Many gamers are currently complaining about Final Fantasy XIII for being a ‘linear’ experience. This is not what Final Fantasy is all about, these people say. These games are about roaming free! But are they?
A couple of weeks before FFXIII arrived in my office, I remembered I still had Final Fantasy V in my DS. I had played about seven or eight hours of it before putting it away. Now seemed as a good moment as any to pick it up again. After booting it up, I was immediately confronted with what I call ‘Final Fantasy Syndrome’. These old games do not have quest logs or markers or anything to tell you where you are supposed to go next. My party awoke in an Inn on Crescent Island without any clue of what they where supposed to do.
I spent a good 20 minutes roaming around the tiny island, speaking to its inhabitants, hoping to be pointed towards my next destination. I once again realized Final Fantasy worlds are inhabited by autistic villagers, stuck in their three square walk, spouting the same useless line over and over. Hopping on a Chocobo only compounded the problem. I was now free to fly anywhere, to any autistic villager on this huge world map.
Thank goodness for GameFaqs. By following one of the walkthroughs, I mentally retraced all my steps and found out where to go next. Turns out there was only one NPC in one specific location who progressed the story.
I called this ‘Final Fantasy Syndrome’ for a reason. All of the FF games before XIII have had this in one way or another. To be honest, I should just call it JRPG Syndrome. There are several PSOne JRPGs I have not finished because of this same exact problem: not remembering where to go next. In any case, this problem shows that what Final Fantasy games offer isn’t freedom. There is only one path to follow. This path, however, is so wide, that we can get lost on it, and mistake it for free roaming.
If we look at Final Fantasy XIII, the path is narrow. This means we don’t have to bother with GameFaqs to find our next destination. It’s somewhere ‘just ahead’. All the pointless wandering has been taken out of the equation, with emphasis now firmly on progressing the narrative and discovering the battle system.
Now, mind you, I am not saying all games should do away with exploration. I am just pointing out Final Fantasy games have never been about freedom. They have been about telling a story and experimenting with the many different battle systems.
Freedom is such a powerful concept. We want to be masters of our fate and be free to decide what we want to do at any given time. Real life rarely grants us this freedom. Perhaps this is why we as gamers are often looking for this in our pastime. But games can never offer true freedom, only the illusion of it. Some games succeed in hiding their fences better than others. And some others do away with the smoke and mirrors entirely.
Writing about games sinds 2003, but playing them since the days of Zork. Harry Hol is a journalist and published author who finds it hard to chose between making deadline or running instances.
I think Dragon Age is also a fine example how much Freedom one can really have. The stronger the story, the more you lose your Freedom of choice. And in the end many decisions still lead to the same end, just with some variations. I also wonder if some decisions will be taken as “canon” for the upcoming DA: Awakening expansion, regardless what you did in the main game.
Fallout 3 allowed for a lot of “freedom”, but in the end the main plot is still quite linear. You just have the freedom to explore the wasteland and go whereever you want, thanks to level scaling of creatures and quest locations often not having much if any impact on other quest locations. So you have basically only a bunch of stories/quests you can do in any order you wish. The only major choice is at the end of the game, and if you want to continue playing one of the DLCs like Broken Steel, your death gets of course reverted and another plot choice is taken.
The problem with level scaling is that it is a very crude way to assess player char capabilities and often pits the player against random mobs stronger than boss encounters, or, more common, the mobs are pathetically weak.
I think this still gives Fallout 3 the advantage of feeling the most like a world. There are many stories, and the main story is just one of them. It is also easier to add almost infinitely new quest/story content locations to the game.
But it does not really work out that well. The more you explore and the more you get, the more problematic it becomes to fit new content into this power creep. The Point Lookout DLC saw me in Hellfire armor and all that, and it had a very primitive/rural setting. I wonder if a “lose all items temporarily” trick would not have been better. It was just absurd that I suddenly had to fight rats and farmers that could stand full minigun sweeps or several plasma blasts.
I think MMOs would profit greatly from the level scaling that singleplayer games offer. But in a persistent world, this is hard to do. I think the Guild Wars approach worked best so far, everyone is really quickly at max level, and it depends on your skill selection and skills if the “mission” works out.
But given the fixation of players on gear/item progression and their own level progression as well, I wonder if the reboot with Guild Wars 2 was not inevitable. GW1 has so many skills by now, it is a bit a mess. And I am not sure if players would really accept expansions that offer only new weapon skins and only 1-2 new or improved abilities. LOTRO does that a lot. Siege of Mirkwood was quite a gear reset.
I think “freedom” of exploration is basically that what is known as side-quest.
This would make MMOs “Worlds of Sidequests” – but even they have usually a very strong main quest storyline. Even GW locked areas of the world till you did certain missions/things with your char before.
Despite all its flaws, Darkfall might be the next thing to a world of total freedom nowdays. EVE also has no major storyline, but a lot of background story. The upcoming SWTOR is supposedly heavy story driven and I wonder how much this will turn it into a single player game online and impact “freedom” compared to games like EVE.
Your points about the series’ general lack of freedom are well taken, but it’s my impression that a lot of the FF veterans complaining about FFXIII right now are actually not looking for freedom per se as much as they are missing the variety of the earlier games. With no town exploration, side quests early in the game and nothing else to do but to run through yet another dungeon looking for the next boss, FFXIII can feel a bit more demanding and repetitive than most JRPGs, even though the strictly gameplay-related activites (battles and character development) are essentially the same as they’ve always been in the series.
@Demiath I think you hit the nail on the head.
The Zune concentrates on being a Portable Media Player. Not a web browser. Not a game machine. Maybe in the future it’ll do even better in those areas, but for now it’s a fantastic way to organize and listen to your music and videos, and is without peer in that regard. The iPod’s strengths are its web browsing and apps. If those sound more compelling, perhaps it is your best choice.
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