The Story Of Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy Begins On The DS

 I’m trying really hard to reply to you without being incredibly rude and yawning a lot, so I’m just going to say this:

Please be kind enough to go off and whine in whichever dark room you usually complain in and let those of us who are actually interested in playing video games enjoy waiting for their release. This game’s development team probably doesn’t even have a single connection to the things you’re whining about. Take your negativity and your boring irrelevancy elsewhere.

Oh, damn, I ended up being rude anyway.

Oh no, someone on the internet is saying something negative about something I like! I must run them out of town!

Today, I’m being pretty nicer about this sort of thing. Most days, I would respond to your rudeness in kind.

There are many ways I can answer this. The most obvious is freedom of speech. I have as much freedom to “whine” about things I don’t like as you have to “whine” about me “whining.” If you don’t like what I have to say, you have the right to ignore it. I’m hardly holding a gun to your head and ordering you to read my comments and think the way I do.

The second is about being critical of a company and their offerings. Not being critical is bad. It’s a disservice to everyone. It robs the company of being pushed to be the best they can be, and it robs the consumers of a chance to experience the best the company can offer. Many great games would not exist if we did not judge the products being put out there. Let’s look at FF13-2, for example. While I consider that to still be fail, most people have been saying it’s a big improvement from FF13. Those improvements would never have been made if every person that had a complaint kept their mouths shut just because someone told them to stop “whining.”

Do I think my comments are going to be some insanely popular crap that shake the foundations of the entire industry and revolutionize video games? No, of course not, that’s not how this works. Everyone says their piece, and if there’s some commonality, THEN things might change.

Lastly, it may surprise you, but I actually DO like video games. I have 30-40 games just in my PS3 library. I have console-specific gems like Demon’s Souls, Folklore, Valkyria Chronicles, Hyperdimension Neptunia. I also have multiplat games like Bayonetta and Vanquish and Blazblue. I even have Nier, and enjoyed that greatly. It’s one of the few positive notes I can give the company in a span of 8 years. I just happen to like video games where quality and effort stand out, and often support the companies that provide those experiences.

tl;dr I’m going to say what I want to say when I want to say it, if you don’t like reading someone else’s opinion because it clashes with yours then either challenge it or ignore it.

1) As a consumer, you vote with your wallet. Every dollar counts. If everyone thought the way you’re proposing, that “the company’s not going to miss a few dollars, nothing you do matters,” SOPA would have passed. I choose to pursue this the way I want to pursue it, end of story.

2) Any time someone says something like “you’ll be a game short” or “you’ll be missing out on a great game,” I roll my eyes. That’s projecting personal values onto someone else. It assumes that the game’s quality would offset how bad I would feel knowing that money in some way, whether directly or just by the company managing to grow bigger, leads to the games I DON’T want to see made. Not seeing great old IPs and characters treated like crap means a lot more to me than buying whatever hot new thing is out on the market right this second, and as I’ve said at least twice now, there are thousands of other games I can spend my money on.

3) This article is about a game made by Squeenix, and in discussing this game and the company that made it, I naturally mentioned 3rd Birthday. It’s a symbol of everything wrong with the company, how could I not?

4) I said it already, if nobody wants to read it, then they can ignore it. It’s really easy to do. You see a comment you’re sick of seeing, you roll your eyes, scroll past it and move on to a comment you care about.

5) Okay, the “your criticism is invalid if you don’t play their games!” argument is just awful to me. I get the logic behind it, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but we have the internet now. We can watch videos, read articles, look at screenshots to grasp the contents of a game. The only aspect where it’s absolutely essential to play the game is for gameplay. In the very, very rare cases where I DO judge the gameplay, and I haven’t played the game myself, I state it outright and that I could be wrong about that gameplay. More importantly…

6) Whenever someone uses the “your criticism is invalid if you don’t play it” argument, I’ve learned that the majority of the time, it’s a not-so-subtle attempt to trick me into buying a game I don’t want, thinking I’ll be desperate to make my opinion more “valid” on the internet. Besides, the end result tends to be “Oh well you thought badly of it before you played it so your opinion still doesn’t count.”

I might have more to say here, but I have to take care of some things here. I might edit this later to add more, not sure.

Again, a matter of perspective. You think a person is absolutely required to force themselves to endure slogging through a game they don’t want to play, just so they have the “right” to speak their opinion on the game. I think a person should be allowed to say what they want about the game regardless. Saying “you have to play it to judge the gameplay” is fair because understanding the gameplay requires direct physical experience; viewing the story does not. Similarly, judging an artist’s paintings requires looking at the paintings, judging a writer’s word choices in descriptions requires reading the book, etc.

Hell, my first message in this article itself is an admission that my laughing at Theatrhythm when it was first announced was a little bit unfair to it given that in this case, it’s almost all gameplay and no story, so the game may be fine.

As for the SOPA part… that’s an analogy. An analogy involves comparing two situations to state one’s message. By your logic, nobody should have bothered with threatening to boycott companies that support SOPA because you’re just one person, you’re just a few dollars, you’re nobody in the grand scheme of things so you may as well just give them your money anyway. This is NOT, as you’re claiming, saying that you are “one step from SOPA.” Your choice to keep buying certain Squeenix products does not somehow instantly mean you like bad games. Though it does likely mean the money you give them for the games you want (whether good, bad, down the middle, whatever) funds both good and bad ones. It’s your decision how you feel about and react to that.

And, based on your arguments so far, I have difficulty believing you didn’t know what I meant: that the logic of “buy it anyway because nothing you do matters” is flawed. Life would be pretty damn bleak if everyone thought that way. I have plenty of other analogies I could make here, but I’ll hold off for the moment because you seem to prefer looking at them in ways other than what I’m using them to say.

… Which is pretty fascinating because that’s the real root of the problem here. A few differences in opinion, two people looking at the situation in different ways, and trying to force one’s opinions on the other. I think my having not tried to convince you to not buy Theatrhythm in itself says quite a lot.

Just buy used then, that’s what i do when i don’t want to support a certain company.