Final Fantasy XIII

Several people have weighed in with their thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII. I was one of the first ‘normal citizens’ in the U.S. to finish the game and I’ve finally come to terms with my feelings about it.

Incredible Beauty

The first thing you’ll be struck by when you pop Final Fantasy 13 into your PS3 (or Xbox 360) is the striking graphics. Square Enix has always been known for incredibly high-quality production, but this game is easily the most beautiful 3D game I have ever seen.

Every tiny asset of the environments has exquisite details modeled into it. There are several times when I stopped playing the game just so I could pan my camera around to inspect the environments. There are several environments with really cool potential mechanics that are completely wasted on a game this linear.

The monsters are also incredibly detailed and the familiar faces of some of them have been overhauled in ways that I absolutely adore. Behemoths and Ochus are specifically my favorites. There are also some HUGE monsters in this world. The scale of each beast is done very well to suit the epic nature of every battle.

Linear Gameplay

This is the number one complaint that every player has with this game. I can’t think of ANY role playing game that I’ve ever played that is this linear. I played Final Fantasy 10 and disliked it because I thought it was linear, but 13 could not be more linear if it were a straight frickin’ line.

The first 20 hours of the game are pretty much hallways. The game blocks the path behind you and tries to trick you into thinking there are multiple paths to take, but there aren’t. There is one route and the only thing you’ll get from trying to diverge from it is the occasional treasure container with a Phoenix Down or something equally boring in it. They may as well just take out the exploration mode and make the game operate as a string of battles that occur when you click on a map like Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s not like you’re going to discover some secret amazing thing by running around in this game.

There is a point –FAR into the game– where you have the option to start doing the equivalent of bounty hunting for notorious monsters. Some of these monsters are so easy it’s a joke. But most of them are so difficult that it’s ridiculous and frustrating to keep coming back for multiple attempts. You can keep re-trying these battles as much as you want, but you don’t lose because you’re unskilled. You don’t lose because you don’t have the proper strategy. You lose because you don’t have enough Health Points to withstand the attack this monster does when he’s at 25% health. If your main character dies, it’s game over. Your two buddies that follow you around apparently have no ability to use Phoenix Downs or cast spells to bring you back to life, even though you can do that for either of them. It gets to the point where you can’t choose to control the character you like unless he has a minimum amount of HP. Fun.

This is the very first time you even have the ability to do something you choose to do and you are so used to the hallway crawling of the first 20 hours of the game that it is almost difficult to run off on a tangent when you finally get the option. I did maybe 10 of these 64 missions before getting bored and continuing the story. I was hoping that around the corner there would be some amazingly awesome event that would turn the world on its edge and reveal to me an open world of meaningful side quests and optional characters to recruit in my team. But no. All I got was more hallways, no cool new weapons or accessories, and no options. Every time I tried to hope for something cool to happen I was always disappointed. I was left with a game that looks really nice and may as well play itself.

After beating the game you have the option to go back to your Game Save and do all the things you missed. You also unlock another expansion for your stats and abilities. This seems like a very cool option at first. You can go back and get your Ultimate Weapons and kill all those really tough monsters that you skipped. I went back looking for depth and I found… some. If you want to kill the very last marks in the game, be prepared to grind for hours and take several attempts at them because they are ridiculously difficult. And to be honest, by the time I received the awards they gave me I didn’t care anymore. There was nothing left to fight.

My favorite thing about RPGs is the ability to do optional missions to develop your characters further in their stories (Locke and Phoenix in FF6), to discover secret weapons and spells (Secret Dungeon in Star Ocean 2), and to change the endings of the story through my actions (Chrono Trigger). I love to customize my characters with full freedom (Final Fantasy Tactics) or develop a brilliant strategy that will even the odds against an extremely powerful foe (Final Fantasy Tactics). Even if those are not an option, I want characters that I grow to love (Lufia series) and a story that is enjoyable and coherent every step of the way (Dragon Quest series). If I’m absolutely desperate I’ll settle for a fun-as-hell combat system (Kingdom hearts). My favorite things are not present in this game.

Fast-Paced Battle System

In a deviation from the normal Final Fantasy combat method, 13 has a battle system similar to Chrono Cross where the player uses Action Points to decide how many and which actions to use each “turn” that character gets.

Large-Scale battles with bosses or powerful Marks are quite the treat. Staggering these opponents is often a brutal undertaking with massive rewards. A few of them are downhill runs of straight aggression where you blast your opponent as fast as you can to race him into Staggering, but most of them are slow and steady battles where you must strike a balance between offense and defense in efforts of a sustained assault.

Summons are all bark and little bite. They have long animations like they do in any Final Fantasy game, but they do very little damage and their effects are only useful on rare occasions, like farming Adamantoise at the end of the game. It’s actually quite sad because they are very cool to watch when they aren’t pretending to be Transformers.

The battle system is simplistic and limiting in the early game, but it becomes exciting and fun to use once depth is added. The intense battles you encounter doing the highest level side quests can make the system continue to feel limited again however, even after maxing out your characters. It turns out, not giving players control of all their characters is still frustrating.

There is a lot to do in combat and many battles are very challenging, but the toughest ones will be won or lost based on how much health your characters have, not your skill on the battlefield. All the skills you learned throughout the game will be nullified until you grind for several hours building up your stats. Grinding levels to defeat a tough boss is something that any seasoned veteran of RPGs like myself should come to expect, but grinding in Final Fantasy 13 is a repetitive and dreary process.

Once you defeat the final boss, an extra level of stats and abilities is unlocked for your characters, but you can never return to the final area of the game. That area would be an excellent place to explore and grind, but if you can’t use it when you have the whole set of abilities unlocked, who cares?

Do I Really Care About These People?

A good RPG presents you with characters you can relate to and grow to love or hate over time. You should at least be able to identify with the struggles that they are going through or appreciate the affection that they show for each other.

Most of the characters in Final Fantasy XIII feel out of touch. They meet up and stick together for very flimsy reasons. They continue fighting against ridiculous odds with very little motivation –at least not anything that would motivate me. They continue to do things just for the sake of normal RPG decorum —Like how an Eidolon shows up for each and every party member at the most perfect time. It’s very hard to care for these characters.

I did like Snow however. It is mostly because he shows more human emotion than any of the other characters, but it is also because he has the most grounded story among them. Sazh is a pretty easy character to identify with too at times, but I’m not always sure why he’s even there.

Vanille is annoying. Nothing human is really revealed about her and she is constantly cheery when she has nothing but reasons to be unhappy. Fang is a very cool character that COULD have been given a lot of depth… if they ever talked about her in the story. She has a very basic overview for her character, but nowhere near as much as I would have liked.

Lightning is just a straight up robot. She grows a bit in the story, but it is very difficult for me to like her beyond how hard she hits when she’s a Commando in my battle team.

Hope undergoes the most growth as a character out of any of them, which might be expected since he seems like the youngest. I’m not exactly sure why he does many of the things he does, especially at pivotal moments in the story where I would expect him to tell the others to go F themselves and leave. Later in the story he just becomes a generic young male character with little evidence of his past hardship.

Nostalgia?

There are several thematic elements that carry through the different Final Fantasy games. They may not share stories, characters, worlds, or even natural laws, but many of these elements still carry through and are in my opinion a very large reason for their success.

Final Fantasy XIII does not have the Final Fantasy theme music in it. Anywhere. Or if it does I never heard it, which is doubtful since it has been in my head since my childhood. It also has another crappy J-Pop song (like Final Fantasy 10 did) that plays constantly in some form, especially when Vanille is involved. This was a horrible idea for Final Fantasy 10, it was one of the things that pissed me off about Kingdom Hearts games, and it continues to be a painful theme in 13. NO POP MUSIC. Stick to Nobuo Uematsu scores and maybe let his band (The Black Mages) do a few tracks like they did in Advent Children.

Experience Points are gone, instead replaced by the equivalent of Job Points. I actually liked this system more than normal Experience points because it gave me the illusion of customization. In reality, I was only choosing which abilities I got before others. There are no options for you to choose any ability that Square Enix does not want that character to have. While that sucks, I don’t think the idea of using Job Points instead of Experience is at fault. You throw the License Map or the Sphere Grid in there instead and I’m giddy.

It also has no Final Fantasy style Job System. No Black Mages, no Dragoons, no Paladins, nothing. There is no character, equipment, or ability that allow you to Steal. There is no Dual-Wielding. There is no spells from the Final Fantasy universe outside of the standard boring elemental and healing ones. No Virus, no Meteor, no Holy and (MINOR SPOILER) only the final boss can use Ultima.

There are a few weapon names that make me happy, but it’s a very thin piece of tissue happiness. Gungnir and Kain’s Lance are some favorites. There is a Cid, which helps too. Chocobos are a big factor in side quests.

There are no Moogles!

There are no Crystals, Materia, Magicite or other methods of containing magical power in physical form. This is a theme in most Final Fantasies that allowed players to teach skills to party members who would not normally have them. But this is also a strong story element.

I have a hard time figuring out what makes this game a Final Fantasy at all. Lost Odyssey has more Final Fantasy flavor to it than this game does. Perhaps it’s my personal taste at play here, because I happen to prefer the Final Fantasies that are based more in the Industrial Era style futurism. I never liked their super-clean super-futuristic games like numbers 8 and 10. I loved 4, 6, 7, 9, and even 12. To me, a Final Fantasy game has a past/future time period as one of its themes and going too far in either direction destroys what makes it unique. Final Fantasy 11 went too far in the past while 8, 10, and 13 went too far in the future.

The saving grace of the entire game is probably its bestiary. Many of the monsters are familiar, but cranked up several notches to match the style of their current universe. Appearances include Cactuar, Tonberry, Behemoth, Ochu, and Adamantoise among others.

Big Spoiler:

The final boss is exactly who you expected it would be. In most FF games, there is another layer to the evil plot you are seeking to foil or a secondary mission that reveals itself just as you think it’s over. Not so in 13. It just ends, and you’re left thinking “Well… I guess I’ll go try to kill that really huge dude back on the Savannah.” You can probably file this complaint under the Linear Gameplay section earlier, but this is a Final Fantasy staple theme in the plot that is disappointingly absent.

Final Word

Final Fantasy XIII was a disappointment to me. It had several moments of greatness and a lot of great things going for it, but it just wasn’t what I want when I pick up a Final Fantasy game (or any RPG for that matter). To me, playing a Role-Playing game involves decisions. Decisions to develop your characters as you please. Decisions to take certain actions in the story. Decisions that have consequences later in the game. I want to feel like I am doing something that matters, not just following a path that was laid out for me by the gods of Square Enix who know better than I. I know there is no such thing as a truly non-linear game, but I’d rather have more effort placed into fooling me.

Final Fantasy XIII is not the worst game ever. It’s not even the worst Final Fantasy. It is a solid Adventure game masquerading as an RPG to use as an excuse for having very weak Action. It is the epitome of visual presentation in a video game. It is also one of the few Square Enix titles that I will only play through once and soon to be another dusty jewel case in my closet.

Mass Effect 2 is ten times the RPG that this is, so I will go play through that for the fourth time now.