Why I hate Final Fantasy. TGAM edition

Blatantly stealing this article from Eurogamer.

Its a pretty good article outlining some of the major flaws with the game(s) unfortunately Mr Daniel Bettridge dicks himself over quite early on in the article with this statement: 

"While the cool kids were out playing footie and smoking tabs I was plundering dungeons as a Night Elf, hunting for loot and trying to work out how my level 20 paladin was going to escape hordes of Orcs."

Shame, credibility out the window. The boy touched on a few good points, like androgynous characters, endless walking about, and OTT CGI sequences. Though made some stupid statements about physics defying weapons, not understanding mini-games, and some drivel about too much text.

Anyways, why I hate Final Fantasy...

Well firstly I don't "hate" Final Fantasy, I have fond memories of FF7 and FF8 and given the time I would happily play them again. And they are OK as games, they have a fun menu juggling mechanic that allows you to make bigger numbers appear on the screen when you hit things, which as we all know, is the main point of any game. But the more I look back the stories are fucking shit, same goes for FFX and especially FFX-2, But yet I played these? I skipped FFXII because it was a PS2 release and far too late in the consoles lifecycle. So on to FFXIII, the latest iteration, has to be the best? MY ARSE IT IS. If you are an avid reader (Ha) you'll know I was on a campaign to 1000 it... I gave up. I got to 860 GP on it and only have 2 cheevo's left. And I honestly cant be bothered with it. Here is how the gave was divvied up for me:

10 hours tutorial.

30 hours complete the plot.

70 hours complete endgame crap.

What a fucking waste of time, complete baws storyline about aliens imbuing humans with powers to keep them amused, and some resurrection crap. Interspersed with shallow characters and silly transformers-esque summons. Followed by End game, which is essentially levelling up all your doods and doing missions. Missions involve: Get mission, go to the monster, kill it. REPEAT 64 times (Actually more as you have to repeat a few, and a few of them drop rare items required for levelling up weapons). 

SHALLOW SHALLOW SHALLOW SHALLOW SHALLOW SHALLOW 

The CGI cut scenes were just too much, and felt tacked on to some stupidly long-winded contrived tutorial. So what could salvage this, some unique characters? Bah, not one of them in FFXIII was likeable. END. Only reason Lightning was bearable was she (in classic Final fantasy protagonist style) was broody and kept her mouth shut. I would say that perhaps nowadays, I hate where FFXIII went. I could sense it going this way in FFX when they made everything to linear... 

So what about the gameplay? Well I thought I liked it. I does evolve as to play through the 20 hour tutorial is mostly setting up the player with 2 types of characters and seeing what they are capable of. This game utilises a different approach to Damage rather than direct numbers its and elaborate scratch and damage system, which we are seeing more and more of nowadays. However after learning the skill abilities It really becomes a case of hitting "A" till the enemy show it's weak point, then pressing "A" some more. The combat wasn't that bad there was a sort of puzzle mechanic to getting the right set-up, though mainly ended up being trial and error till you were comfortable with how enemies react to your chosen role. But again very shallow, and more-often-than-not mindless.

And this is why I hate Final Fantasy, not because of odd stories or dialogue. But the direction they have taken it in; over the top CGI wankery interspersed with shallow gameplay, and smug in the fact that it will take fucking 100's of hours to go through.

Oh yeah and I suppose I could mention FFXI and FFXIV (the MMO ones) but the less said the better, if we ignore them, perhaps they will go away?

Love and 100+ hours collecting enough money and items to create every item in the game, which you will probably never (need to) use just to get the last few items required to get an achievement.

Richie X