This is not a post about the game being bad or any of the stuff that has been rehashed a thousand times, I actually like FFXIII and find it fun to play, and thats all that matters about a game.

I have been thinking about this for a while and can't seem to come up with any answers. When RE4 came around it changed everything but still kept what people liked about the series. Metroid Prime switched to a first person view but still was a Metroid game. FFXIII is here and it stripped away everything that was Final Fantasy. Inns, towns, big overworlds, party control, and more. Most striking is how each environment (until towards the end) is a linear path and thats it. Say what you will about the game but you really do just walk forward. Gone also are the towns and lively little places you used to be able to to go an explore all the nooks and crannies of. Just so much of what always made a big numbered Final Fantasy game was gone.

So has anyone ever interviewed anyone from the Square team and asked why this game came about? Final Fantasy is always evolving but I have never seen such a huge change as to what people wanted and what they got. Normally people who like Final Fantasy games like each Final Fantasy game, they might get cranky about characters or small tweaks to the battle system. but if you are a Final Fantasy fan you like Final Fantasy games, but not this one.

Was it supposed to be a numbered FF game from the start or was it something else that got changed? Did the same people who made some of the previous games make this one or was it a whole new team trying something totally different?

SquareEnix are a company who make video games and would like to make movies to earn money. They needed to earn money. That's about the short of it.

I don't get why people are so taken aback by what XIII was. The evolution to what XIII became was clear from the direction they started going in with X onwards. X was the last one with the "classic" battle system before they started to ape the battle systems of XI (their MMO). X was also just as linear as XIII was, people just don't seem to notice it as much that you essentially walk along a corridor all the way through the game until you get to the Calm Lands because the corridor changes colour and decoration every couple of screens. XII was basically a single player MMO. XIII was the combination of ideas in X and XII.

USgamer did this huge interview with Yoshinori Kitase about it. If I recall correctly, a lot of the problems came down to 12 already being delayed delaying their development of 13(pushing them to make it for a different generation of consoles one year into development), and them aiming for prettier graphics than was practical. http://www.usgamer.net/articles/where-final-fantasy-went-wrong-and-how-square-enix-is-righting-it

I think they were trying to simplify the franchise and make it more accessible to a wider audience. It was very flashy and pretty, but as you said it didn't feel like a final fantasy game really.

@twinsun said:

Yup, they wanted to streamline it so it would reach a wider audience. It didn't work out, but they did try something new.

I'm not going to say it was this for sure, but Square got super obsessed with "appealing to a Western audience". FF13 kind of seems like a shallow interpretation of a bunch of popular video games when you take that into consideration.

Games should be allowed to change, even entries in established franchises. No company wants to make the same game for 20 years, and we as customers shouldn't want that either.

FFXIII is here and it stripped away everything that was Final Fantasy. Inns, towns, big overworlds, party control, and more. Most striking is how each environment (until towards the end) is a linear path and thats it.

So what is Final Fantasy, then? Every single one of the game's entries have been pretty different in tone, setting, and story, and many are different in gameplay. I've been playing Final Fantasy X and that game is just as linear as FFXIII, and towns are merely stops for plot along the way and nothing more.

Think this hits it right on the head, XIII exists because people told Square that they did a good job with X and they just made that game over and over with different characters. Now they are getting the message thanks to Bravely Default that there are people willing to pay for an actual JRPG and not just a movie with some game sections attached. If is sound bitter...its because i am! Its sad to me that so much money and time has been spent on fmv and music and so little of it actually developing an engaging experiance. Completely subjective opinion (obviously) but it does seem to be shared by a lot of people who have been playing the series from the very start. JRPGS are supposed to be about exploring and finding all the hidden bits on the map, not pushing forward constantly.

I always thought that the defining feature of Final Fantasy games was how linear and story-focued they were. Sure, about 75% through each game you get an airship and can roam around doing side-stuff, but for almost all of the time it's very much "go here to advance the plot". Final Fantasy XIII's corridor-style levels just made it much more blatant.

But also, when you think about how wierd and disorganised the pacing and world sometimes felt, you have to consider that that game was in development for ages. They were orginially going to release it on the PS2! So of course, lots of ideas will have not made it into the final thing, or only half-made it in.

Because the people in charge of the FF series at the time thought that story didnt matter if the game was pretty. I am pretty sure the head guy on the 13 series was quoted as saying that at some point.

They tried something new. It was bad... and then they tried again... and kept trying... and somehow we ended up with far too many FFXIII games...

Yep, I've always found this funny. FFX is a essentially one big corridor and people hold it in high esteem, FFXIII is universally reviled for being more of the same. The writing is of about the same quality in both too.. ~Shrug.
People are weird.

@believer258: When I first played FFX I was taken aback at how linear it was. I was expecting an overworld and explorable towns due to past experiences. I grew to like it as I played through it though. I agree that it's pretty apparent that the Final Fantasy series is pretty experimental despite sticking to similar naming schemes.

@lordjezo: What was that about RE4 keeping what people liked from the series? Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the heck outta that game, but let's be real here, RE changed more than FF in that RE1-3 were survival horror games, and RE4 was an action game, or 1st person shooter.

As for FFXIII, the series had already been evolving in gameplay, if they just kept on doing the traditional turn-based JRPG battle system for all eternity people would have criticized them just as much, except for not trying anything new.

Personally I liked the gameplay in both FFXIII and especially FFXII, but got bored with the long corridor crawls in both, the 10 hour ramp up to when you were really in the meat of the game, and the dumbass teenager main characters.

I hated almost everything about 13, but I like that SE has the courage to take risks through reinvention. I adored 12 which was also a real departure from the other games.

RE4 on the other hand, I didn't like. It was fine as an action game. But it dragged on SO LONG and wasn't scary or tense or anything that I'd come to expect from the series. It felt like a completely different series. FF13 feels like part of the FF franchise.

I've come to this great realization in the past couple of years. I used to think I was a huge Final Fantasy fan. I loved FFVII (I was in the right time and place for it) to the point that it's one of my favorites of all time. I also really like FFIX. FFX was good at the time, but after seeing a roommate play the HD remaster, most of the story and pretty much all of the characters (with the exception of Auron and a few others) are terrible. So it turns out, I'm not actually a fan of Final Fantasy at all. I just liked 2 of the 13 games they've put out (to be fair, I've never tried playing I-VI). Even still, I've only enjoyed 2 of the 8 put out after I started playing the series.

It's a great burden off my shoulders once I realized this. Now I can go back to not caring about Final Fantasy trailers and games coming out in the future (except for maybe admiring them for the nice graphics). Because we all know they will inevitably disappoint.

@lordjezo said:

FFX had no inns to speak of, maybe 3-4 towns, an overworld that was basically an extra wide corridor with no airships, and a rapid battle system more largely geared to macro tactical decisions vs micro managing.

imo FF Xiii is a just a evolution of X. Really the games are very similar, have similar aesthetic and sensibilities.

I think what really got to people about Xiii was how much they narrowed the corridor which made it feel more noticeable, which I believe they felt they needed to do to tie into the Fugitive storyline to presumably make it feel more tense. (probably for cost reasons too). That narrow corridor also allowed them to control the overleveling issues these games usually get into.

The downside of course was that it broke the illusion of being in a large expansive world.

I was just going to say money then move on, but then I'd be that guy. I still am that guy though.

In all seriousness, I remember the devs saying they wanted to appeal to a western audience. They admitted to looking at games like Call of Duty (believe it or not) as inspiration for XIII. I wished they looked towards games like Skyrim and Planescape: Torment.