Final Fantasy XV (was Versus XIII)

[Lex]

He could have simply said, "Honestly, I just saw it as this group of guys going on this buddy trip adventure, and saw an opportunity to explore that genuine sense of closeness and brotherly love a group of male friends who have known each other for a long time has. We did something somewhat similar but still very different with the all-female cast of FFX-2, and while I don't think we necessarily have to strive to check off a box on every possible combination of cast members -- nor am I attempting to refute that genuine familial love a group of friends of any mix of sex and gender can and do form -- it just happened that this was the vision that took form when we thought about the premise and who the people closest to Noctis would be. They grew into this particular cast and this particular exploration during this particular set of circumstances.

But that was this time. Who can say where we might go from here?"

I made that up as I was typing it. Who wants to tell me Tabata couldn't have prepared a statement just that good if he had actually thought about this question he had to know was coming some time?

Christ, bunch of fucking amateurs, I swear. If they want somebody who can give them PR that doesn't make even their longtime fans get pissed at them, I can do better than whoever the current failure is, and probably for way less money.

I agree with everything you said and I liked the post, but I want to put my hand up and say "me" when you asked "who wants to tell me Tabata couldn't have prepared a statement just that good..." because history has irrefutably shown us that SE is out of touch in almost every respect.

I still like their games, the fact that I didn't hate the XIII trilogy and I love Type-0 is proof of that, but what I'd really like to see - because this is something we've never seen before - is someone like you Tres, who sits down and asks the questions which are simple questions but to which we have no answer. They never answer direct questions and it frustrates the life out of me.

Add your question to the list. Why didn't you say [Tres's statement]? What have you done with the assets you accrued prior to the shift to PS4? Why has development taken this long? Why is the Compilation of FFVII unfinished? What projects were scrapped during the XIV debacle? Why have you stopped adhering to the FF formula that you know for sure is successful? Why are your western fans always an afterthought when they account for more than 60% of your audience?

I would like to see someone corner the people we want the answers from and ask these questions, purely because I have a morbid fascination with what their answers are. And listen - I know we can make educated guesses about some of this stuff, but this is shit they have never and probably will never address. I want to hear what they would say about it. The Nomuras and Tabatas of the business. Answer the fucking questions.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Anyway as far as I'm concerned what you said he should have said is pretty much what he did say. Even you, who object to the way he said it, admit that what he said is true, so I don't know.... I guess I just don't feel that every single piece of art and pop culture I consume has a responsibility to present the world as we wish it was rather than as it is.

I very much agree. I'm just shaking my head at the stupidity of wording like that.

I think that the problem is everyone expects them to justify every move they take.

Guy wanted to put an all-male cast. So? It's their vision. There is no need to justify it and get in trouble because no matter what you say, there's always going to be "that person" who just isn't happy with what you say.

Yes, exactly. It's like all the people who have come off looking like racists and misogynists because of their complaints about Sam Wilson as the new Captain America and the female Thor. Instead of just saying, "I don't care for the current book" or "The new direction just hasn't worked for me," you get all these justifications that are either lies or gross misrepresentations (e.g. "She stole Thor's name"; no, he insisted she carry it as a title while she carries his hammer) -- and that's when people start asking what you're trying to hide.

Especially when you preface that bullshit with "I'm no [racist/misogynist], but ... ."

Damn, Tres. Ever considered a job in PR? That was a million times better than what he said.

Thanks. Yeah, I've applied a couple hundred times for PR and communications coordinator jobs. Waiting to hear back about one now.

The way I see it, the Final Fantasy series is pretty ahead of the curve when it comes to strong female characters in video games. I think it's earned the right to try an all male cast more than most developers that do it have. So it's not worth getting bent out of shape about.

Agreed.

I kinda feel obligated to point out that in the main FF series, there hasn't been one single gender party ever. When it comes to the spin-offs, there's still just as much woman as men as PCs. It's almost like having a single gender party is something new for SE which isn't something a lot of game companies can say. SE has more then demonstrated that they can do good female characters, so I'd only start worrying if this turns into a habit, which it probably won't.

Here too.

I agree with everything you said and I liked the post, but I want to put my hand up and say "me" when you asked "who wants to tell me Tabata couldn't have prepared a statement just that good..." because history has irrefutably shown us that SE is out of touch in almost every respect.

Touché.

I still like their games, the fact that I didn't hate the XIII trilogy and I love Type-0 is proof of that, but what I'd really like to see - because this is something we've never seen before - is someone like you Tres, who sits down and asks the questions which are simple questions but to which we have no answer. They never answer direct questions and it frustrates the life out of me.

Add your question to the list. Why didn't you say [Tres's statement]? What have you done with the assets you accrued prior to the shift to PS4? Why has development taken this long? Why is the Compilation of FFVII unfinished? What projects were scrapped during the XIV debacle? Why have you stopped adhering to the FF formula that you know for sure is successful? Why are your western fans always an afterthought when they account for more than 60% of your audience?

I would like to see someone corner the people we want the answers from and ask these questions, purely because I have a morbid fascination with what their answers are. And listen - I know we can make educated guesses about some of this stuff, but this is shit they have never and probably will never address. I want to hear what they would say about it. The Nomuras and Tabatas of the business. Answer the fucking questions.

God, I'd love that. It will never happen from Japanese media journalism, though. They are way too "don't rock the boat" to do it. Maybe even worse than the shill-quality comic book journalism we have in the U.S.

 

[ForceStealer]

Thanks. Yeah, I've applied a couple hundred times for PR and communications coordinator jobs. Waiting to hear back about one now.

Good luck, man. Seriously, not only was it obviously better than what he said, it also sounded natural and didn't come off like condescending PR-speak. And that's something seemingly all PR people have never seemed to master.

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

I think that the problem is everyone expects them to justify every move they take.

Guy wanted to put an all-male cast. So? It's their vision. There is no need to justify it and get in trouble because no matter what you say, there's always going to be "that person" who just isn't happy with what you say.

Just for the record, I do prefer a mixed party.

Really feels like having the title change to XV put some constraints on the development that were lifted by originally calling it Versus XIII. Nomura wanted to express himself in a way he felt was inappropriate for a flagship FF and now it's officially the real FFXV, it adds expectations we didn't have at first.

Honestly I'm more disappointed that the locales are as tasteless as Scrumpy Jack, just imagine if it was legitimately as beautiful as FFVIII's pre rendered backgrounds but rendered in the HD beauty we get for all these bland fields in XV.

 

[trash panda]

At least that Gladiolus fella has got roughly the same amount of facial hair as me .

I like facial hair.



If the rest of the women who do appear in XV are going to turn out looking like the mechanic chick then I don't want to see anymore women in this game anyway. =\

I'm already really disappointed that there has been no mention of non-human characters. Non humans have always been my favorites...Mog, Nanaki, Quina...I even liked the monsters in XIII-2 better than the actual characters. There better be a playable moogle...there betterfuckingbe!!!

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

I like facial hair.



If the rest of the women who do appear in XV are going to turn out looking like the mechanic chick then I don't want to see anymore women in this game anyway. =\

I'm already really disappointed that there has been no mention of non-human characters. Non humans have always been my favorites...Mog, Nanaki, Quina...I even liked the monsters in XIII-2 better than the actual characters. There better be a playable moogle...there betterfuckingbe!!!

Vivi and Freya were amazing. It's just a shame all this new technology is being thrown at things we could generally see for ourselves in reality or at least in some films. (the monsters are pushing it maybe, but barely)

 

[trash panda]

IX had great character designs and art style. I liked the squat little characters, and Quina is basically my doppelganger; s/he's probably the character that I relate to the most and I have no idea what s/he/it is. XD
(I'm not sure what happened with Kuja and his crotch armor though...no time to draw pants during development I guess.)

I do agree about being presented with things I can see elsewhere. I can appreciate realism in art but I think that in a game I'd prefer to see things that are oh...I don't know...fantastical.

 

[Tetsujin]

Honestly I'm more disappointed that the locales are as tasteless as Scrumpy Jack, just imagine if it was legitimately as beautiful as FFVIII's pre rendered backgrounds but rendered in the HD beauty we get for all these bland fields in XV.

I see nothing bland here.

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

I'd like to try an 'I see your FFXV HD shindig and raise you an x' but that is actually really nice. And I was aware of it. It's just the game itself has shown very little of that and more of

Even the caves looked super generic, at least just compared to the mines you go through after escaping (or hammering) the Zolom.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Although I'm kinda trying to think how naturally occurring stuff can be made more interesting then SE has already made it. You can only really do anything sorta "new" nowadays if the setting isn't anywhere based on the real world...

 

[Ghost X]

Roger Dean had some interesting ideas for fantasy landscapes in his time. Some of the big arched landforms in FFXV seen so far actually reminded me of him. I really don't think the depths have been plumbed too much at all in regard to fantasy landscapes in general (not just in FF). I don't think that was SE's aim with FFXV anyway, seeing as it is, to paraphrase to some effect, "a real world inspired" game. It being based on the real world is probably the least interesting thing for me about this game .

 

[Blade]

To me it's like this:

1. Wide pretty world.
+
2. Nothing to do in it except fight monsters, talk to NPCs who don't DO anything, and mostly do menu-based gymnastics.
=
3. Waste of time.

Hopefully it's nothing like that and actually has a more Legend of Zelda feel at least so you don't feel under pressure, but at the same time have a ton of things to discover and not just random pick-me-up items like Lightning Returns had...

I'd be happier if that grey-haired female dragoon you fight as a boss in one of the early trailers could actually join your party as a guest at least.

I mean yeah, sure, it would throw the sausage fest in to a frenzied uproar... but change is nice once in a while.

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

downloading episode duscae atm, pretty hype.

 

[Fangu]

I know topic has moved on, but:

Guy wanted to put an all-male cast. So? It's their vision.

This reminds me of every person defending women (only) wearing skimpy armours. "But they're so confident they don't need armour! It's just empowering! It's just stylized fantasy anyway, you all won't be happy until they're wearing giant burkas! Stop censoring the artistic vision!"

X)

And FFXV was originally a spin-off, wasn't it? Versus, it was.

Exactly. Versus was made to balance out XIII. But of course they can't remind people of this because it's basically reminding anyone that they fucked up and decided to launch an old game as the new installment of their main series.

tbh, I was pleased to learn Cid is a woman, but I nearly choked when I saw her in the demo. I was watching a stream when I saw it and I couldn't hide my disappointment in the chat. To my surprise, people in there agreed with me on a large scale. The guys there expressed being pleased by the eye candy, but not so much they wouldn't rather prefer realistic, representable female characters instead. If you want boobs, watch porn. It's that simple.

Which made my day. It gave me hope. And then I start wondering who are these guys SE claim to be their target audience? Everybody loves Fang. Why couldn't we have more Fang instead?

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Which made my day. It gave me hope. And then I start wondering who are these guys SE claim to be their target audience? Everybody loves Fang. Why couldn't we have more Fang instead?

Eh... I loved her visual design, but her character? Totally out of control and good example of what happens when emotion is put before reason. She's the very definition of a loose cannon. The only reason she doesn't become Ragnarok again as soon as she wakes up is because she's conveniently lost her memory. And she's lucky enough to fall in with a group of people who can talk her down (actually, Fang's scenes were the most forced to me as far as character development went). I just feel there could have been so much more done with her if she'd been an antagonist the whole way through...

 

[Fangu]

What I meant by 'everybody loves Fang' is - she seems to be appreciated by players regardless of gender. No character will appeal to _everyone_.

 

[Roger]

Eh... I loved her visual design, but her character? Totally out of control and good example of what happens when emotion is put before reason. She's the very definition of a loose cannon. The only reason she doesn't become Ragnarok again as soon as she wakes up is because she's conveniently lost her memory. And she's lucky enough to fall in with a group of people who can talk her down (actually, Fang's scenes were the most forced to me as far as character development went). I just feel there could have been so much more done with her if she'd been an antagonist the whole way through...

She can't become Ragnarok properly without Vanille anyway. Just as normal l'Cie we did better damage then Fang!Ragnarok. And the only scene with Fang I felt was really forced was her pre-Eidolon fight scene. But even that wasn't bad as Snow and Hope in Palumpolum, where Snow kept the exactly right thing to keep pissing Hope off further. Or Hope's own pre-Eidolon fight scene where he kept depressed out of nowhere because the writers forgot to give him Alexander at the end of those Hope/Snow scenes.

Other then that Fang just had an edge to her that Lightning could only pretend too.

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

Mm, not sure if I like this game. I thought Type-0 would be a toned down XV, but it seems like XV plays a whole lot more like a weaker Type-0. I shudder to think of the final game and it seems the framerate shudders as well. 'Uncharted with Swords' probably isn't a wholly inaccurate generalization.

First and foremost, I was disproved in a lot of ways I didn't expect to be. You're all right. It's a beautiful game aesthetically. I could get drawn into realistic shed debris being stacked up against rocks in a way the grimy atmosphere of FF7's Midgar pulled me along, but there were crystals and bizarre rock formations all over too. There's a lack of unity and it leaves me wondering who'd even attempt building stuff with a Behemoth rampaging around the area, though perhaps Deadeye leaves less about them not finishing it to the imagination...

The Behemoth stealth section was extremely tense. Definitely blurred the line between cinematic and input when I had to guide myself around it's rear in the mist, under the threat of it pulverizing me at a moment's notice. But boy does it blur more than just lines, I want to turn off depth of field. The clipping and aliasing in this game borders on Gran Turismo 5 levels of terribad.

I know I might be alone on this one but I really don't like Noctis' current outfit... Or any of their outfits for that matter, I miss his Versus one with the cloak. Gave him a sense of mystery and self sufficiency you don't see in his 'boy next door' clothes.

All in all it really doesn't feel like FF. FF: action rpg edition I can get behind... FF: Uncharted edition will have to do some more legwork to win me over. I'm not sure I want to chase behind Noctis running out of sprint fuel every five seconds.

It's all opinion. I'll probably play the full game. So, does it have redeeming qualities? Easily. I'm in no rush to amend my mishap in letting that Behemoth do me in since I want to savor the limited time I have with FFXV before the full game.

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

So, then... I suppose my opinion of it right now is neither great or poor, it's simply something I want to see a lot more of. We need the final game, it could be a drastic improvement or even just different.

I was hype for eight... Nine? Years. I wonder how close this product is to Nomura's originally intended target?

 

[Hisako]

My current standard I hold for a Final Fantasy game is that as long as the characters are decently-written I couldn't give a two shits about their gender.
Also 100% agreeing on the narrative tone of the broforce road-trip dynamic - the creators already keyed in on that being a core theme. It could be drastically different if it wasn't all-male.

For better or worse? Certainly more debatable. Could end up being tropey as fuck. That said, definitely hoping the overall cast will be a good mix.

Re: Cindy, I loathe her design simply because visually it looks so out of place for the sake of tits (compared to everything else in the setting we've seen so far). Skimpy outfits in a vacuum don't inherently annoy me - I enjoy being a puerile juvenile pig as much as the next puerile juvenile pig would.

The problem is when pretty much everyone else we've seen is so well-dressed and the visual theming is so low-key, Cindy sticks out like a bloody sore thumb. She looks like the character designers tried to draw what they thought in their heads, a trip through 'murica would look like.

tl;dr I don't care massively for the "realistic representation" of people and characters in videogames because I feel it's a problem that will sort itself out over time as a natural process. But like any other element of design, expression of suggestiveness, sexuality and what-have-you shouldn't ever be at the expense of consistency. And so far, Cindy feels inconsistent with the overarching visual design.

actual tl;dr jesus harold christ just give Cindy a goddamn proper undershirt and it'd already look miles better

 

[Clement Rage]

tbh, I was pleased to learn Cid is a woman, but I nearly choked when I saw her in the demo. I was watching a stream when I saw it and I couldn't hide my disappointment in the chat. To my surprise, people in there agreed with me on a large scale. The guys there expressed being pleased by the eye candy, but not so much they wouldn't rather prefer realistic, representable female characters instead. If you want boobs, watch porn. It's that simple.

Which made my day. It gave me hope. And then I start wondering who are these guys SE claim to be their target audience? Everybody loves Fang. Why couldn't we have more Fang instead?
__________________

And that's the first time you've ever encountered that reaction? That's a very common view across gaming/comics, etc, and not just from the women. I generally find excessive fan service annoying when I'm watching something for the plot.

Fang's costume is stupid too.

I've been playing the Resident Evils lately, and have been consistently impressed with their women. They usually dress fairly sensibly, are just as or more capable than the guys, and in six full installments and several spinoffs, no romantic relationships blossomed because they were far too concerned about the goddamned zombie apocalypse. The closest we get is Leon and Ada, and she very much has her own goals/enjoys trolling him.

On the demo, I'm neutral, although I liked how much personality the Behemoth had (it hunts, it rubs against trees, it gets annoyed when people try to murder it in its sleep.

 

[Fangu]

tl;dr I don't care massively for the "realistic representation" of people and characters in videogames because I feel it's a problem that will sort itself out over time as a natural process.

Uh-huh

Sorry, almost couldn't hear you over the sound of historians giggling there

 

[Blade]

The problem is when pretty much everyone else we've seen is so well-dressed and the visual theming is so low-key, Cindy sticks out like a bloody sore thumb. She looks like the character designers tried to draw what they thought in their heads, a trip through 'murica would look like.

For what it's worth, "Cidney" is essentially a country bumpkin and Noctis and co are city slickers!

 

[Dragonslayer Ornstein]

How would Fang being in XV make any sense and wouldn't it be more of a creative workout for them to make some actual OC for the game? (Though I'd probably prefer her too.)

 

[Blade]

^Lightning going FF-jumping like Gilgamesh makes more sense due to her connection with the gods, imho.