I really want a postmortem article for this game because it would be just as interesting as the FF13 one from a few years ago. Hell, this whole thing needs its own
book, but I don't know if "Japanese companies suffer from mismanagement and/or lack of preparedness for a coming console generation" would fit 200 pages.
It could be a complete mess by the end of it, be somewhat salvaged but not as great as we'd like due to development problems (ex: FF13), or be the best game (which doesn't look likely). I'm really curious about XV's fate and its legacy, for better or worse. It feels like one for the books like Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Resident Evil 4, Prey, etc. were.
I like every FF, so my position is that if it has a mix of familiar monsters with sci-fi crossed with fantasy, it's FF. I expect certain things: cid, chocobos, moogles, but that's where the expectations end. I've enjoyed every game in the series due to that even if some (13, 2) flounder in certain areas. FF for me is like, the one series I special fellow out about, so it's really special to me, even if I think there's a lot of jrpg franchises that are better.
Hmm, yeah. I like commonalities between every entry like Cid, Chocobos, airships, Moogles, summons, crystals, some music that appears in previous entries (ex: "Final Fantasy"/"Prologue", which is one of my favourite themes in the series since it's like the DQ theme to me), etc. But it's not enough for them to just be there but it's great when they're used in the narrative or as quest items, or something like that, to a decent extent. I think when I played FF13 for the first time when I got the Japanese version was that I was so disappointed that very little of that stuff was there, and if they were there, it wasn't used as much as it was in previous entries. Though I do have to say that for some reason I felt that way when I played FF12 but I was a dumb 18-year-old who didn't know what she wanted and had to play the game a year to completely "get" what it was going for (and even then it had some issues later on in the game).
All I can come up with is that they aren't perfect games. They don't all have everything I like about the series, but they have certain elements like the music, recurring themes, recurring characters/enemies/gimmicks/items, etc. Those elements are not what makes me like it so much. I guess I just like it when they're really fun to play and I can play around with a lot of stuff to go for meaningful growth or stat augmentation. I like systems when they feel meaningful, and I like to break the games when I feel like it. I love that the series switches it up every entry while retaining some sort of core mechanic (and FF's "thing" is keeping the player on their toes while making turn-based commands in an active setting since FF4). I like the dumb humour in some of the games, like the stuff in FF5 which didn't try too hard to be funny so it felt natural, some stuff in FF7/FF8/FF9, or even some of the stuff in FF14.
I played two FF games that felt dramatically different from each other this year. I loathed one of them even though I played through it twice, and I liked one so much that I played through it twice even though I didn't have to. It's not that they played differently from each other, but I guess I liked the tone of one far more than the other. The tone and character interactions helped make the experience fun for me, and being able to play around with what was handed to me and trying to figure out how the heck I can do some of the stuff I can in the game with the combination I was handed was fun even if I complained about it both times. With the other, I was thrown into a game where many of the decisions were left up to me and the game lacked some structure, but I just didn't feel very happy with the tone, the lack of proper character interaction, the music, parts of the customization (ex: having to wait until a second playthrough to even bother doing it), the structure, the pacing, etc. The game started feeling like a chore rather than a joy/relief to finish like I feel like almost every other FF game, FF13 (less so) and FF13-2 included. But when I think about it, both games have structural similarities, but one seems to handle it better than the other.
I guess I have to figure out what I liked about those two games and what I'd disliked because it's interesting to have such markedly different experiences with them in the same year.
FF15 seems like something that doesn't feel like a playable FF that I'd want to play since it looks like Advent Children with a UI slapped on it, and I didn't like Advent Children at all. And I don't know much about it. It's hard to say how I feel about FF15 because I barely know anything about it, and what I do know about it, I just don't like because the gameplay looks kind of messy and automated. That doesn't sound very fun!
Going to try to resume FFDimensions because Borys makes it sound fun.
