Square's games have been getting increasingly linear and have been taking more and more away from the aspects of player-driven narrative and exploration, and it's been getting worse ever since Final Fantasy VIII. In Final Fantasy VIII, you were pretty much doomed to have the exact same story no matter how you played, even if you hated it. Example: you may have thought Quistis was awesome and that Rinoa was an annoying, clingy, self-absorbed brat who just wants to make daddy mad, but no matter how hard you try, Squall is always going to end up with Rinoa, and he's going to act like a douche towards Quistis. That's the only way Square wants you to play, and if you don't like it then too bad.
In a Bioware game though, you can play however you want. Don't like character X? You don't have to be friends with them if you don't want. Like girl A more than girl B? That's fine, because you can pick either, or even go with girl C if you don't like either of them, or just make your character celebate. Is your character a goody-two-shoes and you don't like it? Then stop making goody-two-shoes choices during conversations, and start making darker ones. Don't want your character to be a douche? Then make him act nicer. You don't have to bang your head on the coffee table going "Why do I have to play as a character as moronic as Squall?" because the character is whoever you want them to be.
In FFXIII, Square has actually taken a few steps BACKWARDS from their previous games by removing actual exploration from their games and replacing it with linear paths through non-interactive environments. At best you may find a fork in the path that leads to an item box, but that is mearly a tangent in your workflow, not exploration. Square's ethos with FFXIII seems to have been "Make the game as efficient to play as possible, so that theyre's not much coming in between the player and the story we've written." The problem is, the story isn't even that good, and on top of that the player doesn't have an influence over it.
To paraphrase that dude from Bioware, "You can put a J in front of it, but Final Fantasy XIII is not an RPG." This may sound like an extreme stance, I don't think it's without merit. The first electronic RPGs were an attempt to make a computerized clone of Dungeons and Dragons. What these early games lacked though, was the ability to actually role play-- that is, a conversation between the player and the game master, who takes on the role of an NPC, and must interpret the player's dialogue as per what will make sense within the scenario he is overseeing. It's taken many years for RPGs to come close to recapturing interactivity like that, and yet Square seems set on moving even further away from it, with as little player input over the narrative as possible. If the "RPG" in "JRPG" no longer stays for "Role Playing Game," then what is it?
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