Gamers recently went chocoboshit over the announcement that Final Fantasy VII is being remade. I enjoyed the blocky classic that taught my teenage self that brooding loners are too the cool ones who get all the girls, but I'm not optimistic about the remake, considering there hasn't been a good Final Fantasy in a decade. And that shows in its which have been going down faster than all the women who find me irresistibly attractive for writing long essays about fictional magic teenagers. Maybe the FFVII remake will be great. But it will take a lot more than a polished throwback to the glory days to save the franchise, because... It's hard to explain the appeal of Final Fantasy to non-players. Just look at this screenshot: Square Enix Anyone who played FFVI suddenly wants to play it again just for that , while everyone else is wondering how their junior high poetry ended up floating over a drab castle. You need to know the context, which I'll try to explain even though I done don't word too good no more since the ol' accident. Every year or two a Final Fantasy game would come out, and every time it would deliver the same experience. You'd get a brand-new setting, cast, story, and combat system, but enough familiar elements that it was easy to jump right in. Fans could debate which the best was, even though it's obviously IX, but there was always a consistent level of quality. You knew Final Fantasy meant 20 to 40 hours of solid gameplay and story. OK, now kill all those bad guys. It didn't matter that it looked primitive. Your imagination filled in the blanks. Square Enix Sometimes against your will. IV brings so many characters back from the dead that comic book fans would roll their eyes. Most villains are cackling maniacs who are evil for the sake of it. There are plot holes and conveniences galore. It was an early sign that games could accomplish something serious. Then the rest of the industry matched, then surpassed, that level of storytelling. Our standards rose, and Square took a good look at these new expectations and boldly... They took all their beloved characters and slapped them into that exist only to milk loyal fans with insulting transparency. Since X was released in 2001 there's been one mediocre main installment and one awful installment, one mediocre MMO and one completely bungled MMO, and more forgettable spinoffs than there are people on the planet. Crystal Chronicles, Crystal Defenders, Dissidia, Dimensions, Theatrhythm, Explorers, Record Keeper, Flan Fuckers... Mario has played every sport known to man. But no franchise just stopped giving a shit as abruptly as Final Fantasy did. Mario's extracurricular activities usually have thought and effort put into them. Final Fantasy's spinoffs are lazy money grabs with about as much original thought put into them as a BuzzFeed article. Oh, and Mario isn't the new spokesperson for Louis Vuitton Lightning returns to sell you an overpriced purse. V is about stopping an evil sorcerer. VI is about overthrowing an evil government. VII is about overthrowing an evil corporation. VIII is a gay romance gone wrong. IX is about a war with a sinister plot behind it. Tactics is about a war with a sinister plot behind it, but on a grid. Square Enix I is about giving your heroes funny names. There's far more to all of these, of course -- VI ends up being about an evil clown, VII ends up being about a misguided male hair model, and so on. But the basics can be summed up with ease, and then the intriguing details slowly unfold. Even X, where the big twist is that fantasy Peyton Manning is the collective dream of a dead civilization, starts with a lost dude fleeing a giant monster. Now I'm going to try to sum up the opening hours of XIII. If your nose starts bleeding, don't worry -- that is normal. XIII begins in Cocoon, where citizens of Bodhum are being Purged by PSICOM, soldiers of the Sanctum, for coming in contact with a fal'Cie from Pulse. The fal'Cie are turning people into l'Cie, who have a Focus, but if the l'Cie fail to complete their Focus they're turned into Cie'th. Our hero, Lightning, teams up with members of NORA to rescue her l'Cie sister from the fal'Cie Anima, and the story continues naturally from there. Did you get all that? If so, please explain it to me. Square Enix There was something about how dudebros are the worst, right? XIII throws more made-up and unexplained words at you than a cat playing Scrabble. It's like taking the third season of Game Of Thrones, which assumes you have preexisting knowledge of the universe, and airing it as the first. You know, like how they tell you what Jedi, The Force, the Rebels, and the Empire are 70 minutes into A New Hope. Or how The Lord Of The Rings explains what Hobbits, the One Ring, and Sauron are on page 350. If your 50-hour game has 30 hours of fun locked behind 20 hours of incoherent garbage, you've made a bad game. That's why VII doomed the franchise even as it launched sales into the stratosphere. Bravely Default, the game Square released when they wanted to make a traditional Final Fantasy but realized that well was thoroughly poisoned, is a simple but engrossing fantasy about four kids saving the world. Bravely Default was a , but one that Square apparently learned nothing from considering that everything we know about the upcoming Final Fantasy XV sounds like. Square Enix I'm sure it will take only 10 hours to explain why those knights have guns, though. Final Fantasy's storytelling problem is compounded by what I call the Fabula Nova Crystallis Excelsior Flapjack Boogaloo Conundrum -- they've become incapable of telling a story in just one game, and the more games they expand a story to, the dumber it gets. Square first dabbled in this with X-2, where players who enjoyed Yuna's world-saving journey of self-discovery in X could now follow her pop music and fashion career. Then came IV: The After Years, which was thrown together with as much care as its bad sitcom title implies. X-2 was at least aware of how goofy it was, but its success set the stage for bloated disasters. If you want the full XIII experience you need to play XIII, XIII-2, Lightning Returns, Type-0, and whatever else they decide to shit out under the laboriously named Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy subseries. That's Not counting side quests! Jesus, I just want to fight an evil wizard! If only there had been a sign that strategy would backfire. On an unrelated note, which of the is your favorite? Are you looking forward to re-experiencing VII's nicely self-encapsulated story? Well, too goddamn bad, because now you need to play Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge Of Cerberus to get the full experience. Oh, and watch Advent Children and Last Order. Drag out a simple plot point with unnecessary backstory, save the world you already saved, but this time do it as an emo vampire, and watch the doodles on your junior high math book come to soulless life! You don't have anything better to do with your time, do you? Square Enix Be careful, the box is edgy. Then there's the fact that these games feel like grim death marches through a thousand LiveJournals. Games like Crisis Advent Nova Zero Breaker Breaker aren't fun; they're exhausting. Earlier games had serious stories, but they also had fights with a self-proclaimed member of octopus royalty and an angry old man chasing a bard around for trying to bang his daughter. XIII has characters that give endless, rambling, whiny speeches about their emotions as filtered through Philosophy 101. XIII has a character named Hope learn the meaning of hope. If Square made a Batman game, Bruce Wayne would give a 40-minute speech on bats, and then Bane would say that humanity's true bane is feelings. It flashes bright, then fades away. Who wants to grind through multiple spinoffs with a character that joyless? Jesus, no wonder she's so mopey. Here's Lightning in XIII: Square Enix This is the cover of the rap album she releases in Chapter 9. Kind of under-dressed for combat, but otherwise nothing unusual. XIII may have been a dumb game with a tremendously boring heroine, but at least its tedious self-seriousness kept Lightning from being a sex object. She even looks like she's been forced into them at gunbladepoint. And they're not cosmetic -- each costume has different abilities, so switching to fantasy prostitute mode might help win a fight. I'd be embarrassed if someone walked in on me playing that. X-2 pulled the same nonsense. Here's Yuna and Rikku in X: And here they are in X-2, which isn't about their quest to stop a fabric thief: You can play dress-up with them too: Square Enix They look like they should be picking up johns at the Gold Saucer. Look, I'm a grown man. If I want to see an attractive woman wear revealing clothing I'll go on a date, have her lose interest in me because I can't shut up about video games, then secretly follow her home and watch her through the window while she changes. I don't want characters who are barely old enough to drink virtual alcohol shoving their pretend tits at the camera. Square Enix Gaming's always pointlessly sexualized heroines, but Final Fantasy used to be an exception. Let's look at Terra in VI. Square Enix The total babe with the green hair. Oh, right, she's just a bunch of pixels. They didn't make her hot because they couldn't, right? But here's how she and the other heroine were portrayed in the manual, which you actually had to read then: Square Enix You're clearly getting a mysterious fantasy adventure, not bouncy anime boobs. And when the series progressed to 3D, they kept it classy while other developers worked on perfecting their. Square Enix If you're thinking of telling me that her name is Aerith, you can get the hell out. Even Tifa, who was clearly designed to have sex appeal, looks like she's ready to hit the gym and knock a punching bag around, not be ogled by some lonely artist. Square Enix For well over a decade, Final Fantasy heroines looked like actual people while, say, Tomb Raider used Lara Croft's tits as a selling point. Square Enix Europe Actual promotional image for Tomb Raider II, which came out the same year as FFVII and definitely had someone masturbate to it. Square Enix Europe Actual promotional image for Tomb Raider III, which came out months before FFVIII and definitely had someone masturbate to it. What the hell happened? It's not like they're trying to attract new young fans going through a very special time in their lives, because. But older gamers who were happy to play through dignified adventures when they were hormonal teenagers aren't suddenly looking for virtual skin now that they're adults. It's no secret that Final Fantasy struggled to adapt to rapid changes in gaming demographics and development. But it's pathetic that the only solution they could come up with was to design a bunch of stripper outfits and hope someone would be interested. Well, , and the franchise feels lost and directionless while the industry moves on without it. At least Louis Vuitton is letting Lightning wear clothes. Louis Vuitton Quina's Victoria's Secret promotion has been less successful. The new VII is far from the first FF remake. The first six have been ported, updated, remade, and re-released so many times I'm pretty sure you can play IV on your toaster. Sometimes legitimate love and care is put into them, but recently Square has been giving fewer fucks than a nun at a chastity convention. In 2014, remakes of III and IV were released on Steam after previously popping up on the DS. They were both well-received for making smart modern updates while still keeping the charm and feel of the original. You could quibble about semantics, but in the end they were fun, well-made games. Square Enix Square Enix Hey, remember when Cid survived being a suicide bomber? This game is so goofy, you guys. Then, in 2015, Steam got the half-assed, of V that looks like a child made it in Flash. And easy money seems to be all that motivates Square anymore. And, honestly, you shouldn't care. I find it hard to, and I just wrote 3,000 words on the subject. There are countless better games you can buy for 16 bucks. Square released this junk because they still think slapping Final Fantasy onto something is a license to print money. But it's not -- III and IV sold better than V and VI on Steam because they actually had thought and effort put into them. Square might figure that out and the Final Fantasy name might mean something again, but it's OK if they don't. The originals are still classics. Indie developers are , and they put more passion into them than Square's shown for a long time. Maybe it's a sign of how far the industry has come that we don't need Final Fantasy anymore -- there are more than enough other games telling good stories now. And hey, at least Dragon Quest is still going strong, right? Mark has a and a and thinks you should check out if you're a Final Fantasy fan. Learn about more of the twisted interconnected workings of the Final Fantasy series in , and check out the fan remake with better graphics than the best Final Fantasy game ever in. 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