I watched all the clips of epic race car battles on here, vowing never to play this piece of shit so long as there is breath in my body. Then Spoony's review opened my eyes to how truly horrible Final Fantasy XIII is, not just in terms of endless hallways, a terrible story and sloppy blowjobs from critics, but THIS:

Producer Yoshinori Kitase: "We try not to listen to the critics too much. Most of the criticisms have come because the first half of the game is very linear. But we've got a story to tell, and it's important the player can engage with the characters and the world they inhabit before letting them loose..."

Director Motomu Toriyama: "We think many reviewers are looking at Final Fantasy XIII from a western point of view. When you look at most Western RPGs, they just dump you in a big open world, and let you do whatever you like...it becomes very difficult to tell a compelling story when you're given that much freedom."

Wow. Fuck these guys for real.

Abridged plot:

1. God beings can brand humans, forcing them to complete a task so they can turn into a crystal statue. Fail the task, and you eventually turn into a mindless monster zombie. The person receiving the brand never has any idea what the task is. It is never explained how turning into a crystal statue is any better of a fate.

2. The characters get branded by a god being. They do not know their focus.

3. The characters stop and try to figure out their focus. "We don't know." "You don't know?" "We have no choice but to keep going."

4. Characters attack by soldiers, followed by a giant robot boss.

5. Repeat 3-4 a dozen times.

6. Main villain shows up. Says their focus is to kill him. If they kill him, the world will be destroyed. This will somehow summon the long gone creators who made the god beings. The god beings can then have a chat with the creators because they want to see what's up.

7. The main characters, after having learned this, question what to do. It's decided to go ahead and chase the main villain trying to kill him, thus destroying the world, because "We have no choice."

8. Repeat 3-7 a bunch more times.

9. Characters confront the main villain for the fifth time. All but one of them turn into mindless zombies, then turn back into humans for no reason. They kill the main villain, casuing their planet to fall out of orbit and start crashing into another planet. Two women in your party decide that if they hug, they'll merge into a giant crystal cat/bird thing...somehow. The crystal cat bird jumps between the two planets and turns into a giant crystal pillar that locks the planets into place...somehow Everyone walks away. Roll credits.

The main villain also shapeshifts into a jailbait schoolgirl to trick the meatheaded jock main character into going through with the "destroy the world" plan.

Snow doesn't fall for it.

I'd rather play FFXIII than listen to Spoony.

Wow, Quad9. I knew that was their attitude, but seeing it laid out like that, so stark and horrible and in their own words even, it beggars the mind.

Final Fantasy was the game that first introduced me to role-playing, so the series will always hold a special place in my heart. But I haven't really enjoyed any of them since VI, and I gave up completely after the twenty hour extended furry cutscene that was IX. I'm glad to see I made the right choice!

Also, what is it with games that pride themselves on BEING ABOUT THE PLOT, always having the most eye-rollingly stupid stories imaginable? J-RPGs are some of the worst offenders, but I also include stuff like Call of Duty and everything Rockstar's done since San Andreas in this category. I finally forced myself to finished LA Noire last month, and I still can't understand why they chose to eliminate all the freeroam gameplay in favor of... whatever it was they were trying to go for.

You're not fucking Kurosawa. Stop trying to tell me a story and give me a fun game, dammit!

Honestly Call of Duty might have more character development than most JRPGs. This is not an endorsement of Call of Duty's story.

These Western RPGs that Square Enix has such issues with have stories that I don't have to sprint down a neon tube for 40 hours to understand. The stories can also be conveyed without needing a Wikipedia server's worth of in-game data logs.

If you have to keep players on a predetermined, preordained pathway for half your game in order to "tell a story," throwing out open worlds and choices for fixed encounters and hallways, then stop making games. Just make movies. Of course, we all know how great Square is at that.

Nominal: Yessss

Oh god Quad9, please tell me those quotes came from a Play4Real article or something. They're just too perfectly wrong to come from a real human being.

Final Fantasy XIII isn't going away until everyone personally calls up Motomu Toriyama and tells him that they liked Lightning.

Because, as implied at 4:00, NOBODY likes Lightning.

"For Final Fantasy VII, Toriyama designed events such as the ones taking place at the Honey Bee Inn. As the designers were given much artistic freedom, he would often create cutscenes that were unlikely to be approved and thus were eventually changed or removed.[2][3] Toriyama also wrote and directed many of the scenes revolving around the romance between Aerith Gainsborough and Cloud Strife. He tried to make Aerith an important character to the player in order to maximize the impact of her death later in the plot."

Sounds like someone's anus had an unwelcome visit from Don Corneo.

All these sprites and old effects on display just serve to remind me of the days when people with actual talent were calling the shots at Square. It's also telling that even when aping the older games, the new guard can match the look of the old spritework, but none of the charm and emotion the old artists and programmers used to squeeze into every little pixel: a hearty guffaw here, an angry shaking fist there, even a dismissive wag of a tiny finger. When the execution is reduced to this basic state, without all the flashing lights and bloom effects, the dullness of this increasingly irrelevant series is dragged to the forefront. They're never going to make me care about TitsCloud, no matter how many sequels they make.