10 Biggest Nails In The Final Fantasy Series' Coffin

7. Storyline

Storyline is a difficult concept: if you make it too simple, gamers aren't interested, but if you make it too complex, gamers get lost - it's hard to perfect, but lately it's as if the franchise hasn't even bothered to try. Final Fantasy 13 (and the subsequent sequels) overshot the storyline, bombarding the gamer within the first hour with a hundred different plot points and aspects of the world we weren't ready to understand. In the writing world, it's called an "infodump" - putting a bunch of information in just to specifically explain to the reader - in this case the gamer - what is unfolding. It was too much, too fast. Older gamers may have been fine with it but newcomers struggled to catch on. A perfect contrast to the example above is the introduction in Final Fantasy VII: all we know is Cloud is with a group who is on their way to blow up a reactor. It's enough to get us hooked and it's enough to get us asking questions - all the while we are learning the gameplay mechanics, and it's only after the action is settled that we learn what's going on, all through Cloud's eyes. We, like him, are along for the ride in the beginning. We can identify with him and instead of being told what's going on, we learn with him through the dialogue and actions of the characters. The same thing happened in Final Fantasy X: Sin shows up to Zanarkand, and like Tidus we too are losing our minds as we wonder what is going on. It's Auron who arrives and drags us along for the ride.