You mean how the 360 is outselling it's competition in North America?
That is -exactly- the point. If things that are as abysmal as Kinect or Asura's Wrath are successful, they will inevitably either influence other products I
do like or they will take precedence and reduce the amount of products I enjoy. This happened with Kinect, it happens even in small ways with even tiny successes like Heavy Rain. It's the motivation for wanting something to fail. You want that something to fail because it might infect something you like; this isn't a conspiracy theory, it happens all the time. People love to act like they're above such basic things, but I see it all the time.
My previous post was meant to be a joke, but I don't want to do the dance again, where you spout hardcore gamer every 2nd sentence and insult everyone outside of your personal definition of what this is.
More than likely what will actually happen is that the poster in question will be unable to disconnect criticism of a game from criticism of their person, and will whine for eighteen posts about how calling out a game as casualtard garbage somehow is an assault on their personhood and everyone who ever enjoyed these games.
As always, though, if you (or anyone else) don't appreciate well salted commentary on games, there's always eighty billion other GAFers to talk to. I'm not shedding tears, I can assure you, no offense.
Maybe they just want to use some ideas introduced by HR because HR tried to do some different things than most games? Plenty of games use influences and ideas from other games and then iterate on them.
Well, yes, maybe. That's the problem. If I think Heavy Rain is garbage I obviously don't want it influencing products I
do like. That is the very idea behind desiring for a product to fail. Since this happens all the time, it makes logical sense that one would desire a bad 'experiment' to fail, so that others don't get infected with the rationale behind said experiment.
Whether you liked Heavy Rain or not, it did do some interesting things.
Maybe other games can expand on those and make them better.
It did "interesting" things, I just think those 'things' happened to be a terrible dead end for gaming and that there is no way to improve the concept into something good. Even if the story was not trash, we'd be stuck up against that extremely awikward QTE gameplay, and that's basically nowheresville. Naturally, I'd rather developers not waste time and resources trying to go down dead ends.
If we're all going to act surprised that I'm going to want gaming tailored toward my tastes rather than, say, your own, then once again I don't know why this is surprising to anybody. Almost everyone feels this way about their own tastes, whether they want to admit it or not. People want games for them, and they don't want games that aren't for them impacting the ones they enjoy. When they do impact the ones they enjoy, that's where the complaints begin. It's only natural.
Myself and plenty of other people felt that FFXIII-2 was a major improvement over XIII... improving many of the flaws the original game had (although it's in no way perfect). If S-E considers it a bomb, I am personally worried the will try to change everything around once again, perhaps using lots more awkward western RPG tropes in an attempt to appeal to western audiences... though ideally they will go back to what people loved about the series back in the days of 5 and 6.
I'd love for an FF15 to come out early on in next generation, impressing everyone again with its storytelling and graphics and setting the standard for next gen console RPGs. But I doubt it will happen...
It's not like there isn't a foundation in the series. But FFXIII-2 continues to double down on why this experiment with FFXIII went off the rails in the first place. I'm fully aware there are those that like it (there are huge hardcore segments that camp down on every FF game, considering how different these titles tend to be from game to game), but I think fundamentally it is a experiment in how to enhance a failure rather than create success. It allows you some more flexibility in how you proceed with the story, but it still has the same foundational issues with its combat system (game plays itself; set up a paradigm deck, sit back and paradigm shift occasionally during battle to proceed. I can do it with a blind fold at this point and I'll almost always autowin with 5 stars), it made the combat ridiculously easy (FFXIII wasn't exactly hard to begin with, but FFXIII-2 just makes it like cake) and the story is somehow getting just offensively worse. It's essentially insulting to my intelligence at this point it's so bad.
But my opinion on FFXIII-2 aside, I hope SE views this is as a failure or an indication they need to rejigger the series to appeal to the audiences across the world in a better fashion. They don't need to go western.
As I said, adopt the atmospheric heft of FFVI with a next-gen technological edge (drop the japanese pop obsessed trash since FFVIII. FFIX, FFXII and MMO style is appropriate. MMO atmospheric style - not gameplay style - would be rad for a full offline game actually) format and modify the amazing foundation of FFV gameplay/job system for FF15 and bring back the quality voice acting again ala FFXII and more careful consideration toward writing quality as FFXII (excepting the last third of the game, which is just as bad as every other FF game, but just seems out of place by comparison to the rest of FFXII which was finally, refreshingly relevant again).
Also: Bring back fully explorable world map (maybe even ala DQVIII style), airships. Keep Masashi Hamauzu sure, drop the IWANTTOROCKYOURCHOCOBO
FF has plenty of titles and aspects that are great, it's just SquareEnix can't seem to get the world to align again on all the features at once.