10 Biggest Nails In The Final Fantasy Series' Coffin

2. Side-Quests

Some may argue that open-world gameplay and side-quests are the same, not so. Open-world gameplay can involve visiting towns, levelling-up, getting new weapons and armour at shops, but that's nothing like side-quests. The latter are additional quests specifically added by developers so that the gamer can spend more time unlocking new summons, weapons, finding hidden characters, and completing additional parts of the game. Final Fantasy 13 and X had a bit of this - 13 less so - but none of them compared to Final Fantasy VII's Golden Saucer or searching an entire ocean for a sunken ship. What have sidequests turned into? DLC (Downloadable Content), where the gamer has to pay to play more. Years ago developers were dedicated to doing everything they could to get the gamer to be trapped in the world that they had built, but now it's expected that if we want more we have to pay for it. Granted, 13 was nearly 80 hours in gameplay if you completed every quest including the main storyline, but the goal was always to complete the game, not get lost in the world - that's what we used to do. In previous games we found ourselves not caring that we weren't unlocking anything, but just that we were having a damn good time playing the side-quests (VII's motorcycle game was always fun). The card games and X's Blitzball are other examples; people could spend hours, sometimes days, just playing those games simply because we enjoyed them.