Last (Wo)Man Standing

Final Fantasy XIII is finally getting released this Christmas (albeit in Japanese), many, many years after being announced.

Think about that for a second, and reflect on how long it’s been. Flashback time!

Yeah, the PS2 had some truly great JRPG's, including my favorite RPG of all time, Persona 3: FES. Also pictured: Squeenix/Level-5's amazing Dragon Quest VIII.

During the time of its initial reveal, the JRPG genre was a shining bastion of gaming. It was easily one of the most populous genres of the PlayStation 2 era, and the 128-bit generation played host to some of the best examples of the genre ever. Allow me to list but a few: Persona 3 and 4, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Star Ocean: Until The End of Time, Final Fantasy X, Skies of Arcadia, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Dragon Quest VIII, Dark Cloud 2, this list goes on and on, friends.

D’AWWWWWW. Aren’t those memories warm and fuzzy? Yeah, the mid to late PS2 era was a fantastic time to be an RPG nerd. Amid all this greatness, Square decided to drop the bomb on us all: the FFXIII trailer, more popularly known in gaming circles at the time as HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT. Yeah, Final Fantasy XIII dropped the jaws of everybody who saw the quote unquote “in-game footage”, and convinced many Squeenix nerds to plop down their cash for a PS3 right then and there. In the minds of many, Square Enix was definitely going to continue dominating this JRPG shit for many years to come, and the genre that emo bastard Cloud Strife brought to mass-market prominence was as vibrant and alive as ever.

… or so we thought.

Fast forward 5 years. Final Fantasy XIII finally descends from its isolated development chamber in the heavens. It lost its console exclusivity on the way, and its graphics look a little crappier than the target video, but for the most part FFXIII is pretty much intact. However, it will touch down in an environment which has changed drastically since the time it left – the genre basically died on the vine during the next gen era, as for some inexplicable reason JRPG releases came few and far between. I distinctly remember getting my PS3 and looking for an RPG, any RPG, to play – and all I could find was Oblivion (though that actually turned out to be a good decision).

Why did this happen? Were 360 and PS3 install bases too small to justify mammoth JRPG-sized budgets? Are sales really that poor nowadays for our downtrodden plucky heroes and their sad little random encounters? (While Tales of Vesperia on 360 sold well in Japan, medyo linangaw daw yung American version, which in turn explains why we’re not getting Vesperia PS3 this Christmas.) Even on Xbox 360, the JRPG content has been mostly mediocre – The Last Remnant? Infinite Undiscovery? What the fuck? It can be argued that the only truly great JRPG to come out of this generation has been Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey (directed by former FF honcho Hironobu “The Gooch” Sakaguchi) and even that didn’t sell all that well.

(Yes, I know full well that SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles is really fucking awesome, but that’s not an JRPG in the traditional sense – it’s more of a strategy RPG and not a classical, boy-from-quaint-fishing-village-gets-into-a-couple-thousand-random-encounters-then-saves-the-world sort of thing).

So what’s the point of this long and self-indulgent rant?

I’m saying that there’s a LOT riding on the success of Final Fantasy XIII. We’ve seen a lot of pretty video and stills, but we haven’t seen any substantial gameplay featurettes. Will it be a big mainstream success like Final Fantasy X? Or will it be a divisive, love-it-or-hate-it game like its predecessor Final Fantasy XII? The onus is on FFXIII to prove that the genre is not dead, that with the right gameplay innovations and some flashy graphics and sound you can still make money off what is essentially the same old formula. In short, Lightning needs to knock that shit out of the park this winter (and next spring) to keep the dream alive (as I’m sure the dev costs on that game were astronomical, and a lot of copies need to be sold just for them to break even). After all, if Square can’t win, paano pa kaya yung mga mas maliit na developer?

But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. To the all the PS2 era RPG nerds out there: when you really think about it, aren’t you still having fun with your PS3 or 360 right now? Didn’t you keep on playing console games even after the flow of JRPG’s died to a trickle? I know I did. I took my Certified RPG Nerd Card, stuffed it carefully in my wallet for safekeeping, and played stuff like Uncharted and Call of Duty. I'm still a gamer, after all, and I can scratch that gaming itch by playing other genres.

Wow, ang puti ng legs. :-D

Still, although my breathless anticipation for FFXIII has decreased quite a bit, I’m still going to buy a copy of Final Fantasy XIII when it comes out in English, for old time's sake. I still have plenty of love and sentimentality for the old veteran, and I’m sure a lot of you will, too.

What I’m really asking you is this: if FFXIII fails to revive the JRPG market, how many of us will even care? Will we just shrug our collective shoulders and log on to Modern Warfare 2? I certainly hope not... if it does though, I'll always have my memories.

....and Persona 5 for PS3 (hope, hope)! :-)