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Final Fantasy 13 Review As a quick disclaimer, I do not own a PS3 nor X-Box 360, but I borrowed one from a friend and rented the game, so I had a rental period of 5 days to play it. Luckily, I had nothing to do for those five days, so I still racked up 50 hours of game play....don't do the hours per day math, it makes me feel bad. So there is a chance my critique may seem like I was very impatient, but then again, I'm impatient with everything now. So let's review this sucker! Let's get linearity out of the way. The game is a dungeon-crawler that has one set path that you need to follow. There is only one area of the game isn't a clear cut "this is where you go" area, but I really don't mind this. There is pretty much one set path to follow in every dungeon, and if any part branches out slightly, it means there's a treasure there, so do it! But this speeds up the game and takes out the chance of getting lost in a dungeon, so I don't really dislike that dungeons are so linear. The problem is that the game is 98% dungeons, so the entire game is following a narrow corridor with no variation. A lot of games use this style, but I for one expect just a little bit more from an RPG. It's hard to call the linearity a bad thing, but it strays from the Final Fantasy style.
Here's my thing with this game: it isn't a Final Fantasy. Much like Silent Hill 4: The Room, I really felt that this game wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't a Final Fantasy. If I were to compare this game to anything, it would probably be The Bouncer, which is at least another Squaresoft title. Final Fantasy games tend to stray in style from game to game, but the general idea is a mix between primative and futuristic. It's a true fantasy setting where everybody runs around with swords, guns, swords with guns in them...the list goes on! This game, however, is pure futuristic. Is it a bad thing? No, but it doesn't feel very Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy has a few set things that are true of all games, and while this game has some of them, it feels like they just changed a few names to call it Final Fantasy, which I hear was what happened with Silent Hill 4. Not to stray much from the topic, but SH4 (as I heard) was originally a different game, but the developers thought nobody would care about it, so they called the town Silent Hill and added a lead pipe as a weapon so that people would buy it. I compare FF13 because I feel like they played Mad Libs with Final Fantasy names. "And then they have
a vision of a large dragon-like entity called <Final
Fantasy Noun> attacking Cocoon." Final Fantasy 12 did the same thing with the ships named after summons, weapons, monsters, etc., and maybe some people like this idea as a "shout out" to Final Fantasy, but should an actual Final Fantasy even need a shout out to...itself? When I play a Final Fantasy, I expect to have a general understanding of things right away, but I didn't with this game. I knew what Fire vs Fira vs Firaga did, so that's Final Fantasy, but then I started finding accessories that protected against Fog and Daze and such. What happened to the Final Fantasy names? Fog is Silence. What, did you copywrite the skill so much that you can't even use it yourself? Daze is Disable or at least something very close to it. So I was terribly confused for the majority of the game when I got hit with Fog and didn't know what was going on.
Let's start something new. Let's talk story. As always, I'll hold off on spoilers and I'll just give a brief intro to the plot. The game starts off at a climax. Lightning and her new friend Sazh are attacking a fal'Cie. Meanwhile, Snow and a band of buddies are doing....the same thing. It was both the best and worst intro to a Final Fantasy. It was an eventful beginning, but the problem is that I don't care yet! The game starts with people raving about fal'Cie and Cocoon and PSICOM and this that and the other. There was quite the epic battle right away, but I had no clue what was happening, so I lost interest. Not to mention you don't gain experience for the first couple hours of the game. You keep swapping stories between these three groups of future teammates and it makes for a decent scene, but as an intro it's terrible. To get vaguely specific about the plot, once it gets going, the basic premise isn't bad. I love the idea of your characters needing to complete a Focus or else they turn into monsters. It's a very cool premise. It also has some nice semi-related stories that relate to the characters, even if some of them are just annoying. Hope, for example, is a character hellbent on getting revenge, even though he knows that it wasn't the other guy's fault. This carries on way too long, but at least it resolves in a decent way eventually. So we have a premise and side-stories, but beyond that? Umm, I couldn't tell you. See, the story is told terribly. It is probably the worst story-telling in a Final Fantasy since the NES. The big problem is that the story doesn't explain itself. They run around using all this technical jargon and talking about characters that I don't even know. I like that it's fairly realistic, but it ignores the audience, which is a huge mistake. When you meet Fang, for example, they never introduce her. She helps out Snow without saying who she is, then she and Snow disappear for a while. Then, when they return to the game, I believe the first mention of her name is "Good luck, Fang" or something like that. What happened to a "Hi, my name is Fang!"? And this isn't a one-time thing. Most of the characters' names aren't even mentioned or at least not in their introduction. Rosch, Jihl, Dysley, and a bunch of the other non-main characters are shown with no introduction, so I had no idea who they were in the slightest. I could have learned who they were by reading the datalog, which is basically a giant FF13 encyclopedia that evolves as you learn more about people, but if you need an encyclopedia to tell a story, then you've told it poorly. Also, whenever you load your game, you get a summary of your chapter while the game loads, which is nice except that it reveals plot and, again, if you need to use summaries to tell your story, then you're telling it poorly. For example, at one point Lightning gives Hope a dagger and by his reaction, she looks kind of worried, but I had no idea why she was worried. Then, when loading my game, it says why she was worried and I just wish they had made it more clear. So in general, the story might have been decent, but I don't feel like reading a constantly-updating encyclopedia to see everything. The story was told poorly, and had it been told better I might have enjoyed it more.
And now to gripe about something that'll probably make musicly appreciative people hate me. I'll start by saying that the music isn't bad. I'm not really a fan of well-composed music and I honestly miss the old midis from the early games that were catchy and probably considered annoying to most, but that's my personal preference, so I won't hold it against this game. The music is good, but it's supposed to be background music, and it isn't. In a good portion of the dungeons during the walk-around time, the music is absolutely epic, and that's a problem for me. When all the music is epic, how do you define an epic scene? The music needed to be a little bit blander in some areas, as well as quieter. I had extreme volume issues during the game. I don't have a 7.1 surround sound system or anything, and maybe that was part of the problem, but during cutscenes it was hard to hear the voices over the music, and that is a huge problem for me. Maybe with a better speaker system you could have isolated the voices better, but you shouldn't need awesome speakers to enjoy a game. And I hated when a cutscene melded into a fight scene because I had to turn my TV up for the cutscenes, but then way down for fights. The issues with sound are almost exactly the same as the graphics. The visuals for this game are beautiful, but they're flawed on a non-HD TV. I can still appreciate the environments and the characters and such, and I loved them. My problem is words. There was no option for a 4:3 aspect ratio TV like mine, so all the words were pixelated and disgusting. So bad that I could barely read them at all and typically tried my best to not read them since I might become more cross-eyed from doing so. Not only were they blurry, but they were tiny. The menu for the game was pretty, but not functional. When I tried to equip weapons or accessories, I had to get closer to the screen to try to read things because the text takes up only maybe 30% of the screen, while a giant picture of your character takes up the rest. The pictures were pretty and had a cool transition effect, but why so big? I can't read the important stuff, but I can see right up Sazh's nose! Huge problem.
Similar issue with the crystarium. The crystarium is the level-up system for the game and acts very similarly to FFX's sphere grid. The visuals are pretty, but not functional at all. And everything is white. Maybe having a non-HD TV was my issue, but I liked to read the descriptions of what's left in this portion of the crystarium. It says like, "HP: 7/10," which means that you've activated 7 of 10 HP-increasing nodes. I really like to know this, but you can only read that when the lower-left corner of the screen is over a somewhat dark portion of the screen, which rarely happens. I typically had to back completely out of the crystarium menu, then go back in so that I could read it. Absolutely terrible. At least this game has amazing loading speeds so backing up doesn't take an eternity, but it's a pointness issue. Functionality first, please! At least in the menu. When it's functional, then you can make it pretty.
Speaking of the crystarium, let's talk technical. Behind all RPGs is a battle system and level-up system, and it's a huge part of the game. The crystarium isn't as fun as the sphere grid, mostly because it's so restricting, but I didn't mind it. I like the idea of leveling up individual stats at your own discretion, and since this game only has three stats, it was pretty simple. I like simple. And the game limits how much you can level up during set parts of the game, which is a love/hate thing with me. I like that fights will always be challenging because of this, but that's what I loved about past Final Fantasy games. You could play them how you wanted. If you wanted to level grind and kill bosses in a hit, go for it. But if not, then you don't have to. This game doesn't have that, which is too bad. The levels started taking so many points to upgrade anyway, which I think is a good enough restriction, so why put in limits? If you want to try to earn 12000 points in an area where the average fight gives 100, then you should be allowed to. And then there are battles. For a long time, I was cool with battles. I like that after each fight you get a 100% cure. There isn't any conserving MP, because there isn't MP. It relieves a lot of conservation stresses, so I enjoy the idea. Now, here's the problem. The other Final Fantasy games rely on conservation, so even though the groups of goblins aren't difficult, they can wear you down. When there's no such thing as being worn down, it means that each fight needs to be hard, else they can be completely ignored. And so, especially at the end, each fight was really really hard. And not just hard, but time consuming. I hate wasting time, and when each enemy has two million life, I get bored. They also hit hard, so you lost quite often. It's a good thing that there's a Retry option, plus save points every five steps (seriously, about every 8-12 minutes of gameplay is a new savepoint), but I started trying to avoid as many fights as possible because they were long and repetitive. Fight fight cure fight cure staggered the enemy attack! And then you win 10 minutes later. And the worst part about this is the unproportional experience gain. It starts out great. Each movement on the crystarium cost maybe 100 points, and each fight gave you maybe 80-100. So, cool. One or two fights to move once is great. But then at the end with the uber-HP enemies that take 10 minutes to fight you would gain like, 2000 points, when a movement typically costs 10,000. So that means (math time) It takes roughly fifty minutes to get one node on the grid. And when that node is something crappy, like strength for your mage, it's terribly frustrating.
I will give a few honorable mentions now to close this review, first being the one area with any diversity and sidequests. The area is awesome because it's an endless plains of monsters and it's very cool to see the monsters living like animals. Some fight each other, and some work in packs. It's so cool to see all the dog-like enemies in line, walking behind the large (mommy?) dog. And some enemies here are easy, and some are very very hard. My problem with this is that there isn't an option to run from enemies, so if you accidentally fight a King Behemoth, then your "run" option is to die and retry. It's not terrible, but I do wish there was a run away option. Finally, the characters. While I think some aren't as developed as others, I enjoyed the main characters and their diversity. As much as I hate hate hate Vanille, I like the rest of the cast enough that I can ignore her and her inconsistent accent and annoying noises she makes during fights. The characters all have development, and while I don't like some of it, it's at least there. All of your characters have a role, even if Sazh is useless (hope that's not a terrible spoiler), and I must say that Fang might be one of my favorite characters ever for a strange reason: I hate her. It isn't a hate like Vanille, who I just hate her personality, but Fang is a love-to-hate kinda girl. What drives her is so annoying, but she's such an interesting character because of her strange motivations and such. It's hard to describe without spoiling things, but I was definitely intrigued by her, which is cool. So in summary, the game is okay, but it ruins itself and really isn't a Final Fantasy, to me. It has great aspects, but just about every aspect has a crippling flaw. The story needs to be presented better, the fights are neat but too long, the level-ups are hard to use but pretty, the music is good but doesn't properly add to the scenes, and so on and so forth. The best part for me, but not for a game in general, is that the game has little to no replay value. The dungeons are linear, the level-ups are restricted, and since most of the game until this general point have set parties, the game will always play the exact same until Chapter 11 of 13. Is that a problem? Yes. But not for me, since I don't own the game. So win for me! The only things I could have done still done were fighting more giant monsters and trying to master the crystarium using monsters that give crap experience to move you along those last 60,000 point nodes. No thanks. |
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