The reason the Playstation Final Fantasies aren't wholly satisfying is that they haven't got style, just spectacle, which is something else entirely. The opening sequence of Final Fantasy VII, with its pull-back from Midgar's streets into space and then back down again, made us all go "Oooh" in 1997 simply because we'd never seen anything like it in a video game before, but the sequence only exists to show us that Square and the Playstation are capable of pulling off a really big city in 3D, something which was underlined perfectly when Sony re-made the sequence to show off the PS3's graphical capabilities. The remake was called "Final Fantasy VII Technical Demo for PS3", and it's not difficult to see the original as "Final Fantasy VII Techincal Demo for PS1" - it's giving us something impressive to look at, but it's purpose is simply to show off how impressive that something is ASAP, rather than reveal it in a way that works dramatically. Final Fantasy VIII's opening is the same, presenting itself as a "This Week On Final Fantasy!" trailer composed of disjointed scenes and images from throughout the game, which is once again impressive, but doesn't fit together properly from either a narrative or aesthetic point of view. It's just... there. Nice as these things look, there isn't anything stylish about them. The full motion video sequences are only half the story, though. Given the massive leap in what was graphically possible between the SNES and the Playstation, it was inevitable that the series would start taking more and more of its cues from Anime, not simply in terms of plot points and character designs, but in the way the narrative was constructed, and the stories became increasingly more about being than doing. Again, it's in the style department that this falls apart - even the cheapest, shoddiest Anime is still capable of suggesting a character's personality through their facial expression, body language and speech. A low-polygon model with no discernable facial features just isn't, or, more accurately, isn't in the same ways, but this is what they tried doing anyway. In Final Fantasy VIII, there's no way of telling whether Squall is brooding or the game has frozen, and the fact we're stuck with only his dialogue, not a human voice capable of suggesting anything behind that dialogue, makes him come across as a self-centred jerk, rather than somebody who masks their insecurity by acting like a self-centred jerk. The games are caught in an uncomfortable place, having to fight against the medium's narrative shortcomings, where previously it had played up to the strengths. Final Fantasy X, then, is what the Playstation games were trying to be ever since 1997. More than ever before, the story and the characters are the focal point, but they're nowhere near as irritating and intrusive as the last three lots, because the improved graphics (often indistinguishable from the FMV) and, most importantly, the introduction of voices, makes it finally feel like an interactive Anime, not simply a video games with pretentions of being one. A lot of people acted as if this was purely cosmetic, but what it means is that the game can finally employ the stylistic conventions of an Anime series and make them work properly, which in turn gives it a whole new sense of drive and scope. Characters are finally memorable for something other than their designs, and their voices are capable of suggesting a "real" personality, not one or two defining traits that are brought up ad nauseum ("Machines? You know I hate machines!"). The cutscenes can finally work on visual and storytelling levels at the same time, because nobody has to make allowances for variable reading speeds or worry that the text box is going to cover up something important, giving the story a sense of flow rather than the disjointed "exposition - visual event - exposition - visual event" setup. Even if the story is utter rubbish (The terrible secret of pilgrimages is that the summoners die at the end! Who'd have guessed? Oh, wait, everybody), it doesn't feel anywhere near as intrusive or irritating as the last three games' because everything is working as part of the same aesthetic. The technology has finally caught up the stylistic ideas. The price for this is that there's far less freedom, with Spira consisting mostly of straight roads and the occasional cave. The lack of a world map might seem like a fairly incosequential difference, since there's always been a pre-set route from the very beginning of the series, but it ends up making the game feel like a series of levels rather than a fully-fledged world, and the immediate reaction upon getting the airship isn't so much "A new vehicle - think of all the places we can explore!" as "Welcome to Warp Zone". The vast majority of the game's "meat" is held off until the very end, which is likely to turn some people away before they get there, but the game would have lost its focus if all the info-dumping, tutorials and sidequests had been there from the start. The Sphere Grid, like every system since VII, will eventually make all the characters bar three pointless, although the key word here is "eventually", since at least they start out different. Everything that was bad about the PS1 games, except done well. |
"Don't we all know somebody like Wakka?" Yes, unfortunately.
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