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Fedule posted:The game, as a whole, is incoherent. But every now and again you'll find a point where one person has managed to get control over just enough of the game in one chunk to actually make something worthwhile out of it.
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Apr 2, 2014 20:32
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Gensuki posted:8 is not good (if it is I don't know why)
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Apr 3, 2014 00:31
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Schwartzcough posted:It leaves players feeling immediately confused and disoriented, and first impressions are important, so I think people continue feeling resentful over the handling of information.
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Apr 5, 2014 08:15
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For all of the clumsy world-building we go through in the opening, I like how the opening does a lot of work to set up the five-man band of characters in a short space of time. Lightning the stoic and Sazh the realist kick things off, and then Snow the idealist meets up with the naive Vanille and the emotional Hope, so we get a fairly simple sense of how our characters all contrast with one another. But there's more going on beneath the surface, because the idealist one is a screwup, the naive one is being evasive and questioning, the stoic one is basically left destroyed in her failure, the realist is facing up to a crazy situation, and the emotional one is trapped in a situation with the source of his pain and being demanded to resolve his conflicts right now young man. That's without even going in to all the actual interpersonal drama! And then Robot Jesus comes and claims their souls. I think we are a bit ploddy in terms of what our characters are actually doing and where all of it is happening. But in terms of establishing who they are, it's pretty strong. (unfortunately a lot of that gets ploddy pretty soon too, but hey, credit where it's due)
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Apr 12, 2014 19:16
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Cattail Prophet posted:I figured out what the problem is
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Apr 13, 2014 21:25
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Sydin posted:I like the Lightning vs Snow dynamic. They both want more or less the same thing, but have completely conflicting personalities and keep butting heads over it. As much as I want to say I'm in Lightning's side right now (Those punches. I think Lightning is basically grieving. As far as she knows, getting turned into crystal just doesn't get reversed - once you're that, you're basically a shiny blue corpse. So Snow jumping around and talking about saving her and being there when she wakes up sounds like talking about religion and miracles, which she doesn't believe in and so which gives absolutely no comfort or hope. I think she's justifiably angry and hurt by what Snow's doing, which really just interrupts her attempt to process her loss and her situation, and to try to keep going somehow. It doesn't help that Snow is being just as one-minded about what being a l'Cie means for them and their task which is supposed to be telling her what she's supposed to be doing right now. So my sister has literally just died, I only have a few weeks to live myself, and now this guy is telling me I can bring her back to life if I help him save the world? man gently caress him and his bullshit. While Snow is still living in fantasy land, which in a sense is fortunate since they live in a world of machine gods with not completely well understood rules, but is totally happy to make his decisions on the basis of whatever the best possible outcome might be, however remote or unlikely it is. The thing is, he really believes it. I like how Snow gets genuinely angry (though still restrained) at Lightning at this point, having been fairly tolerant of her shouting him down and hitting him, where she's going to walk away and there's nothing he can say to make her stay. It's a crack in his armour - things aren't starting well, and he knows it, even though he's determined to see it through.
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Apr 14, 2014 21:33
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Simply Simon posted:Still - from the beginning of this disaster, Snow did nothing wrong to affect Lightning, unless I am already forgetting scenes. And certainly nothing Snow has done since gives us any sense that smacking him with a couple of punches is in any way a disproportionate reaction to how he's trying to talk up that "it's okay she isn't really dead".
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Apr 16, 2014 21:28
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Snow alone against the world discovers the extent of his new magical ice powers. http://youtubedoubler.com/?video1=h...Name=snoopsagan ... I'm so sorry.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:14
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Cattail Prophet posted:Because anything worth doing is worth doing twice.  This game would have been so massively improved as a musical. With Hope replaced by a comic relief snowman.
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Apr 23, 2014 20:27
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ApeHawk posted:If the point was to make the fal'cie look like utter dicks...well, then why wouldn't the general populace be against it and do exactly what Snow's Heroes are doing?
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Apr 26, 2014 21:15
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^^^ J. Alfred Prufrock posted:Except that this is total bullshit. Cloud puts on a tough-guy stand-off act for the first halfish-hour (tops!) of the game. After that we meet his childhood crush and learn that he was kinda a goober as kid. anilEhilated posted:That's however what makes Cloud likable - he has to overcome his mental issues and we had the entire game's worth of his reactions to different kind of absurd situations to gauge his on. You come to the conclusion that Cloud is a hero by yourself - because you see him break down both literally and mentally and get over it. The parallels with Cloud are very close. Lightning is dealing with her own traumas and sense of self-loathing here, and dealing with it by buying into the role of the l'Cie she's been handed by her sister and spinning it her own way into some kind of quest for justice. And this bit where she's about to walk out on Hope helps to show her she's lost the plot. The problem is that the l'cie stuff hasn't really been well-elaborated on at this point in the conflict, whereas by the time Cloud has to deal with his traumas in the narrative we've already seen him travel the entire world map and seen Shinra and Sephiroth and their respective conflicts. We don't really understand Lightning's struggles because we have very little grasp of her world, in the sense which FF7 took great care to ensure we'd properly understood. Indeterminacy fucked around with this message at 12:08 on May 8, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 12:06
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Rigged Death Trap posted:That would be true if it didnt exist in 2 sequels afterwards.
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May 8, 2014 12:36
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AradoBalanga posted:Let me phrase it this way: If the protagonist doesn't care about what happens to him/herself, should the player even care about what happens to the protagonist? Take the Bride from Kill Bill - she goes into the story basically hoping to face down a team of trained assassins whatever the cost, and although we enjoy the challenge and danger she faces in the process, we want her to win and survive even if she is really only doing it to Kill Bill regardless of the risk to her own life. Then later on something is revealed that gives her a will to survive, and this gives us some relief that after all of the tension has subsided, the Bride will get to live on purposefully afterwards.
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May 9, 2014 00:21
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SystemLogoff posted:I tried What The Font's scanner, but no luck.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:13
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Artix posted:Vanille is an odd case because it absolutely is her story. The game makes no attempt to hide that she's our "mysterious narrator", and the game can totally unironically be summed up as "How badly can Vanille gently caress things up for literally everyone over the course of two weeks?" And yet...she's just there. Once we reach the point in the plot where you actually start playing (which is to say, Day 13 of the plot), she literally has no relevance outside of dragging Sazh in the complete opposite direction of the rest of the plot. If they see the audience as basically a passive teenager making squee noises and keeping a distance from actually influencing anything out of a fear of messing things up, that might make sense of a lot of the design choices.
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Jun 28, 2014 21:39
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Judge Tesla posted:Unusual for a Final Fantasy game that the leader of the empire, Cocoon in this case, is actually the main villain...
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Sep 10, 2014 13:57
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You're in the most open part of the game with complete choice of party members and you're not immediately using Sazh. I am disappointed, guys. 
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Oct 6, 2014 17:30
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Artix posted:Sazh's better HP is counterbalanced (right now) by Hope having both Protect/Shell and the medic role. This will be less significant once Sazh picks them up, but for now I'd actually argue that Hope has better survivability outside of sheer HP. Also Hope's very first Commando node is Ruin, so there's really no reason to not get him that, at least. He's not a great Commando, but he can do it. In my head, I have Sazh and Fang working well together and Hope and Snow working well together because those characters have similar approaches to the defense part of the team. With Snow and Hope you make a specific decision to defend solidly and then to look for regular opportunities to quickly stagger, while Sazh and Fang try to build up more gradually while staying on the attack and then to make really big pretty numbers once the stagger point is reached.
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Oct 31, 2014 22:01
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Judge Tesla posted:Oerba is the place where the game really beats you over the head with the whole "Fal'cie are evil!" theme, with the dozens of Cie'th who used to be Oerba's citizens milling about, the datalogs mention that Anima (I think) was this village's Fal'cie, and boy did he go to town on the place.
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Dec 2, 2014 11:10
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nine-gear crow posted:I agree completely with you though, except I'd take it in the opposite direction. Her arc over the course of the game would have been better suited if it was about stripping "Lightning" away from Claire layer-by-layer as she realizes what a misstep it was on her part to even become Lightning in the first place and what it's cost her.
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Dec 6, 2014 19:05
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Artix posted:This is the first time that this has ever happened. The last time Ragnarok appeared (during the War of Transgression) and cracked Cocoon's shell, it was Fang who only half finished the job because...reasons. There's an explanation, but like all explanations in FF13, it is exceedingly dumb. E: D'oh, reading. Yes that is very dumb. Can I assume that's just Pulse propaganda to justify to the Pulsians (?) why Ragnarok didn't actually kill them like everyone was hoping, and so isn't really a canon explanation? (no of course I can't  )GeneX posted:You think the writers actually had the foresight to connect this stuff to the sequels non-retroactively? No. This was supposed to be a relatively happy ending, and, for all that everyone mocks the game, it really did end in a positive way. The suicidal machine demigods are gone, humanity is free, the whole thing with Pulse vs. Cocoon is over, and Vanille is dead. Everything is great. But NOOOO, it wasn't knowledge and strength of will at all, it was just a different god, and actually doing that means the whole universe is actually hosed until a THIRD god decides to step in and make a new one for everyone. So much for choices and free will and the power of agency. Gods dammit. Indeterminacy fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 15:09
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OmanyteJackson posted:So I get that's what happens, but I really don't know why it happened. Why did we have to traverse so many hallways? Didn't Lightning say she wanted to destroy Cacoon in like chapter 1? and by the end Cacoon is loving destroyed. I think she may have changed her mind a couple times between that but does it even loving matter? The message they're going for is that you do as a human being have control over how you react to those forces. Cocoon was going to blow itself up eventually, whether our party did it or some new l'Cie got roped into it in the near future, because that's what the emo machine gods in charge of it wanted, so at least our party managed to blow it up in a relatively humane way and got its inhabitants off to safety. And if you found something to enjoy in the game and made the most of that, then good for you?
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Jan 19, 2015 10:00
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Schwartzcough posted:Huh, that sure was an intro. It brings to mind Macbeth: "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason."
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Feb 18, 2015 10:07
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Fister Roboto posted:"If you change the future, you change the past" does sound pretty weird, but I think that if you accept that time travel is possible, you have to also accept that time is not linear and doesn't conform to our silly human notions of causality. It's just a mess.
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Apr 8, 2015 13:35
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Fister Roboto posted:To be fair, many time travel stories (Chrono Trigger and Back to the Future to name a few) work the same way, because grandfather paradoxes are hard to resolve (they use the clock puzzle).
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Apr 8, 2015 21:11
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ViggyNash posted:At least a grandfather paradox can be explained in the context of having branching or overwritten timelines; the only belief you would need to suspend is that the object that went to the past and caused the paradox became dissociated from the original timeline by doing so, or something like that. This case has a similar glitch, because we have an artifact that opened a gate from a past in which there was an eclipse to a future that houses a phenomenon responsible for something (the bits of Oerba) being projected back to the past causing the eclipse. We could perhaps determine that the resolution is simply that we're now in a timeline where there never was an eclipse in the first place, but there's a loose end - the artifact that opened the gate comes from an alternate history. If this is the only loose end though then the game has us covered - the artifact when it was found in Serah and Noel's original time was already something that was displaced by a paradox effect, so the suggestion is that Serah and Noel were, from the start, in a timeline affected by a time travelling object, and that they are now back in the object's "own history" once they've changed things. What else would be different? Well, Serah and Noel themselves, because they'd visited the alternate history first before coming to the "true" history, and were motivated to act as they did to resolve the paradox only because of their experiences in that alternate history. They went to 10AF, found that the paradox was blocking them from watching the Oracle drive, so they went ahead to 200AF to resolve the paradox in order to watch the oracle drive. Now if that event never actually happened then what would have motivated Serah and Noel to travel forward into the future to resolve the paradox? Well, clearly nothing. But on the new time line theory, in this timeline there was no eclipse - no paradox phenomenon to encounter. When Serah and Noel now arrive in 10AF, they won't be in a timeline where in 200AF there is a paradox effect that sends Oerba back in time. Instead, they'll come to their timeline with the information in their heads that they've done this thing to resolve a paradox in an alternate timeline, but with no manifested signs that any of what they've done has any connection to the reality of that timeline. As we've established, both Serah and Noel have memory issues when it comes to what things in the past and/or future are actually like, so their memories aren't actually paradoxical either, because they're unreliable. So one possibility would be to say that the possible history where there was an eclipse simply collapsed into paradox thanks to the impossibility that Serah and Noel would ever be motivated to resolve it, and that we now have one fewer possible history to deal with (and an even more confused Serah and Noel who seem to remember something that never actually happened). Serah and Noel simply took a detour to the actual 10AF via an impossibility.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:19
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Fedule posted:I would like to apologise for my conduct in this update; I completely forgot my own advice re: thinking too seriously about Final Fantasy XIII-2 and it broke me for a while there. As with the "Eclipse" scenario, although Serah calls the giant flan a paradox, it's not actually paradoxical in itself. The Dragon on the Archelyte Steppe, having swallowed up the gem that's a portal to the Sunlieth waterscape, sends flans there, they make a giant flan and this threatens to pull down Cocoon. This is a possible outcome! There's nothing inconsistent about what's happening, it's just weird because time travel is weird. As long as the Archelyte Steppe hunts can happen at some point along the timeline then there can be a Flan-vacuum-dragon in it. But it's also an outcome that Noel and Serah don't like. So they'll set out to do what they can to make sure it doesn't happen. The paradox that arises is that in reaction to the giant flan, Serah and Noel travel to the source of the event and kill the dragon, retrieving the gem and closing the portal. Now there's a paradox, because in stopping the event that creates the giant flan there would be no reason for Serah and Noel to travel back to stop it. The paradox is untenable, and so the possible scenario in which Serah and Noel encounter a giant flan collapses into chaos. So when Serah and Noel arrive at Sunlieth, they come back to see Snow fighting the much smaller flan. The assumption (in the terms already set out in the Eclipse scenario) is that Serah and Noel should arrive at Sunlieth in the "corrected" timeline for the first time, where there's no supermassive flan. But, of course, without the giant flan there's no reason for Snow to be there either, because it's not threatening enough for him to travel in time to go fight. So the world with both Snow there and no flan threat is still inconsistent. The reason Serah and Noel wind up there is that unlike with the Eclipse scenario, they need to use the same gate to return to it as the one they used to travel to fight the Dragon, so the world is the same one, and things start going a bit haywire (Snow is there for no explained reason then suddenly disappears etc.) because now there really is a paradox. Serah and Noel didn't correct this timeline - they sealed its fate. The conclusion we have to draw then is that Serah and Noel never visit the "corrected" timeline version of Sunlieth Waterscape 300AF. They enter a gate in 5AF, detour through some possible worlds that are all ultimately too paradoxical to actually exist, and end up in the next destination you're going to go visit (although it's consistent so far for Archelyte Steppe ??AF to exist too; just nothing really important happens there other than Serah and Noel killing a dragon that ate a gem that does something to an impossible world). They will, however, once again appear in the next destination with memories of things that never really happened. Indeterminacy fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 12:35
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Rigged Death Trap posted:You joke but then poo poo like that article about the study exist. So yeah, I agree, let's not kid ourselves about the relevance of physical science here. "Time travel" is at its core a fantasy about the ability to react against or to understand and use the abstract idea of consequences, more moral than physical, and the rules at work are the rules about narrative coherence, not physical coherence. Yes, you can construct coherent or logical metaphysical models of what's going on, but these models might as much be influenced by one's beliefs about ethical consequences and justice as they are by one's beliefs about why some subatomic particles have been observed to behave like waves.
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Jun 30, 2015 08:30
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Shei-kun posted:All I know about the plot of this game is that I gave up trying to make sense of it a few videos ago and my mental health has greatly improved as a result of this decision. In this case, it's good to start with what Hope mentions. Some time after 10AF, Hope discovers a Chaos drive with a recording on it. In this recording, Serah is shouting angrily at Hope for making an Artificial Fal'Cie. This makes Hope think about that brown envelope file with "Top Secret Artificial Fal'Cie Project" scrawled on it he has hidden in his top drawer and he decides to shred it and come up with a different plan. He finds out about this thing called the 13th Arc and decides to put himself into suspended animation until it's about to appear, in order to try to make a new Cocoon to stop the collapse of the old one from killing everyone. In Serah and Noel's personal experience, after portalling out of a (paradoxical) 300AF Sunlieth Waterscape, they arrive in a version of 400AF where such an Artificial Fal'Cie exists. They are thoroughly miserable here, and are informed by a fake version of Caius that they shouldn't be there, because they should have been imprisoned back in 200AF. So they see their presence in 400AF as paradoxical. Serah is worried that it's not even something or some phenomenon that is a paradox but simply their arrival that distorts the timeline, but Yeul lets them know that the timeline was already distorted so she shouldn't worry about it. They go back to 200AF (detouring via 300AF because artificial gameplay lengthening reasons) to find out that Adam, the Fal'Cie that's being constructed in the tower, is actually being built by a future version of Adam that's sending data back from 400AF. This helps alleviate Serah's existential uncertainties, because now they know for a fact that there's a real closed loop that's not of their making. So Serah... sends a message to Hope via an Oracle Drive image. Since this message stops the Fal'Cie from ever being constructed, this confirms that the paradox is real, and so both 200AF and the previous 400AF collapse into Chaos. So although in their personal experiences of time Serah and Noel have been through a number of different worlds, actually every world between 1XAF Yaschas Massif and 40XAF Academia has turned out to be paradoxical. Serah and Noel disappeared from the timeline after meeting Hope, and arrive in Academia shortly after Hope does. And that's literally all that has happened. Everything else is a detour into impossible alternate realities.
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Jul 18, 2015 19:19
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Judge Tesla posted:And, as I see it, as an official Cookies are generally chewier where biscuits are usually crunchier. I think it has something to do with having an egg in most cookie recipes.
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Aug 30, 2015 08:43
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person, a cookie has chocolate chips or a variation of in it...