Final Fantasy XIII – Review

There aren’t many games series that have quite as much hype surrounding them as the Final Fantasy series. You know the drill: The quiet period where Square Enix don’t give us a clue what they’re up to. The E3 event where we’re blasted with the most impressive game cinematic we’ve ever seen, followed swiftly by two more years of complete silence, until……finally……The ReleaseTM!

There are gamers who can’t wait to get their hands on this latest incarnation, regardless of what’s been said about it. There are those who have such fond memories of the earlier games that their only true wish is to play the same game over and over again, but with a new set of characters and a minor twist on the classic tale. There are those who just want to see the Chocobos and/or the hot girls. Over the past twelve games in the series (and countless spin-offs), there have been so many definitions and redefinitions of what a Final Fantasy game is. What I’m getting at here is that although Square Enix were never going to be able to please everyone, they were never going to fail. That said, I (and I hope you too) am less interested in how many copies this juggernaut of a game sells. I’m more interested in how good a game it actually is, and whether it’s worth devoting 50+ hours of your precious time to.

Here’s the Final Fantasy XIII backstory. There are two worlds, Cocoon and Pulse, which were created by large mechanical beings called fal’Cie [sic]. These worlds were created to be inhabited by the humans, who saw the fal’Cie as gods. At some point, the fal’Cie from each of the worlds had a disagreement, which has resulted in a constant war between Cocoon and Pulse. The fal’Cie have the ability to imbue humans with magical powers, and charge them with a Focus (a quest) that they have to complete. These humans are known as l’Cie, and if they don’t complete their Focus in the time allotted to them, they turn into soulless monsters called Cie’th. I’d say that’s more than gentle encouragement. The sick twist is that l’Cie aren’t explicitly told what their Focus is – they have to work it out for themselves. For these reasons, l’Cie see their new found magical powers as a curse, rather than a gift. This ‘curse’ is taken very seriously by the government of Cocoon, who regularly round up anyone who has come into contact with a l’Cie, and ship them off to Pulse.

The game begins during a massive exile of ‘infected’ citizens from Cocoon. After a surprisingly short (for Final Fantasy) introductory cinematic, the first playable characters – Lightning, the mysterious military gal, and Sazh, the afro sporting pilot – are thrust immediately into action, and we meet the FFXIII combat system for the first time. It’s deliberately stripped down at this point, and we get to see more and more of it in the lead-up to the game’s midpoint. We’re treated to the concise tutorials that we’ve come to know in previous Final Fantasy games. The battle engine itself has brought back a lot of the micro-management features of earlier games in the series, but has retained the real-time feeling that those who played Final Fantasy XII were introduced to. The feature that really defines the combat in FFXIII is the Role/Paradigm system. FFXII made use of a Gambit system, that essentially dictated how your supporting party members would act in certain situations, but it was completely optional. FFXIII takes this a stage further with Roles and Paradigms. You can train each of the party members in a set of Roles – these cover the basic styles of play, such as close-combatant, spell-caster, healer, tank and so on. When in combat, you can switch between different Paradigms, which are preset combination’s of Roles, designed to make the team fight with one clear purpose. While this essentially means you can fight your way through a lot of battles by just switching Paradigms, you needn’t worry about feeling like there’s less skill involved, or you can switch to auto-pilot.

The difficulty of the battles as the game progresses reinforce the skill involved in using the correct Paradigms at precisely the correct moment. You’ll also find that as well as each of the six playable characters having certain strengths and weaknesses, they also have access to different sets of Roles, so you really need to select a party that has access to as wide a range of Paradigms as possible, in order to be able to cope with every battle situation.

That’s combat. Our next playable characters are Snow, the rebel leader and self proclaimed ‘hero’, and the kids, Vanille and Hope. You’ll find as you progress through the game, much like an unnamed TV drama with progressively insane plot twists *cough* Lost *cough*, that all of the main character’s lives are all somehow intertwined, and the situation they’ve been thrown into will expose some of their darker secrets. This isn’t the place to give away the major plot twists in the game, but, suffice to say, they’ll keep you well entertained throughout, thanks in part to the beautiful visuals in FFXIII.

There are a massive range of locations in the game (made possible by Final Fantasy’s unique blend of nature, technology and magic), and each one of them has had a massive amount of care and attention from Square Enix’s art department. They truly have some of the greatest game artists in the business, both when conceptualizing the locations and characters, and when making them a ‘reality’. The developers have taken full advantage of the franchise’s move to the current generation of games consoles, so much that I’ve spent a large portion of my play time just rotating the camera around my character, taking in as much of the environment as possible.

The game environment is complimented by a fantastic soundtrack, that manages to capture the mood of the playable sections and the cutscenes, and immerse you further into this fantasy. The audio however was where I met my first hangup with FFXIII. The theme that is carried throughout the soundtrack features a female vocalist, which is beautiful when heard for the first time. This vocal piece is remixed about ten times into just about every piece of music you hear for the full duration of the game, and it starts to get annoying. Luckily there were so many other great things about the game that this annoyance was minimal.

The gameplay in FFXIII differs between the first and second halves of the game. The game is broken up into 13 chapters, with the midpoint of the story occurring at the end of chapter 9. Up until this point, the game is completely linear, which was a dangerous move for Square Enix to make in a series renowned for its opportunities for exploration, side-quests and towns/markets for upgrading characters & equipment. A Final Fantasy game on rails was a very strange thing at first, but as I played through, I began to respect how well it works. By keeping this linear format, I was able to focus a lot more on character and plot development, and spend a lot less time repeating sections and doing the mindless ‘grinding’ that is required in almost every RPG I’ve ever encountered. If it still doesn’t feel natural to you after a while, I hope you persevere, as the big pay-off comes in chapter 10. At this point, you’ve unlocked the majority of the gameplay features, including the trickier elements of the battle system, and you finally get to go out and do things your way. Your characters can begin to specialize in certain Roles, you can take on a massive amount of side quests, or if you really want, you can get down to business and carry on with the main story. I loved this contrast between the two halves of the game, as you really feel like you’ve earned this new found freedom, after the 25-ish hours you’ve invested so far. My only complaint with the latter part of the game is that (as a person who likes to see as much of the game as possible) I began to spend more and more time on the character/inventory screens, swapping out equipment and trying different character development tracks – so much that I started to miss the lovely visuals, and fast-paced combat. If you were to ever consider replaying the game, I’d make a save game at the beginning of chapter 10, and just go from there.

Lets have a closer look at the women of Final Fantasy XIII. The major driving force behind the playable character’s actions is a woman called Serah. She’s just your typical girl in love with her new Fiancé, Snow. Serah has been made into a l’Cie and spends the majority of the game being held captive, pursued by Snow, her sister, Lightning, and the rest of the group. I played as Lightning through the entire game (apart from earlier chapters where your party was picked for you), as she was just awesome. She was the most rounded off character in the game, and aside from wanting to save her sister, you never fully understand her motives. Square Enix made a great decision to place a female as the lead, as it instantly took away that ‘damsel in distress’ theme that’s been done to death in recent games. This woman holds her own, and feels comfortable at the head of this group of heroes. Vanille is a different matter altogether. I couldn’t hide my frustration with her from start to finish because she seemed to embody everything that Lightning wasn’t, and serve it up in the most annoying way possible. She flaps around like a moron. She dresses like a schoolgirl who KNOWS the boys are looking. And to top it off, her in-game sound effects sound like the dirtiest, most ecstatic sexual moaning I’ve ever heard from a game character. Maybe I’ve not played enough top-shelf dating sims, but this was not what I expected from Final Fantasy. The only redeeming quality Vanille had was that her backstory and involvement with the plot brought us Fang, the third female playable character in the game’s six person lineup. Fang is the only character in the game that seems to know what is actually going on, and it was quite entertaining to see her take charge of the situation when the other characters seemed a bit lost.

It really is hard to summarize a game that has such a large scope, particularly because we all look for different things in it. I went looking for a game that had some nice throwbacks to earlier games in the series, a bit of originality & flair in the execution of the battle system, a diverse group of characters, and an engaging story. I found all of these things, plus a couple of nice surprises.

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