I was recently playing Final Fantasy XIII. Well, I should say that I recently stopped playing Final Fantasy XIII. It lost me about 35 hours in. Everything that was holding on to my strings of interest for the game were let go far too early. There was tension between characters, mystery in the world and ambiguous morality driving everything into confusion, and that was a good thing. So why did they let it all go so early and turn it into a hallway dungeon crawler? But that's not the topic I want to talk about today.
A lot of people have complained about how FFXIII robs the player of more control over the game than almost any other RPG to date. The dungeons rarely have alternate paths or hidden rooms, there are no towns to explore and side quests are only introduced much later in the game and are rather linear when they are. Even the battle system, which I'm actually a fan of, can get extremely tedious and boring. If what they were trying to achieve was epic cinematic battles, then making the player fight the same combination of enemies 8-10 times per area is just a bad an idea as asking someone to watch the same episode of some HBO show before asking them what they thought. The beginning of the game introduced new battle mechanics often enough to keep it interesting, but that quickly disappeared. Final Fantasy XIII is a very very long animated movie with a lot of repetition. The particularly surprising thing about this is that the previous entries in the series were more open than any before them. FFXII featured vast areas to explore and find secrets in, large intricate towns and the battle system balanced player control and customizable AI brilliantly. FFXI is an MMO, so its open-ended gameplay goes without saying.
What made Square-Enix decide to go in such a drastically different direction? It's my opinion that it's the current generation sin of gaming: trying to be a movie. More and more games are trying to imitate movies. Is it because movies are a recognized form of art and game designers are trying to validate their own medium? Or is it because the FPS and western developers have become so popular, attracting a large crowd of lovers of action movies. I think that this is a more likely culprit.
Uncharted and Uncharted 2 are the culmination of the type of game that tries to imitate a movie. The plot of the second one in particular is so dangerously close to the Tomb Raider movie that I was embarrassed for the similarities at times. Not to mention the cast of action movie characters complete with snappy female supports and sarcastic, yet charming male leads. Many gamers raved about the story of Uncharted 2 and the character interactions, but the only thing I kept thinking while playing the game was "how would this do as a movie...?". The answer is not very good. But, it was one of the highest ranking games of 2009 with an aggregated score of 96 on metacritic. If you look at the reviews, it's not only the game play that is raved about, although it is indeed good gameplay, people actually boost the score significantly for the story.
The problem here is the phrase "it's good for a video game". Since video game stories are generally something thrown together to allow the gameplay to take place, it's rarely taken seriously. So, when a game that has a story that actually tries, people notice, and are apparently easily pleased.
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