Tom, this article seemed crass and silly, which is totally unlike you. It was also chock-a-block full of really heavy enunciation as though you were reading poety instead of communicating in the effortless style of Kevin or the guys at Giant Bomb, which is, on the other hand, very like you. Cut that out and let those great ideas flooooow, man.

Anyway, not only were a number of the subsequent Final Fantasies huge blockbusters and critical successes (in fact, virtually every one except for the MMORPGs and spinoffs; XIII stands out in my mind as the one canonical game to do poorly from a critical standpoint), but Square's total unwillingness to stick with the same formula from game to game suggests that your whole thesis is based on an invalid premise.

Yet again, you talk rapidly through the duration of the video when what we want to see is the gameplay sans commentary.

@FallenOneX The first two games are among the best of the entire console gen, and totally worth playing (you can pick them up for like $5 each on Steam, or a little more in physical hardcopy for consoles if you can find them). Definitely give them a shot if you like horror. Seriously grade-A stuff.

@queuing_for_PS4 Ok. This is a much fairer point. If the game was going to be commercial and an abandonment of series principles, I'm all for it doing poorly.

@queuing_for_PS4 @GtWthTheProgram You did. Your comment was "Haha! All the PC fanboys have a mediocre game to play. LOL."

You're entertained instead of upset by this. It's extremely dumb, and if you meant something else, you should have said that thing instead.

@clr84651 @darkPSPfan @queuing_for_PS4 Some people are just dumb. Be thankful you are not among them.

@WCK619 For the Dead Space series, though, which has fallen in the 9.0+ range from most reviewers, this is a huge disappointment.

@queuing_for_PS4 I don't follow. DS3 is cross console, and how is it good that a hallowed horror franchise has released a mediocre and compromised title? How does that help anyone?

The trick with you guys at Gamespot is that you have an inconsistent history when it comes to assessing storytelling. Now I should be fair and say that it's a whole new crew since then, but going as far back as Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2, you have variously failed and succeeded at giving accolades to brilliantly told stories that assume they are dealing with sophisticated people, but simultaneously, in cases like Metal Gear Solid, heaped praise on inexplicable debauches that have no internal consistency and feature cringe inducing dialogue and flailing, inept communication.

Hopefully you're wrong, but the editorial direction of this website is so similarly scattered that I have no idea of knowing if this is a laughable failure to understand a brilliantly articulated story that gives its "reader" a lot of credit, or if you are absolutely correct and their meandering and unrefined attempt at immersion falls totally flat.

A well written article about an interesting subject that patently does not belong on Gamespot. I don't know what's happened to the site recently, but there is all this babble and nonsense about things that are not related to games when I really just want to know more about The Last of Us. Druckmann is not any kind of celebrity to the vast majority of the readership of this site. We do not give a **** about him except for his ability to make good games. Those games are the object of our interest, and that's what we want to hear about.