"Ever since its release in December 2009, Final Fantasy has been the go-to game when talking about poor gameplay design—it greatly divulges from the other games in its series and took out some key elements that made the series so successful. Exploration and world building are down-played in favor of continuous battle and frequent cutscenes. However, if you look around at other games that don’t belong to a long line of successful games, you’ll see that very similar games were acclaimed as art and went on to become successful. Yes, I’m talking about Heavy Rain." | Explosion.com
These are the games that championed ideas, mechanics and systems that would ultimately be a much bigger part of the gaming space in the future.
@Escamotage The job system mainly, and how you can set up your party. For me in the original late stage of the game I would give my A team the same skills but nerfed. Vaan was my tank/bruiser/soilder, Penelo was my healer white mage, and Fran was my black mage of course. But I gave Vaan the ability to use both white mage and black mage skills but nerfed a few levels under the true mages. Penelo could use a bit of dark magic and Fran could use a bit of white. So if either mate ran out the other could step in, same with Vaan, with the gambit system it was easy to set up that they would complement each other in battle when needed.
My B team was set up similar but a few levels below my A team. Then when my A team got new weapons and armor, their old gear was passed down to the B team.
In Zodiac age you could not do that, in such a degree as I had it in the original.
Kill Switch is one of my fav shooters from that generation, highly underrated in my opinion.
I'm one of the few people who preferred the original Red Faction to the first Half Life.
Red Faction came out in May 2001 on PS2 and Half Life came out on PS2 in November 2001 . So I played Red Faction 1st .
1. Indigo Prophecy - No
2. God Hand - Hell yeah. Still is. What a game. But Adaptive Difficulty sucks.
3. Metal Gear Solid 2 - Gameplay-wise, sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't. The AI stuff was already Cyberpunk fair and Political Miss-information was old stuff as well. Furthermore, these themes don't really play out during the gameplay portions of the game. So they might as well have been a movie spliced into a game. Which is my main criticism of the MGS series. A lot of Talk and hardly any of it is part of the gameplay or affects it in any meaningful way.
4. Dark Cloud - Couldn't say. But Procedural stuff sucks 99% of the time.
5. Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - The Xbox version sure was and kinda still is. The PS2? Not even close. The Asymmetrical MP was cool though.
6. The thing - The system was kinda cool in theory. In practice? Meh. But it should've been brought back for other games for sure, and expanded upon. At least some type of variation of this mechanic.
7. Final Fantasy XII - While the System was kinda cool. It did lends to your party playing on Automatic. Became monotonous after a while.
8. Kill Switch - Kinda. But Metal Gear, Splinter Cell and Winback already had it first. Then there was Time Crisis.
9. Mercenaries: PoD - You spelled Monster Attack way wrong.
10. Mortal Kombat: Deception: Tobal No. 1 or Ehrgeiz.
I have to agree on Splinter Cell, Xbox version was much better, even the Gamecube version performed better than the PS2 version. But the Xbox version was on another level.
Iceball2000: There are plenty of comparisons on youtube, I would suggest you watch them to find out.
The Xbox verison is basically the pc version in terms of graphics, so it looks and runs amazing compared to PS2, and handles lighning/shadows very well (important in Splinter Cell as you use the dark for stealth). The levels are complete and are not devided into sections like in the PS2 and Gamecube versions. Lastly, the PS2 has longer loading times. That's some of the differences for you, there's probably more that I'm forgetting.
That said, the Splinter Cell games are great on any platform.
Good list, I would include Okami (brush mechanics), Viewtiful Joe (time & zoom mechanics)
While FFVII ranks highly, there's more to the series than one game. Here's Chit Hot's picks for the seven best Final Fantasy characters.
Alex Donaldson: "Hindsight is a hell of a thing, however, and in the years since Final Fantasy XIII, my respect for the decisions its developers made has skyrocketed. In the two Final Fantasy titles since we see both the brilliance and the folly in alternative approaches - and in Final Fantasy VII Remake, we get a more nuanced understanding of what FF13 was trying to accomplish from many of the same development leads."
FFXIII is actually one of the best Final Fantasy games.
I also sort of was disappointed at the time, never as much as the bandwagon. But really all the fantastic 3D rendered cutscenes and I actually liked the characters and the story though convoluted was actually fantastic and the ending was extremely emotional. So much budget and time were put into that game Square had such big plans, I actually have always felt kind of bad for how things played out.
I have been thinking for years how great it would be to get all three games on one disk for PS4 or 5.
Gotta take off the nostalgia glasses. It's the worst FF. Shiva as a bike, I mean come on.
Shiva as a bike is strange but saying FFXIII is the worst FF is not at all a fact, that's simply your opinion.
When I got my series X a year ago, I bought FF13 for nostalgia reasons but ended up being disappointed. When I first played it around the time it launched, I didn't have a lot of experience with final fantasy games, so I enjoyed it. Fast forward to when I played it again, I found that the game had many unnecessary filler moments instead of just giving us meaningful content.
The game is also very linear and a quote on the article said it best. "It is like a sewage pipe that leads to the ocean until it opens up on Grand Pulse."
The story didn't make much sense either and I believe it is my mistake as I played the FF7 remake on PS5 prior which is a night and day difference in terms of pacing, storytelling and likeable characters even though cloud is aloof.
Probably was a mistake to play any of the golden era FFs first (e.g. FF6 through FF10), it makes it harder to enjoy some of the FFs that aren't as good. I think FF12 was where major issues with the series started becoming apparent, and it just got worse from there.
I didn't really care for it that much, the only saving grace was that it had a better story than 15 (overall it was better than 15) and possibly 12, and even then, you had to read some of it through primers, like reading a book. Plus the battle system was reasonably fun for what it was, even if it was more the spectacle that was exciting for me (e.g. summoning). And to be fair, the 13 trilogy got better with every games, I still don't like Snow though.
Ff13 is only good if you haven't played a ff before, or any other games that are decent for that matter.
It is in fact no way the best Final Fantasy game, it's one of the worst
Linear corridors, Cutscene, Fight, Cutscene...rinse and repeat
Dialogue and characters are pretty bad, especially Lightning as the main FF hero, they literally said they tried to make a "Female Cloud" and they failed.
Story was pretty awful
I could go on
I think the only alright thing that came from the game was the music.
That's not a fact that's your personal opinion. The game sold 11 million copies between its 2009 release up until 2014 including critically reviewed as an 8 out of 10 or an 80 out of 100. The game does have some issues but it's not at all a fact as one of the worst FF games.
i liked the game alot but i didnt like how they handled the terminology.
i dont mind reading data logs but it had soo many.
but i always loved the music and how it looked. the battle system wasnt too bad either.
but i like 13-2 more :)
i still dont understand why we never got a remaster of the trilogy
Xbox kinda did. Besides the video files of course which are still best on PS3 due to bluray.
XIII is a pretty solid game, but XIII-2 is WAY better. XIII-2 was one of the few games I decided to go for a Platinum trophy in, early on. Had so much fun the entire way through getting it too!
I hated this to when it released. I haven't much liked a ff game since ff10 as much , aside from ff7remake. I decided to give it another shot on my series x since it's not on a current ps and was liking it quite a bit(just takes me some time to get over things ) until star ocean 2 remake came out I was all over that.
Square should definitely remaster it or something for ps4 ps5
I like FF XIII because of its linear structure and plays like an anime. Other games including XIII-2 call themselves non-linear but really you are still required to solve certain puzzles or find something before you can continue. The only difference is you can travel to different locations to do your tasks a little here and there. Eventually, you still need to complete each task on each location before you are allowed to progress in the story. It's just an illusion that it's not linear.
I dont want more games like FFXIII, that tries to be an anime than a game, Heavy Rain worked because had a plot that wasnt a mess like the one in FFXIII.
This kind of inmmersion sucks, its just like seeing a movie i dont inmmerse in it at all, just let me play and to hell to cutscenes.
Heavy Rain? Seriously WTF is he talking about? FFXIII had some of the worst characters I've ever seen in a video game. It was also boring and repetitive. People put way too much weight on the linearity.
I just read the piece and I feel dumber. I mean, how can she not see how different all those games are design wise? Seriously, it blows my mind the way she compares all those games just because they have cut-scenes... I mean, what is going on?
There is so much wrong on that piece that it would take a monumental wall of text to rectify it because it's all broken from the very beginning. And how come I can see such a low quality article even with the filter "on"?
They are both different genres. FF 13 I like the battle system, but the character development and story line was the worst thing to happen in the RPG. The dialogue was crap, the characters weren't memorable nor was the story line. The summons were useless. Pulse was a disappointment, for a place that look big as the Earth, there was no native tribes living on it, what's up with that.