[QUOTE="ASK_Story"]Seeing the IGN review, the game looks amazingly incredible. Awesome visuals, masterful animation and art, Square-Enix developers are truly talented when it comes to this stuff. I think it's worth playing just for that alone, to see the visual spectacle. As I said before, it's a interactive movie more than a game. Shame-usBlackley
I got that out of my system back when I played The Bouncer.
And I've got nothing against interactive movies disguised as games. My problem is that an interactive movie requires a strong (read: STRONG) narrative and superb acting, and I've seen nothing of that from the industry to date that even comes close to that. It's usually passable at best acting (most recent example was Heavy Rain -- the acting was all OVER the place, some passable, some downright laughable) and narratives that are just inches away from being crippled and poorly edited (MGS4). Ask yourself -- how many people would've sat in a theatre to watch MGS4's story without walking out? I'm not talking about fanboys like me here on forums, I'm talking about dads taking a day away from family duty to see a flick, college girls, and so on? I believe half the theatre would've walked out, just like they did when I went to see Final Fantasy: Spirits Within. This is the inherent danger of games trying to become something they are not currently -- the quality of what can be called a movie that the game company puts out is so far below even gutter trash like Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme movies that Hollywood puts out. If this is indeed an up and coming genre, it has light years still yet to go. If that is indeed what Square was after with this, I have my doubts about how successful they'll be -- narrative has never been all that great in Square games, and voice acting is something they've only been doing for about a decade, and they too have have the horrible hit-or-miss problems when it comes to quality acting.
I disagree that Final Fantasy XIII presents itself as an 'interactive movie', even during the first cut-scene heavy part of the game there is a focus on the tactical and well-crafted battle system. In my view it is one of the best Final Fantasy/RPG battle systems to date. In regard to games masquerading as movies I would agree that the acting is inconsistent and often weak, however there is a noticeable increase in cinematic quality in games, and these kind of attributes need time to progress and develop as they surely did in the film medium, following theatre performances. Therefore if you do want good story-focused games in the future then this kind of development, and often experimentation, should be encouraged. I do completely agree that people would of left the movie theatre if the story of MGS4 were presented in the film medium, but the story works well in a video game. The MGS4 story is far from bad in my view and the core elements could be developed into a movie with some serious work and changes, but the premise could work. I say we encourage game developers to experiment and expand, rather than repeat old tried and tested methods of portraying video game narrative, and see where it goes.
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