Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Final Fantasy XIII/archive1

Final Fantasy XIII

Nominator(s): Darth Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 03:33, 27 January 2011 (UTC), Pres N 20:05, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because it is currently a GA and after undergoing an extensive copyediting today, I am nominating this for FA status to see whether it would become a Featured Article. I believe this article is of high quality and well-suited for FA status. Darth Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 03:33, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am co-nominating this with Sjones; we've both spent a long time on this article and are ready to deal with any concerns that arise. We are also both in the wikicup; while that had no bearing on our work on this article courtesy demands that I let everyone know. --Pres N 20:05, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dab/EL check- There's no dab links, but there are ~~two~~ no dead links in the article. GamerPro64 (talk) 15:25, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Which ones are those? Nothing's showing up for me in the tool. --Pres N 20:08, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hm. Guess I was wrong. My mistake. GamerPro64 (talk) 21:35, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I think there are better sources of opinion to use than Electronic Theatre. I think you could pick a better screenshot, one that shows an enemy clearly, and maybe shows an attack. - hahnch e n 22:10, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The screenshot has been replaced. --Pres N 02:42, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as per criterion 1.(b) and 1.(c); there are several essential sources that haven't been exploited to make the article truely comprehensive. See Talk:Final Fantasy XIII#Ultimania development information. Jonathan Hardin' (talk) 15:04, 30 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We would have to provide a translation for the Ultimania sources. We'll probably see what we can do. Darth Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 15:12, 30 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree that not using those sources means that the article fails 1b and 1c. For one, the sources are unusable- none of us read Japanese, and as magazine scans they aren't google-translatable. That said, regardless of that, can you prove that they contain information that should be but is not included in the article? --Pres N 20:46, 30 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how these sources being "unusable" for us mean they're useless for the readers. As I said before, this topic is about a Japanese game; it's perfectly normal that such a topic would require dealing with Japanese sources. Don't get me wrong, I know it's unfortunate, it's frustrating, but it can't really be helped. As for the information they contain, I don't exactly know what information there is in those books, but that's precisely why they should be translated. We won't know until we do. For one, there is 21 pages about the voice actors' performance in those books, whereas there is literally not a single word about it in the article. Overall the talk page I linked to has about 70 pages of development information -- it is highly improbable that the article already contains even half of this information. The Ultimania guides are not "magazines"; they are the game's official companion books containing extensive and precious development information straight from the developers' mouths -- most of which (as the rare few translations of other Ultimania guides have shown) is never found anywhere else. Jonathan Hardin' (talk) 10:15, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am working on this, but you're going to have to accept that I won't be able to get it all. For example- in the Ultimania Omega, which is a bit over 500 pages, the first 200 is a reprint of the story with some notes- can't really use that, seeing as we're already cutting the story down quite a bit in the summary. The next 100 pages is tons of artwork- really interesting, but not useful for the article. 400-500 is a transcription of the side lines npcs say, the above mentioned discussions with the voice actors, and a reprint of the story from the pal special edition. Pages 508—511 are an interview with Toriyama. Of this, I've been able to find bits of descriptions about the characters and fal'Cie (too detailed for this article, but great for the character subarticle) and most of the Toriyama interview, of which a lot has been made irrelevant by the announcement of the sequel and much of the rest was in the article already. I put in what I could, but Ultimania's aren't the holy grail you think they are- they flip back and forth between super-detailed backstory information that's too much for an encyclopedia article, and fluff. People don't buy these, and they are not produced, for their in-depth analysis of the development process of the game. They buy them because they have hundreds of pages of artwork. I'm going to keep going, but I think opposing because we're not using a specific source that we don't have real access to is a bit much. As long as there isn't a translation available I'm not going to be able to read most of it, and getting a translation without actual text, not scans, is pretty much impossible. --Pres N 19:54, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support - Read through the article. I have played the game, and this is a very detailed and comprehensive article. It reads really well; Nicely done guys--CallMeNathan • Talk2Me 04:34, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments: I'm a big fan of the FF series, so I'll have a go. Here are my comments:

"Starting development in 2005 and first announced at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2006, Final Fantasy XIII is..." — Something's wrong with this sentence structure. The way it's worded, FFXIII started its own development in 2005.

Reworded, though I personally don't have a problem with a little personification in this case. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The amount of non-free media seems a bit high compared to what I'm used to seeing when dealing with book articles, where we're usually restricted to just one. The box art is good for the infobox, and the screenshot is good for illustrating gameplay. I'm not sure if the cast image can be justified if the number of these images has to be minimized. But I'm sure this will be addressed when a more experienced reviewer does an image review.

Well, in a book article there's nothing you can show besides the cover. Here, we spend a good amount of time talking about characters that have a defined, visual appearance, so it is helpful to the reader to show that appearance. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

However, it's not clear who is who in the image, except for Lightning. But I will reserve judgment until someone who is more knowledgeable about images does an image review. – VisionHolder « talk » 04:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

~~File:FF13battle.png is a little too small to be useful at 250px. Personally, I would bump it up a bit... but other reviewers may disagree.~~

I'm worried that any bigger would overwhelm the text on most monitors. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The concepts of fal'Cie and l'Cie are very hard to follow in the lead. I don't know what to suggest, though. It might help to avoid as many game terms as possible and just try to tell the story in more general terms so that the readers get a general picture of what the storyline is about.

That's always been a problem with the game- the terms are odd and slow down the reading, especially in limited spaces. I reworked it to not use the terms l'Cie and fal'Cie- does it work better now? --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's a lot better now, and I'm sure as other reviewers swing by, it will only get better. – VisionHolder « talk » 04:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

~~The "Story" section appears to be lacking some citations. Also the second paragraph of "Release and post-release" appears to lack a citation at the end.~~

That's normal for the story section of video game articles- it's implicitly sourced to the game itself. I prefer to source it explicitly to specific quotes whenever possible, as a bonus, but in cases like the ending where things are shown on screen without the characters talking about them, that's not possible. Not sure what happened there with the Release citation, I'll fix that. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Done- could have sworn that I had one for that, not sure where it went. --Pres N 01:40, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If that's how it works on these kinds of articles, then so be it. Thanks for the fix. – VisionHolder « talk » 04:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You cite a bunch of game reviews which I can guarantee will not be there a few years from now. Please consider archiving them through one of the archiving services, such as WebCite and Archive.org. There are "archiveurl" and "archivedate" parameters you can use in the cite templates.

A good idea, though linkrot isn't as much of a problem for AAA title reviews on big-name websites. I got everything I could get a webarchive for; I'll go back with webcite in a bit. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Otherwise, the article looks pretty good. I'll reserve my final judgment until the concern mentioned by Jonathan Hardin' is resolved. – VisionHolder « talk » 22:54, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reviewing, replied inline. --Pres N 01:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. Nice article. I can't wait 'til I can afford to buy a PS3 and the game so I can play. – VisionHolder « talk » 04:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]