[Multiplatform] Official Final Fantasy XIII Thread

I'd trade some freedom in for a more sensible story.

FFXII: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE'RE NOT ENEMIES, WE THINK THE SAME THING? OH BUT I ALREADY TRANSFORMED WE HAVE TO FIGHT. ALSO SOMETHING ABOUT THINGS THAT LIVE IN A CRYSTAL OR MIGHT NOT AND POSSESSION.

oh ok

edit: also the chimpanzee masturbation subplot was grating
edit 2x: why the fuck would somebody try so hard to protect their rights to a jacking off monkey picture that they'd copyright it?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

isn't it great that they've spent about ten years 30% finishing something?

We went to the square enix showcase in Shinjuku and very apologetic Japanese bowing woman made sure that we didn't take photos of their 30% finished game that may or may not have been FFXIII (because it's going to be so different from the SUPER EXCLUSIVE) footage they were showing.

Let's hear more about your 300 new kingdom hearts titles for our washing machine and get back to us in another 5 years when you've got something from the actual game to show.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by a lurker

Wow, completely valid criticism for a company and yet you fuck it up by whining like a bitch.

Did you lose total faith in Squeenix? Are you going to boycott their products and encourage your friends to do the same? Is it time to put your foot down?

No, I just saw an opportunity to be sarcastic and went for it.

see also: the pokemon thread

square enix isn't my personal jesus and I'm not going to burn my chocobo plushies in a crying angry fit.

so to conlcude my dear lurker: lurk more ;(

p.s. On a more serious note, if the tedium of FFXII couldn't turn me off then I don't think another inevitable delay would make it happen. It was just hilarious because the half hour video presentation was nothing but cell phone adaptations of old titles designed to grift greater profits 100 yen at a time, another 4 new kingdom hearts trailers that all seemed to involve late 90s early attempts at emo hair in place of actual plot, and then about 12 seconds of lightning bouncing around in SHIN-MIDGAR whilst frowning intensely.

p.p.s I missed you touchy sons of bitches <3

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Emotional backbiter? Do you think that John Edwards feels your power as you use your unique skill of channelling oprah.com catchphrases from the ether?

As a courtesy I have prepared a small chart in order to help you understand my original post:



This is going to require a leap of faith, but I want you to stick with me. What you see above are what we 'humans' call "shades of grey". I don't know what level of the spectrum disorder that you belong to, but sometimes it's possible for somebody to like certain things about something without liking all of things about it!

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

You guys ready for a real revelation from Tokyo Game Show?




It was too loud in there to hear the trailer but sephirothsurprise.jpg made up for it. He was looking at some totally sweet armour displays when Senorita Preved took a photo of him whilst pretending to be taking a photo of the armour displays. He turned at the wrong moment and this face happened... the rest is photographic history.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Actually I think they probably just modified the script of the English release to have the same number of syllables as the Japanese.

I hope they didn't miss a beat somewhere or it's going to be awkward haiku for a few hours.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I'm at least partially convinced that if they put the JP audio on the English version they'd lose sales on their INTERNATIONAL FINAL SUPERMEGAMIX version that they'll no doubt sell at full price to the Japanese 4 months after releasing the original.

How ya doing, buddy?

Yeah they're gonna charge what they like and the japanese are gonna buy 5. The price you have listed there is before tax as well I think so you need to add another 5% for most retailers. Some convenience stores are taking pre-orders and have lowered the price by around a 1000 yen to compete. Strangely enough making it around $100US pretty much puts the game on par with the typical cost of higher-profile games in Australia, so I'm pretty used to that nonsense already.

Holy shit the ordering system for the special lightning edition ps3 is awful though. They opened it up on square-enix.co.jp for gold members (basically people who had already spent hundreds of dollars pre-ordering from them before) for two days, which rapidly sold out. Then they opened their silver membership for a day and a half, then their bronze, which is anybody with an account for about 20 minutes until it sold out, all without really advertising any of the periods. Basically you needed to have a bot running 24/7 to get it if you weren't already part of their in-crowd. Regular enthusiasts were out of the running to start with.

I have read conflicting accounts about whether or not it's going to be sold in stores on release day without a pre-order system in limited quantities. Incidentally all of the english articles about it are a copy paste or slight rewording of the same source, and the japanese articles are typically non-sequiteur about GLORIOUS SONY and franchise fuckery with "oh yeah its out on december 17 we decided" as an afterthought and no mention of how one may actually go about getting one.

There's gonna be 50,000 of them in second-hand stores on December 17 at midday with a $500 + markup. I'm betting on it right now.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Quote:

pink ps3

I did it.

take that you mysterious and inscrutable asians with your bizarro pre-order systems! >: The winner was one of the convenience stores across the street from my apartment. It's going to be delivered on release date.

After all of that online trouble a tiny comment on amazon led me to find this system. We were there at 10am today when the orders opened and waiting for it to say that it was instantly sold out, but it worked.

gonna get hit by a bus

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't write the rules concerning gloating. So don't hate the player. We picked it up this morning at the convenience store across the street.



hand modeling provided by the wife

We're playing it right now, about an hour in. Initial impressions are that it's kind of violent, incredibly pretty and the music is very high-functioning in terms of orchestration and arrangement.

We went to buy the playguide to make playing it in moonspeak slightly easier for ourselves and in the first store we went into there was a giant shipping crate full of these lightning edition ps3s that were for people to randomly buy. Well played square enix.

edit: if anybody has any questions or wants a screenshot of a menu or something let me know.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

yeah this lightning edition is for japan only

but the games are region free so no big deal once we leave

edit: + korea

they just decided

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Kishin

The game sounds it's basically the same as FFX in all aspects, with enhanced graphics.

It isn't. The story is much stronger in FFX, there's more of a real villain in that game as well.

Quote:

The thing that worries me is his mentioning of music, since that's the only thing I'm interested in the game. I probably will play the game after many years, but I will grapplehook myself to the soundtrack the day it's released, maybe even buying it. This reviewer however doesn't really know anything about music, so I'm not certain what the soundtrack will be like. I'm worried about him saying "pop" music has taken over into the BGM as well. This sounds weird, and only done, because it's more possible to shoehorn worthless vocals into games nowadays, more than ever before, and Square of all companies WILL abuse this possibility to no end, especially with Final Fantasies. But it's Hamauzu, so it might actually be good, even still...

The music is nice for the most part. I didn't really appreciate some of the jazz in there but it's never distractingly bad and seems to be usually scene appropriate (harmonica solo anybody?).

From my classically trained standpoint some of the music is nice, but you start to notice that most of it is re-arrangements of the same few themes or the same harmonies used over and over (hint: the battle music is re-arranged as an area theme several times, with one notable giant re-orchestration with a rather disonnant brass chord, if you're into that sort of thing you might want to listen for it).

Also I think I heard Maaya Sakamoto singing or humming throughout a few tracks in there. Some of the more electronic tracks are actually the more interesting things from the game, which is a strange thing for me to say because I usually don't care for electronic music for the most part.

Overall it's completely different, slightly more sophisticated than some of the earlier titles, but probably won't inspire the same nostalgia. If you like cluster chords in your tonality you're in for a treat but if you're looking for nerdy anthems it's not going to happen for you.

Originally Posted by Andrew Evenstar

characters are good, story is great as well. But the experience was not even close to what I was expecting or looking for. It was the first Final Fantasy game I was ever disappointed with.

No Spoilers here but a few generalisations;

I feel the same way for the most part with a few exceptions. The characters were a bit too generic for my liking.

"守りたい"

yeah that was indiscriminately thrown around and just about every second word in the game.

We've been sitting here wondering how elements of this story are going to translate into English because culturally that shit doesn't have the same resonance and meaning that it seems to here. When people hear "I want to protect EVERYTHING!" in english 400 times in a row I imagine they're going to start to say "why?"

The story was probably the weakest element of the game in my mind now. The character motivations were generic or stereotypical, the big bad was vaguely mentioned a few times throughout the course of the story and a whole bunch of the people who we've all seen in the trailers are only in the game for a few minutes to dodge some bullets, say something generic and not develop any relevance.

But I'll say this, I did like the battle system. I just don't think that the overall experience puts it on par with the earlier games. If the story was stronger it would've been amazing, but they seem to be asleep at the wheel still.

If you like haircuts, necklaces, somersaults, power-poses and explosions it's a game for you.


edit: I realise that it has become the new hotness to be meta-critical armchair sociologists or economists and analyse the game in terms of its intended audience by saying things like "it's for the japanese not for whities" or whatever to apologise away problems or issues that people have with the game. That being said, I liked a lot of the earlier games and they came from the same company and same motivation, but something has changed culturally in RPGs (Square Enix's) now to the point where it's more about image and suggestion of story rather than whatever possible attempts at depth that may have happened in the past. I'm not claiming that Final Fantasy VII or VIII was Shakespeare, but it was closer to a narrative world than a mohawk and implication. If you want pretty things to look at then it's all there.

There's just something unconvincingly shallow going on.

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