I wish Square would have left XIII at just one game. Actually XIII-2 wasn’t bad, but it should have ended there.

Before you hang me for my thoughts let it be known that is an opinion post, and of course all opinions are my own. You can agree with them or you can disagree with them, but I feel I need to get this off my chest. This has been stirring for a very long time following hints earlier in the year and with next week’s announcement… nearly at the breaking point. I love Final Fantasy, but I didn’t love Final Fantasy XIII.

Now they’re dragging it out to three games with the same mundane cast. Sorry Lightning fans, but she’s extremely boring – her design may be cool, but that’s about it. They tried to get me to care about her sisterly relationship with Serah in the DLC and I realized then that I will probably never have an emotional attachment for these characters like I do in some of the other FF games. To put it simply, they’ve tried too hard.

Instead of showing off the games that people keep begging to see (Type-0, FFX HD, Versus), Toriyama gets to hog the spotlight once again. If XIII-3 or whatever they decide to call it doesn’t release until Summer/Fall 2013, that means the wait for those other titles will probably be even longer – just a guess, but it’s likely true. I’m not expecting Versus XIII until late 2013/early 2014 now.

The more I think about it, the more it really irritates me. Why do they keep focusing on a “series” that a lot of people became disappointed with? It amazes me they shipped 3.4 million units of XIII-2 because they certainly didn’t sell that many to consumers – 1.6-1.8m or so. With the amount of development time going into this continuation, one has to wonder how much are they willing to recycle… and really, is it worth it? Sure you can argue easy profits, but how many will return a third time? This isn’t like the Mass Effect series where it was planned to be a trilogy from the start and so the story was laid out in that way so people anticipated the next entry. With FFXIII, that simply wasn’t the case.

This entire console generation has seen nothing but Final Fantasy XIII games now. Think about that. XIV will soon join it, but for single player experiences, fans have only been able to chose from XIII, XIII-2 and soon a third XIII game. Not very inspiring if you ask me. I recognize that some people like those games, and while they were decent… they weren’t great.

Square Enix tried to listen to the fans with XIII-2 and they got some of it right… but they still continue to ignore everything else, and to me that represents a huge problem.