An attack on FMV in the world of Video [Games]?

by Unknown

A couple of decades ago, there came a wonderful invention called video games. They were made for the sole purpose of entertainment and challenge, usually by one programmer. They were a big hit, sold hundreds of thousands of copies(brushing famous incidents such as the great E.T. 2600 dumping at Roswell, New Mexico aside) and populated many arcades, drawing in endless crowds of the younger generation. The player was stimulated by control of a character, given a goal and charged with the task of achieving it and avoiding the other characters. Or, in cases of text adventures, they were given an imaginary world to explore on their own, at their leisure, along with challenging puzzles to solve in the same manner.

It seemed that things would only improve with the exponential leaps in hardware and technology, and to an extent perhaps they did. However, as recent as five or six years ago I began noticing a disturbing trend; it began with a computer game known as Return to Zork. Actors in games?! Movie sequences that were automatic and beyond the control of the player? Sure it provided nice visual candy, but where was the challenge, the fun in simply letting the computer run increasingly higher percentages of games as the years passed?

Having not yet played FF8(I'm apparently in the extreme minority of hard-core RPGamers not having acquired the game at least 6 months before its release), I will use FF7 as the latest example of FMV-overabundance. Okay, maybe they weren't all that overabundant. But they certainly were one of the focuses, if not the main focus of the game. An attempt at a semi-deep story was made, resulting more in confusion and multiple contradictions than something coherent. I was shocked at how quickly the second and third CDs passed as compared to the first, due to higher FMV content. And the ending was and utterly inexcusable piece of eye-candy trash; 6 or 8 minutes of pure sans-plot FMV, as compared to FF4's 25 or so minutes of a very-well done ending with plenty of plot closure and just enough to make you wonder what happens next. For those who say "choose your own plot, use your imagination" for FF7's ending, that just doesn't hold any water for me. That's nothing more than a cop-out excuse for "uh, we just wanted to make pretty pictures to make all the graphic junkies happy so uh..write the ending yourself in your mind, yeah!".

FMV, as we've seen has stolen a lot from the gaming experience; consistent plot, control, and challenge. Games are turning into nothing more than shallow, pushover interactive movies, and if I wanted that I'd hit Blockbuster.