FF XIII IS COMING!!!!....

And I could honestly care less cause it looks like a complete bore. Ok here we go, the new E3 Trailer of FFXIII hot off the heals of the announcement it will be on 360. This makes it easy on me if I ever decide to pick it up and give it a whirl since I can hold off on getting the PS3 for a little longer to play MGS4, GT5, and some Nippon Ichi goodness. Lets take a look at this trailer piece by piece.

To start things out is some lines of Japanese which I am sure is saying something along the lines of "IN A WORLD TORN BY WAR" or "IN A LAND OPRESSED BY A CRAZY GOVERNMENT" because that tends to be the spin on most RPGs. The first glimpse we get, in true Final Fantasy fashion all they will end up showing us anyways are cinematics and nothing to show off how one may actually be playing this "game", is a dragon flying through a valley which looks like a current generation iteration of Panzer Dragoon (love the games). Next we get a shot of super serial future city and airships. What would Final Fantasy be without Airships? While they have become a standard in the series I wonder if the massive amount of inclusion in the story of EVERY single recent game is necessary. I mean at least in the earlier ones your party eventually got one to make traveling an overworld (WHY DO THESE NOT EXIST ANYMORE?? they were awesome) but now they just seem to be the easy way to get "oohs" and "ahhs" out of people while watching cinematics because it's the most fantastical thing to see in a fantasy world, that's right a fantastic foray into imagination. It's like glitter, lets sprinkle some more of those air ships in there to show how graphically awesome we can make these FMVs, those are after all the main hooks of FF games in the past couple years. I tire to think that Final Fantasy has become some kind of gauge for how technically advanced graphics can get in video games, they've been dropping the ball in terms of characters, likeability, originality, and gameplay because they are so focused on this stuff.

Take notes now, soft cream colors for up in the clouds. IT MUST BE FLUFFY. Blue glowing lights as well for technology, I love my blue glowing external or tablet but if everything in my house glowed blue LEDs it loses the uniqueness. Next we see the obvious large government/army/corporation troops donning bright clean uniforms (note: they have the blue to show the technological advancement) coming to assail our heroine. What RPG would be complete if the introduction of a character was not accompanied by them being surrounded by a large array of enemies. Then followed by them dispatching of the soldiers in a cool, flashy, and sometimes wholly unecessary manner which will be preceded by a slight look of doubt before dealing with them all effortlessly.

Quick, if you look closely at the soldier helmets they have saved time in the design/drafting process by clipping the judges from FFXII. I have performed a hasty process through the advanced program MS paint and this is the result:
Before













After


















And here we can see the new guards:










I mean, I would honestly love for there to be a new Final Fantasy title that just sweeps me up and gives me the same euphoria that some of the previous titles have given me but the Squeenix of late just does not even feel like they try anymore with the FF franchise. Next the game shows off some oldies of what may possibly be the incarnations of Shiva and Ifrit for the game. Then some explosions, gunfire, keep watching the graphics...WAIT THERE WAS A HUD! nope it's gone now. As a whole I can't help but wonder when when it was decided that the future was painted with a palette of primarily white, blues, purple and some other cool colors, interspersed with lots of bold primary colors. The architexture is a lot of smooth surfaces and ovals/circles. I am a little tired of every city and hallway being another take of the hallways from Xenosaga, the Balamb Garden, Star Ocean, Final Fantasy X.

I guess back when FF8 was on it's way those cutscenes of that epic battle between squall and Seifer was like whoa, and that spider robot on the beach had me jumping to play the game. That was then, back when I was actually wowed by graphics because we had honestly not seen anything like it before. This just seems no different from the previous stuff they've released, the video isn't wowing to me at all. It just leaves me with a sense of "yeah...and I don't care what video you've cooked up I wanna know how it plays and what kinda features there are". To be fair I guess you could say they haven't gotten that far in the game planning, to that I respond stop wasting fucking time making videos of the game cutscenes and get to work on the meat of the game. That is the primary problem that I think the Square part of Squeenix is having of late, they haven't caught on yet that gameplay is the heart of the game not graphics (I have no beef with enix, they have managed to do well in this new age). They were able to ride the wave of being on the edge of graphics for so long while we progressed from basic polygons to what we have today that they've changed their method of production to be centered around "awe inspired visuals" and gameplay secondary. In a time now where the graphical increases are becoming so small I feel they have lost a huge edge until the next leap or bound is made. While they may be reaching to be the one to make that bridging of a gap I feel they have sacrificed a great deal in terms of the gameplay and story content they used to have.