Final Fantasy XIII

Let’s get this straight first: FFXIII is not a good Final Fantasy game. It’s not even a good RPG at all. Its reviews were oddly laudatory, especially in Japan (Famitsu’s reader poll in 2010 even came out with it as best game ever), while most of my friends and Facebook acquaintances seem to think very poorly of it. In every way that makes a Final Fantasy game special – story, characters and combat system – it fell short. And yet in some small way, I loved it.

I don’t say this with just a cursory playthrough. I put almost as much time into this as I did into FFXII: I got everyone to level 5 in all their job roles, my three main characters all had their final weapons in levels around 90, Fang’s being maxed, I finished every mission and I could farm Long Gui and Shao Long Gui with very little difficulty. This takes a lot of hours, and raises the question – if it’s not a good game to play, why invest so much time into it?

Well, there are a few reasons. Firstly, it is stunningly beautiful. Nothing I have ever played comes close to this. The visuals in this game are the best I’ve ever seen, a step above everything else I’ve experienced even on their generation of incredibly powerful consoles. Several times in the game I actually stopped, put my character somewhere where I could see things from a good angle, and just stared at the backgrounds. I even felt sad that there would be so much fantastic scenery that just goes unseen by the vast majority of players because they don’t take the time to point cameras up or down – and of course, nobody can see everything on a regular run-through. I had to wonder if parts the camera can never see were rendered in such exquisite detail, too, and lamented the lack of a camera that could be properly controlled independent of the character.

Secondly, I liked the characters. Lightning was a refreshing protagonist, being at first rather Cloud- or Squall-like but gradually showing her softer, more human, far more vulnerable side. Fang was a great strong female character. Sazh was likeable and probably the most identifiable character, often clownish but also showing plenty of emotion. And while he’s hated by many, I found Hope adorable. So he whines a lot – watching the death of the person who means the most to you in the world will do that to you. He hit all my protective instincts and by the end he was absurdly powerful (if still crappy HP-wise).

I didn’t much like Snow or Vanille. Snow is the type to go on about being a hero, which never seems a character trait anyone would actually have, and he’s goofy-looking too. Vanille was the main reason I was annoyed there was no option to hear the original Japanese voices (as they had actually taken the time to re-animate mouth movements for the language, which is impressive), only when I actually heard the original cast, Vanille in Japanese was even more annoying than in English. And Hope’s voice was much more generic and obvious. Some cheesy minor villains aside, the voice acting is great.

The story…was weak and limited. In the world of the game, humans live either on the world of Gran Pulse, a dangerous place with a lot of monsters, or in the developed city of Cocoon, which floats above the planet’s surface and is ruled over by a group called Sanctum. This is made possible by the fal’Cie, huge and powerful non-human creatures, who do things like supply air and keep immense spheres aloft. A human who comes into contact with a fal’Cie can become a l’Cie, a branded human who must complete a task or be turned into a monstrous Cie’th. Even if they fulfil this ‘focus’, however, they are turned into crystals. Becoming a l’Cie is essentially a death sentence.

The story begins, as many do, with the evil government performing some ethnic cleansing, repackaged in sci-fi terms. A group of Cocoon residents are being ‘purged’ because they met fal’Cie from Pulse. Most of our plucky heroes meet here: they are being purged or want to find and save someone who is. However, it all goes awry when they meet the wrong fal’Cie and are turned into l’Cie themselves, with a vague notion of their task being to do with Ragnarok, a being who attacked Cocoon many years ago. Most of the game is spent questioning whether they can change their fate, as well as meeting those who seem to be pulling the strings.

The problem with this story is that it severely lacks real impetus. The plot device of a ‘do or die’ mission from barely-understood godlike creatures is a dull contrivance. The end tries to be too clever: apparent bad guy Barthandelus is manipulating l’Cie in a stupid plot that just might bring back a higher god (based on speculation alone), his target Orphan has his own plan to be set free from a tiresome existence which matches up well with what the party were doing and allows for more confusion and less anticlimax, while the party finally make a decision that could well have killed everyone on the planet but doesn’t because of a property of their newfound power there’s no way they could have known would come about. Sloppy.

I was disappointed by the game system. I didn’t like only being able to control one character, and hated how it was game over if just your lead fighter was knocked out. I didn’t like how shallow strategy became. I didn’t like the lack of real challenges: even in the endgame, there’s no real superbosses: the long gui go down as easily as adamantoises, and Vercingetorix was no challenge at all (unless you are going for a five-star rating). In fact, while the mission sidequests take many hours, they are not satisfactory side-quests: they are dull, repetitive, do not flesh out characters and only show the inadequacies of a game without an airship and only substandard teleportation. The last battles were a grind, not a challenge of strategy.

I also disliked the level-up system, a non-versatile and linear version of FFX’s sphere grid. The music often needed to be more dynamic and though lush and sometimes superb, often felt inadequate and needed more contrast. The final level of shifting platforms was plain ugly. I feel this game came close to being good, but didn’t manage it. How will FFXIII-2 fare?