Remember what I said about the Gamer Hive Mind? It strikes again. Final Fantasy XIII was released a week and a half ago to a resounding meh from the gaming community. Yes, the game took five years to make, yes, you’ve probably never seen anything look so good on in a game before and yes, it’s awesome, but what do gamers really say about the game? “I heard it’s linear! Seriously, the first few hours are all in a straight line!” For that reason, and for that reason alone, most people are dismissing the game immediately and deem it as a failure.
This outcry brings to light a few problems with gamers’ thought processes. First of all, they immediately dismiss the game without playing it, which probably has more to do with the industry’s culture more than anything else (see Press Fun to Play for more on that). Not only that, but people who play the game start complaining about it and judging it before finishing it, and don’t realize that the game does open up 25 to 30 hours in. Thus: premature judgement hampering general opinion of the game. But that’s not the biggest problem point. The biggest problem is that gamers have expectations, and if you don’t meet them, you betray gamers.
They expect a Mario game to be about running and jumping. Super Mario Sunshine was not, therefore, they chastised it. They expect a game about parkour to include only parkour and running across rooftops. Mirror’s Edge was not, therefore, they chastised it. And the same thing happens with FFXIII. They expect a Final Fantasy game to be about flying your ship around, trying (and failing) to breed a Golden Chocobo and hitting A in front of every clock to find Elixirs. Well, FFXIII is not, therefore, they chastize it.
They complain about the game’s linearity, but what they’re really complaining about is progress. Final Fantasy XIII is what a JRPG looks like when you adapt it to today’s reality. It’s taking a genre that is clearly falling apart, losing fans left and right to the Mass Effects and the Borderlands, and that is (barely) sustained by small publishers brave enough to port games over to the US without high expectations, and doing something with it.
Square Enix noticed that the best selling games these days are 1) driven by story and linear as hell by necessity or 2) multiplayer frag-fests optimized to make you pwn fools. Since option #2 was clearly not feasible for Final Fantasy, they took option #1 and adapted their game to it. Final Fantasy as a series is already story-driven, therefore the only thing that needed to be added was the linearity, the necessity of driving players through a certain path in order to tell them the best story possible. Through that process, they take a dying genre and make it accessible to gamers who have not spent 80 hours 18 years ago trying to kill Kefka. They make the game as fun as possible for both players who love Uncharted and players who love Final Fantasy 7 (and make it even better for players who love both).
The decision to do this kind of adaptation is not purely a game design decision. (It’s also not to anger fanboys, in case you’re wondering). It’s in very large part a business decision. The reason Square decided to modernize its franchise isn’t because Yoichi Wada stuck his thumb in his mouth, held it up in the air and said “It’s time”, it’s because it wanted a game that has been in development for five years to sell as much copies as possible. Games are not only works of art, they are also products, and products sell better when they 1) define their market well and 2) know how to cater to that market as best as possible.
The market for Final Fantasy XIII is not a relatively small audience that craves sidequests and grinding and has fond memories of Cecil, Kain and Yang the blonde moustachioed master of kung-fu in Final Fantasy IV. That audience is part of the market, which would be single-players interested in a top-of-its-class storytelling experience (or something along those lines). Unfortunately, doing what those hardcore fans are clamoring for just wouldn’t appeal to that whole market.
This “trend” in linearity is not new, either. It was very present eight years ago in Final Fantasy X (which was basically about going from point A to point B, where there was a huge monster that needed killing). Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since then, or maybe it’s because the surging popularity of sandbox games has transformed gamers into beings that need to be able to do whatever the hell they want at any given point in a game or else it’s not worth it, or maybe it’s even because hardcore gamers just want games to be exactly like they were when they were nine years old, but it seems like this game is the game where everybody decides that they’ve had enough with linearity.
The funny thing about the Gamer Hive Mind, though, is that it sometimes is wrong even about itself and its own opinions. Games it chastizes sometimes become under-the-radar hits (see Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space and, I’m expecting, Dante’s Inferno). In FFXIII’s case, the game it chastises becomes the fastest-selling game in a THIRTEEN-game franchise. I honestly don’t think this would’ve happened if Final Fantasy XIII would have been the same old Final-Fantasy-formula game with new graphics. This shows that Square Enix was right and that they can revive the JRPG, even if they have to take away one’s freedom to do it.
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