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hopeymchope · 12 years ago

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I seriously love Final Fantasy XIII so far (and it should probably feel bad about that)

Are you in for nearly 5,000 words about one HALF of a game, my friend? I hope so. BUCKLE UP.

We’re gonna divide this bad boy out into subsections so that it doesn’t look like a wall of text, but make no mistake – it’s still a wall of text, it just has some bolder text thrown in occasionally.

I Kinda Hate Old-School RPGs (Usually)

Here’s the thing, dear (long-abandoned) readers… as stated in that subhead, I don’t care much for the standard tropes of your “old-school” RPGs. I could summarize my feelings thusly: Fuck a Dragon Quest.

To clarify, Mass Effect is technically an RPG, and I love that franchise more than I love SweetTarts, but I’m talking about the old standards of what constitutes an “RPG.” More specifically, here are my sore points:

I despise random battles. DESPISE. I want to see my enemies coming at me, not “surprise! It’s a fight!” I’ve actually quit playing games entirely because I walked so tantalizingly close to someplace I was going, only to get jumped by an invisible battle that I wanted no part of. Then I realized that I would rather do almost anything than fight another random battle, and I turned off the game forever. Fuck that and fuck you, random battles.

Go back to hell.

The above is made worse by the fact that I don’t like turn-based fights very much either for multiple reasons. Firstly because I like to have more direct control over my character instead of feeling like some goofy spectator. Second because managing the actions of four or more characters is some tedious bullshit (Oh noes, Terra is 2 HP away from dying! I’d better tell her to heal herself or else she’ll just be retarded and let herself die!). Third because I find it unintentionally funny when I see RPG characters just standing there, unmoving, waiting politely to take their turns to attack a gigantic drooling monster standing right in front of them. And of course, they only attack one at a time, because SPORTSMANSHIP.

I’ve often discussed this, but I love short games. I love getting a wide variety of gaming experiences or playing a game that I might actually take the time to replay one day, as opposed to playing some 90-hour grindquest where I limp my way towards saving the world after downing hordes of “surprise!” enemies in random battles.

“Grinding” (i.e. the process of wandering aimlessly in an RPG JUST SO you can encounter more random battles JUST SO you can get more battle experience JUST SO you can get your characters leveled up JUST SO you can fight the monsters you actually need to fight) was invented by Satan to make you realize the world is an inherently evil place. Some people like it; those people are masochists.

This is a lesser issue, but uh… I’m disinclined to go in for classical “Fantasy” worlds. Elves and dwarves and fairies and shit? They’re… okay… but I need either a lighthearted or distinctively unique context to truly care. I’ve never been one for dirty horse-riding dudes that desperately need proper washing habits. Game of Thrones? NOT my scene.

TAKE A BATH, HIPPIE.

Occasionally, despite everything I just said, an RPG will sneak into my heart and live there. I absolutely loved Earthbound because it has hilarious dialogue, a semi-modern setting, a great story, NO random battles at all, and even in the turn-based battles, you never see your characters sittin’ there all lazy and dumb! I even played through the original Pokemon because it A) took place in a modern setting , B) there was a reason why the Pokemon needed to be ordered around (they’re idiots!), and C) grinding was unnecessary.

But when it comes to Final Fantasy, I’ve never successfully gotten into it. The gameplay has never captured me, because… well, just read that bulleted list.

A Brief History of My Final Fantasy Experience and an Intro to “Explorer’s Ruin”

I’ve been curious about Final Fantasy for a long time. It’s hard to be a gamer and NOT feel curious about any series that so many people burn with passion for. I try to be a renaissance man when it comes to video games; I’ll play almost any genre in the hopes that I can finally learn to care. And who doesn’t like the base concepts of Final Fantasy titles? World-threatening evil comes to a world of medieval/steampunk/cyberpunk technology, and a bunch of people fight it using ridable yellow birds, phoenix feathers, and dudes named “Cid.” Sounds good to me!

Beware the dangers of CIDs. Ever since Nintendo Power dedicated an entire issue to loving all over the original NES title, I’ve read about the series’ development at great length, often wondering if I could into the franchise with X game or Y game. And so, on various occasions, I’ve tried to do that.

After the series went all steampunk on us in the game we used to call Final Fantasy III (you know it as Final Fantasy VI), I picked up that game and gave it a shot. Hey, everybody loves it and keeps talking about an opera scene, it’s got mechs and great music, what could go wrong?

Yeah, I made it maybe 15% of the way before throwing in the towel because I was expected to grind in order to progress. By that point, I had already encountered enough infuriating “random battles” to make me grit my teeth in rage, and I’d seen nothing to make me interested in the story just yet, so I sold it for a high price and felt great about it.

Final Fantasy III/VI also marked my first experience with what I call “Explorer’s Ruin.” You see, RPGs often seem like they encourage exploring. Sometimes it’s even true! But then you start to discover that there are many areas – many, many areas – where exploring them just seems to get you DEATH. You’re left to figure out for yourself if this is because A) you’re supposed to return to this area later in the game, or B) you’re supposed to grind and then go through that area if you want to get anywhere at all. You might think that the sheer magnitude of how hard you die would be a clue, but oddly, it’s rarely that clear-cut. Final Fantasy III/VI contains some problems like this, but nothing like, say, Golden Sun (where the area you’re NOT supposed to go yet is often filled with ever-so-slightly-deadlier monsters, leaving you very unclear on whether you’re supposed to just man up and forge through it, so then you stumble your way through it by the skin of your teeth and you get somewhere and the characters in that place are like “We’re not ready to talk to you yet” and you’re all “Motherfucker, I am NOT walking back through that hell,” but then you do anyway and OF COURSE you die and man, fuck this RPG shit).

With that notion in mind, I went over to a friend’s house to play Final Fantasy VII when it came out. He rented it the week it came out, and the world was abuzz with FF Fever. Now, ignoring the hideous polygons of the PS1 for a moment, those CG cut scenes were really pretty for the time. We made it a little bit past some weirdness involving cross-dressing before we stopped for the weekend, but I must say… despite some interesting supporting characters and a lot of cool pre-rendered scenes, I still screamed and growled at every hideous, horrible random battle. I have to give them props for the fact that we were only punished for veering off the main, expected path on one occasion that I remember, at least. Even so, RANDOM BATTLES ALL UP IN YO GRILL. Yeah, I never actually played FFVII again. Given that this is often cited as one of the greatest games of all time, I’m sure some people see that as a crime.

Years later, I saw Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles land on the GameCube. It was supposed to be a multiplayer-focused hack-n-slash action title set within the larger FF mythos, and I thought this sounded like it could easily be my “in.” Sure, I didn’t have access to two GBAs, two link cables and two gamers (much less FOUR of each of those), but there was a single-player mode included, so I was up for it. About six hours later, it was pretty clear to me that the single-player mode was thrown in as an afterthought, and the conceit of being tied to a bucket of water that creates a survival bubble within the overworld’s “miasma” made the entire thing feel similar to a slow death. Speaking of which, you know what else suffers an incredibly slow death? Every single boss monster in this game when you’re playing alone. Apparently, if I really want a short, action-driven single-player Final Fantasy game, I need to play Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers for the Wii, but I only recently learned that game isn’t a bog-standard Crystal Chronicles sequel, so I haven’t gotten around to that.

Shortly thereafter, I opted to give the original Final Fantasy a whirl when it was reborn on the PSP with a supposedly easier difficulty level. I was an adult by that point – more patient and more nostalgic for those old pixelated games of yore – and I figured I might be more forgiving than my teenybopper self was towards FFVI and FFVII. But… nope, I played about 25-30% of the way through the original game in its PSP remake before I got sick of random battles always interrupting me and fucking me over when I was just trying to walk somewhere. (This, until recently, would mark the farthest I’ve gotten into a Final Fantasy game. )

The four heroes in the PSP version FF1 looked adorable, if nothing else.

Next up? Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest! I downloaded it on the Wii Virtual Console, thinking that an “introductory RPG” sounded pretty nice for someone of my ilk. You know, it does have some mildly amusing puzzles, and I like that I can see all the monsters right on the map. But dear lord, this game is too stupid for me. I often fear the complexity of the maths behind RPGs, but this is about as complex as stacking two blocks on top of each other. For once in my pitiful FF career, I got bored with how much I rocked instead of frustrated with how micromanage-y their bullshit was.

My last historical experience with Final Fantasy came with Dissidia: Final Fantasy on the PSP. A fighting game, right? I should be golden!

Ha-ha, but no, seriously, this game is bullshit. Well, all right, it’s actually more like “fandom navel-gazing to the max,” and that’s not INHERENTLY bullshit, but promoting it as a “fighting game” is very much bullshit. If you play it as one, you will be miserable. The fact that it takes place in wide-open three-dimensional arenas in which only two people are really fighting can really make each battle a drawn-out slog, and the fights themselves are definitely catering more towards the “RPG Battle System Complexities” mindset than the “Fighting Game Complexities” mindset. There’s only a little guidance given on how shit works, so the finer details are up to you to figure out. If you can take hold of the system, I know plenty of people who’ve been addicted by this. Me? I played through Cecil’s campaign, then I was like “Whatevs.” I think if I had a stronger background in these characters outside of word-of-mouth, I might’ve cared more.

Which bring us to THE NAKED NOW.

Final Fantasy XIII is totally rad!

Why did I decide to try Final Fantasy XIII? Many reasons: I wanted a background in the universe before Lightning Returns comes out (because that looks like a cool action/RPG hybrid), and I wanted a game that would let my fingers take a break after the intense combat I’m used to made my joints start aching. So I gave it a go and just hoped for the best.

Ahhh, but you know how that turned out. As I stated right at the top of this wee diatribe, I love the crap out of Final Fantasy XIII so far. I’m at roughly the game’s halfway point (they say it lasts roughly 50 hours, and I’ve spent 25), and I suppose that things could go downhill from here. Maybe when I start on Chapter 11? I hear it’s more open and full of death. But it’s earned a lot of goodwill from for the first 25 hours, so I’ll probably be a little bit forgiving even then.

If you read the first section of this post, it’s pretty easy to see WHY I’d love the game up to this point. This is a game that directly addresses most of my complaints about RPGs in general.

There are no random battles. You can always see enemies approaching you or lying in wait; you can even sneak up on them sometimes for a pre-emptive strike attack!

When those battles then start up, they’re not turn-based. You watch your action meter (also called an “Active Time Battle” or “ATB” meter in a vain attempt to appeal to the old-schoolers) fill up, then you have the ability to take whatever action you choose to fill each section of the meter. Typically you wait for the meter to fill completely, then watch your hero of choice whip out four or five or however-many moves in a row, but you can also jump right in immediately after any section fills and just do the move you have the strength/energy for at that moment. And because the meters for everyone in the party fill separately, this also means that characters team up to attack simultaneously!

Oh, and these battles are utterly dynamic . They look amazing in action, with leaping slashes into the air, backwards-jumping gun firing and whatnot. And the characters are ALWAYS MOVING. Even when they’re not attacking, your party is moving around, their weapons at the ready, biding their time and watching for an opening.

You only directly control one party member at a time. The rest of the party? You just tell them what role you want them to fill, and then they’re smart enough to do it their own goddamn selves. In fact, they’re so smart that they understand when a particular attack is weak or SUPER EFFECTIVE! (Pokemon ref, lawlz) against a foe, and they’ll remember that fact FOREVER. For the rest of the game, they’ll spam whatever they know to be strong against that foe. YEAAAAAAAAH!

The game is designed to NOT require grinding. True, you can get screwed if you skip over too many battles by using a shroud-based item to hide from the bad guys and then run around them, but if you play the game straightforward like they want you to, you’ll always be at the proper level needed to challenge your current foe. Unless, of course, the game says “Dude, you’re not strong enough to fight this guy; you should probably run.” Yes, it actually tells you that – which is either terrible or wonderful, and I’m not sure which. You can even power yourself up extra by doing sidequests once you hit a certain point in the game, but I’m not there yet, so I don’t know how mandatory that is. Hopefully the answer is “not at all mandatory.”

Now, I’m not usually a huge fan of super-linear games, but by making this game so linear, there is nearly ZERO Explorer’s Ruin. Even if you get killed in battle, you can start up again right BEFORE that battle, so that’s not bad at all. Usually. Unless that battle’s been going on for 20 minutes. (We’ll get there.)

Much like… well, almost every Final Fantasy since VI… this is a sci-fi/fantasy fusion world full of interesting concepts instead of just elves/trolls/fairies/hooey. No straight fantasy, but lots of intriguing ideas about how our fates are manipulated by forces beyond our control, and seriously, FUCK those forces, yo.

The game’s systems are pretty crazy-complex when they’re fully explained, but the game is kind enough to introduce each idea nice and slowly. It’s like they’re giving you a 20-hour tutorial interspersed with character development and combat, yes, and that’s kind of… well, it’s… it’s kind to someone like ME specifically.

Where the game still stumbles in its relentless attempts to appeal to me personally is in its length. This game takes forever to play (I’m only just past the halfway point after 20 goddamn hours!), and a big part of that is spent in lengthy, interminable battles. It’s a good thing the battle system is so cool, because that makes it ALMOST tolerable that many fights can last for 10-20 minutes at a time. Which is absoludicrously asinine, but I guess I can’t actually have EVERYTHING I want. A 10-hour or 15-hour Final Fantasy was too much to demand (again, yes, I now know about The Crystal Bearers, and no, I haven’t played it since I last mentioned it). But more enemies with shorter battles would be better than this drawn-out blow-trading. If you’re looking for a way to pad the experience, seriously, I think “more and quicker battles” is better than “it takes an hour to whittle down this HP wall.”

It’s all pretty much a blast of fun up until Chapter 7, however. That’s about the point when some of the battles start lasting for-freaking-ever. Some fights in Chapter 7 and Chapter 9 go on for longer than 20 minutes, even. And no, I don’t mean BOSS fights. Just regular-ass fights. At the very least, I can take comfort in the knowledge that this is a sporadic occurrence. Most battles continue to move at a decent clip.

You get to control six characters. All of them can fight, and all of them have hair that looks like cotton candy. Here’s your character breakdown:

Lightning - Lightning is a rage-fueled security officer in a coastal community, and most Final Fantasy fans in North America apparently don’t like her. I can’t imagine why. Whenever a character starts acting like a tool, she usually punches that character. If Lightning senses injustice, she kills it. If that injustice is committed by THE GODS THEMSELVES? Fuck it; she’s going to murder all gods and destroy the world if she has to FOR GREAT JUSTICE, BECAUSE JUSTICE IS ABSOLUTE IN ALL THINGS. And I can’t imagine anything I’d support harder than that. Lightning is the person that humanity should always aspire to be if they want to transcend our mortal bodies and become something greater than themselves. Also, she carries a big sword that folds up into a gun because that’s the kind of thing you do in Japanese video games. Final Fantasy fans in Japan apparently LOVE Lightning, because everyone should.

"God, I'm awesome. Why am I hanging out with these losers?"

Sazh – Single father/old guy/walking bird’s nest Sazh is basically the “in” for the audience when the game begins. He’s the guy who acts normal and asks questions. Then he becomes the funny guy, and then the depressive guy. Sazh is a pretty cool pistoleer-type, but for some reason he insists on only shooting bad guys when he can pose dramatically first. He uses his ATB/action meter to build up the strength to vogue.

Snow – King Tool of Moron Mountain – the kind of guy you’re really scared that your daughter is going to marry one day. He leads a group of idiots who think they’re an army but really just pick fights with wildlife on the weekends, and he thinks this makes him the ultimate badass. Snow’s little gang hangs out in a bar when they’re not pissing off innocent wolves. They all look and act like fratties. As Tim Rogers of ActionButton.net said: “You keep expecting [Snow] to say, when the camera slides in his direction: ‘Hey, have you guys seen my keg?’ … He is dumb enough to misplace a keg of beer. He is strong enough to carry a keg of beer like a Double Big Gulp and then forget that he's not carrying it. He drinks kegs of beer all the time. He drinks them completely by himself. He wouldn't mind just buying another keg to replace the one he misplaced.” On the occasions when someone actually makes him feel real human feelings, Snow gets so confused and angry that he starts punching walls and railings. His trenchcoat has circuitry in it that allows him to fistfight robots and battle machines, and he’s still not cool even when he punches a tank to death. Lightning hates him because she is so awesome, and he is so terrible.

"Have you guys seen my keg?"

Vanille – One look at her tells you that Vanille was designed specifically for sexy coplay girls. But beyond that, she’s also a bubbleheaded pathological liar who is, oddly, really hard to dislike. She’s just so SUNNY. She has a secret so obvious that you’ll figure it out in less than two hours, but the characters won’t figure it out until Hour 17 or so, because video games. She fights with a feathered wooden pitchfork that is also a fishing rod, I shit you not.

Hope – When Hope first shows up, he’s pretty much the most hatable character in the game. He acts like a snotty, misguided little brat for the first 10 hours, but then he starts getting kind of sympathetic and interesting. By the time he was (at last!) ready to stab Snow, I finally liked Hope and hated Snow, so I was actually pretty okay with his plan to become a 14-year-old murderer. That’s real progress. Also, he hits bad guys with a giant boomerang.

Vanille and Hope in a scene where they're probably lying and fantasizing about murder (respectively). Fang – A young Claudia Black with a spear. She is boring.

For the first eight chapters, the game forces you to control individuals and parties that they foist off on you. It’s really annoying initially but then emerges as a stroke of genius in its own way, because it forces you to get to know the different characters – both from a personal perspective and a gameplay perspective. You get to know them through plenty of well-handled cut scenes with great voice acting and gorgeous visuals. Meanwhile, different characters have different roles they can play in combat, and you have to learn all those roles as you work through these chapters. Square Enix refuses to let you just rot away with a single character in one or two specific roles; this is wise, for stagnation is the enemy of the game’s combat system.

“Paradigm Shift!” That’s what the game cries out to you whenever you change the characters’ “jobs.” You see, ever since Final Fantasy X, the series has been trying to shake up the combat with every entry. Whereas X was a smaller shift, XII and XIII are out to rock the combat to its very core.

Combat strategy in XIII revolves around “paradigms.” You get 2 or 3 characters to manipulate at a time (because the game wisely knows that, at any given point in the story, there’s a good chance you only like 2 or 3 characters anyway), and you set up a series of job roles within “paradigms.” So maybe you want Lightning to slash bad guys to hell and back while Fang provokes the enemies to keep all attention on him, and Hope focuses on healing the whole party. If that’s the case, you’ll set up a Paradigm where Lightning is a “Commando,” Fang is a “Sentinel,” and Hope is a “Medic.” (I realize these jobs sound like jargon-y crap, but trust me, you’ll understand them in context). There; that’s one paradigm. When you might set up another paradigm where Fang focuses on inflicting bad status ailments (like, y’know, SLOWGA) on the bad guys (“Saboteur”), Hope gives healthy status buffs to the good guys (“Synergist”) and Lightning heals everybody while this happens (“Medic”). That’s another Paradigm, and you can switch between the two paradigms you just created by simply hitting a shoulder button on your controller and selecting a different setup in a matter of seconds.

There’s other stuff to the combat, like “Staggering” and items and whatnot, but I’m not going to spell that out for you. This isn’t a gameplay tutorial, it’s a review. Well, it’s kind of a review. It’s more of an essay. ANYWAY… the point is that it feels good to outsmart these enemies and keep them on the defensive with your paradigms. It feels nervewracking to be on the defensive, jumping into a protective paradigm while you try to do some party maintenance. The whole thing feels clever and nice; I just wish the battles didn’t take so stupidly long.

Sure, the game has some goofy irritations to it, such as the need for the game to animate each “Paradigm Shift!” and then show you a bunch of meaningless numbers as you pound a bad guy into submission. (“1221” … Uh, 1221 of what? What’s the total hit points on this guy? What does that mean? Answer: Enemies are like piñatas full of numerals. Just keep hitting that dude until all his numbers fall out, and rest assured that the exact numbers have no relevance to anything.)

Collect all the numbers! …but it’s rad in the WORST way.

Now, if you’re a fan of Final Fantasy as a whole, you probably read that bulleted list I posted under “I Kinda Hate Old-School RPGs (Usually)” and told me to go fuck a Moogle. That list is the enemy of RPG fans in general, and Final Fantasy games in particular. The majority of this series is founded on the four principles of:

a) Random Battles

b) Turn-Based Combat

c) Grinding

d) Doing all of the above for 50 hours or more before the game is over.

Generally speaking, this is also a series that revels in exploration. That’s not always the case (my time with Final Fantasy VII was pretty linear), but it’s usually available to those who seek it, complete with all the Explorer’s Ruin you deserve if you actually dare to explore. Hell, even Final Fantasy XIII-2 is reportedly full of exploration and free-roaming opportunities, because enough people missed that in XIII that it became a cornerstone of the direct sequel.

So basically, everything about my tastes is at odds with the majority of this franchise. It’s kind of weird that I keep coming back to give Final Fantasy another opportunity to disappoint me.

It’s weirder still that I enjoy Final Fantasy XIII so much. I love a well-told story with character-building cutscenes, I love dynamic action, I love forward momentum. Naturally, I’m loving this game so far.

But it’s called Final Fantasy XIII, guys. Final Fantasy Ex-Eye-Eye-Eye! I SHOULDN’T love this game, because by this point in the series, the fanbase should probably have a pretty good idea of what they’re getting into. And although this game does feature the obvious components of ridable chicken-beasts, phoenix downs and a dude named “Cid,” those are pretty much window dressing. You can find those in The Crystal Bearers, for god’s sake, but that short single-player action-adventure is at least a spinoff. This is a main-numbered entry in the franchise, for the love of Bahamut, and it’s got shockingly little in common with most of the other 12.

I feel for you fans. It’s easy to see why all of these linear adventures through dynamic battles and cut scenes would turn y’all off. You have my sympathies, but at the same time, I’m… kinda grateful that I’m getting this slice of the series to enjoy. It’s good to feel like I’m on the INSIDE of Final Fantasy for once, even if I probably don’t belong here.

Despite the sensation of being out of place, I’m obviously not alone. This game is one of Square’s top-four biggest sellers of all time in terms of sheer numbers of copies. Even after decades of re-releases in almost every format known to man, much-beloved entries like Final Fantasy VI and IV still haven’t sold as many copies as Final Fantasy XIII already has in a much shorter lifespan. That says something.

Who knows? If I ever finish FFXIII, maybe I’ll even play XIII-2. And I’ll DEFINITELY play Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. That thing looks white-hot to someone of my tastes.

But I can imagine what it must be like for the nay-sayers. What if I showed up for Mega Man 11, and they gave me a first-person shooter with no robot powers to steal and no selectable stages? Hell, I’d be bitter, too.

For the sake of you embittered long-time fans, I hope you get more of what you’re seeking in Final Fantasy XV. You shouldn’t have to resort to playing a spinoff like “The 4 Heroes of Light” on the DS to get your classical Final Fantasy fix.

In the meantime, I’ll keep digging on FFXIII. But I promise that I will try to feel properly shamed while doing so.

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