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.

LIAR.

The game started. On a train. With typical Final Fantasy bravado, we kick off with a bang. KUNG FU FIGHTS AND AERIAL MANEUVERS. EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIGHTS. FLIPPY TRICKS AND MADE UP WORDS. I sigh. Soon, I know, the honeymoon will be over. The prologue’s momentum will peter off and I’ll get the linear slog that I condemned myself to against the video game community’s cautioning. Sure enough after only an hour or two... it didn’t. A few more hours and it still didn’t happen. I was practically flinching with each new development. When does the bad stuff start, I would ask myself. When does this begin to suck? And you know what? It (almost) never did.

Now, I’m very much aware that it says Final Fantasy XIII Review up there in big words, but really this review is A Tale of Two JRPGs, the other being Tales of Vesperia. Many of the reasons I love Final Fantasy XIII are the things it omitted from the JRPG norm; things that are in full bloom in Vesperia. Vesperia is the antithesis to FF13 in just about every conceivable way. It is “open”, it has a traditional levelling system, and it is a fucking slog. The illusory open world is really just so the developers can create strict time frames for sidequests that would be impossible to discover and complete without a guide. Really progressing in the plot means sifting through logs, heading to the last place mentioned, and mashing A around anyone who looks like they have an opinion. A twenty minute cutscene commences and we are subjected to the horribly cliche ridden characters who will either make wacky jabs at each other with the same jokes that will be present for the whole game, or they will opine about racism or duty or other such bullshit. If you know what you’re doing, someone will be wearing a silly costume and the possibility of instant brain-death will be just the slightest bit more remote.

Now you’re doing it right.

Final Fantasy 13 heralds the wondrous occasion when Japanese developers learned that sometimes less is more. I know! It’s crazy! It’s absolutely fucking insane. Whenever a cutscene would start I’d grab a drink and be surprised when the scene would end before the cup reached my lips. The main character, Lightning, will enter a scene and whoever is with her will say something like “What do we do now?” and Lightning will say something like “We keep going.” That’s it! That is indicative of the entire game right there. The people that made this game didn’t want you to stop playing their game for twenty minutes while the characters make a fool of themselves or bash you over the head with whatever “theme” the game has decided to feature. No, they wanted you to KEEP FUCKING GOING.

This is the primary thrust of Final Fantasy 13, and it is the reason I love it so much. KEEP FUCKING GOING. Instead of hours of faffing about discussing the fate of the world and righteousness of our mission, you instead get to play the fucking game. In fact, I’m pretty sure that until the end cutscene, none of the scenes are longer than seven minutes. Can you fucking believe this?

The music isn’t bad either! Although it can succumb to that modern trap of orchestral wankery, a few tracks are actually quite soulful, set the tone well, and even pretty fuckin’ catchy. And of course I need to mention chocobos. Dear god are there chocobos. They’re not central to the plot or anything, but they’re adorable and I just want to be their best friend.

Anyways, the plot of the game can reach pretty far but it boils down to the main cast being branded by a demigod type being that is labelled as evil by The Man. Thus, they are pursued by the military while working through their mental baggage and trying to decide whether or not to fulfill their Focus (big F), a vague goal given to them by the aforementioned demigod. It’s under this premise that you have to KEEP FUCKING GOING. When I heard about FF13’s linear nature, I dismissed it as a lazy design ethos but it makes sense in the narrative and makes the flow of the game remarkably focused (ha!). 

Faffery < 0

Vesperia, on the other hand, is content with wriggling over every little bump on the great road of Plot. A character will mention something offhand and it will become the primary agenda for the next three hours. The same thing happened in Eternal Sonata, which played host to repulsively long diatribes and criminally long faffery. I mean, this is a game comprised of eight chapters, where only maybe three of them pertain to the main plot. Final Fantasy XIII responds to this by putting pedal to metal and refusing to relent until a good 30 hours in.

Final Fantasy 13 is then less about linearity and more about velocity. KEEP FUCKING GOING bleeds through the plot and into the mechanics. You won’t be consulting a guide to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you won’t be delaying the plot for hours because you’re afraid you missed something. Instead, you will KEEP- yeah you know how it goes. This philosophy is present even in the battle system, which is honestly one of most fun I’ve experienced in an RPG.

First, I want to say that whoever came up with the battle system is a genius. Wait, scratch that, whoever programmed the battle system is a genius. You see, it’s built upon these six basic roles: attack, magic, defend, heal, buff, and debuff. Attack is the obvious physical damage, but magic is needed to stagger enemies, which puts them in a vulnerable state. Defend draws monsters’ aggro, while also absorbing tons of damage, and the other three should be fairly obvious. Once a character’s role is decided, they do their thing automatically and you only need to choose Auto-what-have-you to do your thing. But! Within this very basic system there are a number of extremely cool flourishes and tricks of timing. I’ve never been a huge fan of the ATB system, but here it all just clicks. Your characters get a few bars (three at first) and the actions they perform can take one or more bars. The really cool stuff begins when you are told that you can perform actions before the bar is completely full by hitting the Y button (or Triangle I suppose). Every battle then takes on a sort of tempo. You have to choose between performing many rapid fire actions or a few actions immediately. Which SOUNDS pretty simple, but you then have to take into account the way your character moves with the actions queued up, when your teammates will act, how necessary your intervention is, etc.

Come at me bro.

For instance, after a few battles you begin to notice that Lightning does a little backflip after she finishes her attacks. So you can totally judge when the monster you’re fighting is going to attack, finish Lightning’s turn at the right time, and watch as she backflips away from the monster to dodge. Or you can start a battle by setting someone to defend, and having the other two characters do magic attacks because a character performing magic attacks slowly walks backwards from the center of a battle, once your characters are dispersed, you can flip over into another paradigm or just wait out what you know to be a painful area-of-effect attack.

I haven’t even started on the paradigms, have I? As I said before, the roles are the basis of the system, and the paradigms are a pre-set arrangement of these roles. You’re only allowed about seven pre-sets. Which is no problem for earlier battles, but later on you really have to account for some specific situations. Like some monsters that absolutely need to be staggered to be killed, otherwise you can spend forever wailing away and doing negligible damage. So you have to place a focus on magic attacks for your paradigms. Some enemies have a constant high damage output, so you can either focus on healers or allocate some time to defense buffs. And then some enemies can be almost entirely stunlocked with debuffs because they always try to heal them, resulting in a focus on that class.

The closest thing Vesperia has to that sort of strategy is combo linking chains. Which basically means, through trial and error, find out which combos either do the most damage or have the most hits. This comes down to whether your abilities are basic or elemental. You can use a basic and an elemental right after another without delay, but watch out! Some enemies have elemental immunities!

I’m already snoring.

More like SNAILS of Vesperia

Final Fantasy 13 makes battles much more engaging by creating truly life and death situations. Success can hinge on the slightest maneuver at times, and there’s a big risk versus reward system. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a character because you can’t afford to switch paradigms (but it’s cool cause that character still gains experience, it never made sense to me (and infuriated me) that dead characters never gained experience, isn’t dying an experience?). You have to choose between a risky strategy that finishes quickly, or a safe strategy that takes forever, and of course you want to wrap these battles up quick because a speedy battle means a good rating, which means a higher chance of drops. These drops dumped into weapons to level them up and increase their stats, which makes up the other half of the levelling scheme.

The point I’m trying to make here is that, there’s a lot more to this battle system than meets the eye, and I think a lot more people would have realized this had they KEPT FUCKING GOING. Most RPGs have this reliance on levels and statistics, but FF13 is one of those rare gems where a good strategy can just about trounce everything else. In fact, there are only really three stats: Strength, Magic, and HP, so it’s not like you can gain obscene superiority over enemies just by dwelling on a certain area. This probably pissed some people off. In fact I know it did, because the levelling system was one of the main complaints of the game. The video game world cried: WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T GRIND AND POWERLEVEL? Everyone knows that grinding is the best part of any RPG. Everyone knows that wasting time and mashing a single button like it’s your fucking job is just So Much Better than lateral thinking or rewarding strategy. How dare you demand actual strategy, Squeenix!? How dare you make grinding feel like the square-peg-in-round-hole solution that it is!?

No, RPGs are supposed to be mindless affairs obviously. RPGs are supposed to be completely devoid of things like subtlety and symbolism. We need to have everything told to us and explained ad nauseum. We need every situation dragged out and bled dry.

There’s a very neat scene in FF13 where Lightning’s sister Serah gives her a knife for her birthday. Lightning’s only comment on the matter is: “A knife. How practical.” But she says it with this delicious tone of sarcasm that ensures the sentence carries a lot more weight than just text can convey. You see, Serah is there with her boyfriend Snow. Lightning knows what’s up and can see that the gift is just a formality, an offering to soften the blow of whatever is coming next, but what’s cool is THIS IS NEVER FUCKING EXPLICITLY SPELLED OUT.

This scene is also priceless. I’ve rarely seen awkwardness portrayed so well in any medium.

Vesperia would undoubtedly draw that shit out. The scene would surely play out with slow pans on a characters canned animation (each one has like three) as everyone just states and repeats that whoa Lightning knows what’s going on, but Serah and Snow are really sad and why are they sad but Lightning did you know that this gift is a sham and they’re sad but why because Snow and Serah are dating but that isn’t why they’re sad and JESUS CHRIST I GET IT.

Every scene in Vesperia is absolutely bled dry of any form of charisma or subtlety. So it’s no wonder that nobody bats an eye when FF13 begins on A TRAIN, and has summons that are all associated with SPEED. Seriously, car, motorcycle, horse, jaguar; it all complements the style of the game. I swear these things matter. They have to. Things like fate and choice are thrown about pretty sloppily, but it all complements this grand theme of growing up and making your own damn decisions. Nobody picks up the pieces and reads between the lines, dismissing the story as confusing even though there’s a fucking datalog of information that is constantly being updated with pertinent terms and is at your disposal every step of the way.

SYMBOLISM.

This is why when I read all the reviews I feel like I’m playing a completely different game.Then I feel like an asshole because I proclaim that they just didn’t get it. Then I’m not sure what to believe.

Final Fantasy Thirteen came along like a girl I knew through an acquaintance in the back alley of a drinkin’ saloon. I was sitting on the curb, swaying from the other poisonous JRPGs I had consumed when she sat down next to me, bright-eyed and bursting with wit. I’ve heard about her, everyone always talking about how she’s such a bitch or a total ho-bag. But she’s talking with me and we’re having a good time, and soon I notice that I’m swaying closer and closer to her luminous eyes and soft face...

Soon, our foreheads are nearly touching, and she doesn’t pull away.

“Final Fantasy XIII,” I manage, clawing through to sobriety. “I think I love you.”

She blushes but doesn’t pull away. I fancy that she feels the same.

“I’ve... never met a Final Fantasy like you. Hell, I’ve never met an RPG like you.”

And that’s it. We’re off. Apprehension bleeds away and she becomes an inextricable part of my life. There’s no looking back now, no matter how brief our time together was. Maybe eventually the memories aren’t as fond as they used to be, and maybe we both move on to bigger and better things. But the experience remains, and it’ll be there forever.

Okay so now I’m probably alienating my (substantial) gay audience. Just... pretend I was talking about a dude. He was wearing tight leather pants and... I don’t know, a mesh muscle-shirt. Is this what you guys call attractive?

Is this more your speed?

Anyways, I’m belaboring the point that Final Fantasy 13 is not a perfect game. Surprise, I know. But it is a lot better than most people give it credit for, and it means a lot to me for making some of the choices that it did. Sure, the melodrama is laid on a bit thick at times, and yeah the sidequests can be pretty lame (except for chocobos), but it’s worth it simply because every other RPG tries to be this grand meal by candlelight, a lengthy excursion into the darkness of humanity’s collective souls. FF13 is content to be just a brisk lunch in the park, nothing but a simple tale about the expedience and confusion of youth. Youth, just like Final Fantasy 13, is too often fleeting. Some love it, some hate it, but everyone remembers it and yet somehow ends up diminishing its importance.

It isn't perfect, but is easily worth a one out of one.