Just had an itch to re-read FFXIII reviews....
Good God now I remember why is dislike reading reviews(most of the higher profile outlets anyway). That complaint they made about the jargon being too complicated to figure out....you know, those three clearly defined and explained terms: l'cie, fal'Cie and Cieth?
You literally just have to pay a little bit of attention. Gametrailers are like "good luck figuring out the difference between l'cie fal'Cie and Cieth"....No Brandon, I have more than two brain cells, I don't need luck(Brandon Jones still an awesome dude with the best voice for reviews though). It's like they needed something else to add to the list of problems the game had yet they didn't even address the actual real problems the game was plagued with.
I don't hold the game in high regard. Heck, I think most reviews gave it too much praise(Game Informer calling it "Phenomenal")but if you are going to point out the flaws point out the actual flaws the game has.
I thought this too, until my boyfriend and I watched Kingsglaive with one of my boyfriend's friends, and the friend seemed completely lost about what was going on in the opening. I paused the movie, offered a minute's worth of direct context, and that seemed to fix things right up. (...though it probably helped that we switched from a PS3 with really bad wifi to a PS4 shortly thereafter. >_>; Kingsglaive is completely unwatchable when the bitrate is too low.)
Anyway, the lesson I learned there is that people tend to throw up their hands and assume that things are really complicated the moment it seems like whatever they're reading/watching/playing assumes prior knowledge, even if they're perfectly capable of catching up in short order when the source recognizes their ignorance. Most jargon isn't hard, just unfamiliar, but simply
being unfamiliar is enough to make people feel like they're in way over their heads. (It's surprising how little it takes to convince people you're brilliant when you can effortlessly throw around jargon from a bunch of different fields. XD )
Final Fantasy struggles more than usual with this because it... kind of assumes that its target audience will have kept up with (at least some of) the pre-release materials that actually
do spell everything out. Squenix actually did say, "this is what a l'Cie is, this is what a fal'Cie is, this is what a Cie'th is." They just did it months before the game came out (and then proceeded to forget that it wasn't actually common knowledge in the interim).
Unfortunately, XIII's developmental issues likely exacerbated things further. One of the challenges of writing for games is that the development of the actual game can force script changes -- if a level doesn't work out, all of the story surrounding it has to either get dropped or worked into the game's other levels. And I think that the incredibly short period of time between when XIII's team started to gel as a team when making the April 2009 Advent Children Complete demo to the game's actual release in December of that same year might have required the story content to be massively pared back from what it was intended to be, leaving the Datalog to fill in the blanks. Having other parts of the game that really
did require one to read through a bunch of text hidden away in a menu cemented the game's reputation as being willfully obtuse, which then got expressed by critics through stuff like "no one knows what the difference between a l'Cie and a fal'Cie is." >_>;
XV seemed to learn a lot of lessons from XIII's shortcomings in that regard, thankfully. For one thing, it's a lot less reliant on
completely foreign terminology -- it's a lot less intimidating to remember that the gods are called "Astrals" than that they're called "fal'Cie," and even some of the weirder stuff is just Latin. For another, the pre-release materials that do exist are both much more widely accessible and more compelling. And for a third, Tabata seems to have dealt with the need for scope reduction much earlier in the development of XV proper, allowing for the creation of a story that could actually fit within the game's restrictions instead of being shoehorned to fit into a much narrower box than was likely intended.