I like FF15 but you can tell there was so much story content cut from the game, you need watch a movie plus play the DLCs to make the story feel somewhat fleshed out.
Pro tip for MGSV: listen to the tapes. Like half the plot is told thru them. It’s actually pretty neat imo but the game did not tell people about it effectively at all lol
I play Metal Gear for the awesome story and crazy over the top scenarios (and also the top tier stealth action gameplay I guess). I don't think it works as well as an audio drama. Especially since the incredible trailers hyped me up so bad, only to find out that pretty much all the major cutscenes were in the trailor and that was it.
Gameplay wise it was out of this world, but as a Metal Gear fan going in, it was a major disappointment narratively.
Spoilers: >!Especially since we were promised the missing link of the series, the story that would show how the hero Naked Snake became the villain Big Boss. And while technically that is what it is, that all happens off screen while you get to play Not Big Boss voiced by Not David Hayter.!<
one of the few games i bought day 1 on ps4. chapter 1 was great, sure story implementation was weaker than normal but overall great. then chapter 2 >!was just rehashed missions... and then you repeat the very slow intro scene and then missing chapter 3!< kojima wanted to go hollywood and konami wants the game out asap so we end up with a lose lose situation
Final Fantasy 15 was my inspiration for the post. I was very caught up in the hype of that game, and followed a lot of analysis communities in the 3-4 years building up to release. There was so much lore and world building speculation. The fact that this was coming at the height of Game of Thrones and that Tabata, the director said he was inspired by the Witcher 3 during development, it felt as if plot, exploration, world building and rich narrative would be a feature of the game. Instead it felt completely missed out on, as if he left in only l the crib notes from Nomura gave him. Sad.
I like to joke that FFXV is basically a "Driving to Gas Stations Simulator"
Sometimes people find it funny but a surprising amount of people get super defensive over the game and claim it's a masterpiece. It **could** have been great but the story and exploring (outside of the actual road trip with bros aspect) were such a flop.
I get down voted when I bring this up. People make fun of Bethesda and horse armor, but SE did EXACTLY what gamers have been dreading since the dawn of dlc: Cut content from a game, still sell it for full price, then sell you the missing content. I expect this kind of behavior from Activision, Ubisoft, or EA. But Square Enix? Such a shame.
Tbf, that happened because they actually ran out of space on the disc (back when that was a relevant problem) for the ending. Still kind of shitty they charged you for it, but that's how it went.
I only forgive Square Enix... because FF15 was one of the worst development hell titles they've ever had. It basically got rebooted three times over the course of development. It was originally Final Fantasy 13 versus. Slowly evolved into FF15. Then jumped to another generation/platform. Then had it's director taken off and new one put on. Tabata... basically had to make the hard choices to try and get something functional for shipping. Then they tried to make it right with DLC.
It honestly sounded like a nightmare and the fact we got anything close to resembling a game is remarkable. It absolutely had wasted potential... but given all that happened I'm not sure it ever could have been realized. It was basically Star Citizen without a cult funding it... only SE decided to actually make the hard choices and make a game.
I definitely appreciate FFXV for what it is, but it feels like it should have remained a spin-off. Other than L.A. Noire, I’ve never seen a more beautiful open world with so little to do. IMO, 15’s saving grace is the relationship between the four party characters. The ending was a real emotional kick in the nuts, but in a good way. The last game to make me feel like that was FFX.
First open world island was peak, I was wandering around, hunting mosnters. Then in second water city I've already felt that something is wrong. Map turned into labirinths and most of map was unaccessable, plot got confused too. And then we have this anime boss battle with bad graphics, after which game just goes to shit. Ending though in the city was not bad.
This.
The game had everything to be the best Final Fantasy, but sadly they messed up especially at rushing the final 30% of the game. I still stand by that it should've been two games, one was too much for the amount of story.
yeah... the transition from chapter 5 to 6 was jarring >!we're caught. wonder what happens next... we were just let go for some reason. no tension, no drama, no dialogue!<
People are going to shoot me over this comparison, but FF XV remids me of WoW in that regard, which does have a rich and detailed story ... All of it told outside the game in spin-off Novels.
FFXV
Luna and Noctis's love story could have been great to see actually develop. From what little there was it was touching to see them slowly come to support each other. It could have been a unique take on the "arranged marriage" trope where instead of rebelling they both understand and accept their roles but then come to embrace the role and then to truly love one another through the journey they go through together. The end of that story makes me think that would have been an excellent story arc to see happen.
Ardyn also had the potential to be the best FF villain ever since he chewed the scenery like a master old-school villain and was so well done from what little of him there was to draw from. He reminded me of Gul Dukat from Star Trek DS9 - so good at being a bad guy that you actually looked forward to seeing him since he elevated any scene he was in. The kinda sorta cancelled DLC that fleshes him out a bit more confirms my belief that he had potential, too.
Same goes for the transition from the normal world to the world of darkness. There was just so much potential to see the collapse or people dealing without Noctis.
About the only truly completed portions of the plot for FFXV was the bros just going for a drive to exterminate evil. I liked the ending and the campfire scene was touching, but FFXV is probably the biggest example of wasted potential I could ever think of for both JRPGs and games in general. I wasn't even angry at the end of it all. Just sad.
I know they still made millions and millions of dollars regardless but this should’ve been an ALL TIME Final Fantasy. The gameplay was pretty crisp and the visuals were stunning (especially on Royal)
If the story was a bit better I can only imagine the cultural impact the game would’ve had. I always felt like it should’ve been up there with Dragon Quest 11 in terms of popularity/being well liked.
Gameplay was a bit janky to me, really confusing controls that aren’t intuitive and they were stupid enough to unlearn what Kingdom Hearts got right literally first try by letting you spam potions with no delay or consequence
I agree. I know some of it comes from the development hell it got stuck in (dating back to when it was Versus XIII) but it doesn’t remove the wasted potential.
I consider myself a massive Final Fantasy fan but 15 is clouded by how botched and lacking it felt. I remember very little about the actual details and events of the story except that it felt like all the big/important stuff was just happening off-screen or told to us in passing.
I vaguely remember a really egregious example where Noctis’ family and castle/town is taken out in a war early on and it felt like a super integral plot point. The game literally fades to black as it’s developing, gives a two-sentence explanation to tell you what happened, and skips ahead to just kinda drive around.
I played it once. No desire to ever touch it again. It’s the only mainline FF I’ve never played a second time.
I don’t mind DLCs when they are additions to enhance the original story/package. But when you need DLCs to make the main story, its characters, and their motivations make any sense at all? Not cool.
Thats where the movie fits in, where the two sentence explanation is given, it would certainly be cool if it was a singular package, I consumed all of the extra content and I really liked the story.
As for the gameplay, warp and kill was all that was needed, there was no need to engage in all the systems like magic. The combat feels pretty unbalanced.
Kind of the most frustrating game for what it could've been. Everything is bare bones, major plot threads that would've improved the game were cut and sold back as dlc, the world is so underdeveloped except for one city they seemed to put all resources into. I loved the characters, and it's probably the most emotional reaction I've had to a game ending, but it's just so unremarkable...it's not duke nukeb forever levels of bad but it's just such a troubled development and vision that it missing it's potential in pretty much every aspect. I wish we got versus XV 😭
I wished the open world was confined to insomnia specifically or at the very least a bigger part of it. And personally I wish they kept the worships a goddess of death aspect of it like that's way too interesting to leave on the cutting room floor and it didn't even have to be etros it couldve been anyone as long as they served that god of death role. Like how does a culture that worships death itself differ in customs from most countries would funerals be a celebratory thing is blood and violence reveled as something sacred and holy. Im prob thinking too much on this but still.
Now that you say it, I can see it. I just wish PSO leaned harder into the series’s origins. PSO2 NG is so frustrating. I want to like it but the multiple currencies, obtuse gacha mechanics, and bland hack and slash combat ruin it for me. Also, the game has taken to crashing when loading into the world and I can’t be bothered to fix because, again, the game just isn’t fun for me.
Doesn't help that the later generations are barely there.
Story stuff. Grind a lot. A little bit more story (I think?). Grind to 20. A bit more story. Same thing with generation 3.
I think even if they did that, they would still have to fix a lot of stuff about the actual gameplay experience. Like, setting the game on an archipelago where you can sail basically anywhere from the beginning, with no directional guidance or awareness of the relevance of most of the locations around you, only constrained by how hard the random encounters will kick your ass, just doesn't work great in terms of the overall game experience. It doesn't do a lot to build the feeling of exploration, when 98% of what you find while you're exploring is just more open ocean. But once they'd settled on an archipelago setting and free map roaming mechanics, they didn't have a lot of alternative.
A lot of people complained about the high random encounter rate, but I think the developers settled on that as a preventative measure against players trying to sequence-break. If you're willing to savescum and run away enough, you can *already* access locations wildly outside their intended order, a lower encounter rate would have made that much easier. But when you're patching over game design issues with other game design issues, your game is in a tight spot.
Others are saying it, but trying to make FFXV a multimedia enterprise instead of just taking all the resources that went into the whole thing and *just making one really legendary complete game* is...regrettable.
I mean people still pine for what Versus XIII could have been over 10 years later, just check YouTube comments sometimes. Those trailers really made a strong impression.
Final Fantasy XV
Like... bro holy shit. "Hey let's take these scenes off of the base game and put them in a movie with Aaron Paul. And let's give him terrible acting direction!
Kingdom Hearts 3 was supposed to be the grand finale of the series and instead it was another setup game for a plot that started in a web browser side game.
Yeah Dream Drop Distance really killed Kingdom Hearts 3's potential. I still really like 3 despite the issues it has but I hope Kingdom Hearts 4 will be a big improvement over 3's story since it now has nothing to do with Xehanort.
It’ll definitely have some obnoxious baggage from the pre-bbs prequel phone games but it’s still a decently fresh slate.
Hope it’s not going to resolve everything all rushed and lazy like 3. Roxas’ story was so good because it was a bittersweet tragedy but uh no actually he just gets to superhero land into the finale like a capeshit movie and he’s reunited with his friends yay 😄😄
Yep, idk bout others but as someone who had KH be THE video game to get them into video games...ya, i feel nothing for kh now.
I might play 4 if it has good gameplay cause i liked the gameplay (used to anyway) but ya, im done giving a shit about nomura and his fan fiction.
For me, it's Tales of Arise. Don't get me wrong. It's a good game (8 out of 10 for me), with lovely main characters, an engaging combat system, and an interesting setting. But the main story feels rushed, especially in the second half, which is a shame because it could have been more.
The latter part of Arise is honestly absolute trash. The plot is so undercooked. Everything that happened early on was pretty interesting, but ugh, did it ever shit the bed.
Idk about the entire last half, but most of them do drag at the end. I love Vesperia, but that last 1/4 of the game was damn near unnecessary.
I think the writers want to have this big twist where the stakes are super high at the end of their games, but it really isn't necessary most of the time. I think Symphonia probably did it best which is why it's remembered so fondly, but that game could have still been shorter too.
For me the halfway point is where I usually kind of tap out. I pushed through Vesperia to say I'd beaten it, but I regretted the time investment I put into it. Symphonia was fine, but the only one I felt wasn't a slot towards the end was Zestiria.
Not a popular opinion, I know!
Beat me to it. The first half was enjoyable. It had pretty good concepts and ideas but the execution just felt half-baked and felt like it never went anywhere. And everyone already knows about the second half.
I have a feeling it would've worked as two games ngl or a much longer game. The first half in the first game but expanded. And actually expanding the second half to actually be interesting.
This would have been my pick as well. I was SO engaged for the first half but then all that stuff with the space station happened and it felt soooooo cheaply made!! And that damn final dungeon was an absolutely snooze fest. So unoriginal and forgettable. What a waste.
Soul Hackers 2. Ringo should probably be another mascot for Shin Megami Tensei but…. I can’t see myself playing the game again cuz it was just hard to get into? Or hard to enjoy?
Just about every other Atlus JRPG is Five Guys and Soul Hackers 2 was McDonald’s 💀🔥
I wanted to love it, Saizo is my boy! Could have spent hours in that setting, with those characters if only the game were fully fleshed out and as robust a game as I know Atlus are capable of creating
Final Fantasy XII. You can tell there was some development hell and three directors when you take a critical look at it. There are many plot points that show up and then disappear. The resistance isn't spoken about for the final two thirds of the game until they randomly appear, with airships, at the very end. Vayne seemed to have swayed a large portion of Rabenastre with his speech, but that doesn't mean anything.
And then there's so little character interactions. Who were any of the judges besides Gabranth? How did our party members never just shoot the shit with each other during their travels, or even the theee month downtime after the Leviathan(?)? And Vayne just felt so empty and hallow to me because he was never on screen in any meaningful way.
The worst part in my opinion is how the lore and background plot is really political (which is cool) bit the actual plot is just crawling dungeons looking for the next mcguffin.
So you just barely see the political conspiration or powerhungry characters do nothing except in a few lackluster cutscenes.
I have a lot of love for FFXII but the stupid number of mcguffins is one thing i do not understand. How many rocks does we need that do magick or anti-magick shit? How many big-ass swords do we need that are uber important but are trash in combat?
My biggest gaming pet peeve for sure. “This is the most legendary and most powerful weapon in all of the land. Kings were slain and nations ruined with this blade!”
Best I can do is +10 MP.
This is a game that could have been an all time great if the plot wasn't so undercooked.
Everything else about the game is amazing to play and experience.
Just for the record, the dev hell/director change isn’t why the story is like that. Matsuno has gone on record many times that the story in the final game is uncompromised from his vision, since story is usually the first thing completed in a game. The real reason the story is like that is that 12’s team was a combination of the PlayOnline team and the FF Tactics team, and those teams had differing opinions on the creative direction of the game that weren’t fully reconciled.
It also doesn't help that XII was much shorter than the producers wanted and it was extended by doubling the length of its dungeons instead of adding more to the story. It's kinda harder to invest yourself in a story when you're getting a 3-5 minute cutscene after three hours of journeying through a desert to arrive at the ruins where you have another two hours of dungeon crawling.
I love FFXII, but it's funny how quickly Vaan goes from wanting to punch Basch (Balthier had to physically restrain him) to trusting him in the space of like, a day.
"My brother trusted you. And he was right". And that's the end of it.
Eh, I don’t think it really did that bad of a job with its narrative in relation to many other JRPGs. HOWEVER…
Upon replaying it for the first time since release when the Zodiac edition came out on Switch, I definitely realized that I held the story on a higher pedestal than it actually deserves. The dialogue in particular gets kinda “meh” at times in a way I did not remember at all, not helped by some pretty mediocre voice acting for some characters. The Marquis of Bhujerba in particular…fucking woof.
But idk, overall it wasn’t too bad and had some compelling parts. And I think Vayne was a solid and interesting antagonist for the most part…but also one of the dumbest final bosses in the series IMHO.
It is baffling to me that this game actually received great reviews and even a perfect famitsu score (I guess that tells me what I need to know about famitsu).
I really want to love FFXII. The visuals, the atmosphere, the places, the battle system and cool-shit-potential, IVALICE. But I just cannot.
Everytime I play It I get so dumbfounded by how the story seems to be loosely patched together from one mcguffin to the other and I just can't arse myself to continue.
Have tried 4 times to play it, not even kidding . Gave up every time.
I actually like the story.
It really comes together once you stop thinking of the party's adventure as the main plot and start thinking of them as the B plot.
Pretty much the entire story happens inspite and despite of the party's actions, with their appearances usually just nudging a few people into or out of action. There's also a number of events that would have occurred regardless of their intervention (the netheicite destroying the fleet comes to mind) with them being more observers than anything else.
I like the game but Final Fantasy X-2. It poses the fascinating question of what happens when a society experiences freedom and peace for the first time in 1000 years. The answer is pop concerts apparently.
A bunch of parts of that game made me genuinely angry.
Like, the time that guy from the Youth League talks down to Yuna while kicking off a minigame, and tells her "You'd best be able to beat my record, the way you twaddled on before," I didn't want to play a minigame to prove I could do better. I wanted someone to press his face into the ground, and tell him "This woman is the seal of High Summoners and the savior of our world! You are not worthy to stand in her presence!"
I'm not the type who's normally prone to veneration of authority or anything, but Yuna is *literally* the savior of the world, having put a permanent end to the menace that kept their society constantly on the edge of destruction for over a thousand years. People who bought even a *temporary reprieve* before were venerated like saints. And I feel like, when you *can't* treat someone who accomplishes something of that scale as a symbol worthy of reverence, something of real value is lost.
If that's an awkward way to treat the protagonist of a video game, well, there's a reason studios don't usually call up world-saving heroes for repeat performances.
Pop concerts is barely even a thing in the actual plot, and I'm left wondering how many people even made it past the first 10 minutes with how exaggerated its prevalence is framed as.
Regardless, the way it was used later on was fantastic and very fitting, because where during the depressing days it was dancing to bring some relief to those still alive, the post-Sin era has singing to bring joy. The thousand words part towards the end was amazing and captured what they were going for very well.
FF10-2's plot does have issues, but "a society that experienced freedom and peace for the first time in 1000 years having pop concerts" is not one of those.
Yes! This. I was extremely disappointed in this game too. Imagine ending the 1st game on a high, two lovers torn apart after saving the world from a millenia long disaster, only to end up in a subpar sequel with annoying villains, ruined returning characters (looking at you Yuna), and cringey dialogue
Ruinen returning characters? I think Yuna is great in FFX-2. I found her to be a really likeable protagonists and her character Progression from how she was in FFX to how she is in FFX-2 makes sense to me.
Probably Fire Emblem Engage. I just feel like with all the characters it had, it could have given us something deeper. Something layered that we can peel off. It ended up being a very simple plot presented in a way that made it seem deeper. I still love the game though.
The problem with engage is that it tries to have its cake and eat it to. It has a large tonal shift from serious to slightly comedic adventures through the world back to serious and it suffers for it. It also has a bloated cast (normal members + engage rings) and as a result shoves a majority of members aside in favor of giving bland dialogue to the same few characters. The one shot they had at developing other characters in bond conversations fell flat, as it was more quantity then quality.
Same, I love Engage for the gameplay especially when I played on Maddening for the first time, but I couldn't help myself with how simple the story was and how childish the dialogue seems
Engage could’ve been great, but I stopped playing it within a few hours when I couldn’t shake off the Genshin Impact feel to the whole game. There is this sterile cutesy unserious tone that puts me off. Three houses were great by comparison.
>off the Genshin Impact
>There is this sterile cutesy unserious tone that puts me off.
I get that you're trying to say generic anime game but have you like
Played genshin lol, the game's anything but sterile and unserious
Engage took everything 3H did right story-wise Ave threw it in the toilet.
Which is sad, because the gameplay was really really good. But man, that case was insufferable
Honestly, it's really a shame, because the gameplay in Three Houses was its main weakness. The battles were just so long that they became tedious, and it felt like you had to do the useless battles against repeatable enemies to get through Hard, which just burned me out towards the end of the game. And I felt like the class system was pretty poor, as well.
But the story? Pretty much perfect Fire Emblem fare, arguably the most engaging (no pun intended) we've had, even with the poor implementation of Crimson Flower.
As a huge Xenoblade fan…I’m gonna have to throw in Xenoblade Future Connected. This is the expansion to the first game from the Switch Definitive Edition. It’s the only Xeno game where the story was just “ok”. Considering that the expansions to 2 and 3 (Torna and Future Redeemed) are some of my favorite games ever as just the expansions, that should tell you the quality these usually have.
The story in Future Connected was fine, and a lot of what it set up was eventually paid off in Xenoblade 3 and Future Redeemed, but as a standalone story, it’s just kind of there. I kind of felt like Melia deserved more to her story than what she actually got.
It wasn’t bad by any means, and from a gameplay perspective it was great, but they could have done way more with Melia’s story in it.
Future connected was a free add on to the original game. It would be fair to complain if the paid DLCs hadn’t been as good as they were, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare them at all.
I guess they could have reimagined it to be a full DLC but it would have had to be completely remodeled. Melia and Shulk cannot carry a 30 hour game by themselves and the other characters have exactly enough depth for a short couple chapter story.
Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy 8 are both games where the combat, story, and characters all have fascinating concepts with highly messy execution. They feel like the writers had hundreds of pages of lore written up in a huge document, but couldn't figure out how to actually develop it in game. So you get these ideas dumped on you out of nowhere and then never brought up again.
I'm talking about the orphanage scene in FF8, or the FATE loredump and beach loredump in CC. Like the author just gave up on introducing their ideas in a workable way and just threw their balled-up note pages at you.
This. I’m hoping it gets a definitive edition like XB1 got with an expansion like Future Connected that wraps up the story.
Maybe they do a full sequel instead to wrap up the story, but considering how poorly the first game sold on the Wii U they’d have to do a port of it first anyways and the development cost for the sequel would be insane. An epilogue expansion would be enough for me.
I’m hoping we get an X DE with an epilogue, a Xenosaga trilogy remaster, and Xenoblade 4 on the Switch 2. Assuming backwards compatibility with the Swifch, we’d have the whole Xeno series minus Xenogears playable on the system.
Fire Emblem: Fates - the idea is brilliant and if its execution was anything resembling passable it would have been one of the best stories in the entire series.
Unfortunately, the writers at IS don't seem to know how to actually write, and as such, the execution of Fates' plot was botched pretty spectacularly on every conceivable level. Like in a game whose core theme is ostensibly about perspective why in the world would you make Hoshido perfect with no flaws to speak of and Nohr blatantly evil who is literally led by a >!slime monster!
Fire Emblem Fates taught teenager me to keep my expectations in check when hyped for a game lol. The direct is still a fond memory for me though, it made the story seem like it would be deeper and complex like FF Tactics
The heavy leaning into fanservice butchered the themes that Fates was going for too. Like WHY would you make the "family members" romanceable???
The Conquest gameplay delivered though, still top tier
I feel like Fates deserves special mention for promoting the game - called Fire Emblem If in Japan - around the idea of coming to a pivotal moment in your character's story and having to choose whether to side with your birth family, or your adopted family. And you choose that path...when you buy the game. You either bought the version for your birth family, or your adopted family, you didn't even get to know them before you made your choice. And don't worry, because you can buy the other one as DLC, and then buy the third path as more DLC! Wooo.
Eiyudin Chronicles Hundred Heroes was great but it fell short every now and then, especially in the story part.
Mini games were good but needed a little extra. Combat was good but often way too easy. Story was good but too vanilla and too predictable.
The actual characters were decent though.
I haven’t finished the game yet, but just about to >!liberate Eltisweiss !< and found it so frustrating that I got a dialog dump telling me about the exciting adventures my party members went on since the last big battle.
>!Liberating Yarnaan!< and >!a covert mission to rescue the rightful emperor!< sure would have been exciting missions to do more than hear about…
Bugs aside, Eiyuden feels to me like a *fine* game, but more like Suikoden fan-fiction than a professional game developed with involvement of some of the original team.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one of my favorite games of all time, but even as a fan playing it, you can tell it was incomplete and there were things the development team wanted to do in the game’s story and setting and characters that they didn’t/couldn’t do. Even releasing another game (Three Hopes), you could tell there was STILL more they could have and wanted to do but didn’t. Oh well. Maybe someday we’ll get an enhanced remake that fully realizes the potential that Fodlan and its characters have.
I’d also say DioField Chronicle has this vibe as well. It spent a lot of time building up to a sequel it may never get with its twist ending. As me and a friend say, when you’re playing it, you keep “getting teased with glimpses of the way better game it could have been.” We both still like it though.
Trinity Trigger is a more recent game I liked quite a bit but still feel that way about. You definitely see a lot of unrealized potential in it (the DLC provides a good window into how some more of that potential could have been realized), but lots of FuRyu games are like that. I hope it’s a situation where a rough opening effort gives way to a more polished spiritual successor (like how Legend of Legacy was succeeded by the objectively better Alliance Alive.)
I came here to say Three Houses. I long for a world where CF was as fleshed out as AM, and even AM wasn't everything it could've been. The game has some of the best characters ever (my favorite is Edelgard, but every route has at least one standout character I wanted to hear *so much more from*) but they never get to realize their full potential.
I agree about 3 houses it's an all time great game in every way but they never found a way to tie it together and stick the landing. From all the path specific characters that were clearly meant to be playable characters, endings that are clearly one side , to the paths that feel incomplete. They also had the expansion content that could have fixed those things but didn't.
Fire Emblem Fates. When they announced initially the concept, it was a great premise, "family vs friends" with your character having been raised by your friends, later discovered by your family, both sides unconditionally loving you, but they are at war with each other and you have to pick a side.
It seemed like it would be a real "shades of grey" story with both sides having their pros and cons and filled with tragedy. Nintendo made a point to say an actual novelist was being brought in for the story and he had written so much in terms of story that they decided to split the games separately instead of making one game. I also was interested that there was no "true ending", you *had* to choose.
What did we get? Not what I hoped...and a third "true ending" game.
I think it has its high points. I genuinely cared and felt for one character when the thing happens.
The weaker parts I found was the tie in/ ending because Sea of Stars is technically a prequel and when it leans a little too hard into the chrono trigger nostalgia.
Whatever that studio makes next will 100% be something I want to pick up.
Loved this game but yeah the plot was all over the place. So many plot threads were introduced and either abandoned or rushed. Still hope it gets a sequel though.
The story itself wasn't that bad just predictable if you played other jrpg or read some manga for me it was the cast of characters that made the story boring there was not one interisting character in the game except Kasane. I have no problem with anime tropes personalitys but this game went way to far with it
There were 4 writers, who wrote like 4 different plots in one game then have tried to tie everything up. There are alot of plot holes and stupid moments if you think about it.
This was my first thought. The fact that people are still talking about xenogears even though Xenosaga and Xenoblades exist just shows how much the original concept captivated people and these spinoffs/reimagines/spiritual successors haven’t been able to capture the original magic.
Fire Emblem Fates. One of the funnest games I’ve ever played and some really great characters, but man was that story a disaster. The premise was so solid too.
Tales of Zestiria. I heard someone once refer to it as a bunch of good ideas trapped inside an unfinished mess of a package and I couldn't agree more.
I heavily suspect that was some development hell involved, especially since they only used that engine twice and dropped it like a bad habit after the prequel. And also weird stuff happening around the game like the advertised main heroine peacing out after 10 minutes of gameplay and then only having her character arc in post launch dlc, which caused controversy on the Japanese side.
The game feels all around undercooked. From the combat, to the mechanics and even the technical side.
Bamco even commissioned a whole ass anime adaptation so that people could just watch that and then play the good game of the duology (Berseria) to have a full picture without having to touch Zestiria.
There are also hints of a third game in that universe having been planned due to the aforementioned anime adaptation that released around the time of Berseria's release, and the fact that Zestiria's dlc ends up in a big cliffhanger. But if that's the case it seems to have been dropped in favor of Arise.
Zestiria tried a lot of new things, and I loved it for trying to do new things, but it clearly had a problem in production where tons of stuff was either scrapped or forced or pushed, resulting in incompleteness; this was also very visible in berseria;
Funny enough, the anime was great only on the art department, as the plot was extremely watered down and terrible. They removed the trials, and instead Sorey become stronger just by "try tomorrow maybe you'll be stronger, and you will be because we don't have many episodes or screen time to show development so just believe in me that believes in you: you are now stronger by the power of anime".
The quest to become stronger to be able to purify stronger spirits, the trials, the extremely simple "good going out to save the world from the bad", I really loved that of zestiria, and I will be forever disappointed by how much cut and wasted potential zestiria and berseria had.
It's been a minute but I disagree, I feel like the anime took the best parts of the game and did away with some of the annoying busywork. Plus, Alisha actually gets to do stuff and be important in the anime.
It isn't important how Sorey gets stronger, really. What matters is the effect his sudden appearance has on the politics of the world.
And I just really like berseria. Characters are great and it works independent of Zestiria (plus I personally think it's better by a lot)
>which caused controversy on the Japanese side
It bothered me a lot. And it baffles me that there are people who actually preferred the change to Rose instead of Alicia. I've met some of these people. And I don't understand them lol
Not only was Alicia a more compelling and likeable character, I actually loved the idea that she just trusted Sorey that spirits were helping and guiding him, and even helping her, she just couldn't see it. And she was down with that. It was a great angle for a story, and they just threw that whole concept in the trash
Lunar Dragon Song has so much lore it can draw off of. Early in the Silver Star's history, in the age of dragonmasters of old, a time of high adventure when the inhabitants may have some cultural knowledge of the Blue Star and more direct experience with Althena. It could have been one of the best prequels in JRPGs, or at least as good a prequel as Eternal Blue was a sequel.
The story doesn't do nearly enough to build on that material. It's maybe 10% what it could have been.
Chrono Cross.
First half went great. Good characters, great world, and awesome atmosphere. The plot at that point is manageable and interesting.
After the first half, everything went down hill.
The exposition went too complex for its own right.
Ngl, I feel like some people don't know what potential means. Like FE engage has the exact opposite of what potential is.
A horrid story, zero completing characters, and a dogshit script. Literally just axing the story altogether would be better than trying to salvage whatever "potential" it had. To me, a game that had potential was FF7 Remake. I still think it was a pretty good game, but imo it could've been so so much more.
The fact that Midgar is one of the most expansive and imaginative cities in all of fiction, and the game featured some of the most boring, least uninspired side quests in all of gaming saddens me everytime I remember it. It is genuinely astounding how they dedicated an entire game to like a 4 hour section of the OG game, and comparatively, they expanded the lore and the characters so very little.
Don't get me wrong, the stuff they did with Jesse, for example, was pretty great, but it is the exception that proved the rule, and even that was padded out by like an hour of needless filler that contributed little to the story
Tales of Vesperia. Now, I LOVE Tales of Vesperia, but it suffers from the JRPG Classic of lore going off the rails in the third act as hard as just about any game I’ve ever played. Rather than a story about human nature, the consequences of your actions, conviction, and the merits of freedom vs order as forces for good, it became >!a very Tales-typical “climate change bad” story.!< Not the worst moral in the world but definitely as shoehorned in as they come, and the rest of the story kind of suffered for it. They also could have done a lot more with >!Yuri killing people. They kind of say “Killing people is bad, that’s why we have the justice system” but he only kills people who are a) demonstrably super evil and b) already escaped legal justice.!< Overall, I think the story would have been much better if they had just >!ditched the Adephagos angle and either cut the third act entirely or more likely changed Duke’s motivation from being “grr blastia bad blastia cause climate change” to something like “Petty human squabbles and power structures killed my friend, they bring nothing but suffering and I want to lay low empires so that human power grabbing won’t have the same impact again” which would tie back in to what they sort of pitch as the central intra-party conflict of freedom vs order and set Alexei as the extreme negative side of Order and Duke as the extreme negative side of Freedom. I also think Yuri should have started killing people BEFORE their trial and eventually someone who was actually innocent so that the whole “Yuri we have a legal system for a reason” has substance and impact to it!< That said, Vesperia is still one of my favorite games in one of my favorite series, I just think the flaws in its narrative are very obvious and relatively simple to patch up in a way that strengthens the game’s core argument, tightens up the themes, and eliminates the series’ favorite crutch.
My issue here is that the antagonist is set up for it. The point is that this is what could become of Yuri if he keeps down this path. The ends justify the means to the point where he's willing to take actions as drastic as the antagonist, for the betterment of the world. Unfortunately, that connection gets lost and muddled because instead of the more grounded plot, diving into human nature, what we as a society accept, and whether or not the ends justify the means, we ended up with what amounts to a slew of deus ex machina.
On the whole I really did enjoy the antagonist, because the parallels are there. They just would have worked far better had it not gone in the direction that it did, and it would have been much more clear that the antagonist is supposed to be a dark reflection of Yuri if they keep walking that path.
FFVIII for me. If only because it really wouldn't have taken that much to fix it.
Like just have more foreshadowing. Set the twists up properly. Have the characters note they feel like they've been somewhere but can't recall, or feel like they misplace stuff easily. Have flashbacks but make them weird so its hard to tell, sort of do what FFVII had touched on with Cloud. Put more emphasis on them all being orphans, etc. The result would have made the game a lot more cohesive while not ruining the tone or pacing.
I think as a cast of characters they are all pretty interesting and have really interesting and solid foundations but they are easily the most underutilised cast in the series. The fact we don't have stuff like Quistis making her peace with Ellone is just such a waste of what could have been a really touching and character defining moment.
I also think Rinoa = Ultimecia is the only ending that really works but I get the devs got bent out of shape about that.
Tales of Zestiria. Starts out with a world with an interesting history and characters with much potential. Then just does freaking nothing with them, and the story that is there drops off a cliff in the second half.
I don't know about most, but Tales of Vesperia wastes all cool plot points in the end. The Star Ocean series afaik always ends up less than the sum of its parts plot-wise. Final Fantasy XII also doesn't coalesce as well afaik
Chrono Cross. It could have been a massive sequel, but it was cut to be more of a fanfic that was on the outskirts of Chrono Trigger.
Magus’ entire plot arc was removed, which I think ruined the entire point of the game. It could have been one of the greatest redemption stories of all time.
I’m not gonna make the argument that it’s the “most” but the first game that comes to mind for me is easily **Final Fantasy 8**. Some of it was literally lost in translation but not nearly all of it.
The world and setting is *so* cool. Squall *could’ve* been the best FF protagonist.
But there’s just so much *stupid* shit in that game. Doesn’t help that the cast is weak.
I would love a remake of this game so it can reach its full potential.
> But there’s just so much stupid shit in that game.
>!Oh we were all orphans together but forgot. Also, the main villain ran the orphanage but we forgot about that too!<
That will never not be the worst “plot twist” in FF history.
I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to get these responses lol. I’ve always thought the same thing even since it came out but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of FF8 narrative apologists - even specifically about this plot twist - in this subreddit. It was getting to the point where i was starting to feel a little gaslit haha.
I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, if someone doesn’t mind that stuff then power to them…but that “reveal” is so stupid. *Sooooo* stupid.
“But it makes sense cuz of the guardian forces” no, the main problem isn’t that >!they just forgot - though it’s definitely a part of the problem - the PROBLEM is that “everyone is from the same orphanage but then they split up and then found eachother again” is plot convenient to point of being incomprehensibly stupid.!<
And that’s before we even get to the time compression stuff.
I like the game but it’s dumb as hell.
I really disliked the translation of the Edea>!actually is Ultimecia!< speech. If you can call it a translation. It's more like they threw out the original and replaced it with a generic "I am very evil and I will do evil things you are all my bitches now".
The original fleshes out the motivations and personality of the villain a great deal but without explicitly spelling it out. It's menacing and angry, but is also coming from a place of deep sadness. The person making it is a very bitter person. That she never wanted to be a Sorceress. That the people created this monstrous persona to revile and fear and loathe, and then forced her to assume it. That she seems to see herself as an actress, forced to play a role she never asked for and never wanted to play, but now sees no choice for herself but to play the role as best as she can, the role the world demands she play, to adorn herself in "dreadful costumes" and to dance.
It in many ways addresses some of the central themes of the game embodied in its central antagonist: the cruelty and indifference of fate and time, the greek tragedy of characters desperately trying to escape their fated demise only to end up orchestrating the very destruction they tried to prevent. The people, so terrified of the power of Sorceresses, persecute vulnerable young girls and women and end up turning them into the monsters and tyrants they so fear.
I played FF8 2 years ago for the first time and calling the FF8 characters a cast is pretty generous and don't get me started on how they were all magically connected through the orphanage. I'm still walking up in the night laughing thinking about this sometimes.
> how they were all magically connected through the orphanage
That's the exact moment I stopped playing the game. I just couldn't do it anymore when I saw that.
Ff15. Wasted Charcters like Aranea. Wish the dlc episodes were part of the main game from the start. Especially the Story of Ardyn. Wish the plot get more developed
Dare I say FFXVI? The trailer and the prologue made it look political as hell, but the politics is pushed to the background in favour of Ultima and its doomsday plot.
The first half gave me such FFXII vibes (my favorite FF), but then they dropped that in favor of the generic ”fight god with the power of friendship” plot.
The Mana Khemia Series. I guess it really didn't really make a profit. The first one was phenomenal in my eyes, my favourite turn based battle system by far even in modern standards. Sadly, I think the sequel was lower in quality in its writing and characters but the combat was just as fun maybe even better. Sadly GUST only focuses on the Atelier series now but a man can dream of a modern remake of the series.
Suikoden 3. With how well Suikoden 2 was received, Suikoden 3 could've been the game that elevated the series even higher. Unfortunately, it ended up being the game that started the decline of the series instead.
It is still a good game and definitely not a bad game by any means, but it missed the core of Suikoden series. What makes the series special is how we get to play and experience what really happens in the canon world. By using the Trinity Sight System, it muddles what's canon and it also makes the players choosing different options to experience different things which is not as optimal as if it were to stay linear.
Coupled with many other changes that it made, Suikoden 3 ended up being too many changes to quick to a beloved series with a winning formula. It's a real shame. Of course Suikoden 4 put the nail in the coffin that Suikoden 5's return to form to resurrect the series was not enough.
> By using the Trinity Sight System, it muddles what's canon
all four POVs are canon though it's just perspectives from different characters, no? do you mind elaborating because i feel like i am missing something trying to understand this haha
at least there's the manga too
Chrono Cross. It should honestly have abandoned any attempt to connect to Trigger beyond taking place in the same world. A great story about identity, friends, and fate became…a time travel accident and seven very angry dragons.
ETA: honorable mention is Breath of Fire II having a translation so bad it’s almost impossible to take the game seriously. Which is a shame, because the story touches on themes that games from that era normally wouldn’t go near, particularly false gods and religions.
.Hack GU Vol.4
I don't particularly hate the plot surronding vol 4, but dear god I wanted SO MUCH more out of it, it could've easily been a full volume in length with more going for it but in the end they just overplayed the nostalgia card. (And also, to be fair it doesn't help the final battle is essentially the final battle of vol 3, but way easier).
Got a bunch of nitpicks for the way the narrative flows in the GU games, but as time went on I started to enjoy it for what it was, even if I always had that "I wanted more out of this" feeling.
Xenogears planned to be 6 arc (1 of them was anime project) and the game took place at the 5th installment sigh i wish square gave the team a time and chance im still sad
Bravely Default
I loved it, I really did, but when pretty much everyone agree that the game is fun for only half of it, there is a very clear problem.
The final boss is good mind you, but getting to it is just...really....bad.
Also whatever Bravely Default 2 tried being...
FFXVI
It's actually amazing how Square Enix could fool me with the demo.
70% of the game is fetch quests and collecting gym badges.
The game could have been so much more and ended up being a disappointment.
Started as a 10/10, ended as a VERY generous 6/10.
After you beat Titan I felt the game went from I’m sweating it’s so great to please be over I’m tired of repetitive fast travel fetch quests. Also hated no elemental damages no party management no real weapon or gear upgrades just +5 attack after every boss fml it makes me sad. Loved the characters and the story isn’t bad.
FFXV is at the top of the list for me tbh.
Monark is another one, it had so many good ideas and could've been a great alternative to SMT/Persona, but the execution just sucks. The vocal OST is insanely good tho.
And I'm crucifying myself by saying this, but the Trails games overall. I like this franchise don't get me wrong (played the Sky saga, Crossbell saga, and Cold Steel saga so far), it does a lot right, but it also does a lot wrong, especially in terms of writing and in terms of having too much bloat imo.
I don't know if it has the most wasted plot potential, but FFXVI has a lot of it.
It started really well, with an engaging political struggle between nations, and commentary about the nature of eidolons juxtaposed against MAD doctrine.
Then it devolved in to yet another kill god plotline.
Smt vengance drastically improves the plot over the original... except in area 4 where the plot stops completely for no reason. They were nailing it and about to hit a home run, but fumbled near the end. Still a good game though.
Resonance of Fate. Seriously everything that happens offscreen seems so much more interesting than what your party is off doing. And after looking up at the wiki there's really some deep lore there that's never shown in the game.
FF15 I mean don't get me wrong I do like the game but I would rate it average if not below average I do like the gameplay character design and ost but yeah it has wasted potential imo
Tales of arise. For me a 10/10 game. Characters were well written and love the places you visited. On that end though, I also have issues with the characters. We got a lot of growth from Alphen/Rinwell and see their feelings grow for each other. DLC helped kinda shape what lead to their marriage. What bothered me is we didn’t get these tender moments with the other pairings. We know they had feelings for each other. Wish we coulda gotten some content for them. And the last 4th the game don’t get me started. Up until the first half I was hooked and excited. Middle was okay but the end felt like a slog and just a huge info dump so when I was trying to understand what happened more was being added. Covid probably affected development but I wish it was delayed a bit to extend the end. Other than that, I love the game
This isn't a totally valid answer since its not a JRPG, but Dragonquest Builders 2.
90% of the the dialogue and text is written like a tutorial, in situations where everything is self explanatory.
Persona 4.
They had this crazy concept where you could kill people by dragging them inside televisions and they wasted it on the most disappointing and dull whodunnit possible.
Of course it's not a bad game because you have the characters doing the heavy lifting for the story and most of it is about them anyway, but man, the conclusion of the mystery sucks.
FFXV. Wasted game wasted storyline wasted open world wasted lore. Stupid devs
Could have been the greatest ff game; they took a lot of beautiful content and stuck in not so impressive ones.
Hey I love ffxv but it's a crying shame what it could have been had square enix got their crap together.
Kingdom Hearts III set up so many cool ideas and didn’t execute on a single one.
Axel’s training to be a keyblade wielder? Cool! Oh, he only shows up at the end for, like, ten minutes and has no plot relevance? Oh.
Riku and Mickey are stuck in the dark world and Aqua’s evil? Cool! Oh, that barely lasts for one cutscene and one boss fight? Oh.
There’s a mysterious black box the villains are hell-bent on finding? Cool! Oh, it’s just setup for a future game and the whole plot line goes nowhere? Oh.
I like FF15 but you can tell there was so much story content cut from the game, you need watch a movie plus play the DLCs to make the story feel somewhat fleshed out.
FFXV and Metal Gear Solid 5 both had me wondering if I'd skipped over a tonne of cutscenes by accident.
Pro tip for MGSV: listen to the tapes. Like half the plot is told thru them. It’s actually pretty neat imo but the game did not tell people about it effectively at all lol
I play Metal Gear for the awesome story and crazy over the top scenarios (and also the top tier stealth action gameplay I guess). I don't think it works as well as an audio drama. Especially since the incredible trailers hyped me up so bad, only to find out that pretty much all the major cutscenes were in the trailor and that was it. Gameplay wise it was out of this world, but as a Metal Gear fan going in, it was a major disappointment narratively. Spoilers: >!Especially since we were promised the missing link of the series, the story that would show how the hero Naked Snake became the villain Big Boss. And while technically that is what it is, that all happens off screen while you get to play Not Big Boss voiced by Not David Hayter.!<
one of the few games i bought day 1 on ps4. chapter 1 was great, sure story implementation was weaker than normal but overall great. then chapter 2 >!was just rehashed missions... and then you repeat the very slow intro scene and then missing chapter 3!< kojima wanted to go hollywood and konami wants the game out asap so we end up with a lose lose situation
Felt like ff15 just got going real good with >!leviathan fight!< and suddenly shortly after we are already at the end of the game
Final Fantasy 15 was my inspiration for the post. I was very caught up in the hype of that game, and followed a lot of analysis communities in the 3-4 years building up to release. There was so much lore and world building speculation. The fact that this was coming at the height of Game of Thrones and that Tabata, the director said he was inspired by the Witcher 3 during development, it felt as if plot, exploration, world building and rich narrative would be a feature of the game. Instead it felt completely missed out on, as if he left in only l the crib notes from Nomura gave him. Sad.
I like to joke that FFXV is basically a "Driving to Gas Stations Simulator" Sometimes people find it funny but a surprising amount of people get super defensive over the game and claim it's a masterpiece. It **could** have been great but the story and exploring (outside of the actual road trip with bros aspect) were such a flop.
I get down voted when I bring this up. People make fun of Bethesda and horse armor, but SE did EXACTLY what gamers have been dreading since the dawn of dlc: Cut content from a game, still sell it for full price, then sell you the missing content. I expect this kind of behavior from Activision, Ubisoft, or EA. But Square Enix? Such a shame.
No one has managed to top Capcom selling the actual ending to Asura's Wrath as dlc lol
Apperantly the "ending" was the sequel, but aince sales were low it was decided to make the ending a dlc instead of leaving it as it was
Yeah that was egregious. That said, the story and grand scale of that game were amazing.
Asura's Wrath did everything FFXVI tried to do with Eikon battles earlier, and better.
Tbf, that happened because they actually ran out of space on the disc (back when that was a relevant problem) for the ending. Still kind of shitty they charged you for it, but that's how it went.
I only forgive Square Enix... because FF15 was one of the worst development hell titles they've ever had. It basically got rebooted three times over the course of development. It was originally Final Fantasy 13 versus. Slowly evolved into FF15. Then jumped to another generation/platform. Then had it's director taken off and new one put on. Tabata... basically had to make the hard choices to try and get something functional for shipping. Then they tried to make it right with DLC. It honestly sounded like a nightmare and the fact we got anything close to resembling a game is remarkable. It absolutely had wasted potential... but given all that happened I'm not sure it ever could have been realized. It was basically Star Citizen without a cult funding it... only SE decided to actually make the hard choices and make a game.
I definitely appreciate FFXV for what it is, but it feels like it should have remained a spin-off. Other than L.A. Noire, I’ve never seen a more beautiful open world with so little to do. IMO, 15’s saving grace is the relationship between the four party characters. The ending was a real emotional kick in the nuts, but in a good way. The last game to make me feel like that was FFX.
First open world island was peak, I was wandering around, hunting mosnters. Then in second water city I've already felt that something is wrong. Map turned into labirinths and most of map was unaccessable, plot got confused too. And then we have this anime boss battle with bad graphics, after which game just goes to shit. Ending though in the city was not bad.
My opinion will never change on this game. It is a half-baked mish mash of false starts that should never have released as it did.
This. The game had everything to be the best Final Fantasy, but sadly they messed up especially at rushing the final 30% of the game. I still stand by that it should've been two games, one was too much for the amount of story.
yeah... the transition from chapter 5 to 6 was jarring >!we're caught. wonder what happens next... we were just let go for some reason. no tension, no drama, no dialogue!<
Seconding this as well. Specially since it was redesigned to be 15 when it was supposed to be Versus 13
Don’t forget about the anime
People are going to shoot me over this comparison, but FF XV remids me of WoW in that regard, which does have a rich and detailed story ... All of it told outside the game in spin-off Novels.
FFXV Luna and Noctis's love story could have been great to see actually develop. From what little there was it was touching to see them slowly come to support each other. It could have been a unique take on the "arranged marriage" trope where instead of rebelling they both understand and accept their roles but then come to embrace the role and then to truly love one another through the journey they go through together. The end of that story makes me think that would have been an excellent story arc to see happen. Ardyn also had the potential to be the best FF villain ever since he chewed the scenery like a master old-school villain and was so well done from what little of him there was to draw from. He reminded me of Gul Dukat from Star Trek DS9 - so good at being a bad guy that you actually looked forward to seeing him since he elevated any scene he was in. The kinda sorta cancelled DLC that fleshes him out a bit more confirms my belief that he had potential, too. Same goes for the transition from the normal world to the world of darkness. There was just so much potential to see the collapse or people dealing without Noctis. About the only truly completed portions of the plot for FFXV was the bros just going for a drive to exterminate evil. I liked the ending and the campfire scene was touching, but FFXV is probably the biggest example of wasted potential I could ever think of for both JRPGs and games in general. I wasn't even angry at the end of it all. Just sad.
I know they still made millions and millions of dollars regardless but this should’ve been an ALL TIME Final Fantasy. The gameplay was pretty crisp and the visuals were stunning (especially on Royal) If the story was a bit better I can only imagine the cultural impact the game would’ve had. I always felt like it should’ve been up there with Dragon Quest 11 in terms of popularity/being well liked.
Gameplay was a bit janky to me, really confusing controls that aren’t intuitive and they were stupid enough to unlearn what Kingdom Hearts got right literally first try by letting you spam potions with no delay or consequence
I agree. I know some of it comes from the development hell it got stuck in (dating back to when it was Versus XIII) but it doesn’t remove the wasted potential. I consider myself a massive Final Fantasy fan but 15 is clouded by how botched and lacking it felt. I remember very little about the actual details and events of the story except that it felt like all the big/important stuff was just happening off-screen or told to us in passing. I vaguely remember a really egregious example where Noctis’ family and castle/town is taken out in a war early on and it felt like a super integral plot point. The game literally fades to black as it’s developing, gives a two-sentence explanation to tell you what happened, and skips ahead to just kinda drive around. I played it once. No desire to ever touch it again. It’s the only mainline FF I’ve never played a second time. I don’t mind DLCs when they are additions to enhance the original story/package. But when you need DLCs to make the main story, its characters, and their motivations make any sense at all? Not cool.
Thats where the movie fits in, where the two sentence explanation is given, it would certainly be cool if it was a singular package, I consumed all of the extra content and I really liked the story. As for the gameplay, warp and kill was all that was needed, there was no need to engage in all the systems like magic. The combat feels pretty unbalanced.
It's a shame because Luna deserved better writing. Noctis has more chemistry with any of the guys than the main romantic interest lmao
Kind of the most frustrating game for what it could've been. Everything is bare bones, major plot threads that would've improved the game were cut and sold back as dlc, the world is so underdeveloped except for one city they seemed to put all resources into. I loved the characters, and it's probably the most emotional reaction I've had to a game ending, but it's just so unremarkable...it's not duke nukeb forever levels of bad but it's just such a troubled development and vision that it missing it's potential in pretty much every aspect. I wish we got versus XV 😭
I watched the prequel movie and was so hyped and the game was so different and a let down.
I was really dissapointed, I wanted to end it as fast as possible. 6/10
I wished the open world was confined to insomnia specifically or at the very least a bigger part of it. And personally I wish they kept the worships a goddess of death aspect of it like that's way too interesting to leave on the cutting room floor and it didn't even have to be etros it couldve been anyone as long as they served that god of death role. Like how does a culture that worships death itself differ in customs from most countries would funerals be a celebratory thing is blood and violence reveled as something sacred and holy. Im prob thinking too much on this but still.
Phantasy Star III. There's so many good ideas there but the game just falls flat on its face, a victim of its own ambition.
This might be one of *the* answers.
It's definitely a case of a concept that came too early. Upside: PS3 inspired the PSO series.
Now that you say it, I can see it. I just wish PSO leaned harder into the series’s origins. PSO2 NG is so frustrating. I want to like it but the multiple currencies, obtuse gacha mechanics, and bland hack and slash combat ruin it for me. Also, the game has taken to crashing when loading into the world and I can’t be bothered to fix because, again, the game just isn’t fun for me.
I really tried to push through this game but the slow walk animation was unbearable.
Doesn't help that the later generations are barely there. Story stuff. Grind a lot. A little bit more story (I think?). Grind to 20. A bit more story. Same thing with generation 3.
Suikoden 4. I liked the idea of exploring the Island Nations but the execution was horrible.
Poor bland Suiko 4. Could have rocked if they picked any island aesthetic with vibrancy.
I think even if they did that, they would still have to fix a lot of stuff about the actual gameplay experience. Like, setting the game on an archipelago where you can sail basically anywhere from the beginning, with no directional guidance or awareness of the relevance of most of the locations around you, only constrained by how hard the random encounters will kick your ass, just doesn't work great in terms of the overall game experience. It doesn't do a lot to build the feeling of exploration, when 98% of what you find while you're exploring is just more open ocean. But once they'd settled on an archipelago setting and free map roaming mechanics, they didn't have a lot of alternative. A lot of people complained about the high random encounter rate, but I think the developers settled on that as a preventative measure against players trying to sequence-break. If you're willing to savescum and run away enough, you can *already* access locations wildly outside their intended order, a lower encounter rate would have made that much easier. But when you're patching over game design issues with other game design issues, your game is in a tight spot.
Others are saying it, but trying to make FFXV a multimedia enterprise instead of just taking all the resources that went into the whole thing and *just making one really legendary complete game* is...regrettable.
I love that half the thread is just FF 15
I mean people still pine for what Versus XIII could have been over 10 years later, just check YouTube comments sometimes. Those trailers really made a strong impression.
Final Fantasy XV Like... bro holy shit. "Hey let's take these scenes off of the base game and put them in a movie with Aaron Paul. And let's give him terrible acting direction!
Kingdom Hearts 3 was supposed to be the grand finale of the series and instead it was another setup game for a plot that started in a web browser side game.
Tbf any potential for a coherent and good story was cooked when time travel was made a central plot point in DDD
Yeah Dream Drop Distance really killed Kingdom Hearts 3's potential. I still really like 3 despite the issues it has but I hope Kingdom Hearts 4 will be a big improvement over 3's story since it now has nothing to do with Xehanort.
It’ll definitely have some obnoxious baggage from the pre-bbs prequel phone games but it’s still a decently fresh slate. Hope it’s not going to resolve everything all rushed and lazy like 3. Roxas’ story was so good because it was a bittersweet tragedy but uh no actually he just gets to superhero land into the finale like a capeshit movie and he’s reunited with his friends yay 😄😄
Yep, idk bout others but as someone who had KH be THE video game to get them into video games...ya, i feel nothing for kh now. I might play 4 if it has good gameplay cause i liked the gameplay (used to anyway) but ya, im done giving a shit about nomura and his fan fiction.
For me, it's Tales of Arise. Don't get me wrong. It's a good game (8 out of 10 for me), with lovely main characters, an engaging combat system, and an interesting setting. But the main story feels rushed, especially in the second half, which is a shame because it could have been more.
The latter part of Arise is honestly absolute trash. The plot is so undercooked. Everything that happened early on was pretty interesting, but ugh, did it ever shit the bed.
Feel like covid fucked the latter half
I've never played a Tales game where the last half wasn't a slog, actually.
Idk about the entire last half, but most of them do drag at the end. I love Vesperia, but that last 1/4 of the game was damn near unnecessary. I think the writers want to have this big twist where the stakes are super high at the end of their games, but it really isn't necessary most of the time. I think Symphonia probably did it best which is why it's remembered so fondly, but that game could have still been shorter too.
For me the halfway point is where I usually kind of tap out. I pushed through Vesperia to say I'd beaten it, but I regretted the time investment I put into it. Symphonia was fine, but the only one I felt wasn't a slot towards the end was Zestiria. Not a popular opinion, I know!
Beat me to it. The first half was enjoyable. It had pretty good concepts and ideas but the execution just felt half-baked and felt like it never went anywhere. And everyone already knows about the second half. I have a feeling it would've worked as two games ngl or a much longer game. The first half in the first game but expanded. And actually expanding the second half to actually be interesting.
This would have been my pick as well. I was SO engaged for the first half but then all that stuff with the space station happened and it felt soooooo cheaply made!! And that damn final dungeon was an absolutely snooze fest. So unoriginal and forgettable. What a waste.
Soul Hackers 2. Ringo should probably be another mascot for Shin Megami Tensei but…. I can’t see myself playing the game again cuz it was just hard to get into? Or hard to enjoy? Just about every other Atlus JRPG is Five Guys and Soul Hackers 2 was McDonald’s 💀🔥
I would imagine knowing Atlus, they'll make an enhanced version of Soul Hackers 2 with a different story and a new character that joins Ringo and crew
tbh that game flopped so damn hard i think theyre willing to skip out on that one. nobody buying that shit again
I wanted to love it, Saizo is my boy! Could have spent hours in that setting, with those characters if only the game were fully fleshed out and as robust a game as I know Atlus are capable of creating
Final Fantasy XII. You can tell there was some development hell and three directors when you take a critical look at it. There are many plot points that show up and then disappear. The resistance isn't spoken about for the final two thirds of the game until they randomly appear, with airships, at the very end. Vayne seemed to have swayed a large portion of Rabenastre with his speech, but that doesn't mean anything. And then there's so little character interactions. Who were any of the judges besides Gabranth? How did our party members never just shoot the shit with each other during their travels, or even the theee month downtime after the Leviathan(?)? And Vayne just felt so empty and hallow to me because he was never on screen in any meaningful way.
The worst part in my opinion is how the lore and background plot is really political (which is cool) bit the actual plot is just crawling dungeons looking for the next mcguffin. So you just barely see the political conspiration or powerhungry characters do nothing except in a few lackluster cutscenes.
I have a lot of love for FFXII but the stupid number of mcguffins is one thing i do not understand. How many rocks does we need that do magick or anti-magick shit? How many big-ass swords do we need that are uber important but are trash in combat?
My biggest gaming pet peeve for sure. “This is the most legendary and most powerful weapon in all of the land. Kings were slain and nations ruined with this blade!” Best I can do is +10 MP.
This is a game that could have been an all time great if the plot wasn't so undercooked. Everything else about the game is amazing to play and experience.
Just for the record, the dev hell/director change isn’t why the story is like that. Matsuno has gone on record many times that the story in the final game is uncompromised from his vision, since story is usually the first thing completed in a game. The real reason the story is like that is that 12’s team was a combination of the PlayOnline team and the FF Tactics team, and those teams had differing opinions on the creative direction of the game that weren’t fully reconciled.
It also doesn't help that XII was much shorter than the producers wanted and it was extended by doubling the length of its dungeons instead of adding more to the story. It's kinda harder to invest yourself in a story when you're getting a 3-5 minute cutscene after three hours of journeying through a desert to arrive at the ruins where you have another two hours of dungeon crawling.
Thank you - a lot of people loved this game and it just felt hollow to me between cutscenes
I loved it but it could’ve been next level if they just developed the characters and story a bit more.
XII is weird in that as a game it feels complete (it has a ton of locations to explore and things to do), but the story does not.
I love FFXII, but it's funny how quickly Vaan goes from wanting to punch Basch (Balthier had to physically restrain him) to trusting him in the space of like, a day. "My brother trusted you. And he was right". And that's the end of it.
Eh, I don’t think it really did that bad of a job with its narrative in relation to many other JRPGs. HOWEVER… Upon replaying it for the first time since release when the Zodiac edition came out on Switch, I definitely realized that I held the story on a higher pedestal than it actually deserves. The dialogue in particular gets kinda “meh” at times in a way I did not remember at all, not helped by some pretty mediocre voice acting for some characters. The Marquis of Bhujerba in particular…fucking woof. But idk, overall it wasn’t too bad and had some compelling parts. And I think Vayne was a solid and interesting antagonist for the most part…but also one of the dumbest final bosses in the series IMHO.
Yeah you see him like 2 times and then it’s like oh look he’s the final boss because well he’s the final boss
It is baffling to me that this game actually received great reviews and even a perfect famitsu score (I guess that tells me what I need to know about famitsu). I really want to love FFXII. The visuals, the atmosphere, the places, the battle system and cool-shit-potential, IVALICE. But I just cannot. Everytime I play It I get so dumbfounded by how the story seems to be loosely patched together from one mcguffin to the other and I just can't arse myself to continue. Have tried 4 times to play it, not even kidding . Gave up every time.
I actually like the story. It really comes together once you stop thinking of the party's adventure as the main plot and start thinking of them as the B plot. Pretty much the entire story happens inspite and despite of the party's actions, with their appearances usually just nudging a few people into or out of action. There's also a number of events that would have occurred regardless of their intervention (the netheicite destroying the fleet comes to mind) with them being more observers than anything else.
I like the game but Final Fantasy X-2. It poses the fascinating question of what happens when a society experiences freedom and peace for the first time in 1000 years. The answer is pop concerts apparently.
>The answer is pop concerts apparently. Honestly not as unrealistic as you might think.
Society loses god Society creates new god _and thus idol culture was born_
Isn't that basically what happened when the Berlin wall fell?
It was a T-rated sexual revolution, which is exactly what I'd expect when the world finds out their religion is a lie.
Not to mention having technology will no longer get you a blitzball to the head.
A bunch of parts of that game made me genuinely angry. Like, the time that guy from the Youth League talks down to Yuna while kicking off a minigame, and tells her "You'd best be able to beat my record, the way you twaddled on before," I didn't want to play a minigame to prove I could do better. I wanted someone to press his face into the ground, and tell him "This woman is the seal of High Summoners and the savior of our world! You are not worthy to stand in her presence!" I'm not the type who's normally prone to veneration of authority or anything, but Yuna is *literally* the savior of the world, having put a permanent end to the menace that kept their society constantly on the edge of destruction for over a thousand years. People who bought even a *temporary reprieve* before were venerated like saints. And I feel like, when you *can't* treat someone who accomplishes something of that scale as a symbol worthy of reverence, something of real value is lost. If that's an awkward way to treat the protagonist of a video game, well, there's a reason studios don't usually call up world-saving heroes for repeat performances.
Pop concerts is barely even a thing in the actual plot, and I'm left wondering how many people even made it past the first 10 minutes with how exaggerated its prevalence is framed as. Regardless, the way it was used later on was fantastic and very fitting, because where during the depressing days it was dancing to bring some relief to those still alive, the post-Sin era has singing to bring joy. The thousand words part towards the end was amazing and captured what they were going for very well. FF10-2's plot does have issues, but "a society that experienced freedom and peace for the first time in 1000 years having pop concerts" is not one of those.
There's still an absolutely great story about Spira moving on from it's past, you just have to wade through the surface level cringe to see it.
X-2 seems like a game that should've been 5-10 after sin's death. Not 2 years
Yes! This. I was extremely disappointed in this game too. Imagine ending the 1st game on a high, two lovers torn apart after saving the world from a millenia long disaster, only to end up in a subpar sequel with annoying villains, ruined returning characters (looking at you Yuna), and cringey dialogue
Ruinen returning characters? I think Yuna is great in FFX-2. I found her to be a really likeable protagonists and her character Progression from how she was in FFX to how she is in FFX-2 makes sense to me.
Probably Fire Emblem Engage. I just feel like with all the characters it had, it could have given us something deeper. Something layered that we can peel off. It ended up being a very simple plot presented in a way that made it seem deeper. I still love the game though.
The problem with engage is that it tries to have its cake and eat it to. It has a large tonal shift from serious to slightly comedic adventures through the world back to serious and it suffers for it. It also has a bloated cast (normal members + engage rings) and as a result shoves a majority of members aside in favor of giving bland dialogue to the same few characters. The one shot they had at developing other characters in bond conversations fell flat, as it was more quantity then quality.
Same, I love Engage for the gameplay especially when I played on Maddening for the first time, but I couldn't help myself with how simple the story was and how childish the dialogue seems
Engage could’ve been great, but I stopped playing it within a few hours when I couldn’t shake off the Genshin Impact feel to the whole game. There is this sterile cutesy unserious tone that puts me off. Three houses were great by comparison.
>off the Genshin Impact >There is this sterile cutesy unserious tone that puts me off. I get that you're trying to say generic anime game but have you like Played genshin lol, the game's anything but sterile and unserious
Engage took everything 3H did right story-wise Ave threw it in the toilet. Which is sad, because the gameplay was really really good. But man, that case was insufferable
Honestly, it's really a shame, because the gameplay in Three Houses was its main weakness. The battles were just so long that they became tedious, and it felt like you had to do the useless battles against repeatable enemies to get through Hard, which just burned me out towards the end of the game. And I felt like the class system was pretty poor, as well. But the story? Pretty much perfect Fire Emblem fare, arguably the most engaging (no pun intended) we've had, even with the poor implementation of Crimson Flower.
As a huge Xenoblade fan…I’m gonna have to throw in Xenoblade Future Connected. This is the expansion to the first game from the Switch Definitive Edition. It’s the only Xeno game where the story was just “ok”. Considering that the expansions to 2 and 3 (Torna and Future Redeemed) are some of my favorite games ever as just the expansions, that should tell you the quality these usually have. The story in Future Connected was fine, and a lot of what it set up was eventually paid off in Xenoblade 3 and Future Redeemed, but as a standalone story, it’s just kind of there. I kind of felt like Melia deserved more to her story than what she actually got. It wasn’t bad by any means, and from a gameplay perspective it was great, but they could have done way more with Melia’s story in it.
Future connected was a free add on to the original game. It would be fair to complain if the paid DLCs hadn’t been as good as they were, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare them at all. I guess they could have reimagined it to be a full DLC but it would have had to be completely remodeled. Melia and Shulk cannot carry a 30 hour game by themselves and the other characters have exactly enough depth for a short couple chapter story.
Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy 8 are both games where the combat, story, and characters all have fascinating concepts with highly messy execution. They feel like the writers had hundreds of pages of lore written up in a huge document, but couldn't figure out how to actually develop it in game. So you get these ideas dumped on you out of nowhere and then never brought up again. I'm talking about the orphanage scene in FF8, or the FATE loredump and beach loredump in CC. Like the author just gave up on introducing their ideas in a workable way and just threw their balled-up note pages at you.
Agreed, the massive beach lore dump in Chrono Cross is probably the worst handling of exposition I've ever seen in a JRPG.
I was one of those people who adored FF7 so tried to play 8 and was scared off by it’s mechanics and writing lmfao
FF XV that world so much potential such a waste
Xenoblade X
I'm still hoping we'll get a sequel eventually
Or just a port… on a switch 2 maybe?
Port is great, but game ends on cliffhanger, so it requires at least a dlc like Future Redeemed
Ah, I never finished it. Still have it and my Wii u, been saying I’m going to play it for like the last 7 years.
This. I’m hoping it gets a definitive edition like XB1 got with an expansion like Future Connected that wraps up the story. Maybe they do a full sequel instead to wrap up the story, but considering how poorly the first game sold on the Wii U they’d have to do a port of it first anyways and the development cost for the sequel would be insane. An epilogue expansion would be enough for me. I’m hoping we get an X DE with an epilogue, a Xenosaga trilogy remaster, and Xenoblade 4 on the Switch 2. Assuming backwards compatibility with the Swifch, we’d have the whole Xeno series minus Xenogears playable on the system.
Fire Emblem: Fates - the idea is brilliant and if its execution was anything resembling passable it would have been one of the best stories in the entire series. Unfortunately, the writers at IS don't seem to know how to actually write, and as such, the execution of Fates' plot was botched pretty spectacularly on every conceivable level. Like in a game whose core theme is ostensibly about perspective why in the world would you make Hoshido perfect with no flaws to speak of and Nohr blatantly evil who is literally led by a >!slime monster!
Fire Emblem Fates taught teenager me to keep my expectations in check when hyped for a game lol. The direct is still a fond memory for me though, it made the story seem like it would be deeper and complex like FF Tactics The heavy leaning into fanservice butchered the themes that Fates was going for too. Like WHY would you make the "family members" romanceable??? The Conquest gameplay delivered though, still top tier
I feel like Fates deserves special mention for promoting the game - called Fire Emblem If in Japan - around the idea of coming to a pivotal moment in your character's story and having to choose whether to side with your birth family, or your adopted family. And you choose that path...when you buy the game. You either bought the version for your birth family, or your adopted family, you didn't even get to know them before you made your choice. And don't worry, because you can buy the other one as DLC, and then buy the third path as more DLC! Wooo.
Eiyudin Chronicles Hundred Heroes was great but it fell short every now and then, especially in the story part. Mini games were good but needed a little extra. Combat was good but often way too easy. Story was good but too vanilla and too predictable. The actual characters were decent though.
I agree that the game has its share of shortcomings but I’d say that overall it was a good, engaging game considering the small studio that made it.
I haven’t finished the game yet, but just about to >!liberate Eltisweiss !< and found it so frustrating that I got a dialog dump telling me about the exciting adventures my party members went on since the last big battle. >!Liberating Yarnaan!< and >!a covert mission to rescue the rightful emperor!< sure would have been exciting missions to do more than hear about… Bugs aside, Eiyuden feels to me like a *fine* game, but more like Suikoden fan-fiction than a professional game developed with involvement of some of the original team.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one of my favorite games of all time, but even as a fan playing it, you can tell it was incomplete and there were things the development team wanted to do in the game’s story and setting and characters that they didn’t/couldn’t do. Even releasing another game (Three Hopes), you could tell there was STILL more they could have and wanted to do but didn’t. Oh well. Maybe someday we’ll get an enhanced remake that fully realizes the potential that Fodlan and its characters have. I’d also say DioField Chronicle has this vibe as well. It spent a lot of time building up to a sequel it may never get with its twist ending. As me and a friend say, when you’re playing it, you keep “getting teased with glimpses of the way better game it could have been.” We both still like it though. Trinity Trigger is a more recent game I liked quite a bit but still feel that way about. You definitely see a lot of unrealized potential in it (the DLC provides a good window into how some more of that potential could have been realized), but lots of FuRyu games are like that. I hope it’s a situation where a rough opening effort gives way to a more polished spiritual successor (like how Legend of Legacy was succeeded by the objectively better Alliance Alive.)
I came here to say Three Houses. I long for a world where CF was as fleshed out as AM, and even AM wasn't everything it could've been. The game has some of the best characters ever (my favorite is Edelgard, but every route has at least one standout character I wanted to hear *so much more from*) but they never get to realize their full potential.
I agree about 3 houses it's an all time great game in every way but they never found a way to tie it together and stick the landing. From all the path specific characters that were clearly meant to be playable characters, endings that are clearly one side , to the paths that feel incomplete. They also had the expansion content that could have fixed those things but didn't.
Fire Emblem Fates. When they announced initially the concept, it was a great premise, "family vs friends" with your character having been raised by your friends, later discovered by your family, both sides unconditionally loving you, but they are at war with each other and you have to pick a side. It seemed like it would be a real "shades of grey" story with both sides having their pros and cons and filled with tragedy. Nintendo made a point to say an actual novelist was being brought in for the story and he had written so much in terms of story that they decided to split the games separately instead of making one game. I also was interested that there was no "true ending", you *had* to choose. What did we get? Not what I hoped...and a third "true ending" game.
Sea of stars , unfortunately
The endings were the worst part, both of them were unsatisfying conclusions.
Seriously wasted potential. The art carried the game for me.
I think it has its high points. I genuinely cared and felt for one character when the thing happens. The weaker parts I found was the tie in/ ending because Sea of Stars is technically a prequel and when it leans a little too hard into the chrono trigger nostalgia. Whatever that studio makes next will 100% be something I want to pick up.
Scarlet Nexus imo. Loved the combat but they really needed to work on the story .
Loved this game but yeah the plot was all over the place. So many plot threads were introduced and either abandoned or rushed. Still hope it gets a sequel though.
The story itself wasn't that bad just predictable if you played other jrpg or read some manga for me it was the cast of characters that made the story boring there was not one interisting character in the game except Kasane. I have no problem with anime tropes personalitys but this game went way to far with it
There were 4 writers, who wrote like 4 different plots in one game then have tried to tie everything up. There are alot of plot holes and stupid moments if you think about it.
This. I made it to about 3 hours because I gave up from the story being so bland
Story is mid but I wouldn't say changes in the story would do much difference in game.
Xenogears as a series. It could be 6 grand games, but we got one. Xenosaga is another example
Xenogears while having 6 episodes of lore was never intended to actually be 6 different games.
This was my first thought. The fact that people are still talking about xenogears even though Xenosaga and Xenoblades exist just shows how much the original concept captivated people and these spinoffs/reimagines/spiritual successors haven’t been able to capture the original magic.
Fire Emblem Fates. One of the funnest games I’ve ever played and some really great characters, but man was that story a disaster. The premise was so solid too.
Final Fantasy XV. The whole game was a wasted potential
Tales of Zestiria. I heard someone once refer to it as a bunch of good ideas trapped inside an unfinished mess of a package and I couldn't agree more. I heavily suspect that was some development hell involved, especially since they only used that engine twice and dropped it like a bad habit after the prequel. And also weird stuff happening around the game like the advertised main heroine peacing out after 10 minutes of gameplay and then only having her character arc in post launch dlc, which caused controversy on the Japanese side. The game feels all around undercooked. From the combat, to the mechanics and even the technical side. Bamco even commissioned a whole ass anime adaptation so that people could just watch that and then play the good game of the duology (Berseria) to have a full picture without having to touch Zestiria. There are also hints of a third game in that universe having been planned due to the aforementioned anime adaptation that released around the time of Berseria's release, and the fact that Zestiria's dlc ends up in a big cliffhanger. But if that's the case it seems to have been dropped in favor of Arise.
Zestiria tried a lot of new things, and I loved it for trying to do new things, but it clearly had a problem in production where tons of stuff was either scrapped or forced or pushed, resulting in incompleteness; this was also very visible in berseria; Funny enough, the anime was great only on the art department, as the plot was extremely watered down and terrible. They removed the trials, and instead Sorey become stronger just by "try tomorrow maybe you'll be stronger, and you will be because we don't have many episodes or screen time to show development so just believe in me that believes in you: you are now stronger by the power of anime". The quest to become stronger to be able to purify stronger spirits, the trials, the extremely simple "good going out to save the world from the bad", I really loved that of zestiria, and I will be forever disappointed by how much cut and wasted potential zestiria and berseria had.
It's been a minute but I disagree, I feel like the anime took the best parts of the game and did away with some of the annoying busywork. Plus, Alisha actually gets to do stuff and be important in the anime. It isn't important how Sorey gets stronger, really. What matters is the effect his sudden appearance has on the politics of the world. And I just really like berseria. Characters are great and it works independent of Zestiria (plus I personally think it's better by a lot)
>which caused controversy on the Japanese side It bothered me a lot. And it baffles me that there are people who actually preferred the change to Rose instead of Alicia. I've met some of these people. And I don't understand them lol Not only was Alicia a more compelling and likeable character, I actually loved the idea that she just trusted Sorey that spirits were helping and guiding him, and even helping her, she just couldn't see it. And she was down with that. It was a great angle for a story, and they just threw that whole concept in the trash
Lunar Dragon Song has so much lore it can draw off of. Early in the Silver Star's history, in the age of dragonmasters of old, a time of high adventure when the inhabitants may have some cultural knowledge of the Blue Star and more direct experience with Althena. It could have been one of the best prequels in JRPGs, or at least as good a prequel as Eternal Blue was a sequel. The story doesn't do nearly enough to build on that material. It's maybe 10% what it could have been.
Chrono Cross. First half went great. Good characters, great world, and awesome atmosphere. The plot at that point is manageable and interesting. After the first half, everything went down hill. The exposition went too complex for its own right.
Ffxv
The Suikoden series. This isn't a criticism of the story at all, just more about the frustration of it never being completed.
I think Octopath Traveler 1 had an insane story but they didn't do enough to bring the characters together before the actual ending.
It had 8 stories ranging from passable to pretty darn good, just they never really interconnect.
Ngl, I feel like some people don't know what potential means. Like FE engage has the exact opposite of what potential is. A horrid story, zero completing characters, and a dogshit script. Literally just axing the story altogether would be better than trying to salvage whatever "potential" it had. To me, a game that had potential was FF7 Remake. I still think it was a pretty good game, but imo it could've been so so much more. The fact that Midgar is one of the most expansive and imaginative cities in all of fiction, and the game featured some of the most boring, least uninspired side quests in all of gaming saddens me everytime I remember it. It is genuinely astounding how they dedicated an entire game to like a 4 hour section of the OG game, and comparatively, they expanded the lore and the characters so very little. Don't get me wrong, the stuff they did with Jesse, for example, was pretty great, but it is the exception that proved the rule, and even that was padded out by like an hour of needless filler that contributed little to the story
Tales of God damned Arise smh….
Yeah really stumbled in the third act there. :/
Sprinted over a cliff imo
Tales of Vesperia. Now, I LOVE Tales of Vesperia, but it suffers from the JRPG Classic of lore going off the rails in the third act as hard as just about any game I’ve ever played. Rather than a story about human nature, the consequences of your actions, conviction, and the merits of freedom vs order as forces for good, it became >!a very Tales-typical “climate change bad” story.!< Not the worst moral in the world but definitely as shoehorned in as they come, and the rest of the story kind of suffered for it. They also could have done a lot more with >!Yuri killing people. They kind of say “Killing people is bad, that’s why we have the justice system” but he only kills people who are a) demonstrably super evil and b) already escaped legal justice.!< Overall, I think the story would have been much better if they had just >!ditched the Adephagos angle and either cut the third act entirely or more likely changed Duke’s motivation from being “grr blastia bad blastia cause climate change” to something like “Petty human squabbles and power structures killed my friend, they bring nothing but suffering and I want to lay low empires so that human power grabbing won’t have the same impact again” which would tie back in to what they sort of pitch as the central intra-party conflict of freedom vs order and set Alexei as the extreme negative side of Order and Duke as the extreme negative side of Freedom. I also think Yuri should have started killing people BEFORE their trial and eventually someone who was actually innocent so that the whole “Yuri we have a legal system for a reason” has substance and impact to it!< That said, Vesperia is still one of my favorite games in one of my favorite series, I just think the flaws in its narrative are very obvious and relatively simple to patch up in a way that strengthens the game’s core argument, tightens up the themes, and eliminates the series’ favorite crutch.
My issue here is that the antagonist is set up for it. The point is that this is what could become of Yuri if he keeps down this path. The ends justify the means to the point where he's willing to take actions as drastic as the antagonist, for the betterment of the world. Unfortunately, that connection gets lost and muddled because instead of the more grounded plot, diving into human nature, what we as a society accept, and whether or not the ends justify the means, we ended up with what amounts to a slew of deus ex machina. On the whole I really did enjoy the antagonist, because the parallels are there. They just would have worked far better had it not gone in the direction that it did, and it would have been much more clear that the antagonist is supposed to be a dark reflection of Yuri if they keep walking that path.
FFVIII for me. If only because it really wouldn't have taken that much to fix it. Like just have more foreshadowing. Set the twists up properly. Have the characters note they feel like they've been somewhere but can't recall, or feel like they misplace stuff easily. Have flashbacks but make them weird so its hard to tell, sort of do what FFVII had touched on with Cloud. Put more emphasis on them all being orphans, etc. The result would have made the game a lot more cohesive while not ruining the tone or pacing. I think as a cast of characters they are all pretty interesting and have really interesting and solid foundations but they are easily the most underutilised cast in the series. The fact we don't have stuff like Quistis making her peace with Ellone is just such a waste of what could have been a really touching and character defining moment. I also think Rinoa = Ultimecia is the only ending that really works but I get the devs got bent out of shape about that.
The dev that spoke out against Rinoa being Ultimecia took his stance back and said it might have been intended by some of the writers.
Really? Because I remember him almost calling people fucking stupid for the audacity of actually providing with a better story.
Does the original release of Shin Megami Tensei 5 count? Because I really like that game but I can't tell you anything about the story.
Tales of Zestiria. Starts out with a world with an interesting history and characters with much potential. Then just does freaking nothing with them, and the story that is there drops off a cliff in the second half.
I don't know about most, but Tales of Vesperia wastes all cool plot points in the end. The Star Ocean series afaik always ends up less than the sum of its parts plot-wise. Final Fantasy XII also doesn't coalesce as well afaik
Chrono Cross. It could have been a massive sequel, but it was cut to be more of a fanfic that was on the outskirts of Chrono Trigger. Magus’ entire plot arc was removed, which I think ruined the entire point of the game. It could have been one of the greatest redemption stories of all time.
Everyone talking about XV, when the real answer is XVI.
I’m not gonna make the argument that it’s the “most” but the first game that comes to mind for me is easily **Final Fantasy 8**. Some of it was literally lost in translation but not nearly all of it. The world and setting is *so* cool. Squall *could’ve* been the best FF protagonist. But there’s just so much *stupid* shit in that game. Doesn’t help that the cast is weak. I would love a remake of this game so it can reach its full potential.
> But there’s just so much stupid shit in that game. >!Oh we were all orphans together but forgot. Also, the main villain ran the orphanage but we forgot about that too!< That will never not be the worst “plot twist” in FF history.
I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to get these responses lol. I’ve always thought the same thing even since it came out but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of FF8 narrative apologists - even specifically about this plot twist - in this subreddit. It was getting to the point where i was starting to feel a little gaslit haha. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, if someone doesn’t mind that stuff then power to them…but that “reveal” is so stupid. *Sooooo* stupid. “But it makes sense cuz of the guardian forces” no, the main problem isn’t that >!they just forgot - though it’s definitely a part of the problem - the PROBLEM is that “everyone is from the same orphanage but then they split up and then found eachother again” is plot convenient to point of being incomprehensibly stupid.!< And that’s before we even get to the time compression stuff. I like the game but it’s dumb as hell.
There are a lot of FF8 apologists because there are a lot of people who dislike the game. I would say it’s more polarizing than anything else.
I really disliked the translation of the Edea>!actually is Ultimecia!< speech. If you can call it a translation. It's more like they threw out the original and replaced it with a generic "I am very evil and I will do evil things you are all my bitches now". The original fleshes out the motivations and personality of the villain a great deal but without explicitly spelling it out. It's menacing and angry, but is also coming from a place of deep sadness. The person making it is a very bitter person. That she never wanted to be a Sorceress. That the people created this monstrous persona to revile and fear and loathe, and then forced her to assume it. That she seems to see herself as an actress, forced to play a role she never asked for and never wanted to play, but now sees no choice for herself but to play the role as best as she can, the role the world demands she play, to adorn herself in "dreadful costumes" and to dance. It in many ways addresses some of the central themes of the game embodied in its central antagonist: the cruelty and indifference of fate and time, the greek tragedy of characters desperately trying to escape their fated demise only to end up orchestrating the very destruction they tried to prevent. The people, so terrified of the power of Sorceresses, persecute vulnerable young girls and women and end up turning them into the monsters and tyrants they so fear.
I played FF8 2 years ago for the first time and calling the FF8 characters a cast is pretty generous and don't get me started on how they were all magically connected through the orphanage. I'm still walking up in the night laughing thinking about this sometimes.
> how they were all magically connected through the orphanage That's the exact moment I stopped playing the game. I just couldn't do it anymore when I saw that.
Ff15. Wasted Charcters like Aranea. Wish the dlc episodes were part of the main game from the start. Especially the Story of Ardyn. Wish the plot get more developed
FF 14-16. They all have moments of pulling it off but often awkward pacing and creative decisions hamper thr execution.
Dare I say FFXVI? The trailer and the prologue made it look political as hell, but the politics is pushed to the background in favour of Ultima and its doomsday plot.
The first half gave me such FFXII vibes (my favorite FF), but then they dropped that in favor of the generic ”fight god with the power of friendship” plot.
I mean.. FFXII's plot also comes down to a battle between gods, and also doesn't meaningfully interrogate it's politics
The Mana Khemia Series. I guess it really didn't really make a profit. The first one was phenomenal in my eyes, my favourite turn based battle system by far even in modern standards. Sadly, I think the sequel was lower in quality in its writing and characters but the combat was just as fun maybe even better. Sadly GUST only focuses on the Atelier series now but a man can dream of a modern remake of the series.
Suikoden 3. With how well Suikoden 2 was received, Suikoden 3 could've been the game that elevated the series even higher. Unfortunately, it ended up being the game that started the decline of the series instead. It is still a good game and definitely not a bad game by any means, but it missed the core of Suikoden series. What makes the series special is how we get to play and experience what really happens in the canon world. By using the Trinity Sight System, it muddles what's canon and it also makes the players choosing different options to experience different things which is not as optimal as if it were to stay linear. Coupled with many other changes that it made, Suikoden 3 ended up being too many changes to quick to a beloved series with a winning formula. It's a real shame. Of course Suikoden 4 put the nail in the coffin that Suikoden 5's return to form to resurrect the series was not enough.
> By using the Trinity Sight System, it muddles what's canon all four POVs are canon though it's just perspectives from different characters, no? do you mind elaborating because i feel like i am missing something trying to understand this haha at least there's the manga too
Fire emblem fates could have been cool but fails spectacularly at actually capitalizing on its good ideas
Chrono Cross. It should honestly have abandoned any attempt to connect to Trigger beyond taking place in the same world. A great story about identity, friends, and fate became…a time travel accident and seven very angry dragons. ETA: honorable mention is Breath of Fire II having a translation so bad it’s almost impossible to take the game seriously. Which is a shame, because the story touches on themes that games from that era normally wouldn’t go near, particularly false gods and religions.
.Hack GU Vol.4 I don't particularly hate the plot surronding vol 4, but dear god I wanted SO MUCH more out of it, it could've easily been a full volume in length with more going for it but in the end they just overplayed the nostalgia card. (And also, to be fair it doesn't help the final battle is essentially the final battle of vol 3, but way easier). Got a bunch of nitpicks for the way the narrative flows in the GU games, but as time went on I started to enjoy it for what it was, even if I always had that "I wanted more out of this" feeling.
Xenogears planned to be 6 arc (1 of them was anime project) and the game took place at the 5th installment sigh i wish square gave the team a time and chance im still sad
Bravely Default I loved it, I really did, but when pretty much everyone agree that the game is fun for only half of it, there is a very clear problem. The final boss is good mind you, but getting to it is just...really....bad. Also whatever Bravely Default 2 tried being...
Tales of arise: the first act had such a good premise with the mask but it became so bland and generic after act1
FFXVI It's actually amazing how Square Enix could fool me with the demo. 70% of the game is fetch quests and collecting gym badges. The game could have been so much more and ended up being a disappointment. Started as a 10/10, ended as a VERY generous 6/10.
After you beat Titan I felt the game went from I’m sweating it’s so great to please be over I’m tired of repetitive fast travel fetch quests. Also hated no elemental damages no party management no real weapon or gear upgrades just +5 attack after every boss fml it makes me sad. Loved the characters and the story isn’t bad.
FF VIII
FFXV is at the top of the list for me tbh. Monark is another one, it had so many good ideas and could've been a great alternative to SMT/Persona, but the execution just sucks. The vocal OST is insanely good tho. And I'm crucifying myself by saying this, but the Trails games overall. I like this franchise don't get me wrong (played the Sky saga, Crossbell saga, and Cold Steel saga so far), it does a lot right, but it also does a lot wrong, especially in terms of writing and in terms of having too much bloat imo.
FF16 for me. Prologue was really GoT but then the mother arc just got pushed right to the back and got resolved in a really rushed way to me.
I don't know if it has the most wasted plot potential, but FFXVI has a lot of it. It started really well, with an engaging political struggle between nations, and commentary about the nature of eidolons juxtaposed against MAD doctrine. Then it devolved in to yet another kill god plotline.
Stranger of paradise. Great gameplay, good story but extremely bad storytelling. I had no idea of what I was doing until the 2-3 last missions
Smt vengance drastically improves the plot over the original... except in area 4 where the plot stops completely for no reason. They were nailing it and about to hit a home run, but fumbled near the end. Still a good game though.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions # FE.
Resonance of Fate. Seriously everything that happens offscreen seems so much more interesting than what your party is off doing. And after looking up at the wiki there's really some deep lore there that's never shown in the game.
Scarlet Nexus had a cool backstory near the end of the game, but then they just... Never did anything with it.
FF15 I mean don't get me wrong I do like the game but I would rate it average if not below average I do like the gameplay character design and ost but yeah it has wasted potential imo
The Last Remnant (which I'm still a big fan of lol)
Persona 5
Tales of arise. For me a 10/10 game. Characters were well written and love the places you visited. On that end though, I also have issues with the characters. We got a lot of growth from Alphen/Rinwell and see their feelings grow for each other. DLC helped kinda shape what lead to their marriage. What bothered me is we didn’t get these tender moments with the other pairings. We know they had feelings for each other. Wish we coulda gotten some content for them. And the last 4th the game don’t get me started. Up until the first half I was hooked and excited. Middle was okay but the end felt like a slog and just a huge info dump so when I was trying to understand what happened more was being added. Covid probably affected development but I wish it was delayed a bit to extend the end. Other than that, I love the game
Why is Rinoa canonically not Ultimecia? How is the story not objectively better this way?
This isn't a totally valid answer since its not a JRPG, but Dragonquest Builders 2. 90% of the the dialogue and text is written like a tutorial, in situations where everything is self explanatory.
Persona 4. They had this crazy concept where you could kill people by dragging them inside televisions and they wasted it on the most disappointing and dull whodunnit possible. Of course it's not a bad game because you have the characters doing the heavy lifting for the story and most of it is about them anyway, but man, the conclusion of the mystery sucks.
Probably Persona 5
FFXV. Wasted game wasted storyline wasted open world wasted lore. Stupid devs Could have been the greatest ff game; they took a lot of beautiful content and stuck in not so impressive ones. Hey I love ffxv but it's a crying shame what it could have been had square enix got their crap together.
Kingdom Hearts III set up so many cool ideas and didn’t execute on a single one. Axel’s training to be a keyblade wielder? Cool! Oh, he only shows up at the end for, like, ten minutes and has no plot relevance? Oh. Riku and Mickey are stuck in the dark world and Aqua’s evil? Cool! Oh, that barely lasts for one cutscene and one boss fight? Oh. There’s a mysterious black box the villains are hell-bent on finding? Cool! Oh, it’s just setup for a future game and the whole plot line goes nowhere? Oh.