Abandoning The Hype Train

Final Fantasy XIII released on Tuesday morning at 12:01AM this week. And I was at Gamestop an hour earlier eagerly awaiting the countdown.

After bringing the game home and playing the first few hours - the exact same set of sequences composing the Japanese demo and a lot of the footage used for reviews - I came to a stunning conclusion. For the first time, in years, I'm playing a game where I absolutely, positively, 100% have NO IDEA what's going to happen next. And that, especially for a game as story-based as this one, is a VERY good thing.

I made an effort to avoid internet posts that spoil the game (something I usually don't manage to do with a series that is notorious for long localization periods - I always end up stumbling into SOMETHING). Being careful was absolutely worth the effort.

Stig Asmussen, the God of War III director, made a good point in an interview with Kotaku, in that he said the reason why he doesn't want people feeling like they've played his game before they've actually played his game. And there's some truth to that. In recent years I've gotten so worked up over releases that I'd salivate over any new nugget of information about a game's characters, locales, enemies, and gameplay. In this age - the internet age - it's not difficult to find what you're looking for. Always - without fail - after getting the game home and popping it in, I was fatigued after little more than an hour. I didn't realize at the time that the reason for this fatigue, this desire to NOT play the game I've been looking forward to for so long, was not because I'm simply growing out of games. It was due to overexposure. Hype fatigue. Knowing too much is a BAD thing.

People complain consistently about spoiling things. And I believe there's some truth to it. Major plot points hurt story-based games. Gameplay discussion can hurt action-based games. It's far too easy to get information on the internet, and there's always some dickwad who got it early that would be more than happy to tell you everything in an unassuming forum post (the equivalent to driving by a line outside a bookstore yelling "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!!!1!111!"). There is a reason to be careful. And although a victim myself for unrelated reasons, I suppose NeoGAF's itchy trigger finger on the banhammer is itchy for good reason.

Will have a review of the game up soon...