Deep down in my heart of hearts, I'm a Final Fantasy fangirl. Granted, I'm not the uber I LOVE EVERYTHING FINAL FANTASY YOU DISS IT YOU SHOULD BE KILLED type. I'll gladly admit to something of the series in general sucking, though usually it doesn't get in the way much of my overall enjoyment. Sure we all know how Spoony hates Final Fantasy VIII and X, and admittedly they do have bad parts, but they're still fun to me. I can look past the faults for the most part. There has not been a game I truly hate Usually if I play a game I dislike, I just think "Eh, it's not my cup of tea, oh well" and maybe just shelf it. Games like Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed fall into this category.
That said, there has never been a game I've played that has EVER pissed me off to the extent of Final Fantasy XIII. Everything about it pisses me off, to the point where it's saving graces are almost nonexistent. Final Fantasy always has been synonymous with quality, be it story, gameplay, graphics, and/or RPG elements. Consider this my personal review and catharsis of this game, divided into a number of sections; Presentation, Gameplay, Graphics, Story, and sound.
Presentation:
Right from the get-go, you look at the box art and feel underwhelmed. The cover features... the main character Lightning. And that's all. With the exception of the original NTSC SNES Final Fantasy II cover art (which was 20 years ago), the covers have given you at least something to look toward. VII had Cloud looking up towards the towering evil Shinra Corporation, and VIII had the overshadowing Sorceress on the cover. Even the crappier covers like IX and X were more interesting than just a static character shot without any background.
Alright, perhaps I'm making a big deal over a relatively big thing, after all, why bother making a big deal over the cover art? Most people already knew if they were going to buy it regardless of the art. Fair enough. You start the game, and you're just dropped into a whole world... a literal whole world, pre-developed and all. Sound great, right? Only problem: It developed without you. The first thing you'll be wondering is "What the hell is going on? What are Cieth, Fal'cie, L'cie?" "What the hell is the purge?" "What the ******** is going on!?". You feel like you came in the middle of a movie. And in many ways you have. Instead of SHOWING all the events, they expect you to read up on them. Even Star Wars gave you a text crawl that's at least short, concise, and easy to understand. FFXIII gives you a datalog, wherein you're expected to go in, and spend half an hour reading up on the entire history of the world you were dropped in. Imagine going to a movie, but before the movie they passed out pamphlets saying "Here, read this, it'll help you better understand what's going on". Not. Good. Show, don't tell.
Finally, something a little bit miscellaneous, but goes with the presentation as it deals with menus, or technically maps. I think this is the worst map system I've ever seen in my life. If your character is facing north, the map faces north, if your character faces south, the map top faces south, effectively completely making the use of North, South nonexistent in this world, as if it has no natural magnetic pull. Using a random Google searched FFXIII map, let's see how this looks. Now, this looks rather simple... and in fact, the game is SO linear you won't even notice this for about thirty-five hours. For that time, it's almost impossible to get lost. However... when you get into an area like... this (pay special attention to the scale), you'll have to be checking the map every five seconds to make sure you're headed in the right location, since there is no North or South. And with this you have the endless variants of NW, NNW, NWW, and so on.
A little nitpicky this is, but, hey it's what I do. A lot of the names of jobs and roles are just not consistent throughout the Final Fantasy series. We all know we have Black Mages, White Mages, fighters, and so on, right? not in Final Fantasy XIII, we have Ravagers, Medics, and Commandos respectively. Why change it? It's been long established these names. No one knows what the hell a Synergist (Buffer) or a Sabateour (Debuffer) is. The only one that seems at all to make sense in th rest of the series is Sentinel, and even that is just because there isn't really anything defined for that. Also, take a guess what Fog does. It's like blindness, right? NO, It's Silence. Again, who the hell would know this without reading the manual? What Final Fantasy fan reads the manual for status effects. Better yet, what Final Fantasy fan HAS to? We know there's silence, blindness, all that... and now it's just... gone? Hell if I knew what the hell Pain, Curse, and Imperil did without looking it up. I don't get why they'd change so much, it's like they wanted to completely throw out the fanbase, which just brings a new crappiness of my excuse for the cover of not needing to be good because it was for the fans.
Speaking of names, what the hell are with the names of these characters? The six main characters are Lightning, Snow, Sazh, Hope, Vanille, and Fang. Four of these names suck. Spoiler alert: They're not Vanille or Sazh. First off Lightning; naming your character something like that is just crappy writing. Period. Naming her Jill would be less pathetic. Snow sounds pretty horrible too, not as horrible as the aforementioned though. Why are one/thirds of the characters named after weather? Are they REALLY running out of names? Hope is a name that I can see someone naming their daughter... but not their son. And finally, Fang. Pfff. These names are the worst Final Fantasy names I've seen since the epic crappiness of Ex-Death from V.
Summonings make their way back. No complaints there, it's a staple in any Final Fantasy after all. The only problem with this is all the Eidolons are transformers. Yes, each Eidolon transforms. For example, Ifrit fill-in Byrnhildr turns into a ******** racecar. I looked at this and felt embarassed that I paid money for this. The only one that even BEGINS to make sense is Odin turning into Sleipnir. Everything else is just embarrassing. Twin Shivas turning into a motorcycle? It worked in The Venture Bros. because Mecha Shiva was A) awesome, and B) it's a comedy show, not a serious video game franchise, and C) it didn't look like it was lifted from a recent shitty adaptation of a certain cartoon series.
Gameplay:
The most important of all the categories undoubtedly. The gameplay still fails unfortunately. The battle system is messed up. In each battle you may control exactly ONE character. Not one at a time and switch between characters at will like in XII, the rest is PERMANENTLY on AI. This leads to a complete lack of control over what your allies do. Sure you can choose their roles during battle, but I'll get to that in a minute. This leads to your characters not doing what you want when you want them to, and yelling "NO, DON'T USE ESUNA, ******** HEAL LIGHTNING, GREAT, NOW I'M DEAD, ******** b***h". Another problem is when you actually need to use Esuna, say your whole party has a load of status effects, you can use Esuna Twice in one turn. That's good... except you can ONLY target one enemy/Ally at a time, meaning you literally end up using Esuna twice on one person. Because one person isn't enough. Even the Gambit System in FFXII knew not to use magic unnecessarily when saying "Always Use Esuna". It didn't do it if no one had any status ailments. This is FFXIII and a next generation console. Did the AI REALLY get that stupid? You can't have the majority of your allies be AI controlled throughout the game in a game that expects strategy. All this leads to is a glorified Gambit system WITHOUT the customization.
The next problem is one of the most infuriating of the game. When your lead character dies, it's game over. End of story. Sure you respawn right before the battle, but this makes it all the more infuriating getting an enemy with 3 mil HP+ down to 50k and it getting a few lucky fast cheap hits in and getting game over. With all the crappiness of your allies AI as explained above, you almost want to throw your controller on the floor. Even if you have phoenix down, your other characters know Raise, or anything, it's just game over. This is reminiscent of Nostalgia, where you can buy items to cure yourself of Shock, but can't use items because you are afflicted with Shock. I can't even imagine fighting a superboss in this game. It sounds like the most angering experience ever. It makes the entire game feel unfairly hard. Hell, even Yiazmat, the legendary 50 million HP Superboss from FFXII that takes four hours if you're insanely fast to beat felt fair. I love a hard RPG, since your first playthrough will always be the hardest and one you remember, but artificial difficulty? That's just lame. Oh, some enemies have instant death moves too. Thank you Square, Thank you.
When you attack, you have the choice of either going to abilities, choosing each attack you want to use, and click attack, or just choose Auto Attack. At first it would seem like a good idea to do everything yourself, but while level grinding and endless playing, you'll just resort to Auto Attack constantly. The Auto Attack system makes the game feel even more automatic than the Gambit System of FFXII. At least in XII you could choose what they did under certain situations, not completely up to the AI. And of course at any time you could chime in and tell it what to do. I literally can level grind by pressing X and read articles on CBR.
Getting back to the use of changing roles in battle (paradigm shifts as they call them), it tries to make you use more strategy. Fair enough. However, it's a horrendous system. You're allowed six predetermined slots to change at any time. IE, Character one Commando, Character Two Ravager, Character Three Medic. Sounds fair, no? Well, one of the problems is whenever you change your party, all your settings for the paradigm shift are jumbled with random roles for each character. Again, alright I suppose... except for the fact that you're ALWAYS changing ******** parties in the first ten chapters (first ten chapters you can't even choose your party of three, even when there's four members traveling with you). This even happens right before you fight a boss at times. At times when you can choose your party and you change automatically before a boss battle, it screws with your roles, even if you go into the battle with who it wants you to battle with.
the "customization" is a joke. the leveling system essentially works like the sphere grid in Final Fantasy X (They call it Crystarium here), get experience and use the experience to progress farther down a path to get new abilities and attributes. Fair enough. The placement is completely screwed up though. There is one path for each of the six roles, though in the Commando role crystarium path, it is littered with +XX Magic spaces. Why? Sure you COULD customize your fighter to be able to use magic, but if you want and need to use magic, just use a default magic user. The customization feels like this "You can choose to have a professional mechanic fix your engine... or you can choose to have the chef".
Without a doubt, this game is one hell of an investment in time. I remember when I consider replaying a Final Fantasy, I get turned off because I don't want to go through the hour of riggamaroll of the beginning. Imagine that times literally thirty five. This game does not get off the ground for thirty five ******** hours. At chapter Eleven the game becomes open ended, and you'll just be ******** amazed to see side missions. A problem with this is that the open ended non-linear Final Fantasy style comes into play for two chapters. Chapter Eleven, and Chapter Thirteen. The only reason Chapter Thirteen is non-linear is because you can transport back to the area of Chapter Eleven, so it might as well be one chapter of actual non-linearity. Undoubtedly chapter Eleven is the longest, but still, that's pathetic. It allows for Post-Game play to continue with side quests, but still. The most linearity you get up to chapter Eleven is "Go right for a few feet instead of left and get a treasure orb". Even all other Final Fantasies had some sort of side quest pretty early. Hell, in the time you get to the side quests in FFXIII you can beat the game AND side quests in other Final Fantasies. I'll take quality over quantity, thank you.
Graphics:
I think this is the only thing it has going for it. The graphics are smooth, beautiful, crisp, and all while I'm watching it on a standard definition 12" screen. If I can see the individual strands of hair on a character's head, I would be very curious how good it looks on an HDTV. Though, the graphics are really the least important aspect of a game. It almost seems like a waste. Such pretty graphics on such unpolished gameplay.
Sound:
Sound quality is good, and voice acting can range from good to annoying. Though any true Final Fantasy fan thinks of only one thing when it comes to the sound section; the music. The music sounds more often like it belongs to a vocaloid background than an "epic" adventure. I know Uematsu is no longer with Square, and to hold it up to a that high of a standard would be a knowingly unfair expectation to have. Even so, it just sounds horrible JPop music. Even Final Fantasy XII without Uematsu was still epic and beautiful at times. The Battle Theme for the most part is completely inaudible above the clashes of the swords, with the exception of the violin interlude. One of the most sickening embarrassing things is the . They actually added crappy incomprehensive Engrish lyrics. This is something I expect to come out of Youtube, not the Square sound department. Quite a few of the tracks actually have lyrics. That's not Final Fantasy music. I can't think of a Final Fantasy soundtrack that has more than two or three vocal tracks.
Story:
I will be honest with you all right now. After thirty hours, I got bored with the story and just wanted to get to Chapter Eleven. The story had nothing at all interesting to hold my attention. Even the shitty stories like Resident Evil hold my attention longer than this game. I found myself just skipping it all. Admittedly it could be a good story RIGHT after I stopped caring, but I have to say, waiting 30 hours for a story to pick up... I can't say that's a credit to the story.
Closing comments:
I really did try to like this game. I tried my hardest to look past the faults, but I just can't. I heard a theory that this game is so radically different because of the changes in the RPG genre with games such as Mass Effect (Which i can't comment on because I don't have a 360). This does make sense, but Final Fantasy is not a follower, it's a leader of the genre. I can appreciate a risk in a genre. Final Fantasy XII took a risk, but it still was good. XIII does this but falls far shorter. It doesn't even feel like a Final Fantasy, which is what I think a lot of this comes down to. If this game was called "Random JRPG", I would think "Mmmm, it's not bad, but it needs work...". Though this isn't some random JRPG, this is Final Fantasy. This is a franchise that has given us some of the most beloved characters and stories ever in Video Game history. I am holding this to a higher standard because it SHOULD be held to a higher standard. Similar to unknowingly playing a bad Mario game, you have an expectation due to the reputation.
If you play this, you can get some enjoyment out of the side quests, which is truly the only part which has that Final Fantasy feel of the game. Though really, the side quests shouldn't be the best part of the game, hence why it's called a SIDE quest. I look forward to the FFXV (since XIV is a ******** online game...), and hope they rectify their ********]
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