[Games] Final Fantasy: A Request for Alternate Apparel

Looking over my games collection recently I was reminded of how much I enjoyed playing through Final Fantasy XII. When I think back to Final Fantasy XII, one of the first things I remember vividly about that gaming experience was the character of Fran. I appreciated almost every characteristic about Fran: the voice acting, the devilish red eyes, the long white hair, the backstory, the aesthetics of a lanky figure wielding a polearm, etc. The one aspect I didn't particularly care for, though, was her outfit.

I'm not contending that her outfit is offensive or that Square Enix shouldn't have designed this costume by any means, but for me personally I'd rather not watch my main character run around in a g string for the several dozen hours of my gameplay experience. I also understand that the underlying mechanics of JRPGs currently differ from that of Western RPGs on the user customization. Western RPGs are moving in the direction of allowing players more control over their characters' gender, appearance, personality, backstory, etc., while JRPGs, and particularly the Final Fantasy franchise, have been holding the line against these sorts of cosmetic customizations to their characters. While I personally relish carving out the details of my video game RPG characters, I can see the argument that giving the user too much control over customizing their character (and the narrative especially) makes game development significantly more difficult and expensive.

All understanding to the hardships of game development aside, I do not understand the management decision to not allow such a simple customization as allowing the player a few alternative outfits for their characters. First off, I know that Square already has a mountain of conceptual work already done for their character appearances; no studio worth its salt these days wouldn't, especially for a triple A title. All characters have at least a few iterations of ideas for their characters look before settling on their canonical character representations. I'm also not proposing a plethora of choices, or granular choices necessarily, but 2-4 different, overarching costumes to select from would be nice. While this would require the studio to convert the concept sketches to 3D character models, as well as implementing some mechanism in game for switching appearances, this seems like a small development cost for the user satisfaction it would provide.

I think a great example of where this was done was Mass Effect 2. I was ok with the character of Jack, but had a similar dislike to Jack's default flashy appearance as I'm citing with Fran's. After all, bare skin isn't so great at absorbing laser fire, or so I hear. Bioware, however, built in an alternate outfit that was a bit more to my liking. There was only one alternative outfit, I had to earn it, and it wasn't available until the middle of the game, but there was an alternative and I was grateful for it.



So yeah, Square, you don't have to give us the world, but could you let us cover our characters' bums, please? Some of the areas you make us go are rather chilly, after all.

[Gaming] A Need for Achievement Progress Feedback

In my attempt to finish out the final achievements in Final Fantasy XIII over Memorial Day weekend, I ran into a frustrating predicament. One of the last achievements is to handle all accessories and weapons in the game, requiring an obscene amount of money (and hence time) to upgrade. I worked most of the day finishing out upgrading all the items, selling off the items as I created to get more money back in order to keep upgrading. After triple checking lists on the wiki to make sure I had crafted all the items, I headed to the robot in Oerba to get my achievement. To my horror, instead of the achievement, the robot said "there are still items out there you've yet to acquire." Argh.



After turning the 360 off in anger, I came back a few hours later to see if I could figure out where things had gone awry and salvage the situation. No dice. Final Fantasy XIII has absolutely no indicator of progression for this arduous achievement. I also recently ran into the same issue with achievement farming in Red Dead Redemption, specifically the one for exploring all locations on the map. I thought I had explored all the areas, but I was mistaken. The big difference between these two games: Red Dead Redemption has exhaustive statistics, including how many areas in each of the 3 major territories you've explored out of the total. In other words, with an online map of areas in Red Dead Redemption I was able to narrow down the locations I still needed to find in a matter of 30 minutes in order to get my achievement.

Square Enix should take a note from Red Dead Redemption's notion of statistics to make it easier on gamers who wish to get the most out of their games. There is already a lot of bad press on Final Fantasy XIII, and I appeared to be one of the rare few that truly enjoyed the game. I hate to walk away from the game on a low note.