public service announcement

[seventhe]

I DON'T UNDERSTAND FINAL FANTASY XIII AT ALL

Comments

[owlmoose]

Yup, pretty much. Any game that forces you to take long reading breaks to understand what it going on, not to mention a not-insigificant portion of the character development, is not a well-designed game in my book.

[wallwalker]

This.

[thene]

Okay, what I don't get is why people complain about this in FFXIII but not in FFXII or in Dragon Age. I just read all the datalog entries by default, because that tends to be what I do in games, and I appreciated FFXIII's and thought they were great - especially the non-chronological unravelling of the Thirteen Days. I thought that was a lovely bit of storytelling and didn't mind that it existed in a game menu. I am aware that it didn't work for everyone but if the solution to this problem is 'don't tell good stories in game menus' I would be sad.

[owlmoose]

It's not about whether the information in the game menus tells a good story -- I loved the detail in the Dragon Age: Origins codexes, for example, and I felt like it added a lot of fantastic depth and breadth to the DA universe. And it also made a great reference if I'd forgotten a detail of a quest. But all the information was either supplemental backstory or repeated something we had learned during the course of the game. Same with FFXII. What bothered me was how often you had to refer to the datalog in FFXIII to understand what had just happened during gameplay. If it's that important, it needs to be *on screen*. And overwriting the datalog entries as the game progressed, rather than adding the new information as it came along, is pretty much unforgivable in my book.

I agree that it worked much better for unfolding the story of the 13 Days -- that's the kind of thing that menu-based storytelling does well.