OrtizGames

Okay. So I got into the Final Fantasy XIV Beta. As a disclaimer, there are certainly things that could have changed from when I played until release. But let’s face it: release is, what, tomorrow? After the chaos that was betaregistration, the idea that Square Enix know what they are doing is laughable. There is only so much Square Enix could have changed about the game between beta and launch. And most of the game is horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s begin with the good things.
Final Fantasy XIV’s character creation system is miles ahead of XI’s, and even ahead of World of Warcraft’s and Everquest 2′s. I never played Aion, so I can’t be sure of how it compares – let’s say it’s a step up from Monster Hunter’s character creation, which, in my book, is a pretty good place to be. It certainly doesn’t have the freedom of Brink and All Points Bulletin, but those are less parts of games as they are software in and of themselves. I was overall impressed by the improvements Square Enix made to their system and, despite being unable to find a hairstyle I liked (as is all too often the case for me in MMOs), I felt comfortable with my character – I felt ownership over him, like he was my creation. I played with the editor to try to make the most hideous character possible and discovered that it is actually very difficult to do so. It’s the opposite extreme to games like Demon’s Souls, where the tiniest nudge the wrong way will cause your character to flat out burst into flames of ugliness.
I was less pleased with the class system (What, there’s no class that wields a two handed claymore? Seriously?) but when the game started I felt I was off to an okay start.

That’s when everything went downhill.

My immediate disapproval arose when I was thrust into in a tutorial space where no actual tutorial took place. There are no actual players in this small private instance; instead, you’re given basic instructions on how to walk and look and talk, and are free to talk with a handful of NPCs of different persuasions. Despite the fact that I spoke to every NPC in the area, however, I got no hints on other aspects of the game, no special instructions – not even a decent bit of exposition about the world around me. I tried to leave the instance only to have the game warn me “Are you sure you want to leave this instance? You won’t be able to come back here if you do”, which immediately made me paranoid that I would miss something important, sand so I went back around and talked to everyone again, searching every nook and cranny for any valuable scraps I might have regretted missing later on.

But There Was Nothing! The game was warning me that I was leaving nothing behind! Why the hell was I here, if there’s nothing to do? To practice moving forward? Is that really the extent of this map – a map to teach me how to walk? And then you warn me that I might never see this “walk map” ever again? Good riddance with the walk map! It’s as boring as sin and you just made me waste ten to fifteen minutes on it, running back and forth like an idiot!

Fast forward a little and I’ve watched the first few cinematics in the game that include your character walking around and being featured in the overarching story of Final Fantasy XIV. Some people are thrilled with this new addition. After seeing what Bioware has been doing in The Old Republic, however, I’m not nearly as impressed; your character stumbles around in predetermined patterns like a drunken mute, and you have no control over his/her reactions to situations. It throws any preconceived notions about who you are as a character completely out the window, and what’s worse: the grand majority of the time, it seems your character plays a walk-on role in the majority of the story, with other more epic, more recognizable characters whoring attention like some horrible reenactment of a childhood musical where you play the tree while some other kid dances and sings with a cane and a bowler hat on center stage.
I understand if your character is a complete nobody at first and then slowly grows to become a powerful, notable individual. I am fine with the rags-to-riches/humble-beginnings story. It’s evident in almost every MMO out there. However, the odd thing about FFXIV is that the way the exposition is presented, it really doesn’t feel like a story about my character. It feels like you’re watching the cinematics of a Final Fantasy play out, with a plot and a story and drama and memorable characters and some dark evil force trying to destroy crystals and whatnot, only when the cinematics end, instead of getting into the main character’s shoes and moving them around, getting into fights and equipping legendary weapons, you gain control of your MMO character, who was standing around in the background the whole time like some retarded stalker.
This really kills the magic of the MMO – MMOs are about the self – that’s why the key aspects of an MMO (achieving, exploring, socializing, killing other players) are so self-satisfying. The elements of the game should emphasize that player experience as one of the player experiencing the MMO world through a character. Instead, Square Enix seemed to awkwardly present the MMO experience through other characters, and merely using the player’s character as a set of eyes fairly unconnected to the events occurring in the game.

This problem can be noticed in the environments, as well. Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy XIV looks beautiful. But it suffers from the same design problems that plague other [insert stereotypical "Asian" country here] games. The world, as beautiful as it looks, appears dead and uninteresting. I look up at the beautiful sky and feel nothing, because I know that my potential to explore that glorious landscape is pretty much zero. Japanese games have this thing about them where they just don’t want you interacting with the environment – it’s only there to appear stunning, not to serve any purpose. It’s like they just threw up a beautiful matte painting for a background but didn’t supply the cast with enough props and stage pieces to make the illusion convincing. It really doesn’t make it feel like an experience.

Now let’s talk game design, because that’s the real meat of any game.
For those of you new to the boat, “game design” refers to the “mechanics” of a game – the gears that make it function, the elements that determine whether it is “intuitive and fun”. And Final Fantasy XIV is far from intuitive and fun.
Horrendously complex menus that are never properly explained aside, Final Fantasy XIV’s interface is not too complex, but makes up for it in simply not behaving in the way you would expect an interface to behave. I can’t really explain what I mean other than it feels like half the time the interface is suggesting I should attack whatever I’m looking at – whether it be an enemy, a chest, a questgiver, a door, a party member. Maybe it’s just that the PC version plays like crap. The combat plays like a mix of Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII with none of the good elements of either – which is remarkable, as they had very clear and obvious positives which Square Enix seemed to deliberately ignore.
There are buttons at the bottom right of the screen which for a long time I just wasn’t sure what they did other than one made me attack things and the other opened my items. Little indicators would pop up at the top of the screen and I had no idea what they meant or what they were doing. I got killed by a mole rat (at least it wasn’t a damn rabbit) and I could not figure out how to resurrect for a full three minutes because the damn game didn’t think to give me a hint as to where to find the unintuitive command (As if a menu item labeled “Return” is really going to scream “come back to life”). And quests! What quests? I had one quest, and when I was in the middle of it, the game crashed, and on logging in I found that my quest had disappeared and I had no idea what to do. I ran around talking to random NPCs but none of them had anything important to say, and there were no indicators on anyone as to whether they had a quest for me or not!

The game was torture to play. I uninstalled it shortly after getting booting it up for the first time and I don’t plan to buy it or so much as look at another Square Enix game again (which is a lie, because Birth By Sleep is loaded on my PSP right now and I’m thinking of writing a critique of that as well). Honestly, I think Square Enix just hasn’t been the same since the merger, and all of Square’s great storytelling and excellent ideas have simply evaporated without a trace. I truly have no idea what they were thinking when it comes to this new MMO, other than perhaps they were trying to appeal to an audience of players that is honestly not looking to play an MMO for the sake of playing an MMO but rather because they want it to be a Final Fantasy.

I think FF7, along with other Final Fantasies (and basically any Square Enix game nowadays) have always had a bit of a disconnect when it comes to certain features of the game commuting with the rest of it. I dearly love Final Fantasy 7, but I recognize I was only able to thoroughly enjoy it because I had the patience to learn and master the Materia system, to the point where Cloud would strike an enemy for 9999 three separate times every time he attacked, and then would counterattack when he was struck and deal 9999 three times again, and then would jump in the way of attacks directed at his allies, which would cause him to counterattack and, again, strike for 9999 three separate times.

I mean, that’s just awesome.

But you really need to learn the system, and unfortunately the Japanese (and Southeast Coastal Asian, generally) culture has this design philosophy about making games un-intuitive for players, and expecting them to fight tooth and claw to figure out the nuances, then share the information freely with everyone else struggling with the same. It is a very “communitive” (not real word) experience, and unfortunately it clashes horribly with the Western individualistic ideal. In the West, we want to figure these things out for ourselves, and if we can’t figure it out quickly and get our bearings – the Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master philosophy – then we assume the game is badly made and therefore is lacking in quality. And Final Fantasy XIV, as unintuitive as it is, was built to be a grueling experience built for an Asian a specific audience.

Unfortunately, in this case, FFXIV really was badly built. It really was. My blessings go to those who’ve decided to play. May you have more fun than I did.

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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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Over ten years ago, Japan’s greatest developers gathered together at Squaresoft’s home base and collaborated on what has arguably been one of if not the greatest RPG of all time. The name of this game was “Chrono Trigger.”

I find it hard nowadays to find any gamer who hasn’t heard of Chrono Trigger–though that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It is a lot harder, however, to find a gamer who hasn’t heard of Final Fantasy VII–and all the games of the same name that come after the fearsome 7. So why is it that a game that was supposed to be the ultimate RPG has been outshined by other RPGs which some would argue are not as excellent? While Chrono Trigger was far from a sleeper title, other games seem to be considered on a higher tier.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t believe Final Fantasy VII is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that it is my second favorite RPG, trumping Chrono Trigger (my favorite is Earthbound, and I have my reasons). But I think Chrono Trigger deserves just as much credit as any Final Fantasy.

Brenda Brathwaite mentioned to one of my classmates about a week ago that he should start up a blog and write about how Chrono Trigger is under-appreciated compared to many other RPGs (particularly the Final Fantasies). So, of course, I decided to do it instead. I hope she’s impressed by my initiative to steal other people’s opportunities.

Anyway, back to Chrono Trigger. The game was a unique blend of RPG battles placed all throughout the game walk map, so throughout the entire game it seemed as if the transition between exploration and battle was seamless. This was further put forth by the fact that every character set (graciously designed by the great Akira Toriyama, creator of the beloved Dragon Ball series and lead artist for the Dragon Quest series) not only had individual animations for running, walking, laughing, jumping, crouching, thinking, and being shocked (among other unique artistic details), but also animations for drawing their weapons and attacking. So, as opposed to Final Fantasy VI in which Cecil’s battle character set is much more lush and richly detailed than his walking set, the characters are constantly presented to you in the exact same level of detail and quality. I appreciate this as both a gamer and a designer–I’m sure I’m not the only person who experienced the double-take syndrome in Final Fantasy X when the main character, Tidus, looked completely different in his walking and battle animation from what he looked like in his close-up, detailed facial animations, and even further removed from what he looked like in the game’s highly detailed FMV scenes.

Chrono Trigger had an immersive, beautiful storyline that rivals that of any other great role-playing game, with moments that touch most any player that’s taken the time to invest him or her self in these characters. There’s time travel, changing the past to change the future, secrets, hidden dungeons and sidequests. It’s an RPG in spirit and execution–so why isn’t it as huge?

One of the major contributors to the dismissal of Chrono Trigger is the fact that this game was released in August of 1995, a year prior to the release of the Nintendo 64, and a mere two years before the epic release of Final Fantasy VII in 1997. It was a game created once the full potential of the SNES was established, and that is mostly the reason the game in itself was so successful–the best of the best were working on a console they were extremely comfortable with.

The ironic thing is that even when the same Chrono Trigger team moved to make yet another game and this time went for the power of PlayStation, their game was still miraculous yet underappreciated. Named Chrono Cross, the game seemed to have no correlation with the first of the series at first until you started finding the ties between them. The way the games are set up, they are each a unique experience that can be played completely by themselves, and yet when played together they provide for a much richer and more exciting, mindblowing universe.

Between Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger was the curiously named Radical Dreamers for the Super Famicom (SNES) which I affectionately refer to as “Chrono Cross 0.1″. The game is pretty much an interactive novel with a few images thrown into the mix–something wholly uncommon on any console. It’s not very long, but when played and related to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, people’s minds tend to turn inside out from shock of how the stories intertwine. The unfortunate fact behind Radical Dreamers is that, despite its exciting premise and innovative design, it wasn’t released in North America (my suspicions being that the Japanese developers believed gamers in North America wouldn’t want to play a game where you have to read). The end result is that most North American gamers who want to play Radical Dreamers will be unable to actually get their hands on a legal copy of the game they can interact with, as most North American gamers cannot read Japanese. Most of these gamers end up downloading an illegal ROM of the game and using a patch to translate it to English, under the premise that, “Well, Square isn’t going to make any money off Radical Dreamers anyway.” This is one of the points that lead people to want to classify Radical Dreamers as abandonware, and therefore technically legal to download.

How does this story end? Well, Squaresoft purchased the title “Chrono Break” in December of 2001, bringing things full circle with the promise of a trilogy for the Chrono series. Die hard fans of the game rejoiced, but the excitement was short-lived as no further development of the game ever came, and the project seems to have been shut down. Square Enix (Squaresoft’s new frowny face) has inherited the title, but no comments have been made on plans for the game, leading most people (myself included) to believe that Square simply is not going to give us what we actually want. Much like the FF7 remake idea which Square Enix seems to have no plans to go through with–and which, I may add, would guarantee them an easy surplus of revenue when considering the original sold over 5 million units within the first year (in PlayStation One days!), and a modern remake would likely end selling just as well–Square Enix is focused on things other than what fans are asking for.

I think that’s kind of a shame, really. If there’s a demand out there for something that’s as large as Chrono Break or Final Fantasy VII, why aren’t game developers working to try to meet it with gusto? This is, after all, an industry, and supply and demand make up a large part of its systematic function.

In the end, Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross stand out bright in the RPG world, but due to circumstances beyond the developers’ control, it seems they’ve been outshone by others that now dominate the genre like giants. Final Fantasy XII, which has been mostly agreed upon to be a rather tedious game, has sold over 2 million copies now, and no-one needs to ask whether the fact that the title reads “Final Fantasy” has anything to do with it. Albeit, I am one of those two million people and I bought Final Fantasy X-2. I think I can’t talk when it comes to favoritism.

In the end, though, I think the Chrono series deserved more than it got. Maybe if Square Enix decides to actually go forward and make Chrono Break, we’d see some justice served for Trigger and Cross. Maybe Square would even go so far as to release an anthology. The future’s still open for possibility, Square. We’re hoping.

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