Final Fantasy XIII Review

Ah, the ubiquitous Final Fantasy artwork

Games like Final Fantasy XIII come from a pedigree not unlike a royal family. It has elements of all the JRPGs that have come before it, including the bastard children that are never really mentioned and improvements made through breeding out negative elements. You get duds and revolutionaries, bigger wars, bigger guns and prettier women in less clothing. But after a little while, you realise that you’re looking at breeding cousins and that the faces are starting to all look a bit samey. You start to notice grandiose loopholes in the history and it all gets a bit convoluted in parts, trying to figure out which country in what timeline affected which scantily clad lovestory.

FFXIII is trying to be an elegant game, with high concepts. It’s nonlinear story is rife with terrorists and freedom, enemies and victims, death and fear. We start off on a train of rounded up ‘tainted’ people (called l’Cie), who are undergoing a Purge. But that’s really all the information we get before being thrown into a fight, which crashes the train and sets in motion the events which lead to the main characters being infected with the brand of the mysterious and supposedly evil fal’Cie. They must now complete their focus or mission, or risk becoming Cie’th – twisted agonised creatures who were once human l’Cie. If they complete their focus, they have an eternity of being a giant naked crystal to look forward to.

While the plot is as convoluted as your regular JRPG, and it does mysteriously assume that you’re intimately engaged in whatever a l’Cie is and what a Pulse l’Cie is, there’s a lot of fairly high concept plot going on. All characters are moving to bring back something they’d lost due to either the l’Cie or through political upheaval. Nearly all of them are bystanders until something pulls them in, everyone has a woe story. Lightning is the main protagonist and is suffering from a kind of survivor’s guilt. Snow is engaged to Lightning’s sister, who has become a crystal. Sahz lost his son to crystalness. Vanille and Fang are responsible for all kinds of things that will piss off their new friends. Hope thinks Snow is responsible for his mum’s death. No one really communicates any of this to each other, except in tense emotional standoffs that coincide with boss battles. This goes on and on over 3 discs (if you’re Xboxing like I was) full of bored angst. There’s plenty of guilt and angst going around, even though only one of the characters is actually a child. That I found surprising for a Final Fantasy game: pretty much everyone is an adult, only Hope – a wheyfaced boy who sees his mother die – is actually referred to as young. Everyone else ranges from early 20s to mid-30s and all seem to have valid fighting experience or training – guard, ex-cop, freedom fighter/terrorist, guerrilla warrior. Hope still managed to find a boomerang and begin fighting without much in-game hesitation, but there is a whole level of the game where he is ‘instructed’ by Lightning on how to be brave and fight. It’s still a bit 80’s montage, but at least they tried. Fat lot of good it did him however, as I only used him as a medic.

Vanille, normally a 'glass half full' kind of girl, freaks out at the thought of yet another tutorial

SquareEnix has rejiggered their fighting/levelling up system again, something they seem unable to let alone. All minor enemies are completely visible, but surprisingly unavoidable 90% of the time. If you weren’t desperately trying to level up your characters, this would be seriously annoying. As it is, you will find yourself deliberately going back to certain areas just to get more ‘Crystarium Points’ to give your team more skills. I forgot, initially, that this was the point of RPGs, so imagine my pain as I got the second ‘big boss’ and spent a total of 5 hours trying to beat him, going back into the previous room to try and level up. DEAR GODS, it was punishment. There doesn’t seem to be any ‘trick’ to defeating the Big Bosses this time around. The Battle System is basically pushing ‘A’ to Attack over and over, regardless of what you’re fighting. You try to either kill the enemy outright or wear it down so that it ‘staggers’. Sometimes it takes a combo of both, but it’s still just pressing ‘A’ continually. There is the occasional changing of ‘Paradigms’ or group skill sets in order to prolong your health or do maximum damage, but even then; once you have a decent medic in the group, there isn’t any point in doing much more than wearing your enemy down. It’s almost completely automated unless you want to use a potion or call on your Eidolons, which doesn’t happen very often because they’re next to useless. When you finally get them (and apart from those with Commando skills later on, they’re all pretty much obtained in the final chapters), they’re plot point signifiers. If you use them, they don’t do much damage themselves and once they disappear, the enemy usually regains any ‘stagger’ percentage it had lost and you’re back to square one.

Sahz makes use of his guns in flamboyant style, in the hopes that someone will actually use him in their battle team (I did not)

With the new Crystarium system, up-skilling is far more linear. I admit I haven’t played a FF since the one where they were all girls and wore costumes (FFX-2?), but this seems a lot more simplified than the style used 3 or 4 game ago. You fight enemies, you get Crystarium Points, which you use to level up by spending them on skills and classes. There are six classes – Commando (weapons), Ravager (magic), Medic, Saboteur (debuffing), Synergist (buffing) and Sentinel (shields/plays cannon fodder). These are used to make Paradigms or battle groups. I quite liked this as it took a bit of thinking to get the right combo for each, which was taken away from the actual fighting.   My only problem with this was the first 10 chapters having each character restricted to 3 categories (eg: Lightning can only be Commando, Ravager, Medic; Vanille can only be Ravager, Saboteur, Medic, etc etc) and you have to really think about your Paradigms, but then you fight a big boss and get dumped in a l’Cie training ground and suddenly, after grinding your way to level four over 20 hours, every possible category is now open to all characters. I didn’t really see the point in this.

But despite all of these changes and Grand Plot, it’s still a ‘run, run, cut scene, fight, run, run, cut scene…cut scene’ kind of caper and sadly, so intensely boring I had to force myself to play it. At the writing of this article, I’m going against site policy by not having finished the game. I don’t even know if I CAN finish it. Not through lack of skill (because you don’t need any), not because I have no time, but because it is a fucking chore. With all the cut scenes I feel like they wanted to make a movie, then realised they had to make a game and got you to play the boring parts. The running, the beating up of small animals, the getting from A to B. I’m surprised there wasn’t a toilet break in there somewhere (“Press A to flush! Repeatedly!”).

No matter how pretty that city is, all I can think is "LACE UP PANTS?!? HOW IMPRACTICAL!"

Alright, I’ll be positive here: the game itself is beautiful to look at. The world of Cocoon and Pulse are gorgeously made, rich in colour and detail. The environments were stunning, the characters that populate them are individual, realistic and well animated. The beasties are imaginative – I especially liked the machine-hybrids and being able to see them before biomanipulation. But it’s almost as if the world was developed to trick you into thinking you were playing a game that was interesting. Instead, you constantly grind through level after level, running along with that fucking CLIPPITY CLOPPITY sound. The foley work done (is it called foley in games?) was bizarre. No matter what surface the characters ran on, it sounded like they were traipsing across hollow metal while wearing tapshoes. Or they were horses. There were also a few glitches where I’d be playing the game with only a secondary musical track and no dialogue, fight music or sound effects. And what was with the way you’d be running along and suddenly a very quiet narrative monologue would start from one of your team mates? If you moved even a second too fast, it would stop and never be repeated. I’m assuming it was never anything important, but it was highly irritating to have Vanille start whispering about what was happening, only to have to stop as soon as the party moved even one step. UGH.

For a game series which has become a watchword for ‘epic fantasy RPG’ to have become mindnumbingly boring is a real disappointment. Sure, this is just my opinion, but I find it really disheartening that all that plot I wrote about earlier just doesn’t amount to much. On paper, the idea of all of the l’Cie as terrorists or freedom fighters, the whole moral ambiguity of the game, sounds like compelling plot … but it really isn’t. It’s like labouring through a badly written history text book.

We have a game that is based on sound game mechanics, a system of linear progression that works and HAS worked for all it’s predecessors, and yet it feels like SquareEnix have gone back to square one with plot and character development. I do realise that JRPGs are, by their very nature, dense games that can lose a little bit in the translation, but I think they lost the heart and possibly the lungs on this one, whilst keeping the pretty wrapping intact. I enjoyed playing the previous Final Fantasies, but I didn’t enjoy this. It was like one super long tutorial game, followed by a promise of an engaging game that didn’t come true.

The Verdict:

Pros: Beautifully created worlds and as usual, interesting to look at characters. The cutscenes are better than the game, which is convenient as they happen all the damn time.

Cons: Boring to play. A promising set up let down by a plot that doesn’t deliver. Would have been better off as a movie.

Overall: It’s the beautiful and dumb inbred child of a once pure and good dynasty of games. Unless you’re a diehard JRPGer, give it a miss and relive one of the older Final Fantasies instead. It’ll be infinitely more engaging. 1.5 out of 5.