Tuesday 17 December 2013

My Reaction To The Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Guided Tour Video

So after the first two games (even though I like the first a lot more than the second) I am looking forward to this. Even the "bad" FF games are still fantastic in my book so it's only natural. However watching this raises a slight cause for concern... 

 

How to explain? It's not so much that anything looks "bad" so-to-speak, but it's the way the narrator describes the features. Using phrases like "more direct control that ever before in the Final Fantasy series" which insinuates that the belief that a turn-based system gives you "less control" is true... now from a complete technical standpoint that is false, and a generalisation. Any game can have more or less "control" regardless of the system they use. Although the way they describe these things  doesn't actually change what is in the game, it makes me weary that they either believe the generalisations or are just going along with them for the sake of marketing, and when they market based on a common fallacy that people make, this brings their motives into question. What I really don't want is for Square Enix to actually go along with that mentality regardless of weather it is for the sake of what they truly believe or pure marketing. Marketing is understandable, they want the game to sell, but marketing based off a lie makes me sad. Can we please stop this trend of calling mechanics "outdated" when they're just different? Can we please stop making hasty generalisations about a game's system just because it does something a particular way? Also, on the subject of control, can we please stop pretending that having more control is always going to be better than having less?

Now other examples of what I'm talking about here include the colour selection for Lightning's clothes and the gross misuse of the word "exploration" which seems to have become a buzz-word during the seventh gen and really is only ever used to describe exploration of the geographic variety (not saying that Lightning Returns only has exploration of the geographical variety by the way, I'm just talking about the way the word is used). I'm also talking about the photo feature which I can't imagine being any use for other than to show off the outfit colours (by the way, the ability to take screenshots in general would be neat, like what the vita does)

Regardless, I am looking forward to this and I'm interested to see how the "time limit" thing in action. I read somewhere before that the game runs off a time limit and you can reset it with a New Game+. I imagine this fits well with a more open-word style game because it allows you to take advantage of learning different locations, the dash feature seems a bit odd but it also makes sense to have that since better equipment will let you do it for longer and this also meshes together with the time limit. This is the type of thing you get in Breath Of Fire: Dragon Quarter or Dead Rising, and I am generally a fan of the whole "start again but keep some of the stuff you got last time" idea, it allows you to adapt and (for lack of a better word) "immerse" yourself in how the world works (I hate that word).

See what I'm doing there? I'm thinking about how the mechanics work in conjunction with each other and how they facilitate each other. That's what I want to see more of instead of hasty generalisations.

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