Final Fantasy 13 bombs! Hardcore Shocked!

I, for one, am not.

I've been predicting this for months, since back at the end of January when it was number one release week in Japan and then started a rapid decline as the month wore on. I mean, a Final Fantasy selling bad in Japan? That was a really bad sign, and should have been obvious for a lot of people.

But of course, it's 'not doing that bad', and 'had a strong release' (whatever that means.) It 'of course can't compete with Mario' or the other 'casual games' on the Wii. The 'Xbox 360 release sure helped it', though.

I guess it's just something to do with the so-called 'demographics.'

I could tell from the trailers that it wasn't going to be very good. I haven't really enjoyed Final Fantasy since Squaresoft merged with Enix and the result spat out androgynous emos with increasingly convoluted storylines.

But wait, it's Final Fantasy, so it can't suck. It's HD, so it can't suck. 'Weaker' games like the Conduit suck. (because it's on the Wii, so therefore it's shovelware.) It had a lot of hype, so it can't suck. What these people think while saying the above is I spent $60 on this game, so it can't suck! I'll play it for over 40 hours just to prove to myself that it doesn't suck! I'll lose my status as biggest troll if I admit that I didn't actually like a massively hyped game!

How do I know what they're thinking? Because I was once one of them. I spent years trying to delude myself that the Zelda series didn't suck. I tried so hard to accept Twilight Princess as a game that didn't suck. I tried to convince myself that Phantom Hourglass was worth the purchase. It went so far that when they put a friggin' TRAIN in a Zelda game, I still bought it. I convinced myself that the train would be 'fun' and might be a 'new experience.' Or, my favorite self-delusion, 'It might have a train, but it will still be Zelda.' I'm going to have to save all that for a proper review, though.

One can only take so much crap before he decides it's time to take a shower. I never finished the game, and I doubt I ever will. I wonder when the breaking point will be for these people.

When will fans of these New Final Fantasies figure out that these games are crap? When will the 'Hardcore' crowd figure out that the so-called 'shovelware' is the stuff they're buying? 'But it has such good graphics, how can it be bad?' I recall a Mythbusters episode where they proved that it is, indeed possible to polish a turd.

A game cannot tell you that it is awesome, and be awesome. Hype and viral marketing cannot make a mediocre game awesome. Fancy graphics and 'epic' cinematics do not a good game make. The game, itself, has to be the one to convince me that it is awesome. It can't show me that it's awesome. It can't tell me that it's awesome. What does a game have to do? Convinve me that I'm awesome.

To revise a phrase, then. You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.