#honestly i wonder how big the overlap between fanbases are

[supersymmetries]

i had the most wonderful dream where muse collaborated with deftones for their song "entombed". my brain had actually somehow succeeded transplanting matt's voice onto different lyrics. there was a cool black-and-white music video and everything where everyone was playing together. and then a spam call woke me up.

[escapingburger]

Final Fantasy XIII Discovered: A Quiet World

Around the time of Final Fantasy XIII's release, there was a fairly infamous quote from director Motomu Toriyama comparing the game to Call of Duty. Unsurprisingly, this didn't go over terribly well. While there's certainly overlap between FPS and RPG fandom--and plenty of crossover between the genres themselves in recent years--there remains a nontrivial contingent of Final Fantasy enthusiasts who wouldn't touch a Shoot Mans game if you paid them. For them, this was evidence that FF13 had finally killed the series forever, just like Final Fantasies VII, VIII, X, XI, and XII did.

I joke, but the discord around this quote did touch on a larger concern about the game. Final Fantasy XIII is extremely linear, at least for the first half or so, and it's stripped of many of the trappings that flesh out a typical RPG's world. The above article says this was all an intentional design, but various reports in the subsequent years suggest that Final Fantasy, like many series, struggled in the move to high-definition consoles and was forced to streamline itself by necessity. The cost of filling out a game's world was immensely higher on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 than it was in the previous generation, so it would be no surprise if Square Enix chose a linear approach simply because there'd less world to make.

The impression I'd had for a while was that FF13 was something of a compromised experience, shaved down into a narrow, focused game just so the developers could get something out the door. But as I thought about this more recently, I realized that it's not actually so far off from Final Fantasy X's approach. That game, too, is largely a single long path from start to finish, with few chances to explore or deviate until the very end. It, though, seemed to be much better received by the general fanbase than FF13 was. So I wondered: What's the difference here, really? Was FFX's take on linearity somehow just that much better, or was it all a matter of timing?

Now that I'm actually playing Final Fantasy XIII, I feel confident saying that there is something fundamentally different between the two games. Timing was still a factor, certainly, as the RPG landscape had unquestionably changed from 2001 to 2010. But even then, Final Fantasy X captured something that FF13 often seems to miss, and I think a lot of it has to do with the people.

Final Fantasy X is full of people. Although there aren't many towns in the game, you're constantly encountering people along the way--fellow travelers, friends, rivals, and other random denizens of Spira. There's a sense that the world is a living, populated place, where everyone has their own lives and concerns. The game isn't just about getting from one end of an area to the other; it's presented as a grand journey that brings you face-to-face with much of the world you're trying to save. This is the sort of thing that separates an actual role-playing game, I think, from a mere dungeon crawl. Even if most of the game is still about fighting monsters and getting treasure, it's all tied together by a broader context.

In contrast, Final Fantasy XIII is a distinctly lonely game. You spend large portions of the earlier game away from people and society, trekking through remote or forbidden areas. Often, the only other people you encounter are the enemy soldiers who are actively trying to kill you. And even when you do, eventually, re-enter civilization, it largely just leads to more battles along a linear path. The closest thing I've seen to a real town at least lets you talk (well, listen) to people for a bit, but you're still basically on rails until the enemies show up again. There aren't even any shopkeepers in the game; all your purchases are made through the same computer terminals you use to save your progress. Most of your knowledge of the broader world comes through flashbacks or written lore entries.

All of this is perfectly justified by the story, as you spend most of this time as fugitives, but it still feels like a big chunk of what makes a game an RPG is sort of missing. Where FF10's linear path seamlessly blended town, dungeon, and overworld, FF13 is more like a long chain of dungeons, one after the other. Or like a series of levels, punctuated by cutscenes. Kind of like Call of Duty.

I feel like this is the most negative post I've written in this series, but honestly, I've still been enjoying the game quite a bit. The battle system remains fast-paced and strategic, so it works well as a series of levels, at least. And the characters, surprisingly, are a real highlight for me. The plot can move pretty slowly, but that gives the game plenty of time to explore the party members' backgrounds, motivations, and reactions to the situation they've been thrust into. Some characters are more believable than others--I'd say Sazh feels the most like an actual person, and Vanille the least--but everyone gets fleshed out well beyond the basic archetypes they appear to be at first. This is a big part of what keeps me engaged with the game, just to see how they continue to grow.

Normally, this is where I'd say something like "FF13's approach isn't entirely successful, but I'm glad I got to experience it." But the thing is, this isn't actually the whole of the game. Final Fantasy XIII, I'm told, drops the linearity and opens up in a significant way somewhere around the halfway point. I'm not there yet, but I think I'm pretty close--so expect another post sooner or later looking at the other side of this game.