General JRPG Topic

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

13 hours ago, Slumber said:

The Ivalice team is still there, and a number of the people involved with the Ivalice games are still there... though... I don't really know what they're doing beyond consultation for the FFXIV raids.

Maybe we'll get an Ivalice game next.

Also, I feel bad for Tabata. He basically took over work from a maniac and salvaged what was there and got a working... ish product out in about 2 years.

Having your entire life be "Make more FFXV content" for 5 years seems like it'd be soul crushing.

What was the story with FFXV exactly?

[Armagon]

5 hours ago, JSND Alter Dragon Boner said:

What was the story with FFXV exactly?

This is just the sparknotes version but i believe it went like this: 10 (or rather, 12 years ago now), FFXV started as FF Versus X or something like that. And at the time, Nomura was the director and because he's a shitty director, everything took way longer than it needed to. I think like 4 FF games released during that. So eventually, Square had to send in Tabata to salavage the project because it was taking too long. That's when it became FFXV, i think. Then the game finally released in 2016 but it was still incomplete (which i find unacceptable but in hindsight, there was probably nothing they could do at that point) so if you got FFXV at launch, you were actually playing an incomplete game. Expansions and whatnot werr added later on but just yesterday, they canceled the remaining DLC and Tabata stepped down, thus, landing the final nail in FFXV's coffin and resulting in an incomplete game.....forever.

And considering that that announcement was made at the 2nd anniversary livestream, FFXV fans were rightfully pissed. You don't just make a livestream on the anniversary of your game and announce that support is being pulled. That's like celebrating your birthday and then dying.

If the announcement was announced at any other time, fans would still be pissed....but maybe less so. It's just that they went into the livestream expecting a celebration and new content only to be met with the opposite.

[Modamy]

3 hours ago, Armagon said:

Nomura was the director and because he's a shitty director,

So you’re just ignoring the fact that his team was given an incomplete engine to work with and kept having their people pulled to work on other projects. Don’t get me wrong, Nomura was reported to have reworked the story every 3 months, but the fact that Square-Enix felt like it was fine to completely ignore versus xiii all that was a huge reason for the game never making progress. I didn’t follow XV’s development since I didn’t care about but it seems ridiculous to put the blame entirely on Nomura or call him crazy (not you but someone did).

[Armagon]

8 minutes ago, Modamy said:

So you’re just ignoring the fact that his team was given an incomplete engine to work with and kept having their people pulled to work on other projects. Don’t get me wrong, Nomura was reported to have reworked the story every 3 months, but the fact that Square-Enix felt like it was fine to completely ignore versus xiii all that was a huge reason for the game never making progress. I didn’t follow XV’s development since I didn’t care about but it seems ridiculous to put the blame entirely on Nomura or call him crazy (not you but someone did).

I meant, in general, i don't think he's a good director, nowadays anyway. FFXV took 10 years and yes, Sqaure itself fucked with it but Nomura didn't try to make it work. Kingdom Hearts 3 took less time to release, obviously, but we had like 6 "spin-offs" prior to that (Kingdom Hearts is also the main reason why i don't think he's a good writer as well but that's just my opinion) and considering Kingdom Hearts 3 ain't even the finale, we're probably gonna have to go through 6 more "spin-offs" before Kingdom Hearts 4. The Final Fantasy 7 remake is probably a PS5 title at this rate. And yes, i know Nomura has said that they've been devoting all their time to KH3.....but then why even announce FF7R in the first place if you've barely started? Also. i'm last i checked, it's still episodic for some reason so we'll probably get the actual full game by like 2030 or something. And recently, he's said he wants to develop other titles along side FF7R? Like mate, finish FF7R first then work on the other stuff. Though i'm not too sure on this last bit, i remember reading it recently but i'm just not sure.

Either way, if they announce that FF16 is being directed by Nomura, then that's gonna be a yikes from me.

[Lief]

Man, I WISH that there’ll be another Ivalice game (that’s not a mobile game), I loved FFXII TZA and FFTA2, and the setting in general. Question is though, will Matsuno be involved after his experience making FFXII......

As for my KH journey, I made it to the second wave of worlds in ReCoM. Beat Hollow Bastion and Winnie the Pooh, and at the end of Atlantica. I now understand why many consider ReCoM to be the worst KH game, since the worlds have honestly been pretty boring to traverse. They all have much less story, but also feel like a slog to go through due to the uninteresting level design. Battles also favor the use of sleights, as I often got card broken while doing physical combos. It might just be me, as I often just run around arenas getting hit by enemies as I dip through my cards to make the right sleight. All of this created quite the repetitive experience for me, which is why I started Terra’s story in BBS in the middle of ReCoM.

Compared to my Ven run, I kinda rushed through Terra’s a bit due to less Command Board playing. I’m still having fun though, as BBS keeps all the fancy moves from ReCoM but makes melee viable now that you won’t get card broken at your finisher. Weird thing is though, I felt that ReCoM’s melee FEELS better than BBS’s, despite being risky to use due to the shorter animations.

Hardest boss so far has been Braig, until I learned to spam dodge out of his deadly circle strafe attack. All the others so far have been a breeze thanks to Shotlocks. Zack was short but pretty fun, since I finally got Sonic Blade to wail on him.

3 minutes ago, Armagon said:

Either way, if they announce that FF16 is being directed by Nomura, then that's gonna be a yikes from me.

Haha I wish that the other FF old guard like Hiroyuki Ito are anywhere near as prolific as Nomura, or take the reigns on more projects so Nomura doesn’t have to have his fingers in so many things. Like, the poor guy didn’t even know he was directing the VII remake until Kitase asked him for his input too many times. It’s like SE automatically assigns him his jobs without actually asking him.

[Lightchao42]

19 minutes ago, Armagon said:

Either way, if they announce that FF16 is being directed by Nomura, then that's gonna be a yikes from me.

Plot twist: Square Enix will rebrand Final Fantasy VII Remake as Final Fantasy XVI, but it won't be released until 2030. There will be another two Super Smash Bros. games by then but they will still have Cloud, Midgar, and two songs as the only Final Fantasy content. Monolith Soft will ask to include Xenogears content in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and SE will say no, though they will include a Xenogears world in Kingdom Hearts IV when it releases in 2035.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Square Enix predictions.

[Modamy]

@Armagon announcing games before they’ve even really started development is a typical Square-Enix move at this point, I doubt Nomura has much say in it especially since he’s recently mentioned in interviews that he thought it was announced way too soon as well. I’m not super knowledgeable about game development, but wouldn’t be difficult for him to work with only a tenth of his team and an unusable engine?

Also, as a fan of KH I admit the series isn’t well written but the characters are enjoyable and the games are fun and for me that’s the most important thing. Some KH’s spinoffs weren’t even Nomura’s decisions. As far as I know he wanted the series to just be 1,2, birth by sleep, and 3. Also the fact that 3 won’t be the end of the series isn’t really a negative to me since 3 will still be the end of the overarching antagonist of the series up to this point of the series.

@Lief I thought ReCom was fun, but it totally overstays it’s welcome. If the worlds were shorter it would be a better game for it. Also birth by sleep was definitely built with the idea commands being your primary method of attack so your better of just getting commands and abilities that let them recharge faster. I usually just block all of Braig’s attacks and counter the few times he’s in range.

[Slumber]

2 hours ago, Lief said:

Man, I WISH that there’ll be another Ivalice game (that’s not a mobile game), I loved FFXII TZA and FFTA2, and the setting in general. Question is though, will Matsuno be involved after his experience making FFXII......

Matsuno still stops by every now and then to give consultation and guidance. He's one of the people helping with the FFXIV Ivalice raids. He's still clearly invested in Ivalice stuff, but I think the act of directing a mainline FF game kind of killed his enthusiasm to really get knee deep in a big project, and it's why he left Square. I don't think it'd be too far to ask him to be an advisor of sorts to another big Ivalice project. If somebody else directed, while he gave some input, I'm sure everyone'd be happy.

Either way, Square really needs to get some competent directors for FF games. Somebody who can either manage a project(Not Nomura) within a reasonable timeframe and budget, and somebody isn't a complete dipshit/somebody who doesn't let their weird fetishes dictate their work(Not Motomu Toriyama). Those two have been their big show runners for a decade now, and I don't think anybody really wants them back. Or at least, I don't think anyone would really be frothing at the mouth for more of their projects, which is really what Square needs.

Tabata looked promising because he was capable of wrangling such a massive project like FFXV, even with its glaring flaws... but he's gone now.

Edited November 9, 2018 by Slumber

[Armagon]

6 hours ago, Modamy said:

announcing games before they’ve even really started development is a typical Square-Enix move at this point,

Well yeah but that doesn't really excuse it. It's clear they only did it to bring hype but i get the feeling that it's backfired. Especially since updates on it are just so vague and it doesn't help that it's still episodic for some reason.

6 hours ago, Modamy said:

Also, as a fan of KH I admit the series isn’t well written but the characters are enjoyable and the games are fun and for me that’s the most important thing.

I agree that fun and enjoyment are the most important things. KH gameplay looks fun, the Disney worlds are big appeal (especially in KH3, they brought back Pirates of the Caribbean and are introducing Pixar worlds), music's good and so is the art. I like to rag on Kingdom Hearts a lot but there are good things in it that i would probably find enjoyment in. But when i play JRPGs, i do also pay attention to the writing. The writing doesn't have to be the greatest thing ever, it just has to be not bad. And in Kingdom Hearts' case, i'd wager it has worse writing than FE Fates.

Credit where credit is due though, for those who do want to pay attention to KH's story, Square has done a great job in making it easy, from releasing the 1.5+2.5 collections to releasing The Story So Far.

[Slumber]

16 minutes ago, Armagon said:

And in Kingdom Hearts' case, i'd wager it has worse writing than FE Fates.

Depends on your tastes. There's nothing that's outright objectionable in KH quite like there is... frankly, all throughout Fates.

KH is far more up its ass with how self-important it is, which only gets more aggravating the more the script looks like it was written by a 13 year old who watches too much anime. Which has been the series in every game after the first.

I'd say on a very base level, KH has the worse writing, but there's not any one single thing that would piss somebody off like with Fates... where there's about two dozen things that would piss somebody off.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Slumber

[Modamy]

50 minutes ago, Armagon said:

Well yeah but that doesn't really excuse it. It's clear they only did it to bring hype but i get the feeling that it's backfired. Especially since updates on it are just so vague and it doesn't help that it's still episodic for some reason.

Oh I'm totally not excusing it. it's stupid, but it's not on the directors that these games get announced way too early. It ends up putting a lot of pressure on them and their teams and ultimately hurts their reputations more than they deserve because their bosses made bad decisions.

52 minutes ago, Armagon said:

i'd wager it has worse writing than FE Fates.

I guess we'll agree to disagree, because Fates is way worse as far as I'm concerned. KH is at least centered around likable leads. The ass kissing on display for Corrin from every character we're supposed to like just makes me think about how the writers wanted to make the players feel good about themselves for just playing the games, by using the most pandering way imaginable.

[Slumber]

27 minutes ago, Modamy said:

Oh I'm totally not excusing it. it's stupid, but it's not on the directors that these games get announced way too early. It ends up putting a lot of pressure on them and their teams and ultimately hurts their reputations more than they deserve because their bosses made bad decisions.

It'd be one thing if this happened with every director, but this is a very Nomura thing. I admit the FFVII Remake thing is not fully his fault, but at the same time, it's been 3 years since we've gotten an update of any kind on that game, other than "Oh yeah we fired the old guys and now it's all in house and we're in full production now", which we got earlier this year. 3 years from the planning stages(For a game that's already been made, mind you) to finally starting the project is an insane amount of time, and they still have nothing to show for it. Unless they come out and reveal that the whole game is nearly finished within the next year and say that it'll be out by 2020, they're already behind schedule for a typical AAA game. And their last statements still indicate that the game is episodic, meaning that we're still under the assumption that we're not even getting a fraction of the game after 4 years of planning and development.

Most games are conceptualized and finished within the amount of time it took Nomura's team to go from the planning stages to the production stage alone.

FFXV took 10 full years to develop, 8 of those being under Nomura's guidance. You know what happened in 8 years? There were 4 Souls(Demon's, Dark Souls 1-3), and a conceptual spinoff with Bloodborne, and the franchise's style has infected the gaming zeitgeist. Entire franchises come and go within 8 years. That's roughly triple the development time of most AAA titles.

Then Nomura left the FFXV development in early 2014 to focus entirely on Kingdom Hearts 3, a project that's been planned and has been in the pre-development stages since 2010, and development proper started around 2013. The game's not coming out until 2019. That's 9 total years of work that has gone into KH3, and even the 5 years of full development is an insanely long development time.

These long development times are something that are distinctly Nomura. I can't think of a single other game director who is as bad at managing time as he is, which leads to conflating budgets, which is why Square is in dire straits right now.

It's actually astounding to me that he still has a job. Konami straight up dropped Kojima as the development of Metal Gear Solid 5 was nearing completion precisely for this same reason, but Kojima only took about 4 years to nearly finish that game. Kojima is possibly the second most infamous example of a game director taking too much time on projects, but even Kojima at his worst never took much longer than 4-5 years to conceptualize, plan, and develop a game. Death Stranding will likely be out in 2019 or 2020, maybe 5 years at most after he was tossed to the curb. And Kojima has had to start his own development studio and acquire funding on top of the typical development steps to get that game off the ground.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Slumber

[Armagon]

1 hour ago, Slumber said:

Depends on your tastes. There's nothing that's outright objectionable in KH quite like there is... frankly, all throughout Fates.

KH is far more up its ass with how self-important it is, which only gets more aggravating the more the script looks like it was written by a 13 year old who watches too much anime. Which has been the series in every game after the first.

I'd say on a very base level, KH has the worse writing, but there's not any one single thing that would piss somebody off like with Fates... where there's about two dozen things that would piss somebody off.

 

30 minutes ago, Modamy said:

I guess we'll agree to disagree, because Fates is way worse as far as I'm concerned. KH is at least centered around likable leads. The ass kissing on display for Corrin from every character we're supposed to like just makes me think about how the writers wanted to make the players feel good about themselves for just playing the games, by using the most pandering way imaginable.

Fair enough. I personally don't think Fates' writing is an absolute dumpster fire (though it's still pretty bad) but it still managed to have some decently written characters and i believe that good characters can salavage a bad story (and vice versa, bad characters can ruin a good story). Then again, both Warriors and Heroes have written Fates' characters better than Fates itself so that's kinda telling of how had Fates' writing is.

With Kingdom Hearts, as i've said before, i like to rag on it a lot and i do think the plot is a hot mess (though in the grand scheme of things, i've seen worse) but my issues with Kingdom Hearts' writing come more from how it's told rather than how it's written. It's clear that the writers are just making shit up as they go, they hardly planned for this because they didn't expect the series to take off the way it did. That's why the timeline is all over the place (though that point is kinda moot with the collections). Like, at least Fates was consistent and knew what kind of story it was trying to tell, even if it ended up failing at it whereas Kingdom Hearts is just making shit up as it goes.

The writing isn't a complete mess, i think KH1 and Chain of Memories are fine writing-wise. The whole mess started with KH2 and if the series just stuck to what made KH1 and CoM decent stories, i think the whole series would benefit. Maybe make it not an overarching plot as well. That's what i would do to improve KH's writing quality.

All that said, if they put the Avengers and Star Wars in the next Kingdom Hearts after 3, i will buy it in a heartbeat. 

[Slumber]

9 minutes ago, Armagon said:

The whole mess started with KH2 and if the series just stuck to what made KH1 and CoM decent stories, i think the whole series would benefit. Maybe make it not an overarching plot as well. That's what i would do to improve KH's writing quality.

This is how I've felt ever since the second game came out. I would have much preferred if each game was a different story about the bad guys and the Heartless trying to use Disney worlds to do various nefarious deeds.

KH2 took a hard right on that idea, and instead just used the fact that Disney was around to springboard into a... pretty bad anime plotline with an EPIC OVERARCHING STORYLINE! It felt like a lot of the premise of the first game(Worlds merging together, thus allowing Final Fantasy and Disney to mingle with each other) was just cast to the sidelines. In 2 especially, the fact that Disney characters were even around felt like an after thought. There really wasn't a reason anymore that you needed to be chasing these Hot Topic anime cliches through Disney worlds, and the game just fell off for me.

Birth By Sleep kind of got back on track, at least with making the whole Disney aspect of the games relevant again, but it was still sticking to the... just awful storyline that CoM(CoM's story is, as you said, passable, but it introduced the OXIII, who have been a blight on the franchise ever since) and 2 brought to the series.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Slumber

[Modamy]

@Slumber and @Armagon So I should probably make it clear that I've never followed games development closely. When games are announced I basically just say "cool" and ignore much else about the game until it's out. I don't even really follow the development of games in my favorite series. This whole thing is more or less because of me diving into the Youtube comment section of videos on Tabata leaving Square and seeing tons of people pinning the blame for a lot of ridiculous things on Nomura. So this has been me partly venting and partly wanting to talk about it with someone who's not in the cesspool of the Youtube comments. This definitely looks like I'm punking out because I lost an argument or something, but to be honest it's not really something I felt super strongly about and really... I just wanted to talk with someone about it. I still like the games that Nomura has worked on and found the stories enjoyable in spite of no real plan. I actually kind of like stories that work with throwaway plot points from previous installments and turn it into something (It's the main reason why I started to like comics) so I never had a problem with their being no plan for the future installments and just enjoyed the ride.

Sorry if I've come across as obnoxious to you guys.

[Slumber]

9 minutes ago, Modamy said:

Sorry if I've come across as obnoxious to you guys.

You've been far from obnoxious. My wall of text wasn't me being upset at you or anything.

It let me do a little venting of my own, since I really haven't been a fan of the way Nomura has worked for over a decade now. Not just in the project he takes on(Probably just coincidence that I haven't really liked anything he's worked on since KH1), mostly just in how he tackles projects.

FF's always been a favorite of mine, and I've been upset over its handling pretty much since the old-guard left during FFX's development, and Motomu Toriyama became Square's golden boy alongside Nomura. The series' reputation has been... more than a little tarnished since they took the reigns.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Slumber

[Lief]

Squenix just doesn’t know how to keep talent from leaving doesn’t it? Though now they have Hideo Baba for what he’s worth, maybe he might work on a Final Fantasy one day.

As for the KH story, I found it silly but tolerable, and enjoyed KH2’s story. Roxas’ story in that game was great, but the Disney worlds really did feel less relevant compared to KH1 (with the sole exception of Space Paranoids, the best Disney world in the series). The series didn’t really get silly for me until DDD, when they introduced way, wayyyy too many plot twists at the end (the villain possession though it was foreshadowed in BBS, the rules on time travel even though Merlin casually allowed Sora to time travel in KH2 while ignoring those rules, and of course the Recuscant’s Sigil aka a literal alphabet letter being used as a tracking device good lord). DDD’s plot devices reminded me of Fates with how contrived they were, and things are only getting crazier for KH now that KHUX and frickin KHcoded are becoming more relevant with their data obsession like they’re following the big data trend in IT.

Correct me if I’m wrong on time travel though cuz I may have missed something, but that tends to happen in a series with more convoluted lore than Dark Souls. This is why Sakaguchi never made FF sequels haha.

[Modamy]

@Lief While it's also a retcon the series treats Timeless River as it's own separate world that just so happens to connect to the events of the past for a particular world. Timeless River and the Country of Musketeers are both past versions of Disney Castle/Town and Symphony of Sorcery is the past of the world Yen Sid's tower was on before he moved to the outskirts of Twilight Town. So when they went to Timeless River in KH2 they didn't really time travel they just went to another world that was only accessible through Disney Castle.

But like I said; it's just a retcon.

[Slumber]

The amount of talent that has left Square is really crazy to think about. 

A lot of it was when Squaresoft went bankrupt after Spirits Within, which not only prompted the core FF team to leave, but also a ton of people from the Square B team who were still around. We ended up getting Mistwalker and Monolithsoft out of that, though Mistwalker's pretty downplayed these days. 

They've been a revolving door of talent ever since. The Enix side of things has been pretty rock solid, but the Square side of things has been held together by hot glue, and built on a foundation of mud. 

I always wonder what would have happened if Squaresoft never released Spirits Within. Where would they be today? 

We probably would have gotten the PS2 remakes of Chrono Trigger and FF7-9, so as far as I'm concerned, that's already the better timeline. 

Edited November 10, 2018 by Slumber

[Armagon]

17 hours ago, Modamy said:

Sorry if I've come across as obnoxious to you guys

You weren't being obnoxious, don't worry about it. It was still a decent discussion in the end. 

At the end of the day, i'm not particularly mad at the way FFXV ended or how Nomura has handled things in recent years. I crticize them, yes, but i'm neither a FF or KH fan. In fact, i haven't played any Square game (not counting demos for games like Octopath) aside from Xenogears and that's only because it's the game that started the Xeno series.

[vanguard333]

Funny; I never played FFXV (or any Final Fantasy game for that matter; I was an almost solely Nintendo guy for a long time), but I recently saw a video this guy did on what was wrong with FFXV and what went wrong with its development. From what I remember, the short version is that it wasn’t ten years of development: it was seven years of pre-development and rewrites, one year of rebranding, and two years of desperately trying to make a game within the timeframe they were given. I’m honestly not surprised that the next season of DLC was cancelled. DLC shouldn’t be used to fix an incomplete game, but add to a complete game.

i found the video. Here it is: 

 

[DragonFlames]

Yeah, I think the above video said it best. It's easy to understand why things happened the way they did. It's just bad that they did, because some people might have lost a lot of money to something that turned out to be disappointing. I know someone who did buy the game, did buy all the DLC and afterwards felt like he was cheated out of his money. That someone isn't me, by the way.
Like FFXII, my favourite game in the series, which, luckily did get a remake with almost all the problems I had with the original addressed and fixed.
Rich, coming from someone whose only experience with FF comes down to X, X-2, XII, XII: Revenant Wings, XIII, XIII-2 and the opening hour of VII, I know.

[eclipse]

FFXV is my favorite FF, fight me.

Rather than look at what went wrong, I look at what went right.  I don't know what they did with the graphics, but I can play it without getting motion sick.  The last one that sort-of did that was Star Ocean IV.  The characters blow everything out of the water (even Trails, and I adore that series), and it's a matter of "so what do you want to do today?" for as long as you want. . .until you choose to advance the game, that is.

[Modamy]

8 hours ago, eclipse said:

FFXV is my favorite FF, fight me.

In that one sided beating I was given I never actually mentioned that XV, even in its current state, is the Final Fantasy that I enjoyed the most.

[DragonFlames]

On 12.11.2018 at 11:29 PM, eclipse said:

FFXV is my favorite FF, fight me.

Nah, no thanks.
And besides, my favourite FF game isn't that widely beloved in the FF community, either, so... yeah. I don't know many FF fans who would put FFXII on top of their lists, is all I'm saying.