posted 2007/07/16 at 21:18
One of the things I've been looking forward to this summer is replaying Final Fantasy VII to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the game's US release. I plan to start playing on 09.07, the exact date I picked up my copy at my closest Toys'R'Us (the release date), and with any luck I'll actually get all the way through it, and not wind up playing it partway and then getting distracted by other things and not finishing it. (That has unfortunately been the case for nearly all the RPGs I've tried to play in what fleeting spare time I have these days.) It's been a couple of years since I last played through Final Fantasy VII, but somehow I have the feeling that everything will just come clicking back to me simply because of how many times I've played through it in the past.
I guess that this kind of brings me to the subject of Final Fantasy XIII. It was nice of Sony to lower the price of the Playstation 3 to $499, and I've certainly seen enough of them available for sale, but ignoring the fact that I just don't have the money to pick one up right now, I still don't see the value in the system, particularly when the next-generation DVD war still seems to be very much in progress. (Not that I follow said war that closely, but I assume that Blockbuster going with Blu-Ray kind of brought that platform back to life when it looked like HD-DVD was going to win easily.)
There's something else that's been bothering me about Final Fantasy XIII, though, which is this notion that the game is going to have this huge overarching mythology that carries through to all of the titles that are produced using the Final Fantasy XIII title to tie them together. Now, I've always been a huge RPG fan, and you'd think that I would like the fact that Square Enix sounds like they're going to be putting in a huge amount of effort in creating a backstory to the games by referring to it as a "mythology." What I think is bothering me is that I think there's really only a certain point to which a backstory for a video game should be developed, at least at the start. Just to use Final Fantasy VII as an example, the game certainly has a mythology now, and its story was quite intricate and detailed for its time, but most of the Final Fantasy VII mythology came after the game was a huge success and its fans pretty much demanded that the universe stay alive. (Now if only Square Enix would create Final Fantasy VII sub-titles that could possibly live up to the standard of the original.)
I don't want to say that Square Enix is wrong to create a whole mythology for Final Fantasy XIII before the game is released, and if history has taught us anything it is that the first Final Fantasy title for a new generation of systems is always the best one, so there's always hope there. Perhaps this is just a manifestation of my inner Final Fantasy VII fan still desperate for a graphical remake of the game on a current-generation system. Still, even though I've been good about getting all the Final Fantasy (main) titles on or near their release dates (except Final Fantasy XI because I don't play MMORPGs), I just don't see myself picking up Final Fantasy XIII any time soon. Playing through Final Fantasy VII again just seems like it'd be far more fun for me.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon