With the exception of certain games, most games fall victim to a simple phenomenon I like to call The Point of Waning Interest. The story goes along all well and good, and you the gamer gets quite into the game. Everything is going fine, until you hit that point.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about… that part of the game where your interest starts to wane, and your desire to play the game decreases and slowly starts to fade.
Note: Minor spoilers for Final Fantasy XIII ahead. Nothing story-related, but an aspect of gameplay is discussed.
Perhaps you encounter a boring part of the story where the characters are going off on some arbitrary tangent and ignoring the overarching storyline that had carried them up to that point. Perhaps the game suddenly presents you with an open-world environment, and the sudden deluge of new and exciting options to explore gets you side-tracked from the main game’s story.
The latter happened to me when I was playing Final Fantasy XIII. After 15 hours or so of linear storyline, where the characters got developed and everything was moving along nicely, I suddenly got dropped into an open world, where there was a multitude of side missions to complete. These had nothing to do with the main storyline, and essentially were just filler.
The missions themselves weren’t so bad, but the sheer volume of missions available, combined with the sheer insanity of the difficulty of some of the missions, meant that Final Fantasy XIII took a bit of a backseat in my gaming habits recently.
Don’t get me wrong, I still fully intend to play it, and complete it, and hopefully get my Platinum Trophy, but right now, God of War 3 and Guitar Hero 5 have taken priority for the moment.
The Final Fantasy series is particularly guilty of this problem. In VII, I got so caught up finding ultimate Limit Breaks, ultimate weapons and breeding Chocobos that I forgot all about chasing Sepiroth to the North Crater. In VIII, I was off on a quest around the world to find every Triple-Triad card (and get all the Guardian Forces), which involved chasing the Card Queen across four different continents. In IX, I got caught up in “Chocobo Hot and Cold” and forgot my actual destination.
In Final Fantasy X, there was the massive quest for Ultimate Weapons and secret Aeons. Of course, that wasn’t even counting the Blitzball league, where you could focus on getting the Aurochs to the top of the league. Let’s not even go into X-2, which was basically one long side-quest.
Final Fantasy XII, too, suffered the exact same problem. They set you free on the map (or destination-list as the case may be) and gave you an army of marks to hunt and insanely difficult creatures to try your might against.
Assuming that it’s not just me that this happens to, is the developer at fault? Are the side-quests sp engrossing that they overshadow the main story, or does the story just lack enough polish to keep players interested? What do you guys think? Let us know via the usual channels.
