Don't Hold Your Breath For FFXIII 82
IGN is reporting that the next chapter in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, has barely gotten into the production phase. "According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!" And remember, even if it's completed sometime late next year or early in 2009 folks in the states will probably have a wait while the game is localized.
They should just buy the strategy guide... (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody didn't get the joke... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see... FFXIII (as in 13) is 1.3% complete. FFXIII (as in 13) Vs. is 13% complete.
Hmmm... 13... 1.3%... 13%... see a pattern here?
It's a common Japanese piece of PR to release "completion" percentages that everybody there knows are always ludicrously arbitrary. Go to any game show in Japan or read any publication and you will see this number next to every game on display. A publisher can put whatever number they want there. Square Enix is obviously having a little fun with this convention.
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I'm not (Score:1, Troll)
$179 (Score:2)
In any case that alone adds like $30-$40 over the ps2 which still retails f
Don't Hold Your Breath (Score:3, Interesting)
The only FF game I'm waiting to play is FFVII. When will they re-release this game for the DS, PSP, or other system? Otherwise, I'd like to play FFI, which I guess I can get GBA but it's 'advanced' with updated graphics. Bah, I want my 8-bit characters. hehe
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Why do we want FFVII remade again? (Score:2)
1) Little in the way of optional super-enemeies (compare FF IV, FF V, FF VI). I mean, you could fight Cactrots, and the Emerald and Ruby weapons. Yawn.
2) Junction system was not thouroughly tested, IMHO. You can make unanticipated (and seemingly absurd combinations) of materia that give you god powers, exploiting battle engine bugs. I mean, they were tr
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Those of us who like FF7 honestly disagree with the points you made. We aren't, as we are so often accused,
You act as if... (Score:2)
Guess what, it was my first FF too.
But then you play all the other ones in between waiting for releases and you get some perspective on the stories, characters, battle strategies, etc.
And like, FFVII is a popular franchise with a rich universe, but the gameplay wasn't that great. So unless they're going to make radical changes (I doubt it), then why get excited about a re-release? It's not like they used any FFVII-specific spell effects that would look SO COOL rendered
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But then you play all the other ones in between waiting for releases and you get some perspective on the stories, characters, battle strategies, etc
Yeah, I did that too. I still rate FF7 as the best in series, and is easily in my top 5 games overall (probably at #1, but it gets pretty fuzzy trying to rate legendary games against legendary games).
And like, FFVII is a popular franchise with a rich universe, but the gameplay wasn't that great. So unless they're going to make radical changes (I doubt it), then why get excited about a re-release? It's not like they used any FFVII-specific spell effects that would look SO COOL rendered in HD, relative to any other release.
Disagree. I think FF7 has great gameplay. Some things didn't work (Gold Saucer, I'm lookin' at you), but the materia system was incredible. It lent great customization to the game, and I still occasionally find out about really cool materia combos.
Why not take a property that was mildly popular, and redo that one instead, and ramp up the marketing and polish on that universe?
If you look at it from a fanservice perspective, you want to
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I know... (Score:2)
Another reply comment made the Marathon/Halo remake connection. I _hope_ that Bungie would have the balls to do a remake of Marathon instead of Halo in the future. This strategy (take the underappreciated old and make new) has been very successful for other series (game, movie, TV) and I would like to see it happen.
It is inevitable what Square-Enix will.
But I don't have to like it!!!
VIII (Score:2)
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Sure, I'd throw some cash at Square if they made a remake of 8, but I'd much rather see 7 done first.
As expected (Score:3, Insightful)
But, I guess that will continue a pattern: I got my PS2 when FFXII came out, I guess I'll get my PS3 when FFXIII hits shelves.
Anyway this is a good thing; I would expect FFXIII to be a very polished title; rushing it out would be a bad idea. FFXII re-established the series as one that sets standards, with its great reviews from everyone. FFXIII needs to continue that tradition, if anything for Sony's sake.
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FFX was good. You're probably right that it wasn't good enough to justify the purchase of a PS2, but I'm not sure that any single game is before the price of the system has dropped to less than half of the initial price. Luckily, by the time FFX came out there were plenty of other good games that together more than justified the cost of the PS2. Perhaps by the end of 2008 when FFXIII comes out the same will be true for the PS3.
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Re:As expected (Score:5, Informative)
I felt like they fixed some stuff, then broke some more, like forcing you to grind/dungeon crawl for hours between story events. Why did they put gambits in there to automate 95% of those fights? Because most people don't like the vast majority of the fighting in previous FF games, since it's dull. Then after, going to the trouble of automating it to make it less crappy, they made you do MORE of it! WTF?
I was hooked for about 10-15 hours, but just kept waiting for it to get cool. I continued waiting until I was within ~5-10 hours of the end, at which point I checked a FAQ to see how close I was to beating it... and promptly quit playing when I found out that there wasn't enough time left for them to cram a story in there. I really thought things would pick up when Larsa showed up, but then he disappeared for most of the game and they never really did anything with him. Then I thought that maybe the bunny people village or the fight with Balthier's dad would flesh out their characters a little... but no. I kept crawling through one long, boring dungeon after another, to be rewarded with 5-10 lines of pointless, wit-free, dry, emotionless dialogue. None of the characters, with the possible exception of Balthier and Fran, seemed to give a shit about one another. I don't just mean, "there was no love story"--though they certainly seemed to set up several and then do little or nothing with them--I mean that the characters seemed to have no connection with one another at all.
I could keep going. But yeah, some people didn't like it, and I'm not surprised to find out that a lot of other people quit playing like I did.
On the other hand, I'm now playing through Suikoden V for the second time, because once just wasn't enough. Awesome.
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Maybe they put in more fighting, realized how obnoxious it was, and then put the gambits in there to compensate? Games aren't developed in the same order they're played.
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I couldn't figure out whether I was doing something very, very wrong or {1 physical attacker + 2 healers + rotating to get maximum quickenings} really was the ONLY way to win boss battles. Did I just not level e
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Re:As expected (Score:4, Informative)
FFXII sucked. I've played a total of like nine hours into it and got bored with it to the point I really don't plan on playing it again. The gambit system will literally play the game for you, leaving you free to run between cutscenes. The boss battles devolve into manually potion-spamming but otherwise letting the AI run free.
The story is practically incoherent, even this far into it. The characters are rebelling against the Empire because of the Last Rule of Politics [project-apollo.net]. (Kingdoms are good. Empires are evil.) I have really no idea what anyone's motivation is - it seems to generically be "the Empire is evil." Which is evil because they said so, with no real evidence. (In fact, all evidence so far shows that said kingdom is better off under Imperial rule than it ever was under the old kingdom.)
The license grid is insanely lame and seems to be designed to force you to buy a strategy guide. The main problem with it is that it doesn't say what a given slot does until you've got something unlocked next to it. This makes guiding advancement essentially impossible. A license that has nothing next to it may say something like "Shields" but won't offer any idea of which shields it allows. So you wind up having to guess which "Shields" you need to move towards to use your new shiny shield. Likewise, any advancing towards specific abilities is impossible.
Unless, of course, you already know what's on the grid, by buying the strategy guide. (Or looking it up online...)
Likewise, the most powerful weapon in the game can only be obtained if you don't open certain chests. Problem: most chests are randomly generated, are actually called "treasures" and there's no indication that these magic chests are any different from any other randomly generated chest. They're also strategically placed so that it's impossible to miss them while progressing through the game. They're literally placed at key points that you have to travel through.
This "random chest generation" scheme also means that some of the best equipment has a very small (less than 1% in some cases) chance of being generated, and only after building a very long "chain" (killing the same monster family over and over and over and over again).
Personally, I enjoyed FFX far more than FFXII. FFXII really has no Final Fantasy "feel" to it, and despite being set in Ivalice, has no FF Tactics feel to it.
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The plot is more "adult" themed than others in that it is very political. At 9 hours in you haven't even scratched the surface of what is going on. But, I am not going to get in to plot spoilers...this is up to personal taste and I can understand how people might not like it. There is more gray than black and white good and evil. Motivation of characters is pretty obvious though (losing family members, being forced under someone els
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The plot is more "adult" themed than others in that it is very political. At 9 hours in you haven't even scratched the surface of what is going on.
The problem here is that the story is so boring that I really don't feel like continuing it. Good stories grab their audience early and keep their interest throughout the story. FFXII is about as bad as you can get in that respect: it starts with one story and jumps to another one very early in the game. They do reconnect several hours into the game, but it makes the story that much more difficult to get involved in.
So in this game you set up your gambits to deal with the easy fights....you prefer mashing a single button to select fight in the old ones?
That's a false dichotomy. There's more to life than button mashing and auto-play. My pe
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FFX, FFX-2, FFXII (Score:2)
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VIII - 1999
IX - 2000
X - 2001
XII was an anomaly. XII changed producers mid-development and had many features removed or altered. The lukewarm reception the playable demo received at E3 2004 also probably had something to do with the delay. (Remember they had no playable demo the following year at E3 2005, only a video.) So, I actually am surprised that FF XIII is still so early in development over a year after it was first revealed. There must be something else going on here besides just
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Of course, I'm also not sure what that "13% complete" means and whether anyone should care. What if they said it was 75% done? Would that mean anything? I suppose, given what that last 25% has turned into for many games, that it would not.
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And I hate to say it, but Square (as with most game developers) is NOT the greatest at estimating amount completed.
What did people expect? (Score:2)
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Needless to say, it's in Sony's best interest to have the game released sooner than later.
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The separation between X and XII was way more than three years, I remember playing it in 2001 after it had been out a while.
hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
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13% 1.3 % DNF (Score:2)
Duke Nukem Forever is at
That's the percentage you get for puting up a webpage that says "When it's done."
They would probably have had (Score:2, Insightful)
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Apparently this interactive movie is what many people are looking forward to. Considering the 2 biggest "exclusives" (and I use the term loosely, given all back and forth statements in the press) of the PS3 (FFXIII, and MGS4) both fall under that category.
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Boggles My Mind (Score:1)
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Yes, that's a funny joke (Score:1)
Too Late To Switch To Wii? (Score:2)
Local comparison (Score:2)
IN any case all the wii's sold out and we still have those 27 ps3's we got probably two months ago. One week after t
Probably not to their style... (Score:2)
-Re-releasing their old, popular titles over and over and over again for big bucks with very little effort. (the reason they avoid Wii's virtual console like the plague is because people are *still* willing to pay ~50 bucks for the same game they already bought for ~50 bucks at least twice already, crazy fandom... The games were good, but not good enough to sign up for being repeatedly reamed).
-When they do release a 'new' game, it's been increasingly more style over