So was it worth it?
Coming off of Final Fantasy XII, it was fairly obvious that Squeenix wanted their flagship series to evolve beyond what we've all come to expect from the brand. That entry streamlined many of the RPG conventions we all recognize today, including character leveling, a reduced need for in-battle menus, and party members that would remain active instead of waiting for your specific orders. Final Fantasy XIII is the direct result of this evolution, and the vast majority of the game is tied to that aspect alone.
XIII begins within the floating, moon-like colony of Cocoon, where humanity lives within the confines of a protective shell meant to shield them from the outside world. Pulse, the planet that Cocoon hovers above, is considered to be an evil place, and this belief is hardly ever questioned by the inhabitants. The reason for this is that the fal'Cie, beings that are seen as deities by humanity, have had a hand in influencing the population for as long as anyone really remembers. Fal'Cie make themselves known and achieve their goals by marking individuals and giving them a "focus" to carry out in the name of their appropriate fal'Cie. If the focus is failed, then the bearer of the mark becomes a wandering fiend. If the marked one succeeds, then they turn into a crystal. It's pretty lose-lose when it comes to getting marked.
When one particular girl/woman (she looks 16), Sarah, gets the mark, it sets in motion a series of events that brings the main characters together. Snow, a rebel who leads a group called NORA against the governing body of Cocoon, is fighting on behalf of Cocoon's inhabitants who are routinely "purged" from it when all things Pulse related turn up. Lighting is Sarah's sister, and gives up her post as a government soldier in order to face the fal'Cie in person in order to get answers. Sazh, the guy who carries a chocobo in his afro, joins Lighting for a similar reason, only it is his son who has been marked. Hope, a young whiny boy, loses his mother early on in the story when the government troops and NORA clash together on a bridge. Vanille.....I wasn't paying attention when she first showed up. She just walked onto the screen and became really annoying, so I pretty much tuned her out for the first half of the game.
All of these characters wind up in front of Anima, a Pulse l'Cie, all looking for some sort of resolution. Soon enough, they are all branded as a Pulse l'Cie. There's a difference between the l'Cie of Cocoon and Pulse, though to be honest, you'll hear the terms being thrown around so much that you may not know that there is one at all. Since all things Pulse must be eliminated, the group finds itself on the run and looking for direction. Of course, since the characters barely know each other, this leads to quite a bit of strife, but that's your intro.
So now that we've got the story out of the way, the technical details should be the easiest thing to get out of the way. After all, it's Final Fantasy, so we can just give an A+ for the music, presentation, and graphics. Right?
Not quite.
Look, a lot of reviewers out there have been glossing over the game as if it truly had the complete package as far as the technical details are concerned. That's simply not true. One concern that, out of fairness, is addressed quite a bit is the overall setting of the game world. At first, it looks amazing, especially on an HDTV. On the PS3, at least, the game looks fantastic, crisp, smooth, and detailed for what seems to be miles off into the distance in some cases. Unfortunately, that drooling ends when you discover that the first panoramic shot of a given area is all that there is to see. Very few areas in the game seem lively and fresh, and the vast majority of the game is completely uninspired. The setting becomes boring fast, as many areas are recycled and offer nothing more than a major set piece to gawk at followed by a lot of filler.
I will admit that there are a few areas that look fantastic. Snowfields have never looked better, horizon shots can be breathtaking (but only in one area of the game), and there are three particular areas during the endgame that caught my eye as being well crafted or well imagined. The character models are done quite well, too, and if you can fight the camera and win, there are some good still shots that compare to something you would see out of Advent Children. There is also little question that the Crystal Tools engine works well, as the in-game scenes are obscenely close in quality to the rendered ones. The menu screens are also a pleasure to look at, with a clean interface and the appropriate, integrated use of "shinies".
That said, a couple of hours into the game and the graphics didn't seem all that impressive. There were far too many things that reminded me of an overpolished PS2 game rather than something a PS3 should be putting out. Some area effects felt out of place. Enemy design is extremely limited in scope, didn't impress me, and looked cheap at times. Some spells look terrific when casted, and others are underwhelming. The game camera does a terrific job lining up shots, but only if you're moving in a relatively straight line. Otherwise, it can be a pain to lasso the viewpoint to point to the things you want to look at, and not only that, it's slow and cumbersome.
Squeenix did, however, do a terrific job on load times. Except in between major areas of the game, there are rarely, if any, load screens or noticeable wait times. Those hoping for a zero transition field-to-battle style will only be disappointed for a few battles, because even though the transition remains, it's so quick that it doesn't make a difference.
I admit, I just heaped a lot of praise amidst the complaints, but I'm not finished yet.
Musically, I wouldn't rate Final Fantasy XIII as complete garbage, but it's close considering what we expect from the series. Every single track in this game is forgettable filler music, and that is not an exaggeration. The music is done well for what it is, but no track stands out. The boss music at its most intense it still below the most ho-hum of the Final Fantasy XII boss tracks. In fact, if you were to package together the most boring tracks from the entirety of the series, they would still sound better than anything Final Fantasy XIII has to offer. Music has always been a hallmark of the series, but this title was a serious miscue. Also, there's none of the Final Fantasy fanfares. You can forget the victory theme. If they are in the game, I didn't find them, and I did quite a few sidequests.
Finally, the voice acting is really hit and miss. While Sazh, Snow, and Fang are perfectly fine, your other three party members are only given a voice to annoy you. You will want to bitch-slap Hope several times throughout the game, and Lightning is barely passable. Vanille is another story. I always joke that the voice for FFX's Yuna sounded like a sniveling whelp that was, in all probability, "enjoying herself" in the recording booth. Vanille is ten times more suspect of this, and on top of that, she never decides on an accent during the entire game. She also sounds completely psychotic.
I've already commented about the battle system fully in a previous post if you're looking for the complete rundown, but to sum it up, it's terrible. Some people will love it because it streamlines the entire battle process, and for those players, it may be a great thing that that attracts the non-RPG gamer. It does this by trivializing everything you've ever done in an RPG before this game. Many reviewers claimed that it broke up the monotony of the grind, but I found that it had the opposite effect, encouraging the player to get bored with pressing X repeatedly or switching between the same routine "paradigms" over and over again. Grinding is never fun, but this game sucks the life out of you when you do it.
Just to make my point clear, I'll just relay the point my friend made while watching me fight a series of endgame battles. I was walking down a street filled with baddies, and it was clear that I had three unavoidable fights on my hands. I walked into the first fight, then got up and went into the kitchen to make myself some food. In battle, you fight with "paradigms", which are preset party configurations that you choose based on what roles the party members are capable of taking. While in the kitchen, I fought an entire battle without even hearing what was going on by simply going through the laughable routine of pressing the same buttons over and over again and switching paradigms after a set amount of time went by. I turned the corner when I thought the battle would be over, walked into the next battle, and did the same thing again. Then again. When I returned, my friend had decided that something was completely wrong with this battle system, since I wasn't exactly fighting against little peons. It's that bad.
Finally, there's the story. For all of those concerns that the game is too linear, then you'll be unhappy to know that no matter what the big boys tell you, all of the concerns are absolutely correct. For the first 20-30 hours of the game, you literally walk a straight and narrow road until you reach a point where the game opens up to you. I use the term "opens up" loosely, because there's nothing for you to explore. What follows is the exact description of what you open up:
You land in a clearing that connects to a path. That path has one sidepath, but otherwise leads to one giant grassy field that you're expected to do half of your sidequests in. You have three paths you may take from there. One VERY short path leads to a small lake with chocobos. The second path is relatively short, linear path that leads you to the site where you complete whatever sidequests are left over after you've cleared everything else. The third path takes you in, you guessed it, a straight line forward until the end of the game. That's it.
Once again, I have to write down a reminder that this is not an exaggeration. The game doesn't open up. There are no sidequests, only monster hunts. The lack of towns didn't bother me. The lack of a game world does. There just isn't one. If someone told you that you would be spending half of your game doing windsprints back and forth across Hyrule Field, you probably wouldn't be interested, but that's exactly what happens in Final Fantasy XIII.
With all of that wasted space in between, you would expect the linear parts to be absolutely epic, worthy of every kind of praise there is. Sadly, the plot is an elaborate, ill written joke. You will hear the lines "I swore that I would....", "I promised that I would...", and "I made a promise...." a million times. You will hear every cliche in the book. The plot itself doesn't make any sense and the characters say things that make even less sense. Some of the things are downright MST3K material waiting to happen.
Tale Lightning, for instance, who after torching dozens of military troopers and monsters with the power of lightning magic, after being branded by a godlike being with a tattoo and superpowers, and after fighting Odin and taming him to fight and cast magic for her....she calls out magic as "mumbo jumbo".
That's just one example, but there are at least a hundred more. What's more, the characters are all forced to run away after the opening sequence, and before anybody knows what exactly is going on, they have all decided that they are going to save the world. Together. Only not together, because they immediately argue and split up, and then they continue to have dialogue that explains how have no idea what options they have in the first place or what their ultimate goal is. When you're spouting off lines about saving the world before you even realize that the world actually needs saving, then you have a serious writing problem on your hands. The ending takes all of these problems with the writing and cliches and manages to break the expectations of mediocrity.
It's actually hard to make a concrete statement about why the story sucks. There's just too many things. This may seem like prattling off....but, the story is the worst in the series, and that's saying something when VIII and X are floating around out there. The ultimate bad guy is the weakest the series has ever had, and actually left me wishing for the days of Judges, Sin, and sorceresses. The cast is arguably the weakest one ever assembled. Motivations for half of the party are very unclear, character development is kept to a minimum, and the exact second each one of them hits their stride they begin to spout nothing but cliches. The "crowning moment of badass" in the game is something I actually laughed out loud about. Every idea in the story seems as if it was literally picked up from a pile of ideas sitting on a desk somewhere and included in the game at random without any rhyme or reason. Also, I looked online to see if I was missing requirements for a second ending, because I simply couldn't believe that the actual ending would be that bad.
Overall, the game hits some high points in its presentation and is specifically meant for those looking for a shiny experience for their HDTV's. There are some amazing pictures to be seen and everything is right about this game when it comes to the overall speed and fluidness of the experience, but it's empty, boring, underwhelming, and not very captivating of a place. The music is the worst in the series by a long shot, the story is as bad, and it's hard to like most of the characters. The battle system introduces a great way of approaching fast paced, real time combat that could be emulated in the future provided that someone takes the time to fix the other 90% of this terrible system. It is the opposite of epic, and by the time the game ends, you will wonder why the game bothered to carry the Final Fantasy name in the first place. Maybe I wouldn't be so harsh if it just had a different name, but there are expectations. Squeenix didn't bother to step up and meet any of them outside of updating the menu system and increasing their screen resolution.
If you're new to the Final Fantasy series, have at it, but realize that this has nothing to do with the games we enjoy. If you're one of those hoping that this game will save the series in any way, sorry, but this will have you reaching for the shovel to bury your nostalgic dreams with. We've gone from three epic games with Kain, Shinra, and Kefka to Tidus' beach paradise, Balamb Garden 90210, and now this. Can we stop putting the series on a pedestal now? It doesn't deserve it anymore.
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