A Decade Of FFXIII...
Excited for Final Fantasy XIII? You better be, bub. Square Enix says the next major installment of its hugely popular bishi RPG series may set the stage on which Final Fantasy games will be enacted for the next ten years. In other words, the cycle of world-building and theme-keeping may roll over into a more established universe wherein FF dramas are enacted without starting from square one.
From IGN, with Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto:
Although speaking with a Nintendo magazine, Hashimoto brought up Final Fantasy XIII as a comparison for Square Enix's decision to expand upon the FFVII storyline through the Compilation project years after the game's original release. "Different from something like VII, which we expanded upon afterwards, with Fabula Nova Crystallis FFXIII, we've thought about an expansive world setting from the start. Under the idea of wanting everyone to be sucked into the world for 10 years, we're preparing a number of categories." He likened this approach to films like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
My first reaction was despondency: part of the appeal of Final Fantasy has always been seeing familiar names and critters in new, parallel-universe style settings. But that's not a new trick anymore, and I can understand the increasingly laborious and imagination-draining task of drumming up new-but-similar worlds from a design perspective, and certainly from a technological perspective.
And if Hashimoto and the gang are as committed as it seems to that "Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings" approach, what better franchise to elevate the RPG narrative to such stratospheric heights than Final Fantasy? So I'm not casting my lot either way for the moment, and I'm taking the news in stride. If it pans out, I've got Square's back. Or at least, I've got one of Square's sexually ambiguous male leads' back. Ahem.
Ten Years of FFXIII [IGN]
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tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 25 April 2007
· Comments (4)
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I feel sorry for the series. Ever since Enix joined the picture, Final Fantasy has been its cash whore. I seriously doubt we will be seeing anything innovative in the decade to come. New story, perhaps. New graphics, definitely. But Square Enix is more interested in money than the artistic value that made their franchise so well-known (see Final Fantasy X-2).
Mark: How was Final Fantasy X-2 not innovative? If anything, it was the most innovative and original game to come out of the franchise is a good long while. The game is notable for turning the series on its ear and looking at the standard elements of an RPG from an entirely different (and one might say tonuge-in-cheek) perspective.
Indeed, I thought FFX-2 was very enjoyable and it made a lot of money to boot. There is so much hatred of it around, they take this series a bit too seriously.
I didn't like FFX-2, but I *do* have to give it props for expanding the series in a unique and interesting way. In fact, I believe that it was the dynamic approach of FFX-2 that led to the development of FFXII, a game that I'm incredibly fond of.
Mostly, though, Yuna pisses me off.