For a few weeks now my friend has gone on and on about how he wants FFXIII, and every time he brought it up I was just kind of mleh about it. Last night I finally got around to watching the trailer.
Words fail.
I’ve defended the PS3 here in the past because the people here are naive, simplistic, and quick to generalize when it comes to discussions about consoles. Now, I actually have a solid reason to buy one myself.
It’s not just that the graphics are amazing or that the gameplay looked great. Every element cohered to form such a beautifully polished product, it blows the fucking mind.
When I think of recent consoles, I think of a bunch of decent systems with a few mediocre games and a whole bunch of shit. Nothing has taken it to the next level to the extent that FFVII did. Nothing has even come close.
By the looks of it, XIII might. I’m calling it now. I don’t think I have ever been this hyped about a game. Ever. Especially from a two minute clip, and especially from a recent Final Fantasy. They haven’t been so great lately.
I’d also like to be one of the first to say, before millions of dronish fanboys ruin it for me, the protagonist is gorgeous. I mean I haven’t felt this way about pixels in a long time. She’s badass too, and I don’t mean gaudy-underwhelming-laura-croft girl-badass either. I mean she would actually scare me in a real fight. She reminds me of Lilu from The Fifth Element.
Have you seen the trailers for White Knight Story or Assassin’s Creed? That shit is nice looking too, maybe not quite as much for the visuals, but the game play looks amazing. Oh, and plus there’s that game where you play as the US President piloting a mech.
The reason I’m excited for FFXIII is that “seems interesting” is actually a big gash below what I already see it as. Halo “seemed interesting.” This is another thing entirely.
Yeah sorry, I’m not really impressed by pretty pre-rendered graphics and big-titted harlots with sub-machine swords anymore. The gameplay and setting of Assassin’s Creed is what piques my interest, and I’ve really been reserving my outright orgasming for quirky concept games the past few months.
Big-titted? Go watch the trailer. She’s a flat-chested tomboy. The gameplay is one of the things that impressed me most about this, and you know I’m a gameplay whore. If it’s real-time and as fast as it showed in the video, this will be one of the better games released in years.
I’m also going to point out that the graphics here are the difference between FFVI and FFVII. I haven’t seen a leap this big in a very long time. It’s not just the realism, it’s the speed and the FPS and the level of detail, and the good ideas behind it’s designs.
Trust me, I can recognize the difference between formula and innovation. This is innovation. Not complete innovation, but enough for it to be a deal-breaker in my console choice.
My memory is a little fuzzy, I watched the trailer ages ago. So I apologize about misjudging the size of her breasts, and in fact I remember getting confused as to her gender now when I first watched it.
Fuck you, Squall.
I honestly can’t tell what the gameplay is going to be like. If it’s going to be real-time with a menu interface I’m, well, rather dissapointed. More likely it’ll be “real time” in the way that KOTOR was real time, namely that everything looks cinematic but you just queue up commands when you pause the game. There simply isn’t enough to go on to know what the gameplay is going to be like, so right now all that we know is that it’s pretty and somewhat futuristic, which doesn’t really excite me at all.
And like I said, chances are that this isn’t in-game footage anyway, but pre-rendered. SE has a habit of that, and if I recall correctly, the White Engine that FFXIII runs on wasn’t yet completed when they showed this trailer. That doesn’t mean that this couldn’t possibly be in-game footage, I’m just rather skeptical about it.
The fight scenes I saw were in game, numbers popping out of enemies and everything. My biggest fear is also that it’ll be menu-based, but by the looks of it there’s at least a chance that it won’t.
The rest of the cinematic is impressive enough. Getting people to believe that this is what the game will look like sure as hell is worth obscuring 10 seconds of footage with numbers and a fake GUI.
From that point of view yes, but I don’t think there’s going to be any major design changes from the trailer other than the battle system, and even that should be at least somewhat representative of the end product.
Plus look at FFXII. SE is getting their fans used to real time. RPGs are no longer about D&D style menu-based decision-making, especially with the power of the new consoles.
Personally I’m more worried about difficulty than style, and it’s very hard to make a menu-based game hard, and SE wouldn’t do it anyway because their audience can’t handle it. That’s why I’m so impressed by the scenery, I don’t have a lot to look forward to in terms of gameplay unless it’s real time and fun in some quirky way, but even if it isn’t, I still have a reason to buy the game. It’s a whole product, and you don’t often see that.
I’m sure they’ll be aiming for a real-time combat system of sorts, the problem is that all info on that combat system is from 10 seconds of, in all likelihood fake footage. I mean, hell, I wouldn’t even mind a KOTOR-esque system, I just don’t see a reason to get excited over it with the complete abscence of concrete info.
I don’t really know shit about FFXII because it’s only out here in like, February, and I’ve keep keeping myself in an information drought about it. I hear it’s like some hybrid mix of FFXI and KOTOR, which sounds decent enough.
The rest of the stuff is just stylistic preferences, I’m just not that interested in high-tech fantasy orgasming, and prefer steampunk and grit. Maybe it’ll interest me with the next trailer, but for now it just looks like a high-res version of PSO.
It’s stylistically different from PSO. It actually <i>looks like</i> FFVII. It has <i>trains</i>. This is why I’m giddy. It looks more like a combination of VII and X to me, with better gameplay than both combined and a vast, diverse world that will suck me in and ruin my fucking life. Maybe you’ve been more exposed to worlds like that than I have, but I am impressed.
Yeah actually that’s probably it. I’ve seen a lot of these souped-up high tech fantasy worlds, and I generally enjoy them, but it’s just not the kind of stuff I’m into. On the other hand, Lost Odyssey gets my 'nads moving simply because the concept sounds cool and the world has a surprisingly unique look. Or looks, I guess the world changes as time passes, whatever.
I’ll probably get an X360 when it comes out because I am weak, and that means I can play Trusty Bell, Assassin’s Creed and Dead Rising. The PS3 has yet to tempt me with anything I really want, rather than stuff I feel obligated to play.
I know what you mean. There are a lot of games out there that I’d play, maybe, if someone else bought them for me, but so few that I truly want.
I’m not gonna lie, the PS3 has nothing beyond this that I want. The thing is, the Wii and 360 have even less. Times are tough for gamers when console wars are won by game-counts of one or two.
