Square Enix talks about FFXIII “linearity” complaints

If you’ve read any reviews or comments from players of Square Enix’s very recently released Final Fantasy XIII, you’d notice that a large amount of the complaints are directed at the game’s hectic linearity, which is very unfortunate in a JRPG. See, people expected to be able to revel in classic, or rather expected, RPG and Final Fantasy gameplay elements, such as exploring towns, interacting with people as you see fit and playing around with world maps. It seems Square Enix have noticed the complaints, and so Director Motomu Toriyama has stepped up to explain the difficulties behind crafting these elements on next-gen consoles and how it will be a fair bit easier to do so next time.

“Personally, the Final Fantasies that I have worked on have been very story-driven, so in terms of the development I wanted to, of course, use my personal strengths which where those,” he says. “I call it a bento box system, where you have all of the different little things in there. So we had minigames or towns were you were able to talk to all of the townspeople. But with the HD console you’re not really able to do that because it takes so long to develop.

“Now that we have that base technology… The next time you see a Final Fantasy, we might be able to pack in more of those elements that existed in the past. And I also think that a game doesn’t need to have all of those items in the future. We can create additional downloadable content for people to add, too. It doesn’t have to come with that game itself.”

Do you think they could have done much better if a large chunk of their focus wasn’t on graphical detail and eye-candy? We have still yet to get our hands on Final Fantasy XIII and review it and get our own opinion, so for now we’re just curious if the linearity really kills this game, as it’s supposedly said to by some.

[Source: Destructoid]