Welcome to "Mento's Alternative to E3"!, an annual blogging event that celebrates the biggest media event for the biggest media industry by completely ignoring it. I can't really speak to why I find E3 so objectionable - I think it has something to do with how I have piles of games waiting to be played without getting hyped for even more - but this is a service I perform for everyone else in the same underwhelmed boat. Well, not so much a service as one guy's futile gesture to stem the mighty tide of E3 eagerness, in much the same manner as Vinny's favorite pre-Norman English monarch Cnut.
So what goes on with these alternatives? Well, I'll just prattle on about any old thing, really. As long as it has nothing to do with E3. It's a fairly simple rule, one that even I should be able to remember. Let's begin:
Microsoft E3 Confere
No, bad Mento.
Sequels and the Recycling of Resources
I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIII-2 this week. One thing that immediately struck me about this game, and an aspect it closely shares with the other notable notorious Final Fantasy sequel X-2, is how it is comprised of a series of very familiar areas culled directly from its predecessor with a kooky plot that neatly explains why, exactly, you're revisiting all these places. This is partly due to how each Final Fantasy game will have you traverse the known globe in its entirety before you're done, which really paints itself into a corner in terms of leaving somewhere new for a sequel to go. The other, slightly more cynical reason is that these games cost a lot of money to craft, especially all its pretty scenery that in FFXIII's case you could only really stare admiringly at in the distance from the confines of the linear path laid out before you.
FFX-2 had you travel all over the world in an airship from the offset, allowing you to go wherever to service a very threadbare plot of hunting down information spheres and keeping abreast of a three-way civil war brewing in the continent of Spira, newly liberated from the cycle of apocalypse brought about at regular intervals by a colossal flying death whale. The primary goal of that game was to follow a female character from its antecedent in her hunt for her loved one, who conspicuously goes unnamed by the whole cast in the off-chance you renamed the guy "Pooplord" during FFX. At least that's the working theory. In FFXIII-2, you're also chasing the chief protagonist of the previous game, who also mysteriously vanished in the previous game's epilogue and who also requires a secondary female character to go searching for them in a procession of previously-seen locales. But hey, I've already tested the patience of many doing this whole comparison shebang before, so I'll move onto the point I want to make. Finally.
A lot of sequels in other media, like TV and movies, will re-use much of their assets. This cost-effectiveness is why many sequels and second seasons exist, after all. I can't really blame X-2 and XIII-2 for following suit, especially with the amount of money they throw at these games to create new environments. But I wonder if that's really a good idea when so much of your game's appeal is in its sense of adventure and discovery, two aspects which are undermined considerably by having to revisit the same places over and over. I am underselling FFXIII-2 a little here, since the time-travel mechanic does make every location notably different in each of its iterations, but that doesn't still mean the areas aren't functionally identical each time. Diminishing returns set in fast when a newly unlocked area is just a snowy version of a map that is otherwise indistinguishable to one you've just passed through during a summer's day, especially when all the treasure spheres remain plundered. Don't get me wrong, I liked it when Banjo Kazooie did something similar with their Click Clock Wood stage, but it's a gimmick that gets old fast when stretched across the whole game. If I take a certain other time-travel based Square JRPG of some repute, it manages to stand out because each of those time periods and the lands within them are completely new to players. I didn't play much of its sequel Chrono Cross, but I can hazard a guess that its environments aren't just carbon copies the same 16-bit locations of Trigger with a few weather effects layered over the top of them (though I hear it's every bit as crazy as FFXIII-2 has been so far, so maybe incomprehension is a common sequel characteristic).
I really don't mean to denigrate FFXIII-2. I do like some of its additions (crazy Layton-esque time distortion puzzles? Sure, sign me up), as well as being less than pleased with others (boy, do I hate monster-raising), so I can't grumble too much about it being more of the same. I mean, I could feasibly apply that sentiment to the franchise as a whole if I wanted to be especially reductive. I just wonder what message it sends to your potential consumer base that you can't really be bothered creating anywhere new for them to explore in a sequel to a game where exploration was one of the major features. Well, maybe not exploration in the "we can go left or right here" sense, but at least as far as having a string of interesting new locations to visit. FFX-2 and XIII-2 aren't the only ones guilty of this, but apathy is always a worrying trend for a studio as big as Square-Enix. I certainly don't appreciate the now-larger BioWare similarly cutting corners with its recent RPG output either.
Then again, I can't really call developers lazy without a certain element of the Magic Pot calling the Chocobo black here. So what do you guys think of sequels with a considerable amount of recycled material? More frequent these days? Less? Preferable at least to actually-identical remakes? Leave your thoughts and conceding/dissenting examples below. Oh, and I hope you all enjoy E3. I suppose.
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