![]() There’s every possibility that this could be a real turning point. ![]() The series needs to accept that it can finally stop the infinite chase, to slow down and let the army of creatives behind the scenes actually tell some stories, instead of constantly grinding them into paste to keep up the arms race of bigger worlds and tracier rays. It needs to prove that there’s an acceptable baseline of fidelity, that people would rather see more than one vision realised with the same tech. It needs to prove that there’s a possibility for this franchise beyond waiting another 10 years for inscrutable corporate politics to produce another gargantuan cross-media mess. It needs to prove that Final Fantasy no longer needs to be the absolute biggest thing on the planet. A truly solid event with a unique tone and well-executed vision that tells a self-contained story well. The absolute best-case scenario is that Final Fantasy 16 is a mostly linear 30-hour-long action game. Square Enix finally did it, and despite the game’s many strengths (petrol stations in a fantasy world really is a top-tier vibe), it’s evident that a design like this simply isn’t conducive to the sort of structure that makes a great Final Fantasy adventure. It wasn’t until its closing hours, where it abandoned the open road for a linear trip, that the narrative was able to hit the regular dramatic and emotional highs of the franchise.Īn open world is what people have been claiming they want from a Final Fantasy since that first glimpse of the wide expanse of the Calm Lands in FF10. By having players drive in a big circle between the same locales, picking up meaningless side-quests, any sense of urgency to the narrative was completely deflated. The game presented itself as a road trip with the lads, but it ended up feeling like the shortest journey in the history of the series.īy embracing a genuine open world, the game was forced to represent its geography honestly – it couldn’t convey a sense of scale by implying off-screen travel via scene transitions and world maps. The sort of money and scatter-shot creative vision involved in the decade-long history of FF15 is almost impossible to comprehend. When it finally released, it did so accompanied by a feature-length movie, an anime series, and a custom Audi concept car. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. ![]() We only got a Final Fantasy 15 when they slapped the number on a spin-off that had already been in development for six years through two directors and two console generations. A franchise that used to be able to put out a mainline entry every 18 months now struggles with one a decade. The bloat of budgets and production cycles that started more than 20 years ago when Final Fantasy 7 marketed itself as a blockbuster sci-fi extravaganza has already reached the point of being completely unsustainable. It’s been a while since Final Fantasy could rely soley on sheer cinematic spectacle as its defining trait. We’ve moved far beyond anime melodrama, and performance capture can now render something as genuine and mundane as Nathan Drake ignoring his wife during dinner. Of course, this sort of thing has been the norm for big budget video games for decades now. Will Shiva have the sassy finger snap she had in FFX? It's doubtful. ![]() ![]() It wasn’t the first game to feature these things, but it did it all with such confidence, technical brilliance and directorial vision that it still remains as a landmark of mainstream videogame storytelling. The pretence at cinema that had been hampered by mute, expressionless polygons were finally realised by the transition to 3D environments, full voice-acting and motion capture. FF10 is the truest road movie of the franchise – a linear hike from Point A to Point B through a dazzling range of environments, with a tight focus on the characters at its heart. Neither element ever overstayed its welcome, and the natural pull towards the next major chunk of storytelling made these gargantuan games something you’d play through quickly – the characters and their motivations never straying too far from your mind.įinal Fantasy 10 was arguably the pinnacle of this a formula perfected over three previous games bolstered by inarguably the most significant shift in technology between console generations. This served as a great framework for their stories, allowing for a really compelling balance between battle-focussed caves and narrative-focussed towns. In their golden age, Final Fantasy games were structured like road movies – grand odysseys where a tight-knit band of characters travel across the globe. It's been a long time since we've had a Final Fantasy game with a tone like this. ![]()
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