Review: Final Fantasy XIII

To some, 13 is an unlucky number, and I wonder if that holds true in Japan as well. Its industry is in the middle of a crisis in that it doesn’t know how to improve, how to change and how to get back out there as a powerhouse for RPG’s. The likes of Fallout 3 and Mass Effect have created a stir; suddenly the western RPG is king and Japan has been ousted, left a pauper on the street dreaming of being king once again.

Final Fantasy XIII is not going to change Japan’s position any time soon though. By all intents it’s one of the most linear, conservative J-RPG’s from Square Enix since Final Fantasy X. Gone is the open world and combat from XII, replaced instead by familiar action combat, summons and long cut scenes that we all know and love. It starts off rather unpolished and to the player that has been a constant fan of the Final Fantasy series it’s rather insulting. You effectively run down a linear corridor, enter combat scenarios, auto attack, win, rinse and repeat. There are no tactics to the game for an exceedingly large amount of time, just constant repetition and running from A to Z. If a game were to be based on the sum of its beginning, FFXIII would earn itself a very poor score.

It’s only till a good part into the game that things start to open up, and by this time you’ve either gave up bored or you’re hooked enough that you’ll continue. You start to gain more combat options, the story starts to make a bit more sense and the characters start to show some form of human emotion. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s almost as if Square Enix has gave up trying to do anything remarkably different and has just referred to the big old book of Japanese games design.

The story is one of complexity and confusing terms. The world is split between Cocoon and Pulse – Cocoon a large dyson sphere like object that exists above the even larger world of Pulse – and each world has machine like gods known as Fal’cie. The Fal’cie choose L’cie to perform tasks for the Fal’cie’s goals, but do not tell the L’cie what these goals are, preferring instead to show it through dream visions. The L’cie have to perform these goals, if they don’t they become monsters called C’ieth. Performing the goal though results in them turning into crystals, so either way they’re doomed.

If you followed all that you’re doing well, and It should be noted that this storyline comes on rather thick throughout the entire game. You’re literally thrown into these confusing terms right at the beginning and it almost feels like you need a dictionary to cope. Ironically enough Square presents said dictionary as a Datalog within your options screen to tell you all about what’s happening. Not unlike the Codex from Mass Effect, except Enix seems to have missed the point that Mass Effect also tells the story through its characters rather than just confusing you with pseudo-french terms.

Speaking of characters, they’re a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the downright horrible. Lightning is a typical generic main character; broodish, cold, calculating, but opens up like a flower later on in the game. Snow is ridicolously westernised and although his character can be grating at the beginning you do begin to see rather early on why his personality is like that. Sazh is probably the best character as he seems to be a bit more level headed than the rest. Vanille will likely give you diabetes and she’s unable to keep the same accent going for anything longer than 5 seconds. I believe the voice actor is Australian, but in the game her voice jumps from Australian to British to American and back again! It’s madness. Meanwhile Hope I have absolutely no love for as I do not see the neccessity of adding child characters in games that Japan does. Fang is fairly interesting as a sort of strong woman but that’s it.

As a group they balance each other out, but it takes a long time before you actually have them all in a group and are able to dictate parties. For most of the game you play a variety of different party setups that are forced to you whether you like them or not. You’ll find yourself playing Sazh & Vanille (Chocolate Diabetes!), Hope & Lightning (Emo & Grumpy) and for a large part of the game you don’t control Snow at all, resulting in a huge stack of points levelling when you finally do get to play him again.

There is a reason however for these particular setups early in the game. Combat is akin to that of Final Fantasy X-2′s concepts made a bit more clearer. Paradigm shifts dictate what you want each character to do; this ranges from healing abilities, to tanking, to buffing. Though it starts off confusing you gradually get the hang of it very quickly, perhaps in part because you only really control the actions of one character. Yes, FFXIII has opted to streamline everything to the point that the AI dictates what sort of spell, attacking or healing methods your other party members do if they’re not the leader. This at first can seem quite good as it saves you having to decide options and just pushes you right into the action, but later one you might find yourself really wishing that you could tell a buffing character to cast Shield first rather than something that’s not of any use for the battle ahead. Really, the AI copes not because it’s competant but because the battles are so streamlined they’re dull and dumb. In later battles you can dictate what abilities you want to cast, but you’ll quickly give in and find yourself just using auto attack over and over.

Summons are interesting but again refer back to older Final Fantasies. Any summon of an Eidolon you perform will fight along with you until you use “Gestalt” mode. Gestalt mode effectively acts as a lengthy limit break where you choose particular button moves to perform attacking actions, before ending in a large summon attack. Though it’s nice to see summoning again and the different Eidolons can be pretty impressive, you’ll gradually find yourself not bothering to use them due to the cost of doing so. That and they gradually become weak compared to just constant paradigm shifting and attacking.

Upgrading equipment comes in the form of collecting parts and materials from battles and using it to level up your weapon. A pity then that it has to be the most complicated upgrading system ever developed for a Final Fantasy game. Glancing over the strategy guide it still doesn’t make full sense, and what’s more there’s little point performing upgrades until the end sections of the game.

It’s only until around about the end of the game that you actually get to wander about on an open world, and when you do it’s rather a dissapointment. You get a field to play with, not unlike the field from the Calm Lands in Final Fantasy X. You can grind, perform small side missions and wander about, but you’ll quickly find yourself getting bored and just wanting to move on to the end of the game.

It’s around here I should probably talk about the graphics. The version played was on the Xbox 360, and currently LMB doesn’t have the finance to do techno stuff to compare it with the PS3. Going by the Digital Foundry article at Eurogamer you can notice a difference, but is it noticable when played at home? The answer is no, or rather no as long as you don’t have two TV’s sitting next to each other with one playing the PS3 and one playing the Xbox 360 versions. I wouldn’t sweat about choosing a version, and although articles will immediately point to the Playstation 3 because that’s what FFXIII was made for, i’m inclined to say you should pick up the 360 version as well because multi platform is good in todays industry. The more multi platform the better for all of us and our wallets!

Final Fantasy XIII feels good, but it’s not spectacular. It starts off far too rough and convulated. It throws ridicolous words at you fairly quickly and without much explanation unless you look at the datalog. Its insistence on streamlining everything has not made the game good but has simply made it easier to play. FFXIII is not a revolution in any way for the Japanese games industry, but sadly the Square Enix will think they’ve done a good job based on high sales. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s certainly worth picking up if you’re a fan of the series, but as Final Fantasy games go XIII is unremarkable compared the glory days of the FF series. Whether this is the death knell for the J-RPG remains to be seen.

7/10

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