Five Things Square Needs to do so Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t suck.

This is somewhat contradictory, so let me explain. A sequel is “updating” things to where it is sooo much better than the game before it. So why, oh why, do games continue to get those one or two horrible characters that any decent editor would have cut out if they were in there? Characters like Penelo from FFXII, shoving lackluster mini-games down our throats for the best items (blitzball FFX) or, my personal fave: having an endgame that rewards us with nothing, gives us no pride, and makes us wonder what we did with our lives for the last six months getting everything. (side quests in Final Fantasy X and XII).

Remember how cool it was to get Knights of the Round in Final Fantasy VII? Even cooler was using it and watching Sephiroth fall in one casting of it. Now that was friggen awesome.

But nothing’s awesome about going to get the best spear, checking a pot, and having a 17 percent chance of getting it when you check it.

4. Keep the mythology of Final Fantasy (Ifrit, Shiva) and introduce new characters with it.

Again, people have stuck by Final Fantasy Games for their familiar appeal, just as playing or reading a Dungeons and Dragons game immerses you in their mythology. There’s nothing wrong with introducing new summon spells, but when all of them are different, it isn’t the same game-it’s Final Fantasy Tactics.

Come to think of it, never bring Ivalice up…again…ever. That game is for tactics games, FF games are supposed to have brand new worlds created each game. They aren’t supposed to continue a spin-off. Save that for a sequel.

It just felt half-assed. With the exception of Zeromus, there were no summons that had anything to do with previous FF games, I think that’s the main reason they sucked.

5: Make the characters different from each other.

What I mean by this is that each character needs to be statistically different. The license grid system from XII sounded great in the beginning, but far too quickly characters were a let-down. Within a few hours I had everyone learning just about everything on the license grid, and everyone was basically the same sans a few weapon allotments. If you make a character, actually make them with some difference.

People like to say how similar characters were in FFVII but the fact was-they were different. It wasn’t just limit breaks that divided Cloud and co, each character had strengths and weaknesses to build on and you slapped materia in to build off those innate abilities. In XII everyone is virtually identical stat-wise with quickenings being the only difference.

Too bad quickenings were the crappiest implementation that had to be used in battle.

I’m excited for XIII…I really am. I don’t want to think I’ve grown out of Final Fantasy games. It’s obvious we won’t see Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy, but we don’t really need it. What’s needed is the “spirit” of Final Fantasy, and it seems like there isn’t much there. If they can’t get the spirit of the game in line, then it’s become a dying sitcom. I don’t want it to, people will stop buying it.

If it gets to that, it may be unorthodox, but the franchise then needs to die.