Games you hate, yet everyone else cherishes.

I never liked Tidus until before the last few parts of the game... but anyway, what I liked the most for FFX was Yuna


@Tai - that is his preference...

I'm not saying he can't have that preference.  I'm just pointing out what happens if you don't have a character like Tidus in the game.  What the result of that is or what it often is (I've seen a few other games do this) in terms of gameplay or even story.

Can a game exist without a "player avatar"?  Yes it can.  Lots of shooters often adopt this strategy (player has no clue what's going on, but can figure it out based upon how the character they are playing is reacting or acting) of storytelling.

All I'm saying is that the story of FFX kind of turns into Final Fantasy 13 if Tidus does not really exist, because it's hard to care about a world you don't know anything about, and it's harder to become engrossed in a story when the characters and dropping exposition on each other about things they already know.

FF13 has a story??? that's new... Lolz...

It sure does!  It's buried in the exposition dumps and the Datalog.  It's there... it makes almost no sense...  But it's there!

Well, yeah, I can't argue with musical taste, that differs from person to person.

*wait wrong thread sorry*

I thought that was what was going on too. Still painful to listen to, but it DID make sense. Kinda endearing, too.


(Though I mostly want to punch Tidus in the face, especially every time he opens his mouth, but he's got his cute moments too.)


I really like Steiner in IX. He was a bumbling fool, but he was a loyal, hardworking fool desperately trying to keep up with all the crazy Garnet got herself into. I found him very endearing.


As for Quina, I just...You know, none of the other characters really knew what to do with Quina either. A very foreign person, that.


And Vivi was the best thing in the game.

Not necessarily. There's one glaring problem with FF13: it was astronomically terrible in every possible way. The world building was poor, the story and exposition made zero sense, and it expected you to read through countless text entries to even have a grasp on what's happening. It's "How Not To Do Game Design 101."

I feel I do need to clarify one of my previous points though. By preferring a protagonist who is familiar with their world, I didn't mean to imply they leave the player in the dark. Going back to Lloyd: he is certainly familiar with his world, and despite his passion he is young and naive; there's so much out there that's still completely foreign to him, and we're there to learn as he does.

Going back to Tidus (because I love flogging dead horses), he literally knows nothing. He is, in essence, a child. He (and in turn, the player) has to sit back and be told everything as it comes. I get what they were trying to do with him, I just think the game wasn't written strongly enough to support his character. But hey, to each his own.

And yeah, I haven't played FFXII but I've heard if you pretend Vaan and Penelo don't exist, it's actually a pretty decent story.

Honestly, I had no idea what was going on in the story of Final Fantasy 12.  It wasn't until two months ago I conned some people over at Spoony's to even tell me what was going on.  After they explained to me what the story was about and what was going on, I was like, "this sounds like an interesting story!".  The problem is, it's so poorly executed and buried under random cutscene after random cutscene that it's hard to take anything away from it.  I also noticed that there's really no "badguy" in the game.  Not that I need one, but I do kind of need a reason for an epic world exploring Quest.  The most the game ever gave me was "this guy is from the kingdom that conquered your kingdom.  He's here to keep order and rule over the kingdom."  Then, we have our main characters basically going out of their way to undermine him and everything he does.  Near as I could tell, I was playing as the badguys.  When I asked about that, other players basically confirmed it.  They were like, "true, the guy you're fighting against hasn't ever done anything wrong to you or to your nation, but he did kill the princess's father and she's just out for revenge.  The story is about what a person would sacrifice for revenge and whether or not it's worth it".

At that point I went, "Yeah, never gonna finish the game because I'm 40 hours into this mess and someone else had to probably wiki the dang thing to even tell me what was going on."

I played FFIX for the first time last year and I really enjoyed it for the most part. I liked most of the characters (I agree Amarant was an unnecessary character), namely Zidane and Vivi. I liked Steiner's goofy exterior and I felt that he had considerable development that made him fairly interesting. Although I generally enjoyed the combat, I thought it was TOO slow! Everyone's ATB bars continued to fill while a character was performing his SLOW attack animations, almost eliminating the entire point of the ATB system. I also don't like the Skill Progression and Stat Progression mechanics it utilized. I don't like being forced to wear a piece of equipment simply because I need a skill/spell from it...especially when I have much superior options to equip stat-wise. I didn't like the fact that your stat increase on Level Up depended on the type of equipment you had equipped (and I don't think this was communicated to the player at all). Once I learned how the stat-growth mechanics worked, it greatly discouraged me from leveling up more than I needed to because you're wasting potential stats if you level up without the best equipment equipped. My final party was Zidane, Vivi, Steiner, and Quina. I gave myself a personal quest with Quina where I equipped him/her with STR-boosting equipment every time he/she leveled up while purposely equipping Zidane with no STR-boosting equipment when he leveled up. My goal was for Quina to eventually surpass Zidane in STR, and in turn HP (since your HP stat was directly tied to your STR). I met that goal at the very end of the game, haha.

As for FFX, I find that Tidus is my favourite protagonist of any RPG I've played. I just really really liked his character development and I liked learning about the world as he did. It's been a long time since I've played FFX and I can't wait for the HD remaster to come out so I can reawaken my experience with the game and see if it's as awesome as my memory seems to think it was. Funny how that works, though, how you can forget many details about a game and only remember.

I haven't played FFXIII yet (I own it, but it's in my stack of 20 PS3 games on backlog), and all of my friends and coworkers urge me to avoid it. Despite all of the warnings, I feel a need to try it out for myself and see firsthand what all the complaints are about. I've never been a "Final Fantasy" player (up until last year I had only played VII and X and Tactics Advance in the series) so I don't think I'd be able to relate to the many complaints saying "it's lost it's FF feel".

FF13 isn't just "not a Final Fantasy game".  It really is a very good instruction manual on how NOT to create a game.  It does a fantastic job on failing in every aspect of creating a game.  Unlikable characters?  Check.  Muddled confusing or nonexistent storyline?  Check.  Screen Screaming at the ending?  Check.  Poorly created and implemented battle system?  Check.  Nonexistent world building?  Check.  Lack of exploration and interactivity?  Check.  Nonexistent player arcs?  Check.

It really is pretty bad all around.  Though I enjoy the combat system more than I should...  I can't really bring myself to ever finish the game despite being on Disc 3 of 3.  It's probably one of the worst games I've ever played (and not just final fantasy game) and I even spent a lot of time digging in the Datalogs to figure out what was going on with the story!

Have you tried Lightning Returns yet? It's the best of the XIII trilogy, and I know that's not hard to do. It's average at best.

Ugh. Kingdom Hearts.

The "doesn't feel like a FF game" is just a common "vague" complaint that I wouldn't relate to. All of those other points (unlikable characters, confusing and horrible story, no exploration, etc) are exactly what I want to experience firsthand to satisfy my own curiosity. No, I'm not interested in watching a Let's Play for it.

Of course, with all that said, it's not a higher priority game on my list of game sitting in my drawer. But I DO eventually want to play it for myself (or at least TRY and play it. Hehe, maybe I will find myself unable to stand playing it for more than 5 hours - but if that happens, at least I actually tried it).

I'm going to mention the same thing I did in the Final Fantasy topic; although the plot point is utterly ridiculous when you sit and think about it, it is revealed in the middle of probably the game's most awesome moment.  As a result, the whole "man this is stupid" thoughts tend to come after the fact.

Moon Boy?  WTF do you mean by that?  You mean finding out 

I think he's talking about FuSoYa.

Fusoya was bad, but tolerable. The Zemus revelation was ok. Even the Luke-I-Am-Your-Brother was ok. But then the revelation that

Nope. That was the defining moment where it lost me. I mean, it'd been pushing it for a while, but that was the last straw. I actually burst out laughing when I hit that part. It was just too ridiculous.


Now, granted, I had basically the same reaction to the twist near the end of IX as well, but it hadn't been so irritating up until that point, so I was able to let it slide. Same with VII. It had just as much ridiculousness, but it's ridiculousness at least made sense in the context of the story. (Seriously? The Moon? That came right out of left field. If there'd have been some better foreshadowing, I might not have been so aggravated.)


If IV had recognized it's melodrama and made the occasional joke out of it (this is sometimes the only thing that saves VII; the fact that the characters realize how crazytrain their lives have become. IV is just like, it's Tuesday for the the Red Wings better save the world, yo.) I probably could have stood it. I mean, if somebody had just lost it and gone into a gigglefit when they found Fusoya and been like, "Well, we've already been to an underworld nobody knew existed, Rydia went and lived with Eidolons for a while, the whole world is falling down around our ears and...Sure. The moon. Why the hell not. With all the other crazy stuff we've seen in the last month, why the hell not?"


You know? That might have made it tolerable. But no. It was like, "Ah, the moon. Of course! Of course! This makes perfect sense."


No. No it doesn't. None of this makes sense WHY ARE YOU ACTING LIKE THIS MAKES SENSE???

1st : Military fps in general. 
Why? Playing US propaganda is not appealling me and the cutscenes, cover and regenrative health systems etc just piss me off. 

Nah, I fricking miss good old Blood, Doom etc. Big guns, demons and monsters that I can gib and challenging maps. That's all I'm asking for damn it. 

Half-Life franchise. 

I don't play a fps to drive cars and do Zelda puzzles in 3D. Nuff said. 
Also, I don't feel any empathy towards the characters that I find irritating more than anything else. 

King of fighter franchise. 
Here is the exemple of games that are excellent but just not fitting my taste.

Kingdom Hearts serie. 
This mix Disney / Squaresoft....those fat shoes....this key sword....this emodarkangelSephiroth that they managed to make even more emodarkangaltoodarkforyou... all this irritates me to the max. 

Still not decided if I like or hate Mirror's edge too. 

Oh damn I almost forgot Final Fantasy 7. 
BOOORING. 

I'll throw in that I can't stand Kingdom Hearts, and I gave it a fair shot. For me what ruins KH are the main cast: Sora, Riku, Kairi etc. their story is basically a generic placeholder so that the game would actually work. Ironically I think it would have worked better were it just FF and Disney characters. Sora just felt like an unnecessary middleman.

I did love the interactions between the Disney and FF characters though. Donald and Goofy absolutely kill it in every scene they're in. I've laughed so hard at some of their moments. Genuine comedic brilliance. It's a shame the rest of the game doesn't hold up. Apart from the soundtrack; that's pretty amazing too.

I've heard KH2 is miles better so I'll consider trying that one at some point.

Another one I didn't particularly care for was Borderlands 2. Absolutely loved the first Borderlands. Was outrageous, silly, fun and just plain crazy. And it gave some wiggle room for the player's imagination because of how little the playable characters interacted with the people around them. Did not like Borderlands 2 because of the discrepancies between them. The first one never felt like a rush to the end, saving people ect. You didn't know what was in the Vault or who was behind it until much later. You were just going through, completing quests and fighting bandit goons. And at one point, it's clarified that most of the bandits are thugs/criminals anyway, sent to Pandora to do physical labor. The problem I had with the second was that they tried so very hard to make me care for the characters that I either already had a preconceived idea about or they outright changing information. Borderlands 2 had a comment from Tannis (with an attempt at sympathy) about how the bandits were normal everyday Joe's who were abandoned and forced into gangs, while the first already explained why these poor sods were there. I know they had to reiterate this information to newcomers who didn't play the first, but it certainly wouldn't have been hard to repeat the original game's info. It just felt like a sob story with all this tragedy meant to pull at my heart strings for the previous main characters and it was pretty obvious. Like crystal clear obvious.

The first was a menagerie of silly almost non directional quests, the second took a 180, have to save the planet, with an attempt at a deep and heavy storyline. And it didn't feel very Borderlandsish. The story really let me down. I just didn't care for it much.