I think the my days of having the patience to sit through a 40 hour video game are through.
It took me almost 5 months to put in the 45 hours needed to finish Final Fantasy 13, with a lot of it feeling like an obligation to my sometimes misguided principle to always finish what i start. That’s not to say there weren’t some great moments in the experience, but by and large everything the Final Fantasy franchise stands for has become stale.
Final Fantasy 13 tries so very hard to advance the aging Japanese RPG genre and actually does succeed in doing so on some levels. I, for one, am actually glad they got rid of towns in this game. When you boil it down, the only thing towns are good for are a) buying items and equipment and b) fulfilling a required plot/character interaction in order to advance the storyline. Getting rid of them streamlines the gameplay. It’s much more convenient to be able to buy items at any save point instead of hunting for several buildings in a town to complete your shopping list.
One omission that really irked longtime series fans is the lack of an “overworld” area. On the surface this may seem confining, but it’s an attempt by Square to focus the game more on moving the story along. There’s still a sense of exploration through hidden chests and areas in each section of the game. And really – Final Fantasy 10’s “overworld” consisted of a text menu of different locations. Is getting rid of that in favor of a continuous travel progression that onerous?
The other thing Final Fantasy 13 does very well is introduce a very thrilling and original battle system. This is by far the most redeeming quality of the game. Instead of a traditional menu based system where the player selects commands for each of his characters against the enemies, the player acts more like a general relaying orders through the use of “Paradigm Shifts.” You only have direct control over one character in Final Fantasy 13, but you can direct how the two AI-piloted characters act through the Paradigm system.
Paradigm Shifts are on the fly role (job) changes for the party. For example, you might start the battle off in a very aggressive paradigm in order to end the encounter quickly. If something goes awry, you may switch into a defensive paradigm where one character defends to soak up damages while the others become medics to heal. Another solution may be switch into a unit that attempts to inflict status enhancements on allies and ailments on the enemy. There are 6 types of jobs in the game and they should be very familiar to players of MMORPGs. There’s a tank, two different kind of DPS dealers, a healer, a status buffer, and a debuffer.
Encounters can become quite engaging to play as some of the more challenging ones involve precise and constant changing of Paradigm strategies over the course of battle. You can only program a “deck” of 6 different paradigms at a time, but there’s a lot of room for customization as each character has 3 “primary” roles to develop. Needless to say, there’s a lot of options to use in battles. It’s a thrilling blend of real time strategy, MMORPG boss fight tactics, with a touch of the Final Fantasy franchise’s signature Active-Time Battle system.
The bad news, though, is that it takes time for the game to deem you worthy enough to utilize the full capabilities of the battle system. You’ll have to play through about 10 hours to really get to interesting battle dynamics. Unfortunately, the point at which battles become interesting is when the game’s plot starts to become hackneyed and predictable.
I actually had optimistic hopes for the game’s characters and plot near the outset of the adventure. Final Fantasy 13’s “main character”, Lightning, is introduced as a no-nonsense soldier for the Sanctum Guardian Corps. She’s a realist and takes no guff from anyone. Think Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 without the brooding and mopiness, but with a gunblade.
One of my favorite scenes involved her and another character (Snow), who was your typical gung-ho Japanese-RPG “Let’s save the world… I swear it!” hero. Snow launches into some monologue about saving the world no matter the cost when, all of a sudden, Lightning just starts punching him in the face for spewing such unrealistic drivel. I loved it. She does what I’ve been wanting to do to JRPG heroes for years.
At this point I was impressed that Square had become aware that the Final Fantasy franchise was devolving into a formulaic excuse to render expensive CGI. I thought Lightning’s punch to Snow’s face was the sign of things to come. Regrettably, this was as far as they got. The game eventually settled into an easily predictable tale about defying fate in order to save the world. All the characters could easily be described by bullet points of every RPG character you’ve ever known. Even Lightning is neutered into a stereotypical hero by the end.
It behooves me to mention the game’s absolutely horrendous system for upgrading weapons and items. Instead of opting for simplicity here, Square has made an needlessly complex system involving hundreds of organic and tech components. I can’t even begin to explain it, but it took the skimming of several FAQs, message boards, and even the official strategy guide in order to begin to understand how to upgrade my weapons. The process was worse (and actually comparable) than having to study and apply organic chemistry.
Final Fantasy’s iconic summons are also underutilized in the game. Each character eventually gains access to his or her own unique Eidolon. Unfortunately, since you only control one character at a time, I never got to see or use any of the other summons because it was just too much of a hassle to be swapping party leaders. Plus, there was just no point to as there’s no practical benefit to use one summon over another. They’re basically there as glorified eye candy.
When you add it up, Final Fantasy 13 makes for a very unremarkable experience. The cutscenes and graphics are breathtakingly gorgeous in full 1080p HD. However, I used to love Final Fantasy because I was attached to the dynamic characters and the epic plots, not because of the pretty graphics. I can’t even remember the characters and outcomes of the last three entries to the series.
There’s some great tactical gameplay to be had here, but it’s just not worth slogging through the muck of mediocre plot and exposition to get through.
you’re right ’bout the plot…
it like they think players are idiots, the story takes players through the lives of these broken characters but by the end, all the importance is taken to a subplot that occurred a hundred years ago and that its never even fully explained how it happened and while I was waiting for Lightning to make a drastic choice of doing something meaningfull to the plot on the climax, she ends up on the sideways watching as other heroines (Fang and Vanille) end up solving everything.
in terms of gameplay, FFXII and CrisisCore have much more active battles, you can add 5 actions per command and spins and flips but remains a regular command menu, besides i found staggering bars quite annoying, and to end this, the summoning in the later games XII and XIII have gone through terrible changes, they end up being needless and usless.
SE needs to understand that maybe the series can evolve its combat into something more ActionRPG and not trying to emulate Action with and RPG, it doesn’t fit.