Nick

FF's style of story-telling has become one of the worst things in the entire medium. Every game in that series since 12 has been a dissonant mess, and a big part of that reason is because people at Square (and many fans) don't understand how to tell a story in a video game. They're tossing canon into web sites and movies and shoe-horning GOT in with alien gods and forgetting about the whole premise, and turning their urban FF into a casual road trip but also it's not. In FF13 their method was literally: "Uh, so, we just stop the game every thirty minutes to discuss some arbitrary melodrama? Sound good?"

Is LSA missing some soul? I'm sure, that doesn't mean the solution is "copy the other 50% of that thing that you're uncreatively copying". How about "Take the FF aesthetic and actually tell a video game story WELL. Tell it via environment, or via expressiveness like the SNES games, do something that says you're trying to exploit this medium rather than trying to be a movie that turns the gameplay into a stilted rollercoaster ride.

It's really starting to feel like Gamefreak. They're just churning out their particular brand of fundamentally flawed content with zero awareness of perception. "We don't pay attention to our haters" (at a certain point 'haters' just become... A large, correct group of people)

If you asked anyone (who wasn't a kool-aid sipping hermit who plays only Bethesda games) "would you like Bethesda to take a year off from producing STUFF so they can just figure out how to produce a game that doesn't have loading screens and has faces that don't look like mannequins?" Would anyone say no? They're using the Creation Engine so they can add STUFF faster to their games..... And their games are still taking forever. What are we doing?

.... And it's literally impossible that they 'fix' space travel in the way that people would hope. They can tweak it. Fixing all the gaps would require a complete engine re-do.

The "improvements" its made are fine... And they're also not really "improvements", they're half-decent compensations for fundamental problems. And still ~90% of the fundamental problems don't have compensations.

Where're the compensations for the constant loading screens? For the planet generation that effectively makes the game a incredibly banal roguelite? For the mountains of dull words and characters? Meaningful fixes have barely started, and the engine's problems are so elemental that they just... Won't.