Final Fantasy XIII-2

[Celes Chere]

It doesn't say he's a playable character, but I could personally care less whether he was or not. I'm with Tiff on the "I like Snow" stance. I mean, he had his annoying moments when he was talking like "I'MAHERO" and "SERAH", but other than that he was fine.

The only time he really annoyed me was in the very beginning of the game, after that I didn't see anything wrong with him. It's kind of how it was for Hope, too. xD

 

[Marle]

Personal opinion; he's just not a character I liked. I won't back it up because I can't. The things about his character others like, I didn't. So we'd just go in circles. To each their own.

In all seriousness, I know he has to make an appearance; I'm not that daft. I don't have to like it, though.

 

[Tifabelle]

The other thing I was thinking is maybe he appears in flashbacks. Although if we see the rest of NORA, I can't imagine Snow not being still working with them. hmmm.... not sure.

I always liked Hope. But that could be because he's 14 and my little heart loves the little bb ;.;

Personal opinion; he's just not a character I liked. I won't back it up because I can't. The things about his character others like, I didn't. So we'd just go in circles. To each their own.

Oh you can hate him all you want. I didn't mean anything negative. I'm not about to defend Snow as being a great character or anything like that. I just mean, even characters we hate sometimes have to show up again XD

For me, I hate Cait Sith. But if there were to be a sequel, I would still expect him to show up. And if he didn't, I'd probably be upset. Even though I hate him! XD

 

[Marle]

Yep, that's cool. I mainly don't want too much Snow because I want to see what they'll make of Serah minus his character. I did expect he'd be in the game, albeit minorly. I found my dislike of Serah in the original game rooted to Snow, so I think I'd like her a lot more if her character wasn't as integrated in him as much. Like, more about her and Lightning's relationship or something instead of all this corny romance business (my opinion, again). I feel like, solo, she'd be so much cooler. More potential.

Sort of like how Tifa would also be more epic if they did a game based on her with little amounts of Cloud.

It's funny because, with Vanille, I disliked her character up until the relationship between herself and Fang was shown. Then I loved her. Go figure. I'm strange this way.

 

[ForceStealer]

I'd like to point out that I don't think Snow is a bad character, I dislike him. The difference being one is failure of acting/writing, and one is me accepting his character and then choosing to dislike it. (Actually I think his voice actor did a very good job.) And like Tenny said, some of what his character goes through makes sense such as him becoming disenfranchised once his "dash blindly forward" strategy stops working. I just find him annoying.

Hope I dislike on a few more levels (though, again, not through any fault of his voice actor, really), as I couldn't put myself in his place, but we've had that discussion before

 

[Glaurung]

The other thing I was thinking is maybe he appears in flashbacks. Although if we see the rest of NORA, I can't imagine Snow not being still working with them. hmmm.... not sure.

Spoiler: My crack theory about what happens

Snow was with NORA and the rest of the village fightning monsters, but the shots he shows up were cut out of the trailer. Noel appears, has a brief talk with everyone, especially Serah, and tells them about the portals spewing monsters and how they have to fix them.

Snow agrees on letting Serah go through that portal with Noel to fix the anomaly. They go, the demo gameplay ensues and, after they defeat Atlas, they get a special artifact that they use to return home and close the portal.

Then the scene we saw in the trailer, at the beach, during day (and not night, like during the attack), on which Serah asks Noel what does he want, to which he answers "A future where everyone lives" (notice the strange thing he has floating on his hand, like a dark crystal or something).

And then the rest of the game happens. Sorry, I have no more imagination today

But take it as it is, a crack theory

 

[OneWingedDemon]

Not really. Desmond, for one thing, who has almost no personality.

Bitch, sit down!
At least Desmond has more personality than...the entire FF13 cast put together. It just so happens that the others around him are much, much better.

 

[ForceStealer]

That statement isn't even kind of defensible. Desmond literally does nothing. He probably beats Serah, but that's about it. He's a poor man's Nathan Drake.

 

[OneWingedDemon]

It was meant to be a hyperbolic statement, clearly.
Untwist your panties

But I’d like to mention that running from point A to point B does not necessarily = great characterization. This is why Lightning et al can save the world and still be lameass, uninspired caricatures.


/fuck this formatting

 

[Tennyo]

How does running from point A to point B have anything to do with characterization?

 

[Celes Chere]

That statement isn't even kind of defensible. Desmond literally does nothing.

Wassa-matta-you, Forcie? :c

Bitch, sit down!

I agree with you here. xD Meaning, I think Desmond does have a personality. He's a hilarious character with a genuine heart, what's wrong with that? ;n; And he doesn't do NOTHING. True he is just sitting around in the Animus, but he still has to move around and do shit too. Did you forget the entire ending of teh game or what. OAO Sometimes you *do* have to leave the Animus and do shizz.... so I wouldn't say he does nothing.

AND HE WAS A BARTENDER AND BARTENDERS ARE SEXY SO THERE

 

[Kobato]

Since Snow is going to be in XIII-2 now, I'm hoping for more Lighting smashing Snow moments.





Oh epic.

 

[ForceStealer]

Nothing new here, but here you go anyway:

Final Fantasy XIII-2 had its playable debut at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week -- and as director Motomu Toriyama commented to Famitsu magazine, the results seemed to mark a change of direction for the series. "I suppose the keyword here is 'a prayer for rebirth,'" he said. "XIII-2 begins at the point when Cocoon has collapsed. I want to portray the world rebuilding in a very serious way. The base story is already covered in the previous game, but we're taking a new approach this time -- a story that tackles a more universal sort of riddle. A lot of people commented that FFXIII had too much jargon, but we're cleaning all that up with this game."
One thing Toriyama promises XIII-2 won't be is linear. "The previous game was story-driven and people said it was too linear," he said. "This game, on the other hand, is player-driven. The player actively explores the world, and events take place based on his actions. It's made to allow a lot of choices to be made by the player. Compared to XIII, we're using very few prerendered scenes; it's mostly realtime."

"I've gone around the world to promote the game, so I've been hearing a lot of different opinions," added producer Yoshinori Kitase. "I want to pay attention to all of them, and while it's not suddenly going to be an open-world game or anything, I want this to be a better game while retaining the feel of FFXIII."

What's new with XIII-2, then? Among other things, the ability to recruit monsters for your party. "That's so gamers can put together roles for their party in a more strategic manner," said Toriyama. "Compared to the main characters, it's a lot more obvious what unique traits each monster has, so inserting them into your party lets you create a more unique arrangement for your adventure."

That's not all, either. "It takes around 40 hours to finish XIII-2's story," Kitase noted, "but you'll be able to replay the game in a new sort of way, allowing you to enjoy it many times over. This will be a different system from New Game +. We'll also be upping the number of minigames. The linearity of XIII meant that there weren't a lot of extra features like that, but we're really putting a lot of different stuff into this one. It'll mark a return to the sort of vast mix of gameplay seen in previous FFs."

FFXIII-2 will likely see its next playable run at the Tokyo Game Show in September.

It's the most sense I've heard Kitase speak in a long time. We'll see though. I think what's most impressive about it is that he's responding to all these criticisms even though XIII was a commercial success. It's encouraging that a game didn't have to absolutely bomb for them to at least look at complaints.

 

[Alex Strife]

You know? FFVII had a lot of "cutscenes" even if they used the game engine. A lot of them, but that didn't stop the game from feeling awesome. "Not having prerendered scenes" is not the important part here, I believe... we'll see, but I'm not convinced with the road they're taking here.

 

[ForceStealer]

Yeah I think people overreact about pre-rendered cutscenes. I rather like them, myself. If a game has too many cutscenes, it has too many cutscenes, it doesn't matter when they're rendered.

 

[Tetsujin]

Tbh though, pre-rendered cutscenes become more and more unnecessary with the way graphics look nowadays. And it just kinda breaks the flow and immersion I think.
Back then it was pretty much necessary because it's the only way to show character models that detailed and other crazy shit. Today you can do a lot of stuff using the in-game engine.

On the other hand, Square-Enix knows how to do their CGI stuff and it's pure eye candy in HD and I don't really wanna miss that either so I'm kinda torn. =/

 

[OneWingedDemon]

"The previous game was story-driven and people said it was too linear,"

I don't get this. Oh wait, I do, I just fucking hate that they're pulling this again. That's not what your gamers said, SE. You're just using terms like"story-driven" and "player driven" to basically tell us nothing.

Thirteen wasn't a creative failure because it was story-driven. FFs by their nature are story and character-driven -- they're RPGs. That's what they are supposed to be.

This is nothing but them playing with words and adding descriptors that are different (with no real meaning if you really stop to question what the fuck they are saying) in order to make the two sound different.

"Oh, well our previous game was story-driven, but this one is player driven. See? DIFFERENT."

Ja. Ok.
No, the problen with FF13 was that for 20 fucking hrs you were runnin around not knowing the motivations of your characters or what the fuck was going on or why they were doing what they were doing. Everyone was just doing stuff in HD, but you knew nothing about them and therefore DID NOT CARE. On top of this confusion you had the ridiculous terms like Fal'Cie and Cieth or whateverthehell, because for some reason they assumed that the player was going to be immersed if he needed to check a dictionary every 5 seconds to find out what's what.

Add to that bland uninspired characters. Out of a party of 6 you got maybe one decent character -- that's not good mind you. Just OK. Oh, and then a distinct lack of villains.

So no, don't fucking insult your gamers. It wasn't that it was story-driven and therefore people thought it was linear. Fucks sake, typical behavior from SE: blame their gamers for NOT GETTING THEIR AWESOMENESS. The fact that they are even talking about how much they are "listenign" to criticim shows exactly how shitty their 1st was. So why pretend otherwise? Are you not the company offering shit for free because your game sucked dickballs so much? Come on.

I want this to be a better game while retaining the feel of FFXIII."

Not really an achievement

/rant

Sorry, that pissed me off. This game is so unappealing to me, that it's now fun to follow just because of the ridiculous circus that it's become. It's like a train wreck. I wonder how many different ways they can repackage their failures and reword the same story to sell it back for a quick cash grab close to holiday season in 2012.

Yeah I think people overreact about pre-rendered cutscenes.

I don't think it's an overreaction to expect a game to allow me to interact beyond making the objective of the game to get to the next cutscene where I just sit and watch teh pretty. Having them is fine...having them make up over 50% of your game is not.

 

[ForceStealer]

I'm not sure that's what he meant by that... He was saying that nothing drove the game except the story in XIII and people didn't like it. He didn't say they didn't like it because they didn't get it.

 

[Tennyo]

Yeah, by story driven Kitase was referring to how in FFXIII you could basically only go in a straight line almost the entire game, just following the plot. For XIII-2, they are promising us the ability to be able to go where we want, when we want, for whatever reason we want to, and it could change what happens in the plot by making these choices. THAT'S what he means by player driven.

See, they ARE different.

 

[ForceStealer]

I don't think it's an overreaction to expect a game to allow me to interact beyond making the objective of the game to get to the next cutscene where I just sit and watch teh pretty. Having them is fine...having them make up over 50% of your game is not.

Isn't that what I said? I said too many cutscenes is too many cutscenes regardless of how they are rendered. I think people sometimes overreact that a scene is excessive for the sole reason that its prerendered.

 

[ForceStealer]

Hm....interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But I haven't read the novella, perhaps I should.

 

[Tifabelle]

A novelist writing a game script, huh? Well, we'll see how that goes. Could be good, could be bad.

Hm....interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But I haven't read the novella, perhaps I should.

I need to do that too. But keep in mind too that it's a translated novella. The story and idea will probably be the same, but some of the finer points may not translate well.

 

[ForceStealer]

It's odd that Noel, being Pulsian, doesn't have a "[Hometown] Dia Noel" name.

 

[Tetsujin]

I've been thinking for a long time that Nojima should get a break. Can't be good if you have to shit out one FF story after another.

 

[Tifabelle]

It's odd that Noel, being Pulsian, doesn't have a "[Hometown] Dia Noel" name.

Oh yeah. That's true. Maybe it's just an Oerba thing. Or a regional thing... if he's from a different part of Pulse?