Final Fantasy XIII - First impressions

 While I didn't buy the game, I was there to support a friend during the midnight launch. It was, at the very least, in my interests to see the first few hours of this game in action. After all, this is research we're talking about here, though I'm ashamed to say that I learned something the very moment I walked into Gamestop.

 You people need to shower. Seriously. Myself and another friend had just finished working and sweating our balls off during a good 7 hour work shift, did not get a chance to shower, and came in through those doors smelling completely unoffensive. In fact, during a random smell check to make sure that we were not being hypocritical, a girl had said we still smelled damn good. Now, if only that sort of natural upkeep could be taught to the completely disgusting folk who spent an hour marinating the Gamestop in funk, then it may have been a pleasant launch. Instead, I felt completely sorry for the Gamestop employees who were forced to simmer in the stink. It was as if these nasty souls had made sure to only wipe themselves with the stale crusts of McDonald's cheeseburgers. I'm pretty sure that these people were doing something a superstitious athlete would do for the entire week before the Super Bowl, except instead of avoiding the razor, these guys avoided the shower stall. I get pretty defensive when people call gamers useless slobs, but in this case, I think I'm with "them" on this one. You people are disgusting. Learn what soap is.

 OK, now that we have that out of the way, let's get to the game...

 ...whiiiiiich is about as disappointing as I feared. I came into this experience a little biased. Not only did I avoid buying the game, but I wasn't exactly thrilled to hear what design decisions were made. There are some plus marks to be given out, so I'm going to shortly focus on that.

 Final Fantasy XIII looks amazing, without a doubt. At times, it's as if you're actually playing an interactive Advent Children movie. Locales are stunning to look at, and if you have an eye for detail, there's a lot of little things to take in. This whole game is absolutely a reward for anyone owning an HD, though I can say that SD users are going to get a pretty nice upgrade from Final Fantasy XII. Even on the latter, it reeks of presentation. Even the status menu jumps out, as each character has a short, second-long video that acts like a moving baseball card. The frame rate is absolutely smooth, and everything has a strong polish to it.

 Voice acting is done well, and I can see why, considering that I spent the majority of the first hour picking out where I had heard each voice actor from. It's a good list of people to have, for the most part. Yes, things go downhill from here.

 When the voice acting is good, is carries the game, but when it's bad, it's REALLY bad. Half of your party spends the good majority of the first five hours doing nothing but moaning as if someone gave them an unwanted emotional reach-around in the recording booth. It's 10 times worse than Yuna EVER was. Also, every character is pretty annoying to begin with. Lightning can be summed up as the PMS'y version of Squall and Cloud wrapped together, complete with ellipses. Yes, you can hear the "..." and it is nothing short of ludicrous. Somebody dropped the ball here. The only character that isn't totally useless in personality is Snow, and maybe I'm only saying that because he's the least annoying of every party member. He just didn't grate at me the way every other person did.

 The music is entirely forgettable, as well. While it sounds epic and intense at first, there is no point in this game, so far, that had me thinking that a music track was anything more than filler. Asking the friend who now owns the game what track she actually remembered, she gave me a blank look and said, "There were harmonicas, right?" I'm hoping that things get better.

 The combat has finally reached the point where things are a bit too much. The battle system takes some time to get used to, but numbers will fly around so often that hit points have now become secondary to the health bar entirely. You're paying attention to so much else on the screen and the battle as a whole that you really only glance at the length and color of your health bar to figure out just which direction the battle is heading. The first couple hours of the game is also spent doing nothing but hitting X repeatedly, which felt as if I was being treated like a complete idiot. It was that insulting. The battle system expands later, but it doesn't feel right. I'm going to continue on and see how much thought I will need to put into things when the bigger bosses come up, but even watching my friend play, all I could think of was "X, X, X, X, X, X, L1 to turn the healer on, X, X, X, X, L1 to switch back to pummeling mode".

 The story, so far, sucks. We actually spent more time making fun of the game in the first 2 hours, so we missed a lot of exposition, but we didn't seem to miss much. Snow hands out guns to children, then promptly gets everyone he's trying to save killed off. Lightning comes in kicking immense amounts of ass, much like Cloud, then ellipses her way out of the rest of the plot. The party goes around fighting anything it can, and naturally we piss off the wrong bad guy and wind up getting sucked into the real plot of the game, which suddenly turns into saving the world. I don't know exactly how we determined that we were saving the world that quickly into the game, but we did, though I think it has something to do with the "world" being not so much a world as a region. I'm sure we'll get to save the world later, because it's a Final Fantasy game, but it was so by the numbers it made an absolute joke of itself. Fight rebellion, begin love story, start saving world. It literally happens that fast, and I'm not entirely sure if the character have any idea if they knew they were going to save the world to begin with. I'm pretty sure they're rattling that off just because it's in the script. The fact that they don't even know which side their on sort of justifies this.

 Look, I won't lie. I'm sure this is a great game, but it doesn't look like it's going to be a good Final Fantasy game, and it may even just turn out to be a basic eye-candy RPG. The game is almost a parody of itself, and that's sad. I've heard that the linearity opens up in the late game, but at this point, I'm almost not caring. This game has a lot of apologizing to do for itself, but I'm going to give it the chance to redeem itself. I'm going to persist and play it through as far as I can, but at this point, I'm guessing that this game is going to be the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to the series.

 I will give it a chance, though, and my second/lasting impression will come soon. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit