So to the people that bought the game, was it worth the wait?

depends if ur a fan of the old ff, 1-10, cuz if u bought it after playing alot of 11, like i did, you'll get bored.

But i loved 10, so i liek this, i'd say worth it

_________________

I hate this linkshell with a fiery passion.

Have you started on your relic like weapons? Some people are hooked on farming for it, sounds ffxi ish - the needing alliances for dynamis.

I haven't beaten it nor played it in like a week but I think it's really good.

_________________

Yeah I wish I had more time for it kinda ;/

_________________
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams-

Lies are a funny thing,
they slip through your fingertips because
they never happened to you.

no, didnt know there was any

_________________

I hate this linkshell with a fiery passion.

no time to play as well, hopefully once i finish moving into my new place next month, there'll be much time for that again

_________________
lol

a little to linear for me i wish it was more like the old games where you could do whatever but i do like the game. I have 2 weapons leveled up as high as you can w/out trap's and plan to use the trick to get more, lol i also spent like an hour last night and now have speed shoes for my whole party.

_________________

FFXIII dun @ 51 hours

_________________

100% or just final boss?

_________________
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams-

Lies are a funny thing,
they slip through your fingertips because
they never happened to you.

Doubt any of you will be getting 100% if it require getting more than 3 final weapons. People are pulling their hair out for some sort of drop from the big turtles and how expensive it cost.

Ploid there is a trick to getting them though if you can get one you can upgrade either lance of kain or nirvana then break it down and it gives you three trap's (the really hard item to get) then use those to upgrade 3 other weapons

_________________

Final boss

_________________

r u sure about this?

_________________

I hate this linkshell with a fiery passion.

she is quite sure about this

_________________


Sefsig pwns

Jefferson high, hahaha they're our rivals.

_________________

*spoilers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS0n5G3jeyw
I wonder if those matching rainbow beads mean something?

_________________

rainbow beads, me lika the sound of thata

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The points in the following text is why I skipped out on FFXIII. If they make a fixed version/better game version I might be interested in it.

Long read but pretty much everyone agree with it, and my research lines up with what is said. It also kinda explain why people don't try to find time to play the game. Don't seem like it's addictive, or interesting enough to put it bluntly. People find time for interesting books every night even if they have busy days.
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May as well share what I've had brewing for a day or two. This is intended for a friend's gaming blog, and while it's a little "giant wall of text", XIII deserves no less. It's not a review, but more a longer piece on how XIII works and why it's worth paying attention to (for all the wrong reasons).

Appropriate sections will be spoiler-tagged for the sake of preventing my ass from being flamed/banned.

Mind you, I expect flaming anyway, as a byproduct of my often venomous comments. I've vocalized my opinion pretty strongly so far, and this is just the final manifestation of that. Feel free to have fun with it and tear me up.

----

Final Fantasy XIII – Post-Mortem

The topic is Final Fantasy XIII. The verdict is atrocious. Every fan needs to play it to understand why XIII is a failure as a successor to the Final Fantasy name. This article is for the player that’s played at least some of the game already. I’ll be using gameplay terms without strictly defining them, and assuming a reader understands them.

In the last three weeks, I’ve observed a lot of love/hate syndrome for Final Fantasy XIII in some of the game industry’s most popular forums and down on street level among the customer base of a number of gaming retailers.

The common reactions:

“This battle system fucking rules.”

“Why the fuck can’t I decide where to go or who to have on my team yet?”

“It’s so much faster than before – I can’t keep up sometimes. Awesome challenge.”

“Holy shit, every part of this game looks amazing. My eyes are so happy.”

“I’m finding myself struggling to keep going. First time that’s happened with an FF.”


The last reaction listed is the one that captured my attention the most, because I heard it from an alarming number of people. I heard it from the RPG-junkie customers who grew tired of the game and traded it back early to me over a retail counter. I heard it from friends who are usually prone (like me) to storming through the newest game release, FF or otherwise, in a matter of days. I heard it from posters on message boards across the net. And I certainly found myself struggling to keep pushing through it too.

Why was this gorgeous beast of a game not demanding us to keep going in every spare minute of our day, as past FFs had done? More importantly, why did most of us press on and torture ourselves to complete it anyway? Was it simple brand name love? Were we compelled to keep going because it was fucking Final Fantasy? Should that be a good enough reason to invest 30-50 hours into something?

If you read the rest of this article, you’ll realize I’ve come away from completing Final Fantasy XIII with a rather sour taste in my mouth. My hype leading up to it was unreal. I now consider the game the most colossal disappointment of all 20 years of gaming I’ve got under my belt. I felt compelled to detail why and share it with any and all who’d listen, because if nothing else, the conversation about role-playing games, gaming and entertainment in general that this title generates is fascinating.

You’re going to see gameplay spoilers and a discussion of XIII’s game structure throughout this article. I refrain from any major story spoilers, but various minor or basic story elements that present themselves in the first five hours of the game will find their way into the entire piece, so fair warning!



What Owns About Final Fantasy XIII (I’ll keep it brief, and not by choice)


So let’s discuss this brilliantly polished pile of shit and uncover what fails to make it tick. I’ll start with some positives. Check it:

This game is fucking gorgeous. No one can talk about this game without commenting on what a symphony it is for the eyes. The facial animation for characters is practically peerless, the environments are occasionally astounding, lush beyond comparison, and the CG is unrivaled in both artistic vision and technical production values. The game is beautiful to look at, from its slick menu screens, to its stylish battle setups, to its staggeringly well-animated character models (point in fact, while it’s still fairly easy to tell when CG kicks in, there are a number of scenes that will have you guessing for a few seconds, and for the rest, you just won’t care; the in-game engine does an amazing job). That the game is locked to a rock-solid framerate 99% of the time is equally astounding and a wonderful mercy in an age of gaming where consistency is starting to be valued a lot more than polygon counts.

Uncharted 2 and God of War III are the game’s only real rivals on consoles in terms of visual achievement, and each has their definite pros and cons. Make no mistake though, you need a new hobby if XIII’s visuals are an overall disappointment to you. This is a feast for the eyes, with occasional, forgivable hiccups.

(I can only comment on the PS3 version here, mind you – I have heard reports of the 360 version running at sub-HD resolutions and displaying disappointing framerates in some areas of the game, but nothing game-breaking.)


What else can we say is great about Final Fantasy XIII before we get to the inevitable meat of the discussion? The game’s soundtrack has some true highlights, including memorable and exhilarating battle themes. The quality of the voice acting is top-notch (though comment on the dialogue itself is best reserved for later). The hectic pace of battles is welcome, though not new to Final Fantasy (X-2 and XII offered speed increases over their predecessors, but XIII truly ramps it up – aesthetically – to an unheard of level in the series).

Alright. You still with me? Have we fluffed XIII up enough in preparation for its post-mortem? I’ve had three weeks to stew on the latest installment in my favorite game franchise, and the intended reader of this article hopefully has too.

Let’s figure out what went wrong with the rest of Final Fantasy XIII.




Battle to the Thirteenth Degree – The Demise of Control

Every critique and meaningful review of XIII manages to privilege discussion of the game’s issues with linearity. I’ll dodge this and come back to it later, in order to discuss the most pressing issue with XIII. The first sin XIII commits that must be addressed is in its combat system.

On the level of gameplay, practically everything a player does in a role-playing game is an act of preparation for combat. You advance in a story to fight new foes. You defeat enemies to grow stronger for battle. You engage in side-quests such as the game allows to grow ever-stronger for battle. Combat matters in RPGs, and it matters in Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIII’s battle system is an elaborate act of smoke and mirrors. The game expertly fools you into thinking you have an unprecedented amount of control over your battle party, such as Final Fantasy has never seen before, when in fact, you probably have the least the series has ever afforded. I’ll explain why.

At first glance, the system is truly alienating. The camera is livelier than ever, tracking in and out of the battle scene to capture every bit of action it can. The gauges that represent character readiness that litter the bottom of the screen look foreign to the player; they’re segmented and are composed of numerous skills and abilities that never managed to make up a single turn of play in a Final Fantasy game before. The speed and pace of battles are intense, with only X-2 and XII coming close.

It’s exciting and new, right?

I’m a proponent for visual flair and aesthetic. If something looks cool, it gets points. So XIII gets points for looking cool. It’s the coolest battles have looked in the series to date. Dissecting how the system works, however, reveals how stripped down combat has become.

XIII’s battle system isn’t fundamentally new in any functional way. It’s working on essentially the same Active Time Battle system that Final Fantasy pioneered and has employed since Final Fantasy IV nearly twenty years ago. A major difference from the earliest incarnations of ATB is that multiple actions can occur at once if the various timers operating the battle complete at the same time, though this isn’t new either; this was the case in X-2 and XII.

Moreover (and this is the cardinal sin of the battle system), all characters in your battle party, save your leader, are controlled by the game. You can decide which role to assign them from moment to moment in battle (Commando, for attacking; Ravager, to accumulate chain bonuses; Sentinel, to protect the party; etc.), but beyond this measure, they are totally and absolutely out of your control. For those familiar with XII’s battle system, this is akin to having your non-leader characters on permanent gambits. The problem is, you have no hand in deciding what their gambits look like. There’s a Commando gambit pool, a Ravager gambit pool, a Saboteur gambit pool, and so on. You tell a character to switch into a pool, and then cross your fingers, hoping the character in question will target the right enemy or ally, and then hoping the character will employ the preferred attacks or abilities, and in the preferred order.

The illusion in XIII is strong; this absence of control is inconsequential to the first 15-20 hours of the game because the artificial intelligence governing the characters either usually makes the right choice, or the consequence for making the wrong choices isn’t strong enough. So what if Shell goes up before Protect? It doesn’t truly matter in Chapter 2, or 5, or 8. It will absolutely begin mattering in the second half of the game. You will begin cursing at your television screen as your buffer evenly casts a series of buffs you don’t need on the entire party, when all you wanted was for your Sentinel to get beefed up first. You will marvel as your Medics manage to top off a character that had less of a health deficit than the other character getting annihilated mere steps away on the battlefield. You will laugh as they waste a turn refreshing unnecessary buffs or over-healing targets instead of waiting for the right conditions to make the most of their abilities. You will grow weary of your Commandos running off to stagger the wrong targets in a pre-emptive strike situation, throwing off the entire flow of your battle, and rendering your early advantage nearly useless.

With proper gambit setup in Final Fantasy XII, none of these things happen. The player is granted true agency in prioritizing targets, abilities and turns. This agency is lost in Final Fantasy XIII, and the true crime is, its missing for absolutely no reason at all.

XIII’s battle system is identical to its immediate predecessor’s battle system but for these differences:

XII’s gambits are player-programmed, player-controlled, player-activated. They are interruptable with player input at any time in battle. They are designed by the player.

XIII’s gambits (or AI routines, if you will) operate independently of the player. You, the player, choose the general role you want a character to play, and then they’re out of your hands. Their positioning is out of your hands (another loss from XII), their timing is out of your hands. Their targets are out of your hands. Their spell priority is out of your hands.

Here is the first of two common defenses, and they seem to be great ones at a first glance. Check it out:

“The AI is brilliant. It always does what I want it to do, and does it faster than I ever could.”

As a free-thinking gamer and lover of games, you have a problem to reconcile if you accept and believe that this affirmation is a positive change for game development in general. A game should be played by the player. Final Fantasy has proven as a game series that it can move at an acceptably fast-paced tick and has demonstrated that a player can control his entire party and control them well in the face of truly challenging encounters. The graver problem with the statement above, is not only that the AI commands half or more of your party, when it never has in a main-series Final Fantasy to-date, but that a player might be comfortable with the AI outdoing his or her own abilities, and prefer to have it take over.

Ask yourself this question: In an action game, do you want a block ability to be raised by itself, at just the right moment? If the best response to attack X would be reaction Y, would you be content with having reaction Y happen automatically every time you’re faced with X? Imagine your Kratos blocking enemy attacks automatically. Imagine the Spartan magic descending to save you automatically every time you’re swarmed by enemies. Sure, the results are desirable. You blocked. You defended, you countered.

Or did you? Did you the player command that response?

The thrill of gaming is to play, to respond to a challenge with a strategy, and execute it. It doesn’t matter if that strategy is pre-programmed by the player in advance of battle (see gambits), or if it’s executed by mashing R2 to raise a guard as a blade swings towards your character’s face. The point is, you did it, you the player, and you did it all on your own.

There is a fundamental difference between:

a) instructing a character yourself to act in a certain way under certain conditions, and
b) choosing a paradigm, and having the game dictate which actions to default to.

That’s XIII’s illusion. To the naked eye, Vanille’s going to cast that spell on a low-health target automatically when he or she gets hit. In one system, you told her to. In the other, you never laid out those instructions, and while they may usually be desirable, there are battles where they may not be. You gave the game a higher-level instruction. You brought out a paradigm that included a Medic. You said, “heal”, and the game chose the actions for you. This is the difference between coaching, and playing; between guiding, and aiming; between watching, and interacting.

A player plays XIII on a higher, less interactive level of play. Paradigms guide the flow of battle, and leave you unable to make specific decisions about battle. XIII never leaves you on your own. The paradigms are selected, and your allies are off to do what they will. The character Hope will lay some curative magic at just the right instant on your ailing Sentinel. But did you do that? No. You guided the battle’s general flow, and brought the healer out. He independently cast the spell. He chose the target.

And once again, it’s a dangerous proposition to consider for gaming if he chose it faster and better than you, the player could have, with gambit or without. Do we truly want our games playing themselves? If the AI in XIII always made the right decision, would the player making the above defense actually let the AI assume control of the leader too if that were possible, and merely resign himself to shifting paradigms? Why bother even playing the game?

The devastating problem in XIII is that this sad circumstance actually becomes reality when a player discovers that the Auto-Battle feature made available to your sole player-controlled leader character is often the best choice for the speediest victory. As with the non-controlled characters in your party, Auto-Battle will usually choose the most appropriate actions for your leader, and choose them faster than you as a player would. It’s certainly possible to ignore the feature and key in your leader’s abilities yourself, but this is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Like jumping into a pit right away in a Mega Man game to try a level with one reserve attempt instead of two. Like jacking a car with a flat in Grand Theft Auto to impede your own escape from police. Like avoiding the Raccoon Leaf in Super Mario Bros. 3 so as to not give yourself the advantage of flight and an extra attack. Why would any player do this in the face of a game whose speed and intensity encourage you to respond in battle as quickly as possible? Auto-battle becomes the right answer 95% of the time in Final Fantasy XIII, and this is a wildly dangerous development for the playability of future titles in the series.

Once again, there is a fundamental difference between setting up one’s own automated response to battle, and using one pre-fabricated by a game. They play out in similar fashion to the naked eye, but one must realize that the player created and defined one, and is allowing the game to create and define the other.


So what’s the second defense?

“XIII moves too quickly – you wouldn’t be able to handle it if you had to control every character.”

The paramount feature of a game must be player control. The way a player interacts with the game he plays has to be of critical value. Otherwise, it isn’t a game, it’s a fucking film. If a game is designed in such a way that a player experiences a loss of control over what’s happening in order to satisfy some other element of the game’s aesthetic, it’s a poorly designed game. This is a fundamental, basic rule of game design.

Anyone calling themselves a gamer, anyone who’s played games for a good portion of their lives innately realizes this truth about interactive entertainment. Less control, in a series that’s proven for twenty years that it knows how to let you control an entire party, is a step back, and is a disservice to the design formula of the series and the genre. If you’re prepared to sacrifice playability to allow for a prettier, faster moving game, you should put the controller down, and go watch an action movie.

Let’s add one more volatile and brutal element to the battle mix: the death of your leader, is a Game Over for the player. This is arbitrary and nonsensical, unless the current story events require you ensure an important character’s survival for a brief period. It doesn’t work in Final Fantasy XIII, where all enemies in a battle may very suddenly focus fire your leader for no apparent reason (even with a Sentinel out) and destroy her in under 3 seconds, with no solid recourse available to counter it. Even more exciting is a lengthy final boss encounter in which a Death spell can arbitrarily target your leader and end your game with no warning whatsoever. It would be fun and challenging to deal with a sudden and unexpected death in your party mid-battle, but to suddenly be hit by an unavoidable Game Over screen through no fault of your own? Fucking awful.

At the end of the day, it’s fast, it seems to be exciting at times, and it’s eye candy, particularly when some of the more-impressive spell effects go off, which is a touch rare. Ultimately, the system is hollow. It rewards and incentivizes allowing the AI to do its thing, and leaves a player on the sidelines to guide the flow of battle, instead of actively controlling it. The difference is fundamental and powerful.

The Tunnel – How not to incorporate linearity and openness in gaming

So that’s the battle system down. How about that issue of linearity?

XIII’s gameplay structure across its forty-odd hours of play is remarkably polarized. It’s not Y-shaped, with a period of linearity followed by increasingly available opportunities for exploration and deviation, as was common in previous Final Fantasies. The game very strictly confines you to what so many have termed, “the tunnel” for the first twenty hours of play. That’s about half of the game. If one ignores options to explore after the twenty hours and chooses to press on with the storyline, that twenty hours can end up representing two thirds of the game. That’s one sizeable chunk of a game to commit to one tunnel.

A game can certainly be linear and still afford extraordinary experiences to its player. See above, RE: Uncharted 2, and God of War III. Final Fantasy XIII does not provide said experience, nor any real variety or deviation from a pattern for any of those twenty hours. In a series that still battles for the crown of the RPG genre around the world, a genre that celebrates the vital gameplay freedoms of exploration, variability, replayability, and non-linearity, to condemn the RPG player to a tunnel for one-half to two-thirds of the experience is a massive disservice to both the genre, and the gorgeous history and world of Final Fantasy XIII. That tunnel ends up being a laborious trek through only-occasionally interesting environments, and a tunnel that very strictly adheres to one gameplay pattern (approximately 5-15 battles, followed by a cutscene, rinse-repeat), and allows literally no option for player agency in his or her forward advancement, save the option to go for an occasional treasure chest along the path or not.

This confining experience is an alien chore in Square’s FF worlds to date. It would have worked with greater variety in gameplay experiences. It would have worked with minigame sequences or terrain branches to break up the monotony of the corridor syndrome the game forces a player to endure for twenty fucking hours. It would have worked if the game abandoned the series’ hallmark fault of merely recoloring and recasting its monster models so as to provide the player with something new to slice into every once in a while. To not address this fault while layering on a suffocating linearity to the game’s entire first half adds insult to injury.

A common argument to the rampant criticism of XIII’s linearity is that the game’s plot (a story of fugitives on the run) doesn’t afford any non-linearity, and that periods of open exploration would have felt disjunctive to the storyline. This frail defense is punctured by the frequent downtimes in action the characters experience in their first twenty hours under your control. Before the forces of Cocoon truly begin active pursuit of your party after Chapter Six, the characters spend a great deal of time in isolated environments (such as the immaculately designed Lake Bresha) that just beg for exploration. A few members of your party even find themselves in an amusement park during the first half of the game, and very deliberately state that they need to forget about their worries for awhile, slow the pace down, and enjoy themselves. Most ironically, the gameplay sequence that then follows is as linear as the game ever presents; a path from A to B with 10-metre dead-end deviations, no battles, barely a treasure chest in sight, and not one piece of entertainment in an environment that cries out for the inclusion of a traditional Final Fantasy minigame. It was a fucking amusement park, and there was no amusement in sight.

Most importantly, in response to the ‘fugitive’ criticism (a criticism that defends XIII by declaring that open-ended, non-linear and exploratory gameplay wouldn’t jive with the storyline), I must remind the critic that we are playing a video game, and not watching a film. The storyline of a video game, and yes, even a role-playing game, where story traditionally plays a leading role in the experience, must unfold in service of the gameplay. Not the other way around. One doesn’t create a brilliant gameplay experience merely by building a story, and then allowing the player to interact with it. That’s an interactive film.

Denying the player choice, freedom, and the chance to experiment can manage to be a valid gameplay structure for tense and driven sequences of a role-playing game, but isn’t (or shouldn’t be) acceptable for an entire half to two-thirds of the main gameplay experience. This is a role-playing game, belonging to a genre whose hallmarks of world-building, freedom and exploration are willfully withheld from the player in Final Fantasy XIII for, dare I say it again, twenty-plus hours. No sane player should be expected to ‘hold out’ for the release afforded by the late-game open-endedness in one of the XIII’s final chapters. Every game can and will be judged in its first few hours, and XIII most certainly will be in its first twenty. To insist a player hold out for the light at the end of the tunnel (pun very much intended) is an affront to the entertainment of video games. How would you react to a friend insisting you endure the first ten episodes of a television series, because the second half of the season is worth watching? You’d probably agree that it wasn’t worth your time. I couldn’t blame you.


So this appalling linearity makes up the first half or so of the game. What comes next? I mentioned earlier that the game wasn’t Y-shaped. There is no gradual introduction to freedom in Final Fantasy XIII. I suppose the best letter representative of the structure would be a ‘T’. The game flatlines (pun intended, again) in a late-game chapter around the twenty-hour mark, and opens up in enormous ways. The change in structure is striking, at first welcoming and liberating, then disorienting, then annoying. To its credit, the change ties in with the events of the storyline, but once again, in a video game, the story must service the gameplay, and not the other way around.

Player arrival in one of the game’s penultimate chapters is an arrival into an entirely different world, literally and figuratively. Should the player choose, he or she can traverse the wide open environs within 15 minutes to rejoin the on-rails experience of Final Fantasy XIII and complete [spoiler]the game’s last two (hyper-linear) chapters.[/spoiler]

But who’s going to do that? The game invites you to the spectacle of Gran Pulse, and no player won’t take the chance to have a quick look around, a look that will likely transform into alienation rather hastily. This portion of the game is admittedly a visual and auditory treat at first. The game’s signature battle theme returns. The environment is staggeringly massive, a vision of what Final Fantasy X’s “Calm Lands” might have been had 2001’s technology allowed it. The open-endedness is extremely welcome after the tunnel experience. To hear main protagonist Lightning say it herself upon arrival into Gran Pulse’s main arena, “It’s probably safe to say it won’t be boring here.” How utterly perfect. Yes, the game trolls itself, poking fun at the misery inflicted on the player in the preceding two chapters’ seemingly endless gray dungeons, and you get to laugh along with it for a minute, instead of at it.

Here comes the real problem with Pulse:

Gran Pulse quickly proves to be an empty wasteland of rough creature encounters. There is no endearing populace to interact with, save or do the bidding of. There are no tangible rewards to exploration outside of visibly checking out the new vistas (which is wonderful for the first five minutes in each area), the continual equipment upgrades and the return of series travel trope, the chocobo. There exists a gap of anywhere between one and three hours from one’s arrival in Gran Pulse to the activation of faster modes of travel around the vast environment. That translates into a lot of time spent running from place to place, which becomes remarkably tedious when visiting any area outside the central Pulsian arena of the Archylte Steppe – because, yes, each of those surrounding areas is essentially its own linear tunnel with rare exception. Sure, it’s wonderful to marvel at the environments for the first few minutes in a new area. The experience quickly grows tiresome upon the third, fourth or fifth run through the same forest glades or mountain paths.

What can we say about this wide open, monster-filled arena, whose only real interaction with the player outside of combat is a one-trick series of hunting quests? Combat missions accepted from dead characters that can’t react to your efforts, save for awarding you a piece of equipment?


It’s lifeless. It’s dead. Human character interaction is missing. Nothing is worth saving. Fulfilling the tasks of long-dead l’Cie never winds up being rewarding when the only gift the game gives you for completing the tasks is a new item on a post-battle combat screen.

And that’s part of the point. Your travails on Gran Pulse lead your characters to the discovery that the world is devoid of human life. Nothing of consequence is happening in these wilds. It’s a playground for you to level your characters up and finally test out some new gameplay strategies. The imperative quickly becomes to return to the action of the main story. Freedom is most masterfully dished out in doses in a role-playing game, not in a wide-open stretch twenty hours in the making. A twenty-hour tunnel, followed by the most expansive, open environment in any Final Fantasy entry is not a balanced and well-paced design, no matter how one slices it. The player ultimately has the freedom (and will likely exercise it) to bail from Pulse and continue on with the storyline after a couple of hours of exploration at the most. The problem is, they craved that exploration throughout the first twenty hours. They will wind up craving it again in the final 5-10 hours of the game.

Balance is sorely lacking in this series entry as a result. In a series of games that has so expertly oscillated between progression and exploration in terms of gameplay choices, it’s confounding to realize Final Fantasy XIII has no awareness of its linear structure, has no construction built on gameplay variety, and that the game developers have no tap on what a player wants hour-by-hour throughout their forty-hour experience. What confuses me the most, is that twelve installments have gotten this fundamental law of pacing right. Why the radical departure in this vital first entry on the current generation of game consoles? Was number thirteen’s Focus (L-O-L) to live up to its numerical stigma of unluckiness, and end up being such a gross misstep?



Character Development – Uninvolving, Unrewarding…Unnecessary?


There’s more to XIII’s gameplay than battle and terribly paced exploration, and that’s in character upgrades. Sadly, the vast majority of player reaction to this is fairly united (in my admittedly anecdotal experience).

Weapon and accessory upgrades are a one-note, blind gamble. There should be an element of risk associated with upgrading to keep it exciting, but the game actively encourages upgrading early on, and provides you with very little in the way of resources to get it done. A misstep is financially catastrophic to your party. Weapons in this game arrive into your inventory at equal statistical strength, whether bought, or found, whether one hour into the game, or thirty hours into the game. They each possess some distribution of only two attributes (Strength and Magic), leaving little room for balance (one weapon that has the highest of the desirable stat for your character will likely always be the best choice), and they may each possess one random ability.

The game may throw a weapon with an awesome ability at you in the final hours of play. At this point, if you’ve followed the path the game has laid out for you, you’ve sunk all the limited cash this game affords your party into existing weapons. The cost of upgrading the new, low-level weapon is prohibitive. No one’s going to bother doing it until the cash rolls in during the post-game. The post-game grind for cash ends up being the repetitious slaying of one monster type for hours for maximum results to afford the insanely overpriced goods required for upgrades. This can be remedied by saving the game, trying shit out, then reloading it. But who’s going to do that all day to discover the best upgrading methods through three hours of trial and error? The people who write FAQs for GameFAQs, that’s who.

Who the fuck wants to do that?

This game doesn’t require a grind at all (a gameplay design I actually adore) – therefore, investing into a limited, shallow and prohibitively expensive upgrade system never seems like the right thing to do, and is ultimately completely unnecessary, as many players will tell you they didn’t even bother with upgrading until arriving on Gran Pulse, or even until after completing the game.


The game’s Crystarium system is simple and straightforward. It looks cool, and at first glance, seems remarkably complex, but essentially plays out like a hollow shell of what Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid was. Where X allowed you to branch out over one gigantic board, XIII will instead allow you to progress down your choice of three ultimately linear paths, privileging one over the other at your whim. When the game allows each character to branch out to six paths in total by late in the game’s second half, the cost of doing so is prohibitively high and, like the weapon upgrade system, ultimately unnecessary, and even ignorable unless you choose to pursue XIII’s grind-heavy end-game. The main campaign will not require you to even complete development of each character’s primary three roles.



The Story – I mean, “The Noun-Fiesta with accompanying encyclopedia”


What’s left to criticize in this flaming pile of wreckage? Oh right. The Final Fantasy hallmark among games: it’s storytelling. I won’t belabor the point, but it must be said that XIII commits a number of grievous storytelling sins that again, its predecessors dodged handily, in a variety of ways.

XIII will use proper names and terms with reckless abandon in its first five hours. These words will make up the subject of practically every meaningful piece of dialogue spoken. The game starts you off in media res, and you must play catch-up.

But check it: catch-up is only afforded through extensive use of XIII’s in-game encyclopedia, the Datalog. In fact, whole histories of characters, and even vital plot points totally absent from the dialogue and cutscenes in the game manage to make it into the Datalog. It’s up to you, the player, to keep checking it to make sense of the awful and initially confusing world structure and terminology.

The game has no towns, no gatherings of non-player characters, no living, breathing areas to protect, to learn from, to build, to plan in. The story of XIII is conveyed to the player almost entirely from the conversations of your six characters who know much more about the game world than you do. The world-building present in XIII is likewise, almost entirely relegated to the Datalog, instead of to player investigation and exploration. Aside from some standout moments [spoiler](such as the brief and semi-boring exploration of the ruined Pulse village of Oerba)[/spoiler], the world and history of Final Fantasy XIII aren’t discoverable by a player. The player can’t help but feel disconnected from both Cocoon and Pulse – why then care about saving Cocoon (the party’s main directive) when you can’t even explore it and understand what is worth saving?

When your sixth and final party member joins, very little is conveyed to the player about her history. The datalog on the other hand almost immediately gains access to vital history about the character and expands on the world in ways the game either couldn’t or refused to. A player will be left a little dumbstruck, wondering how they were supposed to have known such important details had they not paused to check out a text-only in-game encyclopedia on the menu. The task of pausing one’s gameplay advancement to read text entries to fill in the gaps in the game’s ridiculously boring plot quickly becomes grating, and unfortunately, a little necessary if you plan on investing any emotion or care into XIII’s world (and really, doesn’t every player who plans on sinking over forty hours into this want to connect to the world?).

Anyone will have a truly difficult time making the argument that the Datalog is a superior source of exposition than a smattering of characters a player can actually talk to within the game world itself. The datalog only adds to XIII’s dead and irrelevant world. The history has happened, and is preserved immaculately in text form, voiced by an unknown and absent encyclopedia deity. You’re just playing the part of the battles that end the long history. You, the player, will constantly wonder why you’re being brought in for the climax, instead of all the foreplay.

A final addendum worthy of note: boss encounters in XIII lack true gravity, forcing the player against an army of relatively nameless and forgettable monsters and robots that leave no mark on the story and are barely worth remembering for any extraordinary fight mechanics. The number of human and story-based opponents is tragically low. There are no Kefkas in play here. No Gilgameshes or Ultros’ to break up the party, no Jenovas to inspire us, no sorceress battles to compel us, no Black Waltzes hunting us, no Sinspawn to remind us of the greater threat, no Judges to terrorize us. There is hardly a face to most of what you fight in XIII, and that’s a significant problem in a game that privileges combat above all else.


So the plot might be garbage, the telling of the story might be uneven, atrocious and barren, the world might be lifeless and irredeemable, and the cliché archetypes are self-reflexively beaten over the head throughout the game (watch Snow call himself “the hero” for the fifteenth time and you’ll know what I’m talking about). Why are we playing this again?

To arrive at a final encounter with [spoiler]a poorly characterized (and brazenly unspecified) antagonist that confuses all character motivation (both the motivation of our heroes and the story’s villains).[/spoiler] You will actually want a datalog entry to explain what the fuck happens in the ending, which, like everything else in Final Fantasy XIII, privileges spectacle and aesthetic beauty to the detriment of logic and player comprehension.

It is a mess. A beautiful, gorgeous mess.


The Traditions – The Butchered, the Forgettable, the Forgotten


Can Final Fantasy XIII commit any more energy into turning its current-gen debut into a disappointment? For series fans looking forward to how XIII uses familiar elements, names and gameplay, it can, and does.

Chocobo travel is secluded in the game’s optional missions. It’s entirely possible you won’t even see them if you sanely avoid the game’s hunts and progress with the story away from the terminally lifeless Gran Pulse wasteland.

XIII’s incarnation of the character Cid is arguably the most disappointing turn the character has had since its inception in its NES days. [spoiler]Not a playable character, not a memorable villain, not intriguingly motivated, not given any standout voice acting, not given anything more than a Kingdom Hearts-quality generic emo design, and not given more than five minutes of screen time before the confrontation that ends his role in this game.[/spoiler] ...what else needs to be said?

The acquisition of an Airship – the ultimate go-to moment in any FF that a series fan salivates at – because it means the world is finally open and available in its entirety – [spoiler]is missing in this game. XIII even teases you with it, as the party stumbles upon an airship just prior to the start of the game’s non-linear portion. But surprise of all surprises, the ship is never under your control. Even X’s disappointing airship destination list surpasses this. But wait – if you had control of a ship, where would you even want to go?[/spoiler]

The game’s summoning system, Eidolons, boil down to a series of six metallic, transformer clones (which the geek in me secretly loves) that are ultimately never necessary to use in battle. Ever. You’ll actually only use them because of the restorative by-product their departure from battle bestows on your party. And even then, you’ll probably stick with one or two characters as your leaders (once the game finally gives you the option to select your own leader) and thus, only have access to two of the six Eidolon summons available. What a tragic waste.

And yes, the Victory Fanfare is missing from battles, and even boss encounters (to where it was appropriately relegated in Final Fantasy XII). I'm told it still appears at one point in the game somewhere, but I clearly missed it, and it's definitely not on major display.

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Final Fantasy XIII is one fucking gorgeous game to look at, 90% of the time. Its battles will seem exhilarating and refreshing, until you realize what cheap machinations operate them and keep you out of control in the process. Its disastrous storytelling techniques and third-rate dialogue will have you cringing in every other scene. Its linearity and disappointingly barren world will crush any hopes of the game’s replayability. Its upgrade systems are nearly as linear and poorly crafted as the game’s plot and progression.

Nevertheless, every Final Fantasy fan needs to play the game to understand why they enjoyed the last twenty years of Final Fantasy so much, and what to hope for in the series’ future. It is an entry best relegated to our gaming ‘datalog’, hopeless to bestow a greater amount of good than frustration in a replay, and best remembered only for its faults so that its designers may learn from them, dodge such pitfalls in the future and put more of the game back into the player's hands. That's what Final Fantasy used to be about. That's what games are all about.