By Nelson Schneider - 09/23/17 at 02:33 PM CT
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, Square Enix, the company that in 2012 was considered a ‘complete failure’ is still failing away. We thought the “Final Fantasy 13” Trilogy was bad enough, but “Final Fantasy Versus 13 15” has really taken things to a whole new level (so much so that neither Chris nor I, both long time ‘FF’ fans, have any plans to touch it). Smartphones and luxury sedans in a FANTASY game? Square Enix seems to have nothing but contempt for its audience at this point, pandering to the lowest common denominator whose banal minds can’t conceive of a world without smartphones and instant communication.
Many plot tropes used in both Fantasy and historical fiction are completely subverted by the presence of instant, long-distance communication, which will cause the writing to become more tortured than it already has been for decades. On the other hand, limited forms of instant communication have existed in Fantasy Role-Playing since at least AD&D 2nd Edition in the form of the Sending spell (which was actually rather more similar to Twitter than a cellphone, but originally used a tin-can telephone as the material component).
It blows my mind that the same company that brought us lunar airships shaped like whales and steampunk magitek armor couldn’t even come up with a whimsical take on the smartphone. Instead, they just opted for the generic, black rectangle than Apple foisted upon us a decade ago.
