Oh god….these stories need to stop. People are just insane. There’s really no other reason for all the whining.
If you are familiar with the FF series, part XIII won’t suprise you in any way. Funny that people aren’t mentioning all the positives, like the best battle in an FF game ever, and amazing visuals, along with good characters and an interesting story.
People are also leaving out the fact that there ARE sidequests, an open world (eventually), some minigames, ect.
I hope Square-Enix doesn’t listen to critics. They need to keep trailblazing. The people that complain are squeaky wheels that are incredibly ignorant. I guarantee have the reviews that gave it the lowest scores didn’t play the whole game. Games journalism is as bad as MSNBC or FOX NEWS.
It’s just sad that you can have such a masterwork get so blasted by a bunch of children. just recently, you had ME2 released, which was INCREDIBLY linear once you chose a mission. it was basically a bunch of “corridors” with perfectly placed blocks to hide behind, so you could point and shoot. NOBODY criticized this in the media, because there is a western slant on things here, and for some reason many kids that are in the business just don’t respect Japan or understand how important they are to the culture and mechanics of video games.
The reason behind this obsession with non-linearity is because you have a massive generation of new gamers that were brought up on GTA 3. these children assumed that every game had to have these elements, otherwise they were “lacking”. therefore, the JRPG has been blasted by younger and less informed critics that like run & gunning or GTA style open world structure.
JRPG’s come in many varieties, and most of them turn off the slow minded kids that can only conceptualize pulling a trigger and watching the enemy die. As soon as you’re required to have a sense of humor, and give up trying to be “cool”, they’re on the hatewagon claming that JRPG’s are so “old” and claim various things that they SHOULD be, as opposed to accepting what they are.
FFXIII is great, because it cuts out the fat of the traditional rpg, and is much better and more addictive for it. so, funny that when FF tries to move the genre forward, it gets hammered even harder. but truthfully, a game this big and important is going to get criticized unfairly not matter what…..
postscript:
Seriously? People are lamenting the loss of the RPG-town fetchquest and NPC conversation spree???? HAHAHHAHAHAHA.
(when the game does let you do a little bit of NPC convo, it suddenly feels really pointless. Happy they left it out.)
Destructoid – Square Enix addresses FF XIII 'linearity' complaints