168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16 is not for everybody. But then, few games are, and none of them have been published by Square Enix. The developers of FF16 envisioned a relatively dark setting, and they ran with it. But I've been thinking about this month's State of Play trailer for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, monitoring the reception, and thinking about why Final Fantasy 16's trailers never quite seemed to drum up the same degree of enthusiasm. I think I've figured it all out.
First, the elephant-sized chocobo in the room. Yes, this is partly because Final Fantasy 7 is practically its own brand. You may never hear about how charming Final Fantasy 9's Vivi is, or how cool Final Fantasy Tactics' Agrias is, but if you play video games you've heard of Cloud and Sephiroth. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is also the second part in a planned trilogy, so has an established idea of characters that seven million players and counting are quite familiar with.
But it's not just that. Traditionally speaking, there's a great deal of excitement whenever a new mainline Final Fantasy is on the horizon. It's that newness, steeped in ever-shifting settings, boosted (or sometimes plagued) by a constant desire to reinvent the gameplay wheel, that makes every Final Fantasy launch so special. You'll find some big yellow birds, and every other weapon you find will have a cheeky name referencing past installments. There may or may not be Moogles, and there will absolutely be Behemoths and Malboros. The jury's out on the rest.
We saw some of that excitement across Final Fantasy 16's roughly 33-month marketing cycle. Fans were amazed at how great iconic summoned monsters like Ifrit and Bahamut can look with the power of the PlayStation 5 at the developers' disposal. And surely, there was a subset of fans who watched every FF16 trailer, beheld the war-torn realm of Valisthea, admired the haunted looks on the very-much-adult faces of Clive Rosfield and Jill Warrick, and said 'this is what I've been waiting for. This is Final Fantasy.' Because there are, after all, at least four subsets of Final Fantasy fans, all lining up to tell you what is and is not Final Fantasy.
But within hours of FF7R’s trailer, the JRPG-loving section of the internet seemed enamored. Meme upon meme popped up about Cloud riding a Segway - sorry, apparently it's called a 'wheelie' in-universe. "No one's even seen a Segway in years," the internet joked. I'll have you know my roommate owns one, but whatever, laugh it up.
There have been viral TikToks of that moment when Cloud and Sephiroth look at each other just before tearing up a monster with their swords, mostly bubbling with queer overtones. People have spoken enthusiastically about the return of FF7 Remake original character Andrea Rhodea in what appears to be an encore of his spectacular Wall Market dance-off routine. Fans are head-over-heels with Rufus' suave villainy. Everybody's talking about that synergy technique where Aerith appears to, uh, inspire Cait Sith to vomit a purple beam at the enemy.
While some of these reactions stem from a return to the warm familiarity of a classic known quantity, I would argue the reception would be almost identical even if this was a brand-new story. It's the ingredients on display here, so many of them share one very important quality: goofiness. The chocobo racing is silly. The mini-games are all silly. The Segway shtick is silly, and it’s totally new - but it fits right in, because Final Fantasy 7 embraced being a goof, and it quickly became one of the most celebrated video games of all time.
Rebirth follows in Remake's footsteps but can take far more from the original FF7, and it just reminded the world what it's like when Final Fantasy lets its hair down. Final Fantasy 16, and particularly its marketing, never did. There's more levity in FF16 than its trailers ever suggested, and I bet it'd have more fans if people knew just how hilarious Cid can be. Final Fantasy 16's trailers were mainly flashes of bleak situations interspersed between lengthy summon showcases; conversely, the new FF7 Rebirth trailer got the point across on that score with quick reveals of Alexander, Kjata, and Odin.
Let's think about the so-called 'golden age of Final Fantasy' for a sec. The exact details will naturally vary from fan to fan, but there's a good deal of agreement that the period between Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy 10 is highly revered. If you were to showcase a few moments from each of those games, you'd have to include Kefka's jests, right? Zell with the hot dog thing (which is flavored bread in Japan; the more you know); Kuja's completely unapologetic sense of style; Tidus... existing.
We didn't get any of that with Final Fantasy 16's marketing, and frankly, we didn't get much with Final Fantasy 16 itself. Cid is great, but in seeking to be seen as uniformly mature, FF16 forgets those dollops of lovable nonsense that stick with us for decades. I'm not saying the game would be better if Clive was obsessed with hot dogs (can you imagine, though?) but it was marketed as more grim than it actually is, and it's still grim enough to miss the mark in ways FF7 Rebirth looks poised to nail.
Maybe if Naoki Yoshida, Hiroshi Takai, and the rest of the gang at Square Enix Creative Business Unit 3 ever take another crack at a mainline single-player Final Fantasy, they should consider mixing their potentially darker vision with a healthy dose of what makes Final Fantasy so memorable. Let your hair down, Yoshi-P. Put your brooding hero in quirky situations. Break up your game flow with more than just mark hunts and battle practice. Let Jill compel a giant stuffed animal to puke purple magic beams. You don't have to sacrifice your bid to be more politically charged, more melancholy, more high-stakes, but you can still afford to have fun. The FF7 Rebirth trailer is proof of that.