Graphics ruin gameplay

I don't mean this to be an alarmist post, using that age old mantra of "gameplay above all else." They work in tandem, obviously. That doesn't mean that all graphics have to be just a fraction off of real life – Wind Waker is one of the most beautiful games ever made, and it's nowhere near realistic.

I'm talking more about a specific case, and one that I'm sure has happened more than developers or reviewers would care to admit in this generation. Anyways, if you weren't aware, I'm a big Final Fantasy fan. Once FFVII got its claws hooked into me, I was done for. Playing that goddamn game was all I could think about, and even though it frequently dove into the deep end of the melodrama pool, I found it to be one of the most compelling gaming experiences of my life. Since that time, I've tried out and beat the first three games in the series, and I'm nearing completion on the fourth one (which has to be my favourite so far).

People talk about "system sellers," and for me, that system seller was Final Fantasy XIII. It got me to buy an XBox 360, so you could say I've been excited to play it for awhile now. Well, I finally got around to starting it last night, and, well, I have some trepidations. Some of these have been well-documented by reviewers – a lack of towns, an abundance of cutscenes, and a real focus on "linearity." Now, when they talk about linearity, they don't mean that it tells a straightforward story with a definite arc from beginning to end – that encompasses most JRPGs, and most games in general. I think they literally mean it as "in a line," as so far into the game (granted, I'm only an hour in, but I've heard that it stays this way for a majority of the game), every area has been a straight line to the objective.

FFXIII is supposed to represent the "essence" of Final Fantasy games, but so far, I'm finding that they could have titled it anything. Besides a mish-mash of series tropes that have reared their head (my girlfriend and I call Lightning "Lady Cloud"), there's nothing to tie this game into the overall feeling that I've gotten from Final Fantasy games in the past. Granted, FFVII started out equally as obtuse, with its attack on the Mako reactor in Midgar, so I'm willing to give the game a shot. But something is clear to me already. The design choices that the current guardians of the franchise have made with this installment weren't by choice.

I truly believe that Square Enix could have delivered something along the lines of a Final Fantasy VII for this generation, and people would have been overjoyed. It would have been ridiculously successful, both commercially and critically, because to some degree, they knew what they were doing in that era. Mimicking the golden era of the JRPG isn't a bad thing when you're the ultimate King of JRPGs. But to deliver as robust an experience as FFVII, with its sidequests that you could lose days in, the expansive world, and the illusion of branching paths (even if it is basically just as linear as FFXIII, although presented from a different angle and much less obvious), would have cost Square Enix probably close to a billion dollars, without hyperbole. Fans can clamor for a FFVII remake all they want, but developing for the PS360 is prohibitively expensive.

Could Square Enix have delivered a less ridiculously pretty game? Of course. No one would have faulted them for it. As it stands, FFXIII is actually stupidly pretty. There's so much going on in the graphics that this element of the game alone must have cost them more money than all of their other FF games combined. So they can't offer the branching paths, they can't offer the huge towns to explore, they can't offer anything like the Golden Saucer, because it just would have been too much. So what happens? Graphics trump gameplay. In other words, you might as well be looking at a painting.

This is maybe a pretty specific case – you still have games like Fable 2 and Grand Theft Auto 4 giving you huge worlds to run around in (not that I think either of those games are all that good, although I can see the merit in GTA4 – not so much with Fable 2). But how many times have we been lead through games instead of being allowed to explore them? It's a weird thing to have economics affect gameplay in this way, because how fucked is it that what we're getting are the most graphically advanced games ever, and we can't even replicate the awesome gameplay elements from 15 years ago because of it?

It can just as easily swing the other way too, where developers try to cut corners and save money, and release just complete garbage (usually on the Wii, but there's a good amount of shovelware on every console ever released). Still, I'd like you to consider the game The Last Story, which is now being touted as the last Great Hope of the JRPG. It's being co-developed by Mistwalker (formed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of the Final Fantasy series) and Nintendo, and despite how little is still known about it, it's a clear line in the sand, directly challenging the prettification of the Final Fantasy games. I mean, The Last Story is a really pretty Wii game, but consider what you're getting with The Last Story – huge towns, a real-time battle system, an engaging and coherent storyline where you don't have to read datalogs just to understand it, and a timeless feeling. I can't say the same about FFXIII so far.

The balance of graphics and gameplay is paramount. While I of course am a champion of gameplay, developers need to make sure  that all aspects of their game work. That being said, even though FFXIII's first hour didn't really do much for me, I'm hooked – I need to see it through. Damn your JRPG crack, Square Enix!