventing a change of pace for players players who might want a "change of pace."

Xenoblade, that's what FF12 should have been. There's no doubt Tetsuya Takahashi had inspiration from that game. He took the FF12 model and made it work. The gameplay is more polished and more interesting. The world is massive, much more so than FF12's, but there's something to do EVERYWHERE. The pacing of Xenoblade is also excellent whether you're following the main path or diverting to do one, two, or a few dozen side quests/stories. Xenoblade also doesn't rely on the huge streams of battles like FF12 and 13 did; so I didn't end up getting tired of battles like I did in FF12 and 13. I do think that if Yasumi Matsuno had been on the FF12 project all the way through, and it wasn't rushed, that it might have been the great revolutionary title it was supposed to be.

Don wrote:Likewise Lightning isn't really that impressive either. I don't know why they thought she's supposed to be the second coming of Cloud and Sephiroth put together.

I have no where else to put this, so I'm just gonna leave it here.

And this

Ummm, what? There are folks pissing in their pants over Cloud's sword? I mean, with the graphics nowadays, Cloud's ridiculously oversized sword just looks even worse. Especially compared to anything you could design today.

No but Cloud Strife is one of the icons of Squaresoft so I'm guessing that's why you got the obvious ripoff.

That said, I really don't see how that can possibly going to work. People usually only want the original stuff, not some cheap imitation.

Lightning was much more like a more polite Squall, without the inner dialogues, than she was like Cloud. She even had a gunblade.