I still don't think they went too far on chapter 13. This is one the people got wrong. That was full blown hysteria and sometimes listening to fan feedback is a bad thing. Don't make a game by committee. And sure as hell don't listen to gamers on the internet about anything.
There's a difference between making a game by committee and taking feedback, to be fair.
One way of taking feedback is, of course, to see what people want and give it to them. But that's not the only use for feedback. It's also possible to use feedback to craft a particular emotional response regardless of what the audience actually
wants, which seems more along the lines of what Tabata wants to do.
If a lot of people are assuming that something that's designed to make them feel negative emotions is just the developer team being lazy, that's a problem that can be resolved by feedback... it just needs to be resolved by redirecting those negative emotions instead of removing them entirely.
Right. Don't get me wrong, the ring could use a boost, maybe a little bit of fat cut, but that's all. I'm still completely convinced that the outrage was misplaced and primarily rooted in chapters 9-12.
One thing I can definitely confirm is I know hysteria when I see it, and that was hysteria. And hysteria is rarely about what it pretends to be about.
Chapter 9 might have been controversial and Chapter 12 might have felt like wasted potential, but let's not cast blame on Chapters 10 and 11. xD; The only real problem with those two chapters was that they were over too soon.
I do think you're onto something with regards to misplaced outrage, but I think it mostly shows up in the parts of Chapter 13 that people blame rather than the fact that they're upset about Chapter 13 in the first place. The usual complaints are stuff like "it goes on forever," "everything looks the same," "it's a bunch of linear hallways," and "it keeps making me run back and forth to find Macguffins," which seem like reasonable things to complain about until you realize that it's bog-standard for RPGs to have end-game dungeons with those sorts of designs. When I played FFIII and IV on DS, they both had annoyingly long, frustrating, samey slogs before their final bosses, with III's pushing you to run around looking for four bosses before fighting the final boss and IV's having six levels of mini-boss level random encounters between the final save point and the final boss. I understand that FFVIII has a massive final castle where you have to give up your abilities to fight four other bosses before you can fight the final boss. FFXII has Pharos, which I haven't played but sounds like the literal worst (fifty samey, hallway-like stories of weird puzzles like farming monsters to create bridges, why). FFXIII has Orphan's Cradle, which shocked me with how long it went when I decided I wanted to see my boyfriend beat the final boss (and I'd beaten the game myself back when it came out XD) and was, again, samey, hallway-like, and full of tiles you need to find to take you elsewhere in the level.
The difference between Chapter 13 and all of those segments, though, is that it
doesn't provide the satisfaction of making it through something really challenging, because the stuff you're fighting should, by all rights, be trivial and even at a massive disadvantage, fighting takes a lot longer but there's not
that much risk of you actually getting killed. (That's why Tabata didn't need to think twice about offering "buff the ring" as a solution, and, conversely, why a lot of people say that's missing the point.) It's a two hour stretch of the game essentially cheating the player of what they want from a final dungeon and taunting them about it, because the "Dungeon Master" is more interested in toying with them than in trying to kill them.
Or, in other words, the game broke the player's trust on purpose, and a lot of people responded by nitpicking at level design elements instead of recognizing that they felt betrayed. XD;
