magusat999

As I was sitting here thinking about the FF series, it just dawned on me what the real problem is - it's the guy that took over. He is from the FF Tactics team, and he doesn't seem to "get" the difference between a tactics player and an RPG player. He is designing FF like a tactics game, and that is not working.

I have played many RPG games over the years - but only dabbled in Tactics games. I notice the difference, and unlike RPGs, tactics games are made to frustrate you. In tactics games, you are playing with constantly dwindling resources, with foes who are usually more powerful than you and one step ahead of you. Every fight in a tactics game is by the skin of your teeth; win this fight or game over. You have very limited resources and unless you cheat, very little in the way of clues as to what you are up against until you are in the midst of battle. The enemy in tactics games is designed to take advantage of you and wipe you out. Tactics are designed to make you a loser.

By contrast, RPGs are made to make the player a WINNER. You are well aware of what you are getting into, and usually informed in one way or another. Unless you force the situation, or accidentally wander off in the wrong place, you usually go in with the upper hand. If you fail in an RPG, it's usually because you didn't do something that you KNEW you should have done. The RPG helps you to be prepared for the difficulty ahead, unlike a tactics game - which banks on you forging in unprepared, and then punishes you for it.

RPGs are meant for you to complete because there is a story being conveyed. There is a story with tactics games too - but it takes a back seat to the fighting engine. You are encouraged to stop and check out the scenery, the props, the view in RPGs - not so with tactics games; with tactics it's just "pop in here, pop in there, and get back to battle". The characters are often one dimensional in tactics games, many times relying more on already established characters from other games. Tactics games are severely linear, unlike RPGs.

So if you get someone who only knows tactics games and slaps him in the lead of an RPG, what you get is blasphemous, ugly changes that strip away all of the RPG goodness. What you have is frustrating tactics game disguised as an RPG. RPGs are not supposed to be frustrating - you are supposed to be the WINNER. Also, RPGs are supposed to offer alternative ways to achieve something - can't pick a lock? Smash the chest open! These elements have been stripped out of FF ever since the tactics guy took over, and that's the real problem with the series. He needs to either quit or learn what an RPG is supposed to be - or this series is going to be OVER!

I WISH that the reviewers would have played Skyrim on the PC all the way through before writing. There are very few PC players who can finish Skyrim, because of a problem that occurs after 250 hours of play. The game will crash to desktop more and more frequently, after 250 or so almost error free hours of playing, until it crashes every time you make any type of transition. PC players are screaming and pulling their hair out about it, but since game sites aren't speaking on it Bethesda is ignoring the complaints. It looks like we are going to have another Fallout NV situation, where we had to wait about a year for all of the game-breaking bugs to get fixed AND had to start our 2-3 hundred hours of gaming all over again.

If it were up to me I would strip them of their VGA award and have all of their PC scores dropped dramatically, and reviews re-written or appended to address the game-stopping bug. But who am I? Just another guy who was duped out of $65.00 based on all these glowing, yet hasty reviews and undeserved accolades...

I didn't like the linearity of the game. I didn't like fighting the same monster, just painted differently, over and over again. I was hopeful about the part where you run around in the wilderness, but that got boring too. The mob-hunts were much better in FFXII, in the way you acquire them and hunt them down. I hated Hope and Sazh (Sazh because he was made a clown, not because he was Black - although I think someone DECIDED to make him a clown BECAUSE he was Black, which doesn't sit right with me either. I mean, if you are racist, why even put the character in there? Just put someone in there you are comfortable with and don't make us gamers suffer a weak / weird / useless ass character because or your silly prejudices.. I just didn't get that... freaking bird poop in a played out Afro - Black people don't even wear Afro's anymore... that's a third world stereotype... anyway...).

Yeah. Shutting off the Crystarium system until after game was a stupid idea. Making you wait until after the game to finish the monotonous mob-hunt... frustrating and irritating. Hope never buffing up into a big strong hero - WEAK. FFXIII is the first game FF game I returned to the store - no interest in continuing after the main story - which was a PITA to get to in the first place.

FFXIII had a better story (although it was still "love based", but the characters were ill-created, just butt ugly and anorexic. And they really tried to push that Leon character, even having him in other games, like Kingdom Hearts - the best part of that game was the flashback to his father and the other characters which were much more appealing, interesting and creative. Leon was a depressing character that I kept wishing would just commit suicide at some point. The summons were great, though - but the boost was unnecessary. Besides that, the Triple Triad game was way too long, and slow as hell. YAWN.

I had great fun and fond memories of FFVII (14 playthroughs). You can't look at it now and criticize it negatively - tell me what was better when it came out? NOTHING. The materia system, the story, the character development, the hidden gems, the secret bosses - the game was just supreme in it's day and a blueprint for what we should look for in a JRPG. FFIX was great if you knew that you should steal everything... EVERYTHING. FFXII wasn't bad, except for the dilution of summons, the cranked up difficulty of bosses, and the undivulged secrets (like the Zodiac Spear), which I thought was cheap and gimmicky. FFIII, IV and V were all great - but the onset of better graphics washed away the blueprints for good gameplay that they should have provided. FFX was a kindergarten FF, and holding and wiping away everything that made the series appealing - and what the hell was up with FFX-2??? Who cares about Yukka and her stupid dress??? Why spend millions on that crap - or any sequel to one of the worst entries in the series... and to make matters worse, base it around fashion??? Sickness!

SO I don't have too much hope for FFXIII-2 (just the fact that they made a sequel to the suckiest game of the series is enough). There's something rotting the brains away at Square... and it's about to leak all over our consoles... again.

@(Unverified)

FFX, IMHO, does not qualify as a good game by any stretch of the imagination. It had monotonous, drawn out, near-impossible mini-games. They tried to kill off all of the classic summons (guardians or whatever they called it in FFX). The game was the first in the series to abolish the world map, so the game would be more "first timer friendly" - eliminating grinding (which, btw not everyone is opposed of). The most pathetic thing was how all of your game play before going into SIN ended up not mattering, because once you entered SIN you were basically "leveled up" almost automatically. Not only that, you were not allowed to leave once you entered - what a jip!

And lets not forget the stupid "love story" and Wakka-ball... just a big boring, irritating game.

I am hoping KoA will be good and immersive - hugely disappointed with Skyrim's PC problem, which will probably never get fixed if Bethesda follows it's past history (is there a fix yet - NO... Is there even an announcement or acknowledgement - NO). I'm glad to hear people from Morrowind and Oblivion are on this team, hopefilly BHG will be better at quality assurance than Bethesda and I can forget about Skyrim until the year it is finally fixed and I feel like playing a whole new game. Hey, I still have Fallout NV installed, and the fixes finally completed after a year or so - but why would I want to start right over doing the same stuff after 300 hours of play? I'm looking for a good game WITHOUT big fat nasty game-breaking bugs....

If your wondering what I am talking about, play Skyrim on your PC to 260+ hours; you'll have plenty of time to chime in as it suddenly decides it likes for you to see your desktop more than the world of Skyrim...

I'm glad Google jumped on this, as there is a market need for a more efficient game platform (than Facebook). If nothing else, hopefully Facebook will become more gamer-friendly as a result of the competition. One caveat, for Google+, though, people need to be able to be anonymous, and they are forcing your real name to be displayed. They should allow nicknames for games at least - in that respect they are no advantage over Facebook, who still tries to hold on to that old "real person" program they started with when Facebook was a little used "social gathering" website for old folks. Yes - its time to broaden the definition, and change some things.

I am just surprised that this little game made so much money - I mean, it's a fun and addictive little short game - but $1.2B??? Its like a game someone could make in their spare time, with an old Pentium 3 and a copy of Flash... and BAM! 1.2 billion bucks... I'm seriously in the wrong line of work here.

If Bethesda has he right to stop anyone from using the common word "Scrolls" as a trademark, copyrighted, etc. IP - that's like having the trademark on the word "The". The only right they should have is the full name, and obvious iterations of that full title. There is a game series called "Ninja Scroll" - I guess Bethesda should be able to sue them too?

Common everyday words cannot be trademarked - at least that is the basic law. Whether one can afford to protect themselves is another matter altogether - and that type of bullying is what big companies use to stop the little guys, not the proper application of the law. "Yeah, we know the law is not on our side - but can you afford millions of dollars to defend that in court???".

Looks like its time for a new console to hit the market...

Addressing some of the comments citing expecting better from the people who made Doom and Quake - well, Doom 3 and Quake 4 were horrible games. Id fell off a long time ago, way before Rage. Rage is just another iteration of the same type of game as Doom or Quake, just a different story.

The fact that Id completely abandoned their flagship products (again, Doom and Quake) should have clued us n that something was amiss here. Why Rage instead of Doom 4 or Quake 5? They needed a new IP after totally destroying the others.

Quake had a cult following, bred real life gaming champions - even had million dollar competitions. And then it disappeared. Quake-Con is still around - but it has nothing to do with Quake anymore. Quake IV, as a game, was ill conceived, monotonous and uninspired. You faced the same enemies, with simple variations on color. Your movement was severely hindered. You fought mostly in a linear, hallway type of world. It hallmarked the degeneration of the series.

Doom 3 came out, first of all to push a new generation of Nvidia cards (5700 FX and higher) that didn't even come out until 9 months later. Through some kind of wacky tie-in deal, they locked in the requirements of the game, forcing players to accept low quality play, and in some cases no play at all. They hard sold people to buy new cards in order to play it, but those cards were not ready for prime time, and by the time they did come out nobody cared about Doom 3 anymore.

Besides the hardware ploy, Doom 3 was more of a moving picture than a game. Your interactions, and the action was rare - and when it did happen it was brief, like an introduction to each classic monster in new, improved 3D. Not once in the game, or it;s add-on did you face the waves of creatures you fought in the classic games. Nor were there any secrets or alternate solutions. It was very linear and story based - highly disappointing to classic Doom fans, and a questionable experience for new players.

So I am not surprised that Id screwed up Rage - because that has been their M.O. ever since Doom III.And I certainly did not take their word for it that Rage was going to be "all that', because I truly believe that they don't have a clue how to write a compelling game. I am going to play it at some point, just because I like shooters, and why not - but there won't be any fat bucks coming out, no extras, no collector's editions or limited editions - its going to be bargain basement and the bare game in an unmarked sleeve when I get to it.

I am more hyped about Borderlands 2 - if Borderlands had these types of graphics - well we wouldn't be talking about a lot of the new games right now...