Final Fantasy XIII and beyond; the halt of a series.

Now some people may think of me as a bit harsh about FFXIII(which I have still yet to complete, bleh), but given the bigger picture I am about to say my opinion on I hope you guys will at least agree of some of my topic's aspects.

First, the love-hate of Final Fantasy XIII.

I remember watching the original trailer of FFXIII was quite thrilled by the graphics and potential gameplay, but that original trailer seemed eons before the game finall released which killed alot of the hype behind it for me and practically thousands of people. FFXIII looks amazing graphics wise still, but the only thing I found degrading is while they were adding the final make-up to the graphics, the story seemed more of an afterthought in the process. The gameplay at times is pretty solid I have to admit, with a unique real-time-esque system that's quite enjoyable...for the first several hours...but that's the thing...the game's linearity just seems to cripple the potential of this game, and the massive unoriginallity of the story.

Some people my scorn me for this, but whoever was in charge of the XIII project seemed to have the impression by the major "sellout" of the original trailer's fantastic graphical presentation that the story shouldn't have been first priority, a loophole that seemed also evident in FFXII which looked solid on PS2, but the story just kind of....died. It just kind of horrific that FFXIII took too many years too long for what the story presented, as if those 5 years were more spent on graphics buffing than story phases that ended up in the plot's sometimes inconsitent taglines which ended up in a horrifyingly linear game. Grinding has always been about of RPGs, but the shear scale of FFXIII linearity and difficulty just made it seemed like "if you fight 100 baddies and level up enough...here's another snippet of the plot".

Second, Versus XII and XIV

Though FFXIII is over and done with(though there are plans for a sequel, somewhat surprisingly), the same engine and story neglect also has affected it's sister products, Versus XIII and XIV. Versus XIII is still in design phase with Nomura just making little touches to the graphics(can you believe one of his blog posts was just about admiring the cloud physics simulation in the game?!) and the story progress while ramping up has been slow as well, with most of the trailers practically mirroring each other in content. It just seems that due to Versus XIII using the same engine tech that of course it is experiencing the same design and management flaws. Of course none of them are as bad as FFXIV, an atrocity to the sake RPGs and MMORPGs alike.

XIV uses the FF (VS) XIII engine but in MMO form, leaving many of it's players to horrendous high specs and crippling bugs not suited for any kind of launch...with the backlash of one of their investors going on a stock-selling spree and having to refund players for several months. That and it seems that's only the tip of the iceberg.

It was about last year that Squenix announced their next-gen engine(for PS4 and Xbox 720) and are hiring "pro engineers" for it's making. This news is nothing less of a facepalm seeing how Square-Enix's CURRENT engine is still with design flaws and in major need of debugging(cough XIV cough).

At this point Square-Enix has nothing but bring their biggest-selling franchise to a stammering halt in efficiency, and they need to fix their problems soon.