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IMPress Polly
03-19-2016, 07:24 AM
In a surprising, but for me welcome, development, Final Fantasy 15 game director Hajime Tabata recently revealed in an interview by Examiner that Naughty Dog's The Last of Us was looked to as an example of how storyline, character development, and game play could be woven together in a way that never disconnects the player from any of those things for the (theoretically) upcoming FF 15. To explain why I find this a refreshing development, we'll need to briefly discuss Final Fantasy 13:

With 2009's Final Fantasy 13 (it was released in 2009 in Japan and in 2010 here in the U.S.), Square Enix sought to take the novel step of moving the franchise away from the role-playing genre by creating a new genre that streamlined traditional RPG elements in order to speed up the flow of events and make the experience feel more thrilling. To this end, Final Fantasy 13 adopted action combat, had no side quests, and imposed time limits on the player for completing large sections of the game, for example. They also moved away from the use of character development to a considerable degree to focus one-sidedly on the central storyline, with the result that Final Fantasy 13's main protagonist Lightning (an adult, stoic female soldier) came off as simultaneously a breath of fresh air in a series and JRPG tradition that had become known for its over-reliance on brooding male hipster teens as its stars and yet simultaneously as an unwelcome shift away from the franchise's ability to make the player empathize with its major characters. I found this to be a mixed bag. I liked Final Fantasy 13's abolition of side quests in order to present a more focused and less "gamey" feeling central story and I also liked the game's stronger role for women and for its use of a more adult cast of characters, but at the same time, I also felt that the move away from role-playing in favor of a more one-dimensional protagonist upon which one is supposed to basically mentally impose their own personality (the kind of thing most adventure games do, in contrast to RPGs) seemed like a step backward for the franchise. Anyway, I don't know if these changes really qualified Final Fantasy 13 as the first game in a new genre so much as simply the most massive action-adventure game that had been made up to that point, but that's what they went for. The developers felt that the RPG genre had grown stale, so they sought to move away from reliance on cliches and similar designs and do something that felt new.

The game was well-received in Japan (Famitsu readers even voted it the best video game of all time in 2010!), but not so much elsewhere, where critics felt that the streamlining of the franchise's elements made the play experience too linear; too bereft of player control. In response, the company quickly reversed this innovation with the sequels (Final Fantasy 13-2 and Lighting Returns), moving toward and then formally adopting a standard, Western-style open world play format driven by side quests, keeping only the time limits from the original project. It was an unmitigated disaster. Adopting the sandbox style format resulted in much weaker storytelling, which was problematic for a franchise known primarily for its strong stories. Namely, the huge array of plot twists traditionally featured in Final Fantasy games, and for which they'd become well-known, had to be replaced by far more straightforward and predictable stories in order to ensure the player's freedom to roam anywhere and do anything. In 2011, this started to become a more general shift for Japanese RPG makers when Xenoblade Chronicles became a hit, and since then the latter franchise has become far more influential on Japanese RPG makers than Final Fantasy.

This brings us to today. I find it exciting to hear that the (again, theoretically) upcoming Final Fantasy 15 will use a storytelling approach inspired by The Last of Us because 2013's The Last of Us is a game that pretty seamlessly merges central story, character development, and game play into one cohesive thing. This source of inspiration suggests that FF 15 will continue to move away from JRPG cliches while also moving away from a lot of the franchise's more recent missteps like the sandbox play format. It suggests that the game will feature a stronger and more complex central narrative than any FF game released after FF 13 and also revive character development as a major aspect of the franchise. It also suggests the possibility that the game may shift between two or more lead characters, as The Last of Us rotates the roles of a pair out as a plot device. And again, I can't stress the seamlessness with which The Last of Us combines these elements. So I think this is promising news because The Last of Us truly is a wonderfully-crafted masterpiece of drama! :cool2: I'd very much like to see a weighty franchise like Final Fantasy move in that direction and for it to thereby regain its waning influence over Japanese RPG makers more broadly in such a way that they begin to collectively move more in this type of direction and away from the Xenoblade Chronicles sandbox adventure model.

Ethereal
03-19-2016, 07:05 PM
I stopped playing FF after FFX. I simply cannot identify with a character who looks and dresses like this...

http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130622121056/finalfantasy/images/0/02/FFX_HD_Tidus_Render.png