We are one of the few people that dreaded the release of FF XIII, because we knew it was going to be bad, but we had to play it anyway, if not just to see how drastically different it was. I’ll be frank here — it isn’t disastrously bad, it is just simply quite a disappointment, something that you would come to expect, with the decline of the qualities of JRPGs. This generation has been terrible — the decent ones being Lost Odyssey and the mostly ignored Eternal Sonata (or Trusty Bell, for winning the stupidest name ever); even so these two titles were pretty mediocre by the standard of jRPG greatness, just that they were much more decent than the rest of the crap — from Star Ocean 4, Infinite Undiscovery, the Last Remnant to Resonance of Fate; all uninteresting tales with uninspired gameplay built with an undermined drive and desire to make great games. What happened to the godly Tri-Ace who made the best jRPG ever, Valkyrie Profile, and the best tale ever told in its sequel Valkyrie Profile Silmeria. Final Fantasy XIII isn’t nearly as bad as the the RPG clones you have likely played in these couple years, but the fact that it constantly reminds you that Japan no longer makes the greatest games, is simply a realization that the world has changed — Japan is no longer the innovator in game design, it hasn’t been for years, it is simply struggling to keep up with the rest of the world.
FF XIII can be described with a single phrase — it is a straight line, with no deviation in your path whatsoever; it is as linear as Heavy Rain. If you thought previous FF titles (with the exception of XII) linear, you would be in for a surprise here, for you have seen nothing yet. No efforts of level designs are put in, it seems, for most of the dungeons are just a straight line towards the end goal. Sure the environments are beautiful, but why would you care if exploration is taken away from you? We called Heavy Rain the rail shooter of adventures, FFXIII is the counterpart of on-rail RPG. FF XIII is about lack of freedom — 18 hours in and I thought I was finally done with the tutorial (I am not kidding), but I think it is about the 25 hour mark and I got the last tutorial message that said you can now “finally” switch out team members by going to the battle team selection — I have only been incessantly clicking on it for the past 20 hours and it has been grayed out. This is why we have decided to write this article at the 26 hour mark — we are at the last 2 chapters and the plot twist has been revealed and we think we have more than enough information to rant about how displeased we are.
To dissect what makes FF XIII bad, we would have to look at what makes FF X and FF XII great, our two favorite FFs along with VI (and no we don’t want to talk about VII). The plot of X was ingenious, the character growth moving and the love story would bring tears to your eyes, the final revelation of the truth of the world was probably on the level of watching the final moments of Sixth Sense provided you didn’t get spoiled in the first place. Years later we still remember it as one of the most moving tales told in the medium, if not the best game made. FF XII took the other direction, it disregarded its story and characters and made the player immerse in a nonlinear world filled with choices and exploration, and even that the world told an interesting story with its political conflict, just that the characters are simple chess pieces that is moved across the board in a grander scheme – they weren’t interesting. FF XII isn’t really a FF Game, it is in fact Vagrant Story 2 (it shares the same world and mythology, it shares the same real-time combat system with body parts targeting, it is designed by the same team with its story carrying the same theme — their opening sequences being almost identical). Sure insert Chocobo and a random character called Cid and you have branded another Final Fantasy in the making. What we loved about FF XII was exactly what was missing in XIII. In fact XIII took the linearity of X, made it even more linear, with promises of grand storytelling and great character growth that never delivered; all it did was put the most uninteresting aspects of XII, its story and characters, and inserting it into the template of X, made it about 10 times worse with 10 times the production budget, and you have XIII, a game that is supposed to make you regain your faith in JRPGs.
Every Final Fantasy after VI with the exception of XI and XII is about awing the players with a masterpiece plot. The template of grand Final Fantasy plot goes like this — an unwilling hero joins a band of other heroes some with altruistic purposes and some with their own dark machinations, fights a common enemy that is believed to be evil (usually called the mid-boss who is disguised as the final boss), who is always not what he seems for he is hiding some secret or his strings are pulled by another foe or he is actually in fact good, and some secrets of the world is revealed, that all is that what it seems, that the belief and traditions are always a lie that is sometimes in place for the survival or the destruction of a planet, and with revelation in hand you fight the true architect of the world’s demise (the final final boss) who usually believes he is doing something for the greater good. That’s the common template of any Final Fantasy game and X has used this formula to its best telling a really heart-moving tale. Of course XIII does not stray far away from the template — the result being a disaster, that simply you just won’t care about the characters, nor the world.
The one thing that is semi-interesting about FF XIII was the battle system — the game mostly play itself like it was in FF XII except that you cannot program the action of your companions, you can however change everyone’s class on the fly so they will perform appropriate actions — kind of like putting the costume-change system from FF X-2, without the actual visual part, into real-time combat like FF XII, and calling it the Paradigm Shift. What may seem like a quite interesting battle system on paper, it does get tedious, especially in the first 15 hours of the game you will most likely be mashing the X button and let the game play itself and you will hardly ever perish in battle. Not until you pass the “tutorial” section, you will start to encounter bosses that have millions of hit points and the only way you can damage them is that wreak enough havoc so you can stagger them, kinda like dizzying someone in a fighting game, then you can launch them into the air and combo them Tekken style – those are really the only satisfactory moments that I found in the game — but hay we have experienced that years ago in a game called Valkyrie Profile.
There aren’t a lot of things we like in FF XIII, you go through a straight line and get to some cut-scenes and then the game is going to ask you weather you want to save, and then it will play some more cut-scenes, and ask whether you are going to save, yet again, but even after you save you are dumped next to save point at the beginning of a level — while save points are plenty and if you die in battle you will be able to continue right before it; Cut-scenes are skippable anyway so there’s no reason for anyone to save instead of just starting over from your last save points in the case that you needed to go out to dinner. Everything tedious and simply bad about FF XIII would have been forgivable if it told an unforgettable epic tale — while the tale itself is set in a world with some potential of epic settings, it just doesn’t have the right elements to be unforgettable, like in the case of FF X, or even VII and VIII. At the end it is a very forgettable experience — that very cool summoning CG porn cut-scenes are not going to save the day. Sure we haven’t completed the game yet (we will soon), but I don’t think our opinions are going to change. But do stay tuned if we have anything new to say.
P.S. Vanille’s fake British accent is more annoying than a puppy incessantly chewing on your slippers and peeing every 5 minutes on your bedsheets.
Another Take by JetFable– I have actually finished the game shortly after the 50 hour mark. Sure I agree with Zilla’s comment about how bad the game is, up to the 30 hour mark. It was simply bad storytelling, and that’s inexcusable. The world was epic, yet in order to fully understand what was going on one is required to read the data entries the game has compiled for you, as opposed to something like Dragon Age, the reading is only for further understanding the world so you can skip that without hampering your enjoyment of the game. Reading here in FF XIII is essential, if you can’t be bothered by reading, you might as well not play the game. At Chapter 11, the game finally gives you a non-linear area to explore, which is reminiscence of a FF XII world, or Monster Hunter. Finally you are given gameplay and choices, and the game will throw you into battles that are actually much harder than the end boss. I have qualms about how every random battle before the endboss is actually harder than the endgame, that it can’t be won except that you do a preemptive strike and stagger about half your opponents right away, for the sheer number of those monsters will pummel you to death. The thing that the last part of the leveling up system is locked so you can’t really grind your way through (you will be wasting your CP at that point), to me that is just sheer bad game design. Furthermore, back to talking about the storytelling, what is this obsession with including a random comic black dude sidekick into the plot, alright we were over that in FF VII, back then the polygons were so blocky you can’t even tell he’s black. But here, yes I know that Japan is obsessed with black people (that they are awesome, as opposed to everywhere else in Asia, where darker skins indicate lower class status), but here it doesn’t fit into the world. It is the reverse of anti-racism, there is no other black person in the entire universe, where did he come from and where he found a wife to Freck to produce a child of African decent, the result of that is almost like watching the awful move called Black Knight. I once heard something about Lord of the Rings being racists, and that’s just ignorance speaking. Should there be blacks in Beowulf? There aren’t Asians either. They just don’t fit into the settings. If Japan are so obsessed with the culture, they should be a game entirely filled with blaack people, I am fine with playing that, like how they made the whole FF X with that Asian look. To do anything but is just being racists. This is one of the worst Final Fantasy ever, but still it is superior to all the jRPG that has been out for the last couple years. If you are a fan of the genre, you are going to need to spend the time to finish the game regardless. For me it was simply too long — I would have gladly just spent half that time that is required to finish the game so I could just have a Life in the real world.
