Has the general opinion shifted on Vanille at all (besides the favorable crypto-Lesbian couple interpretation)?
I have never replayed the game and I remember finding the ending bafflingly stupid, but the one thing I never understood at the time is that everyone kept trashing on Vanille whereas I thought she was the only likable and redeemable character in the whole cast. Like, she fucked up once and is accountable for it for the rest of the game, whereas cool girl Lightning is a complete moron for the course of the entire plot.
I remember the FFXIII release from the perspective of a teenager with friends who were also FF fans. My piers who loved FFX loved FFXIII, I was more inclined to be wishy washy on it due to being a fan of the older games I was playing at the time, and agreed with a lot of what I was seeing primarily in magazines like Gameinformer who had lukewarm opinions on the linearity iirc. (or I wanted them to say that and they didn’t?) Now I can take things on their own merit, but just for context I didn’t do that and decide to enjoy FFX until the year 2020 But for the most part the FF fans in my small town HS either loved or hated FFXIII. The weebs of anime club loved it to bits, my SNES-enjoyer pal was more in my camp.
Simply put, I think there’s no denying that it was divisive all the way back to the original release. How could it not be?
If you are just talking media reaction, well, that’s easily researchable, check wikipedia and its sources.
Oh, one more thing, the small town high school I’m referring to-- it was also where the voice actor of Hope was in attendance at the time. I think a lot of us played FFXIII not even realizing our classmate Vincent Martello was in the game, and when/if we eventually did, it was a mindfuck of the highest calibur. He was known as a disney channel kid.
I still occasionally see the same ragging on Vanille (and Hope) as I saw back in the day, but it’s certainly not as common as it once was
I actually revisited as many media reviews and the like I could find within the last year or so and was honestly rather surprised that the game’s critical reception wasn’t nearly as harsh as I remembered it being. I think some of the more negative positions I remember came more from other, fan-focused platforms (like Penny Arcade)
I originally gave Final Fantasy XIII a pass because I didn’t own a platform that had it. It sounded like a game I would like, even with the hyper-exaggerated fan criticism that it’s “just a hallway with combat.” (Even at the time, I distrusted the overgeneralization, but I had no means to disprove it.) All of that is to say, this conversation has put it back high on my list of games to get to. As someone who defends Final Fantasy XV and XVI and likes the older Final Fantasy games, I might find a lot to like in XIII.
FF13 came out kinda right as I was dropping off video games (~2010) but I was around enough to see some of the reaction. I see a lot of people cite the “unanimous dogpile” - even in another thread last week I saw someone say that people trying to say that not everyone hated the game are doing “revisionist history.” …But I don’t think that’s true! What happened with FF13 is that we saw a series that used to put out games that 9 out of every 10 players enjoyed put out a game that only 6 or 7 out of every 10 players enjoyed and that difference is enough to be noticeable. It really was the victim of the Yelp effect (or, in more statistical terms, Response bias). The only people who are driven to write their opinions online are the people with really strong positive or really strong negative opinions. Because of the time period, a lot of the discourse online was draped in misogyny, and it was also right at the beginning of “all japanese games are bad/outdated” and the imperial reign of brown COD/Skyrim,
FWIW, I didn’t play my first FF game until 2018 though, so this is a bit of an outsider looking in at that time.
Yea I’d go so far as to say that this is an understatement. On the FF Reddit and in other FF communities and such, the dust has kinda settled and “the Big 3” FF games are 6, 9, and 10.
I think more than any other series I see FF games really coalesce in these generational trenches. FF7 is really deep in that older millennial trench. Every person I see mention FF7 as one of their favorite games talks way more about how incredible it was to open on Christmas morning back in the 1990s than any of the game mechanics.
I’m an odd example in that I did not play any FF games until adulthood and yet my taste (favorite is X, love XII) still aligns with my generation (I grew up playing PS2) - maybe there’s something PS2-y about them that makes them feel comfortable and right to me.
This has been really heartening to see. Stuff like this used to be everywhere on the internet - just unfunny slop (also it was somehow always Britney Spears’s fault for everything that ever happened).
I like the whole cast so I can’t quite share your thoughts completely, but when I played it a few years ago (critical consensus had been starting to turn at this point), she and Lightning were starting to get favorable comparisons to Terra and Celes. In both FF6/FF13, you start the game as one woman but ultimately the story seems to coalesce around another… Terra and Lightning have very similar arcs about letting people in instead of shutting them out… Celes and Vanille seem to find their footing as leaders over time…
Wicked good point to make there as well—you’re absolutely right about FFX-2, I’m gonna crib from my Backlogg’d for a sec
When FFX-2 came out, being a girl who liked video games meant wading into pretty awful places: game stores where they hate and leer at you, online spaces where they hate and leer at you, and games themselves where they hate and leer at characters like you.
To like games as a girl in the early aughts meant you had to learn to deal with never getting to play a game with strong women and you had to learn to deal with men who would make fun of the games that did have strong women.
I think it’s gotten better these days, but I think you’re right that a lot of modern reevaluations are giving things that were overlooked or undervalued for bad cultural reasons a fair shake
I’m gonna say something that you might not want to hear, but I genuinely believe it: you’ve avoided the best ones!!
I agree on PoR being just okay. I didn’t play it until years after I’d played RD and there’s a pretty notable difference. PoR kinda just feels like what they were doing on the GBA with better graphics. RD actually pushes the 3D space a lot more and has way better map design. The Laguz do reappear in RD but aren’t super plot-relevant for a lot of it and are on the whole kinda weak units (other than the super busted Royal Laguz) so they can mostly be ignored. I don’t want to spoil too much but RD does a lot of experimental things that PoR never did and the series hasn’t really done since. There are long stretches of the game where you’re swapping your entire army every chapter, and so you really gotta stay on your toes and just always play with the pieces that you have at any given time. It’s way heavier on the strategy than the RPG
I have mixed opinions on the 3DS ones. I don’t really like “skill emblem” (the super heavy emphasis on builds and reclassing many times to accumulate tons of broken skills; this was also an issue in Three Houses). Awakening I don’t like very much. Conquest was actually kinda good (horrendous story though). Echoes was a pretty package - great art, great music, just okay gameplay.
Engage is unfortunately one of the best games I’ve ever played. Every character looks like a bad vtuber and the whole thing is an assault on the eyes but… that gameplay. They gutted skill emblem and made something really tight and controlled. I played Maddening without the DLC/Online right at launch and that’s been one of the most difficult, meditative, fun, rewarding, experiences I’ve ever had with any game. I was in a trance for like two weeks straight, playing 8-10 hour days and I really felt like I had unlocked some higher plane of existence by being that focused for that long. My third eye was open
Chuds complain about this a lot online but I thought this recent research contained an enlightening statistic about Steam releases with female protagonists:
There has in fact been proportionally less games with female protagonists released on Steam in the past decade! There are obviously many more games being released overall, so the sheer number of games with female protagonists has indeed significantly increased, and the atomization of entertainment has allowed for more audiences being catered to overall. But this was quite a striking dissonance with the overall online discourse I see online (both from chuds whining and people perceiving an improvement).
I assume the difference in perception is that more female protags now assume typically male leading roles / appear in typically male gamer-oriented games, but I don’t have the historical chart on that.
I knew a bit about the army switching (from watching my brother play, he never complained about difficulty though), and you’re right in that it probably is an improvement on PoR. I wouldn’t be against giving it a go someday instead of replaying PoR, just disappointed that they (really had no choice in keeping them since it was a sequel) kept the laguz in since I felt it made the gameplay suffer.
Awakening’s systems and story left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn’t believe it was as beloved as it seemed (but then again, we’re probably talking about teens/kids whose first FE it was), but it kept the series alive for potential remakes of the old stuff so maybe it will all be worth it?
and you pegged me right, I’ve avoided Engage like the plague because of aesthetics and because in the trailers I saw they have a hub world (which I’m guessing is possibly as soul-less as 3 houses was?). But I appreciate your efforts, you’ve convinced me to purchase Engage if it ever goes below $30/40 - if they cleaned up the gameplay/maps then some sins can be forgiven
i thought this quote was beautiful and i put it in the weird video games quote thread. i know it’s not technically from a video game but i hope to live long enough to hear jaffe say this before an episode.
I feel bad that people were so hard on FFX-2. I remember getting it around xmas and talking to my cousin about it and he said his friend got frustrated because of “monkey love” and threw it out the window. Once I got to the monkey love part I laughed a lot because who would go nuts over that? Anyway I was 100% there for the dress spheres and outfits and settings. I did get kind of bored of the gameplay but I’m here for the rest! (I said the same thing about Tekken earlier this year)
first one i think of is sonic R. i wasnt there when it released but i remember growing up seeing people online agree that its a bad dumb game with terrible slippery controls and unfitting music. nowadays i see more people appreciating the unique racing controls and the awesome music which is good because sonic R fucks
One game that I’ve mentioned before that has had a change in reputation that puzzles me is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 on the NES. It was always considered a solid Konami platformer, but the Angry Video Game Nerd made a video dumping on it several years back and now it’s often cited as one of the worst NES games ever.
Even if you don’t like it, TMNT1 is above average quality for a NES game. I’ve never talked to anyone who has an appreciation for the NES, the type that doesn’t just regurgitate secondhand opinions, that thinks otherwise. If any of you think TMNT is truly awful I urge you to go play actual licensed garbage like Ghostbusters, Uncanny X-Men and Predator - and then tell me if TMNT is so bad.
the specific kind of damage avgn did to the Retro Gamer Mind is unmistakable. i’ll stick up for milon’s secret castle even though i don’t necessarily love that game
Epic’s acquisition ofpublishing partnership with genDESIGN means any day now Trico / The Last Guardian will be rereleased on PC and general opinion of it is going to rocket through the roof. I have decided in advance the precise nature of this cultural rehabilitation will be Annoying. On the other hand, it will be vindicating
“captain, you told us… why didn’t we listen”
But for the most part the FF fans in my small town HS either loved or hated FFXIII. The weebs of anime club loved it to bits, my SNES-enjoyer pal was more in my camp.
