TL/DR: I wish Final Fantasy played more like it used to, and that they could make the characters and story better, because the last several games haven’t been fun for me on any level.
Not sure if anyone saw this or what you thought of it. Apparently Tabata resigned to start his own company and work on a new project. I guess he’d been working on a project at Square Enix that seems likely to have been cancelled, as they reported a loss of 30 million recently that many in the gaming media seem to attribute to this. The fact that most of the new DLC for Final Fantasy XV has been cancelled is still pretty surprising.
Still, and maybe I’m in the minority, but while I haven’t played Final Fantasy XI or XIV (which I don’t believe Tabata had anything to do with), I really haven’t liked any Final Fantasy game since X.
The way that gaming has grown and changed over the years, producing more complex characters with more nuance, more range of emotions, with storytelling that deals with complex themes, with compelling moments, twists and turns, etc makes the Final Fantasy XIII series and Final Fantasy XV feel rather antiquated to me.
XIII’s characters felt very flat to me. They all seemed to convey a single emotion or vibe through 95+% of the games. Lightning was the quiet, stoic type. Sazh was the comedy relief. Vanille was the relentless optimism. Snow was the upbeat arrogance. Hope was sad and worried. Fang was adventurous.
They all felt so one note, so paper thin, that most of them became rather obnoxious through the story, though that’s also due in no small part to how terrible the dialog was most of the time, which is something I really hope Square Enix can work on.
You couple these issues with a story that led you down one single path for the first 20+ hours, only to open up in to a world that was… Okay, I guess, and you’re left with an experience that feels incredibly stilted.
Still, the worst part to me, and it’s my same issue with Final Fantasy XV, is that battling in those games simply isn’t fun. For XIII, you had to paradigm shift, but mostly you were just mashing a single button to line up your characters attacks or healing spells. It felt mindless in a way that I’ve never seen a final fantasy game play before, and the fact that the only real player engagement came in either boss battles or from simply switching characters jobs really put up a wall between the player and what was happening on screen.
For XV, that wall wasn’t quite as bad, as you had to run around and attack manually, but a vast majority of battles simply played out as mindless hacking and slashing, teleporting to safety, then teleporting back in for more mindless hacking and slashing. Summons, one of the coolest parts of any FF game, are more or less relegated to special events, and the fact that magic can hurt your own party becomes a huge disincentive to even bother, further limiting player agency.
There was just something off about a rich brat and his three bros rolling around in an expensive car, only to get out and kick the crap out of some animals or monsters or whatever, not to mention rolling in to a new area, only to check the map and find a bunch of unappealing fetch quest crap to do. Oh, I have to find this item, do this thing for this person, run around until I find this and then wow… I’m having fun?
I get it, RPGs are more or less built this way, but the game should make you WANT to do those things. It should make you want to explore the world, battle monsters, level up, get stronger, find new things, learn new spells, find out what happens in the story and none of XV made me want to do any of this because the core gameplay, the story, the characters and most of what there was to do in the game just felt so boring.
All of this is a long way of saying that while I certainly wish Mr. Tabata the best and I certainly begrudge no one at all for enjoying the XIII series or XV, I’m really hoping Square Enix can push forward on XVI and find a newer, better direction in terms of gameplay, character design and storytelling.
I don’t need Final Fantasy to be a Witcher or Dragon Age clone. In fact, I’d almost rather they go back to turn-based and find fun and compelling ways to innovate on that, like Lost Odyssey did with the timed strikes and the ring system, only take all to the next level. But in terms of storytelling and how characters are crafted? Yeah, they could really stand to learn a lot from newer RPGs and other types of games in general. Stuff like Uncharted, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2, Tomb Raider… Which Square Enix publishes, so maybe it might be time to hand the reigns to Crystal Dynamics for FF?
I believe the director of FF XIV will be handling Final Fantasy now, and while I haven’t played XIV, I’ve heard great things. Here’s hoping this series can finally return to prominence, modernize where it needs to, and overall just put out a game that’s really fun to play, from story to battling. Oh, and maybe try and put a new game out in the next few years? It’s already been two years since XV released.