Hailinel

I know your life is crazy right now, but I hope you have a chance to enjoy the sequel when it comes out.

Sandtrap Overpar

Thank you for sharing this, and for helping to enlighten on a situation that many people are simply unaware of, willfully or not. For what it's worth, I do believe you, and what's been transpiring as of late has definitely made me think. That's partially why I didn't respond directly to most comments you made in the letter to the editor thread. I wanted to take in what you said.

I'm not sure what I can do to help the situation other than not contribute toward the hateful culture and try to encourage others to do the same.

Indeed. Marketing efforts like this just make me less interested in a game.

Visual Novels have a distinct structure and concepts that separate them from interactive fiction like To the Moon. And "interactive fiction" is a very broad term. Where are the boundaries and how is it defined? Technically, all games with narratives are interactive fiction.

@excast: It's one example out of many. And to dismiss it because it's a Warriors game is ignorant in itself in a different manner. But that's beside the point. My point is that the staff routinely dismisses female characters.

One more note from me before this thread closes.

Going back to my earlier comments RE: Bayonetta, Giant Bomb really is terrible when it comes to discussing representation of girls and women as prominent and strong characters in games. Because I'm short on time, I'll cite one example and then bow out.

Hyrule Warriors.

I'm serious. It's a Zelda game that's not a traditional Zelda game, but it has the playable female characters, which is unheard of in the franchise. (CD-i people, shut up.) Being able to play as Zelda, Impa, or even Agitha is a really big deal. How awesome is it that the title character of the series can fight Ganon? How many women out there enjoy the game for that?

I don't know. And part of the reason for that is GB's preference to essentially say "TROLOLOLOLO DYNASTY WARRIORS LOLOLOLOL" when the game came up for discussion. The staff turns opportunities for learning and appreciating into humor born from ignorance.

Sorry if this sounds frustrated or ill-stated. I'm rushed, on a phone, and wanted to get this off my chest.

There's a datalog entry locked away that describes the Seventh Ark, though it's inaccessible like the rest of this content. Otherwise, other than the fact that such arks were spread out around Pulse, I can't recall a specific reference to the Seventh Ark in the released game. I could be wrong, though.

As is often the case with games, Final Fantasy XIII includes some unfinished content that was left in the game, but the triggers to access it were removed. Specifically, the game includes an area called the Seventh Ark, which would have been accessible from a portal near the end of the game as a sidequest. The content was ultimately cut because of development time. There was talk among the development team of adding the content back in as DLC after the fact, but that was obviously scrapped.

One interesting note is that he end boss of the Seventh Ark content was a fal'Cie called Nemesis. The Nemesis model and fight were later finished up and included in FFXIII-2 with Nemesis given a new role and renamed Adam.

There's also video footage of the Seventh Ark, which highlights some of the content in its very unfinished state.

Hardcore enthusiasts are generally speaking Giant Bomb's audience. The same audience that knows where to look for videos online. And again, Giant Bomb already reviewed the game and gave it five stars, so it's not like there's no coverage on the site at all. I'm not concerned about Nintendo's choice on that.