I think Final Fantasy 7 was a great game. It felt fun to play. It was satisfying to play. You gain experience points for fights. When you reach a threshold, you level up. When you level up, your stats improve. You can customize your characters with equip-able magic stones called materia. You can swap them freely among your characters to make all kinds of combinations for your playstyle. When you fight, you also gain AP for your equipped materia. When your Materia reach an AP threshold, they level up and you gain more utility or power. When you fight, you get money. When you get to a new town, new weapons and armor become available for purchase that make your characters tougher. In dungeons, you can find unique weapons and armor and materia. Really simple gameplay loop. Make some progress to make more progress. You could see and feel how you get tougher. You could watch numbers go up. It was simple. It was elegant.
Then Final Fantasy 8 came out, and it was nothing like Final Fantasy 7. They changed almost everything. You earn experience points, and you can level up, but your stats barely increase! Worse yet, the monsters' levels scale to your levels, and their stats and powers do improve! It means that leveling up is disadvantageous! You can find these monsters called GF you can equip, and they gain levels with exp, but they don't have stats that you can see. Instead, you're mostly keeping an eye on their AP. When AP is earned, they learn abilities. There's a hidden ability tree where certain abilities are prerequisite to others. What abilities are going to be valuable? You don't know till you get there! Instead of finding magic stones that you equip for magic, you have to go stock spells with a tedious, slow combat action called drawing, or by using special abilities to modify playing cards or refine various items you collect from monster drops. You had to collect items to use to upgrade your weapons, some of which were rare to find and rare to drop! Armor was gone. Instead, you equip magic spells to your specific stats, and the level of the spell, and the quantity of the spell effected the amount that the stats increase. It was a very micromanage-y, it was complex, and it was intimidating to learn. Mastery meant playing the game in a very controlled way to efficiently earn AP without getting so much exp. Ugh.
But it was different, so that means it was OK? Right?
Remember the Nintendo Wii and its nunchaku controller? Eff that. Sometimes I hear people praising games for being new and different. What was wrong with Final Fantasy 7? Give me more of that! I want more of that! I wish I was into sports games and FPS games and Assassin's Creed because those game devs look like they figured this out. People like the formula, keep it! How do you go from FF7 to FF8? It's madness! What a wild change!
So, my central complaint is novelty for its own sake sucks. Is the game good? I have heard people praise FFX for being a non-standard fantasy setting. Boo! It was the ugliest setting ever. The costumes were ugly and stupid looking. The unique hair styles were dumb and ugly. Machines were ugly and dumb looking. Monsters were OK. Buildings and boats were dumb when they were unique. How many people cosplay as characters from FFX? Better yet, when people cosplay as FFX characters, which ones do they pick? Auron, and the main girl characters. That's it. The game is so ugly, no one cosplays as any other character. Ronsos were in the game. Ugly effing game.
So for some reason, people think FFX is a really good game. It's not. They did some cool stuff. Being able to swap characters in and out mid-combat? Cool. Having to swap your characters in and out mid-combat because all the monsters in the game are functionally a rock-paper-scissors game? Meh. I just want to pick my favorite characters and use them. The game's best mechanics don't get fully utilized until late game if you fill out the monster arena, which is effortful, but I think you have to be into grinding to really enjoy yourself. It so happens that I am into grinding. Why can't the whole game be more like the late game? The equipment customization system doesn't even matter until this late portion of the game. You might be able to manage to make a few useful things throughout the main game, but that's it. Mostly, you would put elemental damage on weapons so you could do double damage. By the way, Str + 5, +10, +20, etc. in FFX is a trap when using the right element doubles damage! A trap I say!
I hate the story and characters in FFX. OK, I don't hate the story and characters, but it was a very, very delayed appreciation and even then, I don't actually like them. I just don't care. I enjoy Lulu's cleavage though. More of that please. Also, bring back the customization of materia. Powers are contained in objects that are tracked separately from characters, and they can be freely moved around. And there weren't that many fiddly bits. Very simple, very fun. You dumb dumbs at Square came up with a cool idea, you used it once, then that was it. The hell is wrong with you?
What's wrong with them is they pursue novelty for the sake of it. As if reusing something that works is a bad thing because we already did it. So in FFX, they give you this thing called the Sphere Grid instead of experience and levels. What is the sphere grid? It turns character improvement into a process of moving your character along a path on a game board and activating nodes with consumable items you collect after battle. The problem is it's linear, so why? What's the point? Again, it's something in FFX that only gets good late game when you can move freely around the sphere grid and earn whatever you want. It's undercooked.
Anyway, if you've stuck with me this long, thank you. Believe it or not, I am not here to complain about the Final Fantasy series, it just happens to be what I'm very familiar with. I'm here to complain about novelty. I don't care about new things because they're new. New is not a virtue. How about I get you a new turd? And so understandably, I get a little annoyed when I hear people praise something for being new. I could get you a new car or I can get you a new scratch on it. The new car is valuable if it's in new condition because that means its quality is intact. But a new car that's used is less valuable.
I think innovation must a value to some people. I don't share it. Can I say I'm tired of people trying to be innovative? Are we done trying to invent new stuff? Or make old stuff seem new by adding a twist to it? Are we done? Can we just embrace tradition yet? If you don't like tradition, then by all means make something different, but be honest that you don't like tradition. Many of us just like being a male, human, fighter, with a sword, and that will never get old to us. When you eff with the thing that works, you alienate the people who come for something familiar. I think this is why media has generally sucked for the last ten to fifteen years. Especially Final Fantasy games. The FF7 remakes sucks too. Can we cut out the ten-to-thirty-minute cut scenes? I don't want to watch an effing movie! Oh, and bring back timed hits and defenses from Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars. Those were fun!
I think I made my point without ruffling too many feathers. Newness does not automatically mean good, quality, or fun. We have decades of good stuff we abandon. What happen to side-scrollers? Video games were 90% side-scrollers once upon a time. They didn't stop being fun! And isometric perspective games are missed. Did I piss off the FFX fans? Who cares. Wakka's hair sucks and you suck for liking it. Insert the Titas Ah-ha-ha laugh. Cue the outro. DUN da da dun dun dun duuunnn.
