dimensional said:
Simply put, yes... 1, 2 and 3 weren't the best of games. 4 onwards was went storyline and gameplay became the better half of the series. However, while it's true that change does not mean bad (again, see 4 onwards since 4 was the first game to have pre-set character classes instead of the class-changing from previous and future titles), it doesn't always necessarily mean good either.
Fine, 11 could have been better... but then, it was their first step into MMOs... so it was expected to be bad and it was expected to have real-time combat so as to make it fair on players. However 12 on the other hand just proved how bad real-time can be. Running around till some random enemy pops up, the "rare" enemies being harder to find (obviously) is one thing. However, just setting up enough auto-action things to have the game play itself just took out all but the exploration of the game. If you set it up well enough, you'd never have to do anything other than buy supplies. That just takes the fun and strategy out of the game. You cannot specifically say that change isn't always bad when you're promoting the part of the game series that caused it to fail, crash and burn. 12 could quite easily been a good game. All they needed to do was make it turn-based with combat. Remove the auto-action BS and make it pause when enemies appeared, have you select your character's attacks and then watch the outcome, having ALL of them (not just the character you're not in direct control of) move around the enemy depending how well you set the AI... If you want an example of this, see Grandia. Alternately have the characters stay still and only the enemies move about. For an example of this, see a previous Square title, Chrono Trigger.
As for 13, well I can complain about gameplay with the obvious of how it was way too linear (given that almost all previous games had free-reign on the world map in some way or the other) and the whole battle system seems like too much of a cut-scene rather than any actual selection of things to tell your characters to do. I can't comment too much as I got bored and pissed off with 13 only a few hours in...
And by the by... the only wheel that 13 got involved with was the stupid summoning system.
"How can we make real-time monsters who are fighting for you more kid-friendly and awesome?"
"I know... we'll make them turn into cars!"
I can assure you, this is how Power Rangers started going downhill... with PR Turbo...