I got the exact opposite vibe. I got more of an VIII vibe myself. The sort of love it or hate it kind of game where I'm firmly on the side of "hate it".
It's really hard to say which characters would be coming back in ME3. A lot of it depends on the individual player and who died during the Suicide Mission. I think though, that ME3 will likely involve building some sort of grand citadel fleet to combat the Reapers and that how you have treated certain squadmates over the course of the last couple of games will make an impact on what happens. If I had to guess, I would think that BioWare's "canon" Shepard would include some combination of the following:
Kaiden/Ashely - depending on who survived ME1 Wrex/Grunt - depending on if Wrex survived ME1 or maybe just because I want Wrex back in my squad (Please Bioware? Pretty please with a cherry on top?) Liara Tali/Legion - one or both depending on how they decided the whole quarian vs. geth thing would shake out canon wise. Garrus Mordin
I could be happy with that. Personally I wouldn't mind a few less companions in ME3, since I never really felt as attached to the ones In ME2 other than Garrus and Tali.
@SecondPersonShooter said: Your music argument is also ridiculous. Final Fantasy XIII has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard (actually the ONLY video game soundtrack I ever went out of my way to get) "
You honestly think that XIII is better than anything that Uematsu did? Wow. Just...wow.
I don't think either one is a particularly good example of the RPG genre.
LO is so traditional and conservative you wonder if the designers even believe in fire. Nearly every complaint that is usually lodged against the JRPG genre is found in that game: Menu overload, annoying child-characters, random battles, cutscene fatigue etc.
FFXIII on the other hand, experiments to the point that I'm not even sure who the game's intended audience is. I prefer a bit more "traditional" experience in my RPGs, so I'm not that crazy about it. That said, I don't really think it breaks the mold enough to appeal to people outside the traditional RPG fan base.
The FF series is kind of like The Beatles: they try out a lot of new stuff. Sometimes you get something great like "All You Need is Love", and other times you end up with "Revolution 9".
" @Cristofyr: You're confusing the medium with the message. The medium of music is to express or evoke a mood through melody and texture. The exact song may have been a poor choice, but that doesn't somehow alter the medium. Also, the music during that segment in the Vile Peaks is pretty canny. You may not have got it, but I sure did. As soon as I heard it, I knew they were attempting to give a sonic profile of Sazh's "jolly" character, and focus on the difference between Lightning's style of leadership with Hope, and Sazh's leadership with Vanille. In a purely musical sense, the other thing I noticed was that while it did have a jazz nature to it, it was not very organic sounding jazz. They made it sound somewhat off-kilter and askew, with the fragmented percussion and electric guitar lines. I assume this was to evoke the 'junkyard' mentality of all the area, a sea of Pulse refuse crudely assembled together. "
I never asserted the opinion that music is an ineffective medium for evoking a mood or emotion, I was saying that in this particular instance the game failed to do so and that since around FFX, the series has been much less effective at it. The older FF games had larger overarching themes and motifs that have largely been absent in recent entries (or at least have not been good enough to be memorable). Every time I hear Aerith's theme I still remember how I felt when she got offed. Other than the theme of Zanarkand in X, I would be hard pressed to remember more than a couple of tracks from the last several games, much less what was happening when they were playing. I have literaly sunk tens of hours into XIII in the last week, but the only music that sticks out in my head are the instances when it was so jarring it took me out of the gameplay experience.
"@Cristofyr: I think a large part of that has to do with translation, and the difficulties in localizing a game set in a future fantasy setting. Medieval games can be given Ye Olde Englishe treatment (like the reworked Final Fantasy Tactics), and modern games can be moved over quite nicely... however, there are moments in Final Fantasy XIII where the dialogue clearly was not written in English first. You see this a lot in Metal Gear, voice actors trying to wrap their mouths around constructions that don't appear natural in English. This generally ends with the graphical avatar displaying an emotion that doesn't match the voice, or the feeling of wooden acting as the actor struggles to deliver natural emotions to an unnatural phrase. As for the music, you're thinking too literally. The music hasn't changed in that it is still used to deliver emotion the same way, much as the visuals have. From MIDI to synthesizers to real instruments, it is still designed to amplify the emotional effect of a scene. To Zanarkand is no different in scope and delivery than the Battle Theme from the original on the NES. "
So a jazz track is supposed to convey "We've been hopelessly cursed and we're on the run from a facist government that wants to kill us all"?
As for text vs. voice, I am starting think that it all goes back to story telling. In the original FF games, there was no graphical capacity to have FMV or even in-engine cutscenes, so everything had to be big blocks of text. Then we hit the PS1 era and the graphical capacity improved. Now the desginers had the option of delivering parts of the story graphically, but because they was still no voice, character movement was used to telegraph specific emotions within big blocks of text. Like how Steiner from FFIX used to jump around when he was angry. It was cartoony and overdone, but it got the point across without actual speech.
Then we hit the PS2 era and things started to go down hill. Characters were now voiced, but the body gestures were not toned down at the same time. The problem with this is that very few people are actually as demonstrative as FF characters when they speak. We all make hand gestures, sure, but usually not the sweeping movements like you find in FF games. This makes them look silly and the cutscenes feel overdone. It also means that there is speech when maybe there shouldn't be. Just as real people don't make gigantic gestures most of the time, they are still capable of conveying emotions clearly with subtle gestures. This is something Mass Effect caught onto. There, a character doesn't start shouting "I'm angry and I want to hit something!" The game would just show them narrowing their eyes and maybe slightly balling up a fist and it would get the point across without dialogue. That's the lesson the FF franchise needs to learn - just because you can have the characters talk doesn't mean you should.
I don't think that the voice acting is necessarily a negative, but I don't think FF has really figured out how to incorporate it properly. In many ways it feels like it's about 5-7 years behind where the voiced stuff is in more western games in that they treat it as a novelty rather than as an important part of the gameplay. Back then, it didn't matter what the characters sounded like or who you cast because the novelty of actually having voiced dialogue was still fresh to players. Today we expect games to not only be voiced, but voiced well. I had absolutely no problem with the voice acting in a games like Mass Effect or Gears of War because those game got quality voice talent that "felt" right for each character. They also did a much, much better job of intergrating the characters with their environment during the cutscene. The camera moved like a movie in those games complete with a small shake at the end of a pan and lens flare, compared to FF, where it a lot of times feels like a bad fashion show with it zooming in for closeups all the time. Maybe this has to do with the fact that the dialogue felt so much more natural in the other games? FF has a tendency toward melodrama, so a lot of time it feels like the characters are reading from a carefully prepared script rather than reacting how they actually would as a character and sound stiled as a result.
Also, I would argue the music has changed. Ever since X, there has been this shift (a bad one in my opinion), away from true orchestral scores toward bad pop-style music. I remember playing through an early part of the game with Sazh and Vanille and the music sounded like something I'd hear in a coffee shop rather than a game. It was really pretty bad. The main theme is also piano heavy to an extreme. Compare this to the orchestral version of the music from VII or VIII and there is a big difference.
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