Okay, This Final Fantasy XIII Story Recap Is Pretty Cute

Vagina Time Portal go!

@heatdrive88: The charm you are looking for is pure nostalgia.

@believer258: ....You would rather play a sprite based, 2D game? Embrace the future, man. FFVI only works for FFVI.

It makes me really wonder why FFXIII-2 needed to be tied to the FFXIII universe at all; I might have actually been interested otherwise. I know, "asset reuse", but I'm honestly not seeing a whole lot of that actually applying to these sequels for how much they've seemed to have redrawn and created for them.

These sequels could have easily been "FFXIV" and "FFXV" (ignoring the actual games with those names right now) with a fresh cast of characters in the same game engine, just like the PSX trilogy.

And just like in the games, the story doesn't make sense.

I don't know man, mixing SNES era graphics with a soundchip that isn't SNES.

@fisk0: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Square Enix have heard your prayers - they canned FFXV and the planned FFVII remake and are now putting all their resources into Final Fantasy XIII-0 instead!

This video does a bad job showing it, but FFXIII-2 is basically Quantum Leap meets Final Fantasy. Bad guy gets angsty and wants to destroy the world, attempts to do so by causing time paradoxes that make our heroes travel to various points on the timeline to try and rewrite history in such a way that lets them finally catch/defeat the bad dude.

It's super dumb and super anime-bullshit, but I can't help but love it.

You've misinterpreting what I'm saying, sorry, but I'll clarify.

I was not saying that this teaser/trailer/story recap thing was ineffective at the purpose of being a story recap - it's effective, cool, and like Alex said, a cute thing at that very purpose. I still have little idea what's going on, but regardless of that, I'm not heavily invested in the current series so I just don't care that much.

What I was actually trying to say, is that this story recap is framed as a huge hot garbage pile of nostalgic bullshit, because it's completely unrepresentative of what modern-day Final Fantasy is. I'm sure it's representative of the story elements that it is trying to recap, but the fact remains that the modern Final Fantasy game it is attempting to describe is absolutely nothing like the golden-era of nostalgic presence that it is trying to evoke with its pre-FF7 2D sprites and design.

Am I saying I just want Final Fantasy games to be 2D sprites again? No, not at all. I'm not a game designer, what do I know? But there is a very certain charm that this "story recap" trailer/teaser evokes that is very reminiscent of the Final Fantasy games of the past - a charm that is completely missing and devoid of the modern-day Final Fantasy game.

This Video makes me think someone at Square still gets it, but this story still makes no sense. I still love the final fantasy 6 engine still looks so good.

I loved that. I'm stoked for new ff! Haters gonna hate I guess...

@tryptophan: They did do all those FFIV games, but they were all cellphone games in Japan and WiiWare games T_T

And yeah like the FF13 characters are pretty and all, good job on their models, but even the pretty dumb story of the FF13 series was pretty rad in this 16-bit style.

OMG YES!

I still don't know what the fuck is going on.

Square really have put the work in, I hope this game is a success. I like Lightning as a lead character game looks great!

I wish they would recreate Final Fantasy IX in this art style

Unfortunately, this spot let's me know Square could still be making much greater games than they are with staggeringly less overhead and development time. As glorious as these sprites are, it is saddening to think that Square thinks of this as a mere recap movie.

Since Square has proven it's possible, and the response to this vid is pretty much unanimous: Bring on FFVI-2.

I double dog dare you!

That was awesome- I finished the first 2 games and had no idea what was going on.

I mean, I really like 13, but I think my favorite part about this is how they just pretty much ignore Hope and the middle portion of the game where characters are split up.

It's like they know those parts are bullshit.

6:18 ULTROS!!!!

Kinda wish that all the newer FFs were more stylized like VI. Kinda.

According to that video I didn't make it 2 minutes into the series. I tried the Lightning Returns demo the other day and that whole series is just not for me.

This makes me glad I never continued onto XIII-2. What a bunch of god damn nonsense this story is/became.

Ironically, I think the writing there was way better than in actual XIII-2. Playing that game after coming off Bioshock Infinite probably did it no favours.

Also, I like how they're like "here's what happened, now 500 years later when none of this probably matters at all: NEW GAME!"

More so that this little recap is a parody of XIII and XIII-2 rather than the two games being a parody of Final Fantasy.

It's pretty great either way.

Man, the alternate endings were amazing.

Holy crap. Is Square-Enix making fun of themselves? Is that the real plot? It was like some kind of bad fan fiction obsessed with adding difficult names to everything. Fal'cie? L'cie? Did that guy really just turn into TRIPLE Bahamut?

I feel like a whole lotta game stories don't make a ton of sense, but I love the mechanics of 13 and 13-2, and the demo for this one got me really excited.

Phew! I was tempted to try and understand the story, maybe play the new one, but they've saved me the trouble of learning that there IS no story and these games have all been a big waste of time.

Sweet graphical treatment, though.

I'd rather play this x-bit FF13 than the original one.

Great idea!

I love that I've played both these games and still only kind of understand what is going on in the key moments here. It doesn't help that 13-2 feels very bolted on to the characters and story of 13. 13 was weird, but at least felt self-contained and made some sense. Adding sequels kind of defeats that, not to mention that it was a time traveling nonsense sequel with all this mythology that wasn't even hinted at in the first game.

As far as I'm concerned, the canon ending of XIII-2 is Snow and his time traveling motorcycle.

I enjoyed this way more than I probably should have, though it started to lose its charm towards the end. Maybe because it reminded me the plot of these games is really wacky. It also reminded me how much I like Lightning's theme music.

Not sure if I'll buy this game, but there's something appealing that I just can't put my finger on.

Ultros cameo = WIN

This was better storytelling than the actual games themselves.

It's almost like they get how awful the 13 games are and they're willing to make fun of it...but I played the Lightning Returns demo this morning, and they obviously don't get it.

I'm still blanking on the ending of XIII-2 even though I beat it. Still excited to play Lightning Returns anyways.

Really cool, shame the plot is final fantasy levels of convoluted.

After watching this really awesome video of FF13 and FF13-2 I started to burst out laughing because I still couldn't understand what the hell is going on.

Played both FF13 games though, understood the story of FF13 did not like the gameplay, disregarded almost everything story related in FF13-2 and liked the gameplay (so many monsters caught, end boss became super easy).

Well I love FF6, it's clearly the best one. Mega pander-points for the effort... but if anything this reinforces my suspicions that the story in FF13 was utter nonsense and garbage.

Not a fan of the 13 series, but this just shows what SE is capable of doing but just doesn't do anymore (at least for the single player games).

Just frustrating. Obviously someone there said "Hey.. you know what would be cool? Make something in the style that our fans love.." and they did it. So why can't they apply that to the single player games?

"Hey.. you know what would be cool? If we made a game like any of the previous ones that made the franchise in the first place.." "Nah fuck that.. Lets do a third installment on a FF game not many people liked and lets make it an action beat-em up.. I'm sure people will love that. They didn't like 13 because it needed more Call of Duty, Devil May Cry, or Uncharted elements. Those are popular right? Lets do that.."

Now I want an official demake of Final Fantasy XIII.

Wow, why didn't they make this game instead.

So... precisely what the beginning of Final Fantasy 13 is, then?

I bought FF13 last summer but still haven't finished it. I like it well enough so I'll get back to it someday. I would much rather be playing this game, though.

FFVI 4 Life.

As far as I can surmise Lighting falls through a hole in the ground to an alternate viking dimension, and then there's wacky time travel shenanigans. So basically straight up anime bullshit.

Dope.

You weren't kidding! Damn that was cute. I'd love to play that game in the video.

Although I DID play the Lightning Returns demo and found the combat and dress-sphere type system somewhat interesting. Having said that I still won't buy the game. Just not into the characters(and thier designs) and wacky VO/storytelling. Plus I needed more FUN in ff13 for me to finish it. Got to end game (not gran pulse, after that) and the difficulty spiked way up. Decided I wasn't going to waste my time grinding and traded it in! Just wasn't worth it to me :)

The Witcher 2 is great!!

I still have no idea what that recap was trying to explain but it looked great. I did try to play FFXIII when it first was released but after a handful of hours I couldn't do it anymore.

@heatdrive88: So you want to just be thrown into the game and have no idea who these characters are, what's going on in the world, why we should care, non-stop action and changing locales, almost no way to figure out what makes each character unique besides their look, and a story that isn't even attempted to be explained to you?

Yeah, that would make Final Fantasy great again.