11 Things We Miss From Final Fantasy
6. Towns And Cities
One of the biggest complaints about Final Fantasy from X onwards has been their sparse, soulless worlds. The biggest reason for this is their lack of real towns and cities, and by extension, their lack of NPCs. With no people or sense of activity, the worlds naturally feel barren and lifeless.
Final Fantasy X did feature the major settlement of Luca as well as the Bevelle citadel, but neither were at all explorable. At the very least they gave the impression that Spira was lived in and worth saving. By XIII however, inhabited areas were gone entirely.
There were a few instances when traveling across Pulse that the player encountered occupied towns, but they were nothing more than backdrops to a series of tunnels. For Final Fantasy XIII, Square-Enix fashioned an enormous world, but it was almost nothing more than ornamental. Not a single NPC to talk to. Not a single vendor to buy from. Not a single thing to care about.
By comparison, Final Fantasy IV actually only had a few dozen people populating its world, living in relatively tiny towns and cities of up to about five buildings. But the scale was irrelevant; the locales created the illusion of something much bigger than it was, and the world felt important. How could anyone care about the Calm Lands or Gran Pulse, basically two massive fields with tons of monsters in them?