Yeah, I know that this is pretty late, but I was dedicated to at least FINISHING the game before I reviewed it and, as Yahtzee alluded to, the bloody thing is fucking long as hell. That being said, I've gotten all the way up to the very end of the game and have hit a brick wall and if I don't write this review now, I probably never will. So, without further ado--Final Fantasy XIII--The Fal'Cie Caper!
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Final Fantasy XIII is a stunningly beautiful game. It has great performances in its voice actors, its characters showcase incredible depth and development, there's ample deconstructions of many cliches and though its story is rather bland, its focus on its characters provides a link through which the confusing narrative can be digested. That out of the way, the rest of the game is shit.
I went into this game with low, but educated expectations. Yes, the game is slow. Yes, the game is linear. It takes half the game before you can actually start playing the game freely, and you have very little options for customization or free-roaming, non-linear exploration until this legendary "golden point" where the game opens up. Going into the game WITH that mindset, I came to several conclusions.
One, I like the approach that Squeenix has taken in making this game. There's a lovely undercurrent of "if it doesn't work, chuck it" that seems to have been the core philosophy behind the game's development. EVERYTHING that is absolutely unnecessary--NPC conversations, fetch quests, optional dungeons, physical shops, branching paths, exploration, treasure hunting--EVERYTHING that is not important to the progression of the plot has been removed, leaving two things: the battle system and the story. That is what the game is selling itself on--that is the ONLY thing the game offers you...and in that regard, the game is definitively unremarkable.
The battle system reveals itself piecemeal, not fully delivering its range of features until, oh, I'd say about 7 hours in. This is a bad idea, of course, since you are utterly and totally limited to pressing one button and winning every fight until this point. Once the battle system is graciously given to you, it plays out like speed rock-paper-scissors. You have a variety of jobs that your different characters can learn, and you win battles by switching between combinations of these jobs in order to respond to different threats--full offensive combos for smaller encounters, buff and debuffs for larger ones, and boss fights often require some degree of unique combinations in order to claim victory. The "speed" part comes from the INCREDIBLY fast nature of these fights--your input has to be nigh-split-second, and the system helps you in this regard by automatically lining up your abilities depending on which class your leader character is.
And that's it. That's all there is. Customization is something of a joke. You get a bare-bones expy of FFX's Sphere Grid, upon which you hold down X until you are stronger. There's nothing more to it than that--there's no limit to the amount of abilities any one job can get, exp is shared by all party members, and the ONLY diversity to the system is occasionally needing to push the stick in a certain direction while you hold down X. Your characters are fairly diverse at first, each only having access to three different jobs, meaning that you have to pay attention to who you have in your par--oh wait no you don't, because you don't get to control who is in your party for over 25 hours of gameplay. So, nevermind, instead you just get to control very specific party combinations in order to get a taste of what is to come.
And that's the problem on a whole. The entire FIRST HALF of the game is a tutorial, building up to this "legendary" moment where you'll be given a magical ticket that makes the game fun. And trust me, you'll be BEGGING for that ticket, because the game isn't fun. Oh, you'll convince yourself it is. I sure did. I convinced myself that walking down a narrow corridor (with wildly different wallpaper) for 25 hours fighting identical encounters and listening to a bunch of whiny cunts prattle on about terminology and technobabble that has little-to-no relevance to either my life or the life of any well-rounded human being was not only fun, but innovative. And it's only barely the latter, and it's certainly not the former, because the game hinges upon this notion that the "golden" ticket-inducing moment will redeem the first half of the game and make everything better.
IT DOESN'T.
It doesn't just fail to vindicate everything you've been doing for most of the game, it actually powerfully kicks you in the balls and laughs at you. First off, the game doesn't STOP being forcibly linear. The straight paths get a little more winding, with more side paths ending in dead ends or unbeatable enemy encounters. But that's all. There is ONE--count it, ONE--area that is NOT a linear corridor. It is one large, unremarkable grassy plain filled withe enemies who will kill you. Easily. And the game's idea of "opening up" its gameplay and story is to give you a series of incredibly dull bounty quests where you seek out some random monster and kill them, so you can unlock another bounty quest where you kill some random monster and unlock another bounty quest and another bounty quest and another and another and if you don't do it you LOSE.
Why? Because not completing these OPTIONAL quests as soon as you get them means you don't unlock the waypoint for that area. And if you don't unlock that, ten hours later, you won't be able to go back and fight the optional baddies to power up for the really really hard boss fight. And that sums up the second "half" (more like last third) of the game--incredibly hard random encounters, requiring a MASTERY of the battle system to the point where you know EXACTLY how to beat down your opponents with PRECISELY the right strategy and character set-up and if you do not know EXACTLY which strategy to use, you LOSE. You retry the fight and do it again. And again. Until you win, or find a way to cheat your way through. And every fight becomes this. Every fight is an uphill struggle, where the battle system does nothing but hold you back. You can't control your party members. You can't grind new skills or explore alternate character paths or do anything more than tinker with what you're given. You have no option but to play the game EXACTLY the way the game wants you to play it.
And I take offense to that. I really do. I take offense that, after spending 25-hours being hand-held through a bland, but passable glorified tutorial, I am suddenly kicked in the balls, thrown to the ground, and repeatedly mocked for my inept ability to NOT DO ANYTHING. The game ties one hand behind my back and expects me to last 9 rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, and I can't lose and go to the gym and learn a new fighting technique to crush him. I can only try to punch him in the face, but his face is made out of diamonds and my fist is made out of cream.
You may have noticed that I'm not talking much about the story. That's because this is a video GAME. I take offense with people who tell me "well, the story's more important anyway". I want to slap them in the face because that is WRONG. In this game, the things I do--the things that I the player have control over--are MEANINGLESS. I don't have any decisions to make, I can't influence what people will do one way or the other...even if I win a fight, that doesn't neccessarily mean I win it, because maybe the enemy generated a brand new fucking health bar and fights me again five seconds later. Gee, THANKS FFXIII. Thanks for reminding me that I have no stake whatsoever in your goddamn pretentious sci-fi epic about bullshit I don't care about. I'll just read the BOOK you provided with your GAME so that I can better understand the goddamn MOVIES.
This isn't a game. It isn't. It doesn't care about being played. The battle system is an afterthought to the story. The character customization is an afterthought to the battlesystem. The "game" is an afterthought to everything else. I played this game on the basis that it gets magically GOOD after the halfway point. I love Final Fantasy. I've played every game. I owed it to the franchise to give this a shot. And it fails. It fails on every level that matters. It fails as a game, it fails as an RPG. It provides me nothing--all this game has to sell me on it is the battle system, which I hate, and the story, which sucks. The game has good points--its characters are among the best the franchise has spat out, even if it takes hours and hours for them to become anywhere nearly bearable, and the graphics are literally the best I've ever seen.
But seriously...this isn't the PS1-era. This isn't a game where we can blame anything than conscious choice for not allowing we, the players, from having control over a cutscene. This game doesn't WANT me to play it, and when it begrudgingly allows me to play it, it makes it very clear that I shouldn't be. For the first time, I found myself putting the controller down and not ever wanting to pick it up again. Why not? I'd rather watch the game anyway. If they'd released FFXIII as just a movie, I think everyone would have been happier. As it stands, fuck FFXIII, fuck its linear corridors, fuck its obnoxiously overblown tutorial, fuck its stupid terminology, fuck its datalogs, and fuck its disregard for the concept of FUN. I'm going to go watch paint dry while jerking off with a piece of sandpaper, because THAT would at least be an activity that involves me more than FFXIII ever does.
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Final Fantasy XIII is a stunningly beautiful game. It has great performances in its voice actors, its characters showcase incredible depth and development, there's ample deconstructions of many cliches and though its story is rather bland, its focus on its characters provides a link through which the confusing narrative can be digested. That out of the way, the rest of the game is shit.
I went into this game with low, but educated expectations. Yes, the game is slow. Yes, the game is linear. It takes half the game before you can actually start playing the game freely, and you have very little options for customization or free-roaming, non-linear exploration until this legendary "golden point" where the game opens up. Going into the game WITH that mindset, I came to several conclusions.
One, I like the approach that Squeenix has taken in making this game. There's a lovely undercurrent of "if it doesn't work, chuck it" that seems to have been the core philosophy behind the game's development. EVERYTHING that is absolutely unnecessary--NPC conversations, fetch quests, optional dungeons, physical shops, branching paths, exploration, treasure hunting--EVERYTHING that is not important to the progression of the plot has been removed, leaving two things: the battle system and the story. That is what the game is selling itself on--that is the ONLY thing the game offers you...and in that regard, the game is definitively unremarkable.
The battle system reveals itself piecemeal, not fully delivering its range of features until, oh, I'd say about 7 hours in. This is a bad idea, of course, since you are utterly and totally limited to pressing one button and winning every fight until this point. Once the battle system is graciously given to you, it plays out like speed rock-paper-scissors. You have a variety of jobs that your different characters can learn, and you win battles by switching between combinations of these jobs in order to respond to different threats--full offensive combos for smaller encounters, buff and debuffs for larger ones, and boss fights often require some degree of unique combinations in order to claim victory. The "speed" part comes from the INCREDIBLY fast nature of these fights--your input has to be nigh-split-second, and the system helps you in this regard by automatically lining up your abilities depending on which class your leader character is.
And that's it. That's all there is. Customization is something of a joke. You get a bare-bones expy of FFX's Sphere Grid, upon which you hold down X until you are stronger. There's nothing more to it than that--there's no limit to the amount of abilities any one job can get, exp is shared by all party members, and the ONLY diversity to the system is occasionally needing to push the stick in a certain direction while you hold down X. Your characters are fairly diverse at first, each only having access to three different jobs, meaning that you have to pay attention to who you have in your par--oh wait no you don't, because you don't get to control who is in your party for over 25 hours of gameplay. So, nevermind, instead you just get to control very specific party combinations in order to get a taste of what is to come.
And that's the problem on a whole. The entire FIRST HALF of the game is a tutorial, building up to this "legendary" moment where you'll be given a magical ticket that makes the game fun. And trust me, you'll be BEGGING for that ticket, because the game isn't fun. Oh, you'll convince yourself it is. I sure did. I convinced myself that walking down a narrow corridor (with wildly different wallpaper) for 25 hours fighting identical encounters and listening to a bunch of whiny cunts prattle on about terminology and technobabble that has little-to-no relevance to either my life or the life of any well-rounded human being was not only fun, but innovative. And it's only barely the latter, and it's certainly not the former, because the game hinges upon this notion that the "golden" ticket-inducing moment will redeem the first half of the game and make everything better.
IT DOESN'T.
It doesn't just fail to vindicate everything you've been doing for most of the game, it actually powerfully kicks you in the balls and laughs at you. First off, the game doesn't STOP being forcibly linear. The straight paths get a little more winding, with more side paths ending in dead ends or unbeatable enemy encounters. But that's all. There is ONE--count it, ONE--area that is NOT a linear corridor. It is one large, unremarkable grassy plain filled withe enemies who will kill you. Easily. And the game's idea of "opening up" its gameplay and story is to give you a series of incredibly dull bounty quests where you seek out some random monster and kill them, so you can unlock another bounty quest where you kill some random monster and unlock another bounty quest and another bounty quest and another and another and if you don't do it you LOSE.
Why? Because not completing these OPTIONAL quests as soon as you get them means you don't unlock the waypoint for that area. And if you don't unlock that, ten hours later, you won't be able to go back and fight the optional baddies to power up for the really really hard boss fight. And that sums up the second "half" (more like last third) of the game--incredibly hard random encounters, requiring a MASTERY of the battle system to the point where you know EXACTLY how to beat down your opponents with PRECISELY the right strategy and character set-up and if you do not know EXACTLY which strategy to use, you LOSE. You retry the fight and do it again. And again. Until you win, or find a way to cheat your way through. And every fight becomes this. Every fight is an uphill struggle, where the battle system does nothing but hold you back. You can't control your party members. You can't grind new skills or explore alternate character paths or do anything more than tinker with what you're given. You have no option but to play the game EXACTLY the way the game wants you to play it.
And I take offense to that. I really do. I take offense that, after spending 25-hours being hand-held through a bland, but passable glorified tutorial, I am suddenly kicked in the balls, thrown to the ground, and repeatedly mocked for my inept ability to NOT DO ANYTHING. The game ties one hand behind my back and expects me to last 9 rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, and I can't lose and go to the gym and learn a new fighting technique to crush him. I can only try to punch him in the face, but his face is made out of diamonds and my fist is made out of cream.
You may have noticed that I'm not talking much about the story. That's because this is a video GAME. I take offense with people who tell me "well, the story's more important anyway". I want to slap them in the face because that is WRONG. In this game, the things I do--the things that I the player have control over--are MEANINGLESS. I don't have any decisions to make, I can't influence what people will do one way or the other...even if I win a fight, that doesn't neccessarily mean I win it, because maybe the enemy generated a brand new fucking health bar and fights me again five seconds later. Gee, THANKS FFXIII. Thanks for reminding me that I have no stake whatsoever in your goddamn pretentious sci-fi epic about bullshit I don't care about. I'll just read the BOOK you provided with your GAME so that I can better understand the goddamn MOVIES.
This isn't a game. It isn't. It doesn't care about being played. The battle system is an afterthought to the story. The character customization is an afterthought to the battlesystem. The "game" is an afterthought to everything else. I played this game on the basis that it gets magically GOOD after the halfway point. I love Final Fantasy. I've played every game. I owed it to the franchise to give this a shot. And it fails. It fails on every level that matters. It fails as a game, it fails as an RPG. It provides me nothing--all this game has to sell me on it is the battle system, which I hate, and the story, which sucks. The game has good points--its characters are among the best the franchise has spat out, even if it takes hours and hours for them to become anywhere nearly bearable, and the graphics are literally the best I've ever seen.
But seriously...this isn't the PS1-era. This isn't a game where we can blame anything than conscious choice for not allowing we, the players, from having control over a cutscene. This game doesn't WANT me to play it, and when it begrudgingly allows me to play it, it makes it very clear that I shouldn't be. For the first time, I found myself putting the controller down and not ever wanting to pick it up again. Why not? I'd rather watch the game anyway. If they'd released FFXIII as just a movie, I think everyone would have been happier. As it stands, fuck FFXIII, fuck its linear corridors, fuck its obnoxiously overblown tutorial, fuck its stupid terminology, fuck its datalogs, and fuck its disregard for the concept of FUN. I'm going to go watch paint dry while jerking off with a piece of sandpaper, because THAT would at least be an activity that involves me more than FFXIII ever does.
