Let's Talk About... Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy VII (AKA Sir Long Time Coming and Sir Hype Train)

So... let's talk a bit about Nomura.

 I've made my feeling about the man clear before. However, they have changed.

 Since playing 358/2 Days, I've mellowed on the guy. What he needs is someone to keep an eye on him and put him under some kind of restraint.

 And him being the director of Final Fantasy VII Remake makes me fear that Square Enix hasn't got the good sense to keep him on a leash.

 On the other hand, considering that the designs and the story are already in place, this may just be them using the name recognition he has to push Final Fantasy VII, and it does look good as he worked on the original game.

 It would be hard to fuck this up.

 Very hard indeed.

 I'm hoping that this will be a good experience for him to actually figure out what he needs to do to get a game out in a timely manner, as both Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy XV have taken so long that it's been a running joke between Doug and me that they would never be released. In fact, Doug still maintains that Kingdom Hearts 3 won't be released.

 Now, since the Final Fantasy VII Remake is pretty self explanatory (though if they remove the cross-dressing, there will be hell to pay) I thought I'd talk about the Kingdom Hearts 3 trailer that was shown at E3.

 The first thing that really caught my attention was- well, it was that if you were following straight on from KH2, you would be immensely confused as to who the hell to two chess playing people were.

 That's a big problem.

 I let it go for Assassin's Creed, because each number represented a different playable protagonist (until they abandoned numbers all together), but Kingdom Hearts... no. It doesn't really work to have so much of your plot in side games.

 -sigh-

 The second thing is that it doesn't half remind me of Super Mario Sunshine.

 Yeah, I am fully aware of how weird that sounds, but I'm standing by it.

 It's something about the colours, the shown settings, some of the heartless that were featured... (and I see you there, big armoured dudes. I hate you more then life itself. ... But less than the Leechgrave)

 Also, the roller coaster that showed up.

 That really clinched it.

 Yoshi wouldn't look out of place if he showed up, I swear.

 And I mean that literally, not in the 'the game has such a screwed up aesthetic due to the poor execution of the premise that meant we got Johnny Depp and Donald Duck fighting side by side unchanged' sense you might have assumed. Which would be a fair assumption, but not what I meant.

 I just can't shake it now it's occurred to me. This game looks like Super Mario Sunshine.

 The others didn't, not even the first one. The one you'd think would since the sea is involved more in that game.

 That realisation hasn't made me any more or less excited for the game, I'm largely over Kingdom Hearts as a concept since the plot got ridiculous and overly convoluted.

 Right now what I really want is a VII/XIII crossover.

 Also, a Final Fantasy VIII sequel and reboot.

 KTHNX.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantaxy XV (AKA Sir Didn't Appear at E3 Again)

 Okay, we knew that it wasn't going to be at E3 this year, but it's still funny.

 It will be at GamesCom, so I'll be keeping an eye out for it there.

 So, Final Fantasy XV... I haven't spoken about this game since January, and since then, I've calmed down a lot.

 The fact that the four playable characters are all dudes has become much less distasteful.

 Largely because, to be completely honest, I was looking for things to complain about due to my absolute derision for Tetsuya Nomura (and we'll talk more about him tomorrow when I've finally watched the Kingdom Hearts III trailer and have had a gander at the trailer for the remake of Final Fantasy VII, because I have thoughts on that as well).

 It's not just that, though, with time and more information it's become clear to me that the all male playable cast of XV isn't there for the benefit of GamerGaiz (that's what Cindy is for), it's there to for benefit of Fujoshis.

 If you aren't familiar with the term, it's a Japanese word that means 'rotten woman' and is applied to girls and women who are really into yaoi.

 Oh yes. This isn't a story about dudebros, this is a story about yaoi archetypes.

 Which has made me a lot happier with the whole concept.

 Hell, I'm embracing it now. I love me some homosexual subtext and this looks to have it in spades.

 So, I went from only caring out of spite to full blown support.

 Partially because of this:

 They've already done this the other way around, and with the resounding success they had with Lightning (the sole reason that there have been three XIII games, and they're thinking of giving her a cameo in XIV to help boost sales), I don't see them having any fears in the future about more female led games, or games with a solely female party.

 (Though all the whining about XV is going to backfire like all hell the next time they do that.)

 There's also the fact that XV is the last of the Nova Fabula Crystalis games to be finished and released, which means that this game, the game with the solely male party, was intended to be a side show for Lightning and the story about her, the lesbians, the kid attempting to avenge his mother, the man attempting to save his son, and Lightning and Snow wanting to save her sister.

 Noctis is Lightning's sidekick.

 Never forget that.

 I think at this point I'm actually starting to look forward to XV, which has shocked me more than anyone, but I think after playing some of 358/2 Days and actually rather liking the story (but not the game play, ugh), I have reason to think that XV may actually be good.

Bah, Kingdom Hearts

In my defence I said I was back on my feet-ish.

 But today I feel as though I need to rant about 358/2 Days some more.

 I'm not going to go into too much detail, since I am planning to do a review for Fission Mailure on the game, but I really need to let off some steam on the most frustrating part of this game for me.

 So many of the monsters, especially anything remotely resembling a boss, take way too long to kill.

 I'm not kidding, the Infernal Engine took forever to kill, the Emerald Serenade takes way too long and doesn't even attack and now I'm up to the Leech Grave and it's so demoralising knowing how long it's going to kill.

 I tried using fire magic on it, and it doesn't even seem to be doing anything.

 So I'm just here to wait around until it's done pissing about and then take half a green point at a time while just avoiding the tentaclaws.

 I'm actually avoiding playing because I'm so bored by these needlessly lengthy fights.

 It's not even just bosses, or boss like things, the big armoured enemies take ages to kill too. Something which is just made even worse by the fact that magic point blank refuses to go in anything other than a straight line in front of Roxas or maybe a leisurely curve in the correct direction.

 This game is fundamentally a hack-and-slash, or whack-and-bash since the keyblade clearly doesn't have a cutting edge, and such lengthy fights do not serve that format. Especially when the 'special' magic attacks are so imprecise, take such a weirdly long time to allow you to use them again, and don't appear to do anything to certain bosses.

 Not to mention that the lengthy fights do not necessarily lead into interesting parts of the plot.

 It's so mind numbingly dull, yet at the same time is so bloody frustrating.

 Ugh.

Let's Ramble About... Kingdom Hearts

 I... have a complicated relationship with Kingdom Hearts.

 I don't particularly hate the concept of the series, I like weird mash ups as much as the next person (Captain N needs to comes back as a video game).

 It's just... the execution has been absolutely horrendous.

 If you know me, you know I do not care for Nomura Tetsuya. I think he is a pox on this industry and a canker in Square Enix's design department, and I'm getting the feeling that they're finally realising this.

 At the same time, though, as much as I despise the man, I actually like some of the original characters.

 But then again, there are characters I have some serious problems with.

 Like Xion.

 This rant is entirely because I just bought 358/2 Days (AKA the worst title).

 Look, it was £8. Don't judge me.

 I've heard that Xion is a pretty terrible addition to a game series that is already oversaturated with original characters despite having a large roster of pre-existing characters who the game is sold on, yet have barely any impact on the story.

 I just need to see for myself.

 I need to see first hand how bad this game really is and how Sue-ish Xion really is.

 For science.

 And that is a real problem with Kingdom Hearts, by the way.

 It's meant to be Final Fantasy meets Disney, yet we rarely see any non-Nomura or Nomura adjacent characters, and even those who are there aren't at all important to the narrative.

 Did we really buy this game to have Cloud and Squall sit quietly in corners doing nothing until the occasional cutscene happens?

 Why don't the Square characters have more of an impact?

 Why isn't Organisation XIII made up of Final Fantasy villains? After a first game with a council of Disney Villains, it would have been perfect!

 Hell, why isn't there more crossover between Disney properties?

 Why can't I have Captain Jack Sparrow stuck on an island being brought food and random trinkets by Ariel?

 Where's my Baloo being completely baffled by Little John wearing clothes?

 Where is the Shere Khan and Scar teaming up to mutually beneficial ends?

 Why isn't there a story arc where Clayton from Tarzan and Gaston from Beauty and the Beast are decimating the population of a forested area together?

 Actually, on that note, where the hell is Gaston?!

 Why have Organisation XIII want to make Heartless Beast when Gaston, who is the most self-centred being in the shared universe, is around to make a far more terrifying one?

 This series is just a string of missed opportunities and terrible design decisions. It makes me mad.

 This is one of those ideas that sounds ridiculous, but works. Yet the execution is the biggest problem.

 It's also set to just get even worse.

 With the inclusion of Marvel properties we're going to get even more Disney owned characters filling up the game, to go with the original characters who are oversaturating it, drowning out half the reason we came to the game in the first place.

 If I wanted to play a game with just Disney characters, I'd play Disney Infinity.

 Square is just screwing itself over.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XV (AKA Sir Bound To End Up As An Advert For Seatbelt Safety)

 I know it's an Eight day, but I only got an hour's sleep and I am way too tired to give Part Seventy Nine the attention it deserves right now.

 So instead of rushing a post I've been looking forward to writing for about a week, I'm going to post it up tomorrow and give you some thoughts on the Bosses & Towns gameplay trailer to tide you over.

 First of all, this trailer gives me the impression that they took elements of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy XII and just smashed them together. Square likes to abuse Norse myth almost as much as Wagner and they like their Shakespeare too.

 Also, Insomnia?

 There's a place called Insomnia?

 Insomnia?

 Square, did you really just put a character named Night into a city called Sleepless?

 I'm not sure even thematic connection could make me accept such a silly naming scheme.

 Although my current lack of sympathy is because I'm currently suffering from insomnia.

 So far I don't much care for this little gang of four they've got going on. None of them pique my interest outside of my distaste for Noctis, who is already presenting as an annoying pissant.

 I am mildly impressed that they all have red soled shoes though, I didn't know Laboutin did that for men's shoes too.

 I think the thing that stood out to me the most was that Noctis is a moron who is inevitably going to die in a road traffic accident because he never wears a seatbelt.

 In my country, you are required to wear a seatbelt by law. If this was taking place in Britain, the evil empire wouldn't have to worry about him because he'd be too busy either fighting monsters to earn money to pay off his fines, or being dead.

 If they thought a seatbelt would make him look less cool, they were wrong, sitting in the passenger side of your best friend's ride never makes you look cool it makes you a scrub. This was established in 1999 by the scholars collectively known as TLC.

 Either way, he's getting no love from me.

 Speaking of no love, we were introduced to Cindy in this trailer.

 She's a mechanic in short shorts, knee high boots, a midriff exposing top and has her boobs hanging out.

 So, when the GamerGaiz tell you that men are just as objectified in video games, you can point to Cindy and then point to the four fully dressed main male characters who have one exposed chest and midriff between them, and it's on the male power fantasy character, and remind them that they're being stupid.

 I see Nomura has been Nomura-ing things up good and proper again.

 Oh, and the end of the trailer says 'In Development', it's supposed to come out this Spring. That's what they said.

 I am not inclined to believe them.

Let's Play: Final Fantasy VIII - Part Seventy Seven

 Part Seventy Six

 Masterpost

 Day Thirty Three: It Made the Kessel Run in Less Than Twelve Parsecs

 I love to show off how little Nina has levelled in the game so far.

 So here's another example of this.

 This is what happens when you remove a character from the game for long periods, they end up severely under levelled.

 Game development tip: Don't do that.

 So, you're probably wondering if I tried to take on the Ultima Weapon again.

 I did.

 I lost.

 I hate that fight, it's the most unfair battle that I've ever faced in a video game and the awful battle system prevents you from seeing what you're doing about thirty per cent of the time and has you hurriedly cycling through menus.

 It causes constant pressure and that just isn't fun, because that's not what I signed up for.

 If I wanted constant pressure and the perpetual threat of insta-death, I'd play Five Nights at Freddie's 2.

 Additionally, the nearest save point is a loong way away from the actual fight, and there's that annoying cutscene... It's like they wanted to make the most annoying and inconvenient optional boss fight in the history of optional boss fights.

 They succeeded.

 On the plus side, I do have an example of Nina's new limit break.

 After Zog disregards her decision to put the safety of others before her personal freedom, Nina gains a limit break called Angel Wing that renders her magic insanely powerful. It's also rather pretty.

The angel imagery still isn't explained or justified.

 So, since I've given up on the Ultima Weapon method of acquiring Eden, I took the difficult decision of actually continuing the plot instead of avoiding it.

 Which is always a difficult decision to make.

 This involved heading back to Tear's Point and trying to get into the Lunatic Pandora.

 My initial attempt to get into the Lunatic Pandora involved actually heading into Tear's Point.

 This is not how you get into the Lunatic Pandora. You just end up in a dead mystical server room where the sky is blocked and you feel mildly depressed.

 Nope, you need to fly into the Lunatic Pandora with the Ragnarok, which is probably the coolest cutscene in the game.

 It's like the result of some kind of mad experiment by Final Fantasy, Star Wars and Star Trek fans.

 I'm going to present some screenshots now to show you what I mean, then I'm going to critique all the things I find odd about it.

  One, since when did Zell have piloting experience? Selphie and Quistis I can see working out how to fly this thing and work it, they're child geniuses, but Zell's just a pretty dude with a strange tattoo, good fists and a nice ass. Did Quistis and Selphie really have the time to show him what to do? (And I'm standing by this, because this type of technology is exceedingly rare in this world.)

 Two, what the hell was the Ragnarok for?! I thought it was used for space exploration, why are there guns?! What were they fighting up there? Monsters live on the moon, not in space itself!

 Three, why does this thing have a face?

 Four, they don't seem to be particularly bothered by ramming into a building all that much.

 Five, oh god, why does it have arms?!

 All in all, I'd describe this cutscene in two words: Fucking Awesome.

 [Editor's (AKA Murphy's) Note: In my opinion, this – and a later scene – are the most epic and well-crafted moments of VIII. It's silly. It's really, really silly. It's people screaming about shields while a spacecraft shaped like a dragon fires weapons at a giant floating rock and suddenly unveils evil claw hands. It's like somebody took Star Wars and filtered it through every shounen manga ever created and then shoved it with great force into a Final Fantasy game. But you know what? That really works. Final Fantasy VIII is at its best when it drops any pretensions of solemnity and grimness (and they are pretensions, wholly and completely without substance or worth) and indulges fully in the desire to be as overtly and skull-shaking ridiculous as humanly possible, and the game as a whole could have been vastly improved by a Suda51 esque attitude of 'It's awesome, let's do it.']

 Weirdly, though, you can easily escape the Lunatic Pandora by talking to Selphie and once you're back outside, the chirpy flight music comes back. It's the funny and mildly pathetic kind of mood whiplash, I think.

 Once you head further into the floating building thingy-majig, Fuujin and Raijin pop up to demand Nina and fight once Zog refuses to hand her over.

 Two things about this surprise me; one, Fuujin uses a full sentence and two, I thought we'd dealt with this and they were on our side?

 It's really kind of confusing.

 It wasn't a super difficult fight, just mildly annoying since I'd forgotten to give two party members their ability to use GFs back after atempting to get Eden again.

 Pro-tip: Magic or GF Fuujin to death first. After that you can defeat Raijin as you see fit and as per last time, he won't attack a woman in your party.

 Once defeated, they run back to Seifer.

 Which is hardly a surprise.

 We'll be joining them in seeing him next time, in Part Seventy Eight.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XIII (AKA Lady Why Does Every Female Character Show Her Legs)

 Sometimes PC ports of video games require patches. Sometimes they require modders to come in with independently created fixes.

 This is something  have first hand experience with. I'm the proud owner of the Steam version of Deadly Premonition and my game just stopped working and is refusing to.

 So, what's this got to do with Final Fantasy XIII?

 Well, according to PC Gamer, the version that I recently reported was released on Steam has been the recipient of a lot of complaints.

 Having a quick look at the reviews on Steam, 865 reviews are positive and 602 are negative (as of reporting). That's not much of a difference for a triple A game that's a main title of a major company's flagship franchise.

 The reported problems involve a huge file size because of uncompressed cutscenes and a resolution that's been capped at 720p, which is ridiculous. This isn't the console market, PC gamers can and do get better resolutions than 1080p. There are also problems with stuttering.

 I brought up Deadly Premonition because, like Deadly Premonition, these problems have been fixed because of a mod created by a fan of the game and not a patch created by the company. This is a situation that is incredibly frustrating to me with Deadly Premonition, but to know that a game that has the pedigree of games like Final Fantasy VII, X and XII behind it is having these kinds of problems despite Square Enix being a veritable giant is actually rage inducing and I don't even own FFXIII!

 It's not even on my wishlist.

  If you're thinking of getting FFXIII on Steam, I'd suggest holding out until all of these problems have been fixed. Use your money on The Vanishing of Ethan Carter instead.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XV (AKA Sir You Fool, This Isn't Even My Final Form)

 Oh, hey. I finally bothered to get a logo for these posts.

 Honestly, I just ripped it from the trailer.

 Ah, the trailer. Let's just have a quick chat about that.

 It came out a couple of days ago a the Tokyo Game Show, which makes sense. They may be able to wimp out of E3, but they weren't going to be able to wimp out of that. Remember, things aren't going so well for them at the moment, so they had to show something, and since they're a Japanese company (for now, muahahahaha) it was bound to be here.

 It didn't fill me with confidence.

 Mostly because of this:

 Maybe that coloured my perception, but this trailer that basically just amounts to a road trip and some monsters getting beaten up gave me the sinking feeling that this game was nowhere near being finished. And for a game that's slated for an early 2015 release, that's not a good thing.

 "In terms of how much development has been completed, the game is at about 55%."

 Oh, dear god above...

 According to the director Tabata Hajime, this is how far they've gotten in eight years, but fans shouldn't worry that it'll take eight more years to finish. Part of the reason for the delay was the decision to put it on next gen consoles. Which he says delayed it by about two years.

 So... what about the other six?

 Have you just been sitting on your thumbs lads?

 "It’ll basically be a one-button action, and the AI intuitively outputs an action that kind of satisfies, gives you that instant gratification, and it connects with the simple touch of a button."

 ...

  "I myself am not getting any younger. I don’t want to be frantically pushing buttons."

 You know, Tanabata-chan (no, I don't care if you don't want me to call you that), there is this magical thing called a 'turn based RPG' that allows you to make thoughtful decisions and doesn't expect you to hurriedly rush through a bunch of menus because some pillock decided to put a time limit on every turn.

 You could have just used that.

 Also, do you not remember how everyone hated the one button combat in XIII?

 Because everyone fucking despised it.

 Actually, that's a good point, what does Nomura think of all this?

 Well, he's off the project!

 Yes, with the trailer came the news that he's been taken off  left FFXV in order to concentrate on Kingdom Hearts III.

 I wouldn't be surprised if that was his last game at the company,

 Oh! Do you know how all the player characters are men?

 Nomura's idea, he was very keen on it.

 Tanabata-chan's gone with it, but even he doesn't think it's a particularly healthy thing to have done.

 Whatever glimmer of hope I had for this game, has crashed and burned.

 I think Square's main goal at the moment is to get this game finished and out so they can start with a clean slate on the next one.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XIII (AKA Lady Wondering Why Her Friend Is Taking So Long)

 Final Fantasy XIII is out on Steam.

 Which is a boon for my childish urge to own all Final Fantasy games, but bad for my urge not to play Final Fantasy XIII.

 Honestly, I have my suspicions that you guys who enjoy my Final Fantasy VIII series would just love me to do a series on Final Fantasy XIII.

 I'm not going to lie, it's a possibility, but I do have my doubts about how such a series would work.

 Doug played XIII back when it first came out and he did not have a good time of it.

 One of the great criticisms was that it was pretty corridors, and having watched someone play it, I'm going to have to say that they were totally right.

 This made grinding a real pain in the neck.

 Of course, there was a secondary problem with grinding. It was capped.

 Yeah, you were prevented from levelling up skills past a certain point until you did something in the plot. Thus making the branching skill trees kind of pointless.

 This game was absolutely riddled with problems.

 But I wasn't prompted to post just because the game is now on Steam, I was compelled to write this because of Steam's description.

 Lightning is not stylish.

 Sure, she looks fine from the waist up, but that skirt.

 It's so short it's practically a belt.

 Not to mention that it horrendously impractical.

 Reasonably form fitting trousers in a stretchy material would have looked better and less stupid.

 Trained soldiers don't generally like wandering around with their femeral arteries wear anyone can puncture them.

 I'm not sure if I'll ever do a series on XIII, it's not VII. Hell, it's not even VIII. There's no Selphie here.

 Besides, I have a plan as for what I'm doing. It's preliminary, but I do have it.

 More on that later, though.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XV (AKA Sir Actually May Be Released In My Lifetime)

 I have no idea why, but a lot of the sites I've found news for Final Fantasy XV on are Christian websites. That is, websites specifically for Christians to the exclusion of the rest of us.

 I... have no idea why. This is the religion that has people saying that Harry Potter is of the devil, and that has people celebrating Christmas and overcoming a very Judeo-Christian notion of evil kind of bad guy.

 Also, have they not played Final Fantasy X? It has an expressly evil and bloated religion that oppresses the population with the threat of Sin and lives in luxury while every one else has to live in a needlessly outdated fashion.

 Final Fantasy XIII never shied away from this either. Hell, in XIII-3 the bad guy is pretty much just the Judeo-Christian god.

 There's a similar story going on in VI as well.

 I'm just very confused.

 Anyway, according to Christian Today Final Fantasy XV is the last hope for the Japanese console market.

 Alas, poor Japanese console market, I knew him, Horatio. Never was there blah, blah, blah. You all don't know the rest, and neither do I.

 If I was a console manufacturer, I'd be angry that my last huzzah in Japan was down to Tetsuya Nomura. I'd also be resigned to my doom.

 That said, it might actually be able to save the console industry. The Japanese did like XIII far more than the rest of us did. Or rather, they liked Lightning.

 Since my last post, we know we're getting XV in March of next year. Probably.

 Also, there's going to be a demo released with Final Fantasy: Type-0 HD on 17th March.

 It's called Episode Duscae and reportedly covers early parts of the game, with some parts altered to make it a better demonstration.

Finally, since the last time I posted about this, the lead programmer has left Square Enix.

 Oh yes, this is a thing that has happened.

 It fills me with a perverse joy.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XV (AKA, Sir Not Appearing During This Fiscal Year)

 So, Final Fantasy VX's release has been delayed from later this year to some time in the next fiscal year. They say spring.

 I don't believe them.

 That's basically it for news, guys.

 This is the only concrete detail that's come out for this game in the last month.

 There's been some stuff about Square using the Yebis 2 development engine for the stuff they showed at last year's E3, but that's basically just cosmetic guff and isn't new. Nor does it speak to the actual quality of the game play, as there really isn't any.

 We've been shown virtually nothing of the actual game, but that hardly seems unusual in the current game development market.

 In my search, I also found some info about Project Flare, which sounds more like Lysander's genocidal plot to create a new world than a method of making videogames. But I digress.

 The point of Project Flare is to create large video game worlds, which sounds attractive, but really isn't.

 The example they used to compare the potential capabilities of Project Flare to was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. They claimed that the map they used was seventeen times the size of Skyrim's.

 Now, riddle me this, does anyone actually want a map that large? It was already taking a proibitively long time to get from place to place in Skyrim, a map seventeen times the size of that would either be incredibly frustrating to get through, or ultimately pointless as the quick travel or teleportation that it'd need to make it less frustrating would mean you'd barely see most of the map.

 I'm bring this up because there has been some speculation that this technology could be used in Final Fantasy XV, which, if I may remind you, is set in a city state and the immediate surroundings of said city state. This isn't a grand adventure that calls for a map of any great size by any means.

 So, that's all the stuff that could be considered 'new' since my last post.

 There was, of course, a few things we knew about the game before it didn't show up at E3 last month.

 Well, I say knew, but we 'knew' that you'd be able to plant an acorn in Fable 2 and watch it grow into a tree and that never happened.

 There's a planned feature that involves teleporting in three dimensions, as well as a smart phone feature.

 As for the plot, well, I pretty much covered that in the last post, so there's not really much for me to talk about there.

 However, there is one thing I would like to mention.

 At the beginning of the post I said that the release of the game was being delayed until next fiscal year. The reason for this is that they aren't anticipating great game sales this year.

 Which I take to mean that Square Enix is finally realising what I've been saying for years; Tetsuya Nomura is harming their company. If we're lucky, after FFXV and KH3 come out, we may finally see the back of him. Or at least the beginning of the back of him.

 Which can only be a good thing.

Let's Talk About... Final Fantasy XV (AKA Sir Not Appearing At E3)

 Now here's a game I'm not looking forward to.

 Not so much in a 'I think it's going to be painful' way, more in a 'I don't care' way. Although I am anticipating it to be rather painful.

 Honestly, my attitude towards this game hasn't changed in the eight years that it's been in development. (For the sake of guilt by association, Duke Nukem Forever was in development for fifteen.)

 Lest we forget, this was originally a Final Fantasy XIII spin off game. The fingerprints of which are still smeared on it.

 Noctis was supposed to be the 'dark' to Lightning's 'light' and the duality can be seen in their names.

 This game should have come out a short time after XIII did. So it's at least four years late.

 Final Fantasy Agito XIII didn't come out around the time it was supposed to either. It was renamed Final Fantasy Type-0, and although it was apparently rather good, does speak to the total failure of the Fabula Nova Crystalis as a concept.

 Which isn't even grammatically correct, by the way. The proper title should be Fabula Nova Crystalli or Fabula Novum Crystalli (depending on whether you want the feminine or neutral form of nova). What they have doesn't mean 'the new tale of the crystals' like they want, it means either 'the new tale is a crystal' or 'the tale is a new crystal'.

 The base game was terrible, and the two spin offs were both reworked into brand new IPs for the series.

 So from the two games from the series that have been released so far, we can predict that this game has a fifty per cent chance of being awful.

 But there's also a bigger problem. It's a Nomura project.

 Ugh.

 I don't like Tetsuya Nomura. I think he's terrible at his job, is dragging down Square Enix and represents an awful lot of what is wrong with the video game industry in general, and possibly all of what's wrong with it in Japan.

 So I'm not particularly keen on XV because he's directing the game, designed characters for it and came up with the concept and base story.

 According to Wikipedia, this is going to be 'a heavy departure from previous games, providing a darker and more realistic atmosphere that focuses on human emotions and believable characters'.

Which,

1.   shows that the company thinks poorly of the previous fourteen games and their spin offs, 
2.  shows a fatally flawed understanding of what that sentence means, 
3.  begs the question of what they thought was going on in Final Fantasies VII, X, XII and even XIII not to mention an awful lot of the other games attached to the franchise
4.  implies that they're going to confuse 'dark' for 'oppressively grim' (Kingdom Hearts, anyone?) and
5.  grossly overestimates Nomura's ability to create believable characters or realistic atmospheres.

 Here's a pro-tip, direct from me to you: just because you can draw, do not assume you can write.

 Nomura isn't the only one who falls into this category (although opinions vary on how well he can draw), although the guy I'm going to bring up kind of can't.

 And I feel kind of bad for saying that, I've heard he's a nice guy.

 However, it's true.

 Rob Liefeld is a terrible, terrible artist, and an even worse writer.

 (I also have anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon happening with a person I once knew. She too has a terrible, terrible grasp of Latin. But that's a story for another time.)

 Testuya Nomura is the Rob Liefeld of video games.

 I say this entirely because he is convinced he can write and has all of these 'brilliant' ideas, but he's really, really bad at it.

 For example, if you've been reading my Let's Play Log, you know that one of my bugbears about the game is that no one ever mentions Seifer's large facial scar. But worse than that, I can't actually remember any point after the opening sections of the game where anyone has actually mentioned Squall's.

 I bring this up because the only reason all that happened in the first place is because Nomura designed Squall with a scar.

 Here's a better example of how Nomura is totally awful at writing.

 He was going to make XV a musical.

 Yeah, for a day, but the fact of the matter remains that he thought this was a good idea for long enough to go into the office and demand it be made so.

 I've also heard rumours that he's gotten bored of XV and is already working on a sequel. Of course, I can't cite this, but considering that we got two XIII sequels and Versus XIII is now a main series game I wouldn't be at all surprised if this turned out to be true.

 After all this rambling about Nomura and XIII, you may be wondering what XV is actually about.

 As far as I can tell, it's going to be about a Mafia like royal family protecting a crystal and running a city state repelling invaders while the Prince is off having romantic dalliances with some blonde girl he has a single thing in common with. It's also going to probably have them be star crossed lovers or something.

 I'm not impressed.

 The only thing new about this entire premise is the Mafia thing, and even that's not that new if you consider how the idea of royalty came into being in the first place.

 This premise could be interesting, but after suffering through Nomura led projects in the past, my expectations are so low I can hardly bring myself to care.

 Furthermore it's coming to the XBox One and PS4 at some point in the next few millennia, and I don't have either of those, nor do I intend to get one.

 No, my console of choice is the Nintendo Wii U. So be sure to check back on Sunday, because I'll be talking about Nintendo's offerings at E3 this year.