Final Fantasy XIII Review

When it comes to Final Fantasy XIII, everyone has an opinion. Those opinions usually begin with “I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy...” and end with “...but this game is a complete piece of shit.” Well I have an opinion about Final Fantasy Thirteen, and it includes neither of those phrases because it turns out I actually really liked the game.

Callbacks!

A while back (actually exactly a year ago: weird) I reviewed Final Fantasy Twelve and proclaimed that I didn’t “get” Final Fantasy. I don’t think that’s changed. I probably still don’t get it. But perhaps Final Fantasy has started getting me. I honestly expected myself to absolutely hate the shit out of Final Fantasy XIII. I mean, all I had ever heard about the game was that it was boring, a straight line, and had an incomprehensible plot. To the world it was a cash-grab where Squeenix watered down its works for the masses. Everyone told me it was an insult to video games and the people who played them. Everyone told me it brutally murdered and raped years of fine RPG tradition then spit on their graves, and that the art of the JRPG was truly dead now that a series so heralded as Final Fantasy had sold out to the casuals. Everyone told me that Final Fantasy XIII was a Bad Game.

Everyone lied.

Sean Games: The Best of the Worst

Let's be honest, we all make some pretty poor purchasing decisions from time to time. I remember saving for months - mowing lawns, pulling weeds, and babysitting spoiled brats that watched Tom and Jerry and ruined Lego creations - just to buy Scooby-Doo Mystery for the SNES. It was a poorly designed licensed game that controlled like garbage, had around three songs and four levels. I liked Scooby-Doo and was also eight, not exactly in the prime of my consumer decision making abilities.

Now imagine if all the purchases you made were bad decisions. Imagine seeing a deal on marked down video games, twenty dollars each say, and going ahead and buying five at a time. You will probably never play them, and you probably won't enjoy the ones you do. Sooner or later you can't even remember what a good game feels like. Everything you buy, all the games you play begin to oversaturate the thought-space you've set aside for video games until all your experiences become simple manipulation of the neurons in your brain. Can you imagine never getting that taste - that taste of bland, of average, of the poorly programmed and the poorly designed, of the lazy - out of your mouth? Can you imagine living in the boring haze of the cheap, picking the bones of the dying for every tiny achievement and every scant five minutes of enjoyment? Can you imagine being my friend, Sean?

You see, Sean's life is full of the poor purchasing decisions the rest of us have come to regret. I figure he just has no sense of regret, but the point is that Sean no longer has any concept of what a good video game is, which is strange because he owns more video games that almost everyone I know. He just happens to be a frightening statistical anomaly in that nearly all of them are bad. So I was not expecting much when I stole a few games from him while staying at his apartment in Houston during Spring Break.

I was still disappointed.

Darksiders

"How's this... Darksiders?" I say, holding up the case so my friend Shawn can see. We're sitting in Sean's apartment (yes that gets confusing), on the floor, rifling through a pile of his games that we've shoved off a swiveling case next to his TV.

"Meh." Shawn replies. The sun is setting and we're all ready to leave, facing an hour and a half drive back to College Station to drop me off then a 12 hour drive to El Paso for everyone else. It's a weird twilight that's sort of dark but the pools of light burned into the rug eliminates the necessity for ceiling lights, so everything is darker than it should be. All my other friends - including Sean - stand around us and impatiently wait for us to finish our thievery.  

"I like the sound of that. What's it about?"

"It's metal Zelda."

And so it was.