07-01-2009, 12:21 AM
Honestly, the last game I remember that was a different enough from every other game to be considered innovative Katamari Damacy. The game doesn't try to be serious, doesn't try to have a good story, and tries at every turn to make the player say "WTF?!" The cutscenes are totally random, the King of All Cosmos says the absolute strangest things imaginable, and the music is diverse and awesome.
The past few years have had, as Yahtzee put it, a bad case of the sequels with almost every game coming out having increasingly large numbers tacked onto them. I don't mind this for franchises where the developers actually make the effort to make subsequent games in a franchise different.
For example, Final Fanasy does a great job here, as each game is actually quite different. Sure, they all have Moogles, Chocobos, and a mechanic/authority figure named Cid, but the gameplay is generally pretty different. FFIV, for example, was the first game to use the ATB system. V introduced jobs. VI had Espers and steampunk elements. VII was steampunk/futuristic, had Materia, and involved the death of a main player character. VIII had Junctions, Guardian Forces, and a plot centered mainly on the love story rather than "beat the baddy." IX was...well I didn't like it, so I guess you can say that it included a cast of completely unrelatable characters, which was a first for me from a FF game. X was the first to feature truly three-dimensional environments over its predecessors' rendered environments, had the Sphere Grid, and spoken dialogue. XI was an MMO. 'Nuff said. XII was MMO-like, in that the world was huge and took a long time to traverse, had the License system, Gambits to dictate character actions, and so on...
In short, Final Fantasy, as a franchise, has pretty successfully wedded things with which the gaming audience at large is familiar with to things which are entirely new ways of looking at these familiar things. Not exactly innovation, but at least it's conscientious thought.
And then we have franchises like GTA, which ever since the very first GTA on the PSX/PC, have boiled down to identical parameters.
In general, creativity has been pretty stagnant lately, and I find myself less and less willing to shell out $60 for something I feel like I've already played *coughStreetFighter4cough*. Games that are truly immersive or interesting to me, or promise hundreds of hours of gameplay, for example Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, I'll happily shell out some cash. But a "once through in 10 hours" ordeal just doesn't cut it for me.
The past few years have had, as Yahtzee put it, a bad case of the sequels with almost every game coming out having increasingly large numbers tacked onto them. I don't mind this for franchises where the developers actually make the effort to make subsequent games in a franchise different.
For example, Final Fanasy does a great job here, as each game is actually quite different. Sure, they all have Moogles, Chocobos, and a mechanic/authority figure named Cid, but the gameplay is generally pretty different. FFIV, for example, was the first game to use the ATB system. V introduced jobs. VI had Espers and steampunk elements. VII was steampunk/futuristic, had Materia, and involved the death of a main player character. VIII had Junctions, Guardian Forces, and a plot centered mainly on the love story rather than "beat the baddy." IX was...well I didn't like it, so I guess you can say that it included a cast of completely unrelatable characters, which was a first for me from a FF game. X was the first to feature truly three-dimensional environments over its predecessors' rendered environments, had the Sphere Grid, and spoken dialogue. XI was an MMO. 'Nuff said. XII was MMO-like, in that the world was huge and took a long time to traverse, had the License system, Gambits to dictate character actions, and so on...
In short, Final Fantasy, as a franchise, has pretty successfully wedded things with which the gaming audience at large is familiar with to things which are entirely new ways of looking at these familiar things. Not exactly innovation, but at least it's conscientious thought.
And then we have franchises like GTA, which ever since the very first GTA on the PSX/PC, have boiled down to identical parameters.
In general, creativity has been pretty stagnant lately, and I find myself less and less willing to shell out $60 for something I feel like I've already played *coughStreetFighter4cough*. Games that are truly immersive or interesting to me, or promise hundreds of hours of gameplay, for example Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, I'll happily shell out some cash. But a "once through in 10 hours" ordeal just doesn't cut it for me.
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Avatar art by Fluke