Review: Final Fantasy XIII
[originally posted: April 11, 2010] I haven't written a review in a long time. The last review I wrote, in fact, was of Devil May Cry 4, for the Official Xbox Magazine, in 2007. I didn't much like Devil May Cry 4, really. In the way of game journalists of my generation, I gave the game a 7.5 and an even-handed review, because there are things that it did do well. All the same, I was never asked to write another review for the magazine; much later, a staffer told me that someone from management had asked them to stop publishing my work. "Fine! Fuck you, too!" I thought, and then felt a burden lift. I had been reviewing games professionally since 1999 and was tired of it. I have long hinted that I would some day write an expose about what's really wrong with game reviewing, since nobody seems to quite get it right. But by the time I felt ready to do that, I was so bored with the whole business that I couldn't make myself want to. To my surprise, I instead find myself compelled to write a review once again. The game which I will endeavor to review, in a way that I'll make up as I go along, is the most complicated game of 2010: Final Fantasy XIII. * * * Final Fantasy XIII was announced for the PlayStation 3 in 2006, at Square Enix's E3 press conference. As a long time fan of the series who was confounded by its direction at that time -- the gully between Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XII -- I was eager for both a return to form ("form" as a concept roughly equivalent to "more Final Fantasy X" in my mind) and a justification for Sony's yet-to-be-released next generation system. Well, things change. * * * One thing that will make this review dramatically different to any I have ever written is that I will be considering what I learned by reading others' reviews, talking to other players, and generally trying to synthesize the concept of why this game was made the way it was made, not just whether it's any good. To my mind reviewing games in 2010 the old fashioned way is beside the point; as a journalist I recognize my own obsolescence -- the old tools have been made irrelevant by the power of marketing and the cacophony of the internet. Plus it's boring. That's not to promise that will be a review worth reading. I'm going to try, all the same. Final Fantasy XIII was released for the PlayStation 3 on December 17, 2009 by Square Enix Co., Ltd. It was localized into English (and ported to the Xbox 360) and released on March 9, 2010 in the major Western markets by the company's international subsidiaries. This is notable because it reveals so much about the flux of development from the time this game was conceived until it was released. Final Fantasy XIII came out nearly three years too late, by my reckoning. By the time it did come out, one of the only ways it successfully aligned with the market it was released into is that publishing a major game in March isn't, anymore, all that peculiar. Final Fantasy XIII, however, is. In 2008, Square Enix delivered a talk at the Game Developers Conference in which it described the features of its Crystal Tools game engine which powers Final Fantasy XIII -- a talk which a developer friend and fan of the series emphatically described as "terrible" shortly after. Terrible not because the technology is bad; terrible because it took the company so long to step into the technological present. In 2008, Crystal Tools promised to deliver yesterday's features tomorrow. Coincidentally, Final Fantasy XIII was released into the Western market on the second day of GDC 2010. When I review games, I typically insulate myself from the opinions of others. This was a solemn requirement at the heart of reviewing games for EGM, for example. Editor-in-chief Dan Hsu, who was one of my mentors for much of my career as a reviewer, demanded three distinct opinions. That's not as easy at it sounds, and not just because editors are talkative. If you go out there with the wrong score, you're going to get a lashing from the internet; you may well have to justify yourself to the game's publisher; you may even put your job at risk. Consensus is a safe haven. This is part of why reviewing Final Fantasy XIII in April 2010 is amusing: staying isolated from opinions of this game, so polarizing and so widely discussed, is impossible. I've spent the better part of four years anticipating the game more than any other ever released. I've also spent the better part of the last four months marinating in the game and people's reactions to it. I've read, written, and spoken more words about this than any other game in years, and probably any in the foreseeable future. In fact, this may be the last time I can claim authority over any sizable chunk of the mainstream game industry. I didn't think about it that way in the past, but Japanese-developed RPGs have been, since the early 1990s, my passion. The JRPG is my favorite genre. Very, very briefly, it was also the world's: starting in 1997, with the release of Final Fantasy VII, it seemed that the games I loved would finally get their due. I used to have the mentality -- which now feels quite dated -- that I could convince people to give games a shot. I thought that if I could cut right into the heart of a game and explain exactly what made it tick and why that mattered, I could convince people, with only my words, to try something they weren't planning to. While I don't think that's impossible, I think it's an edge case; voracious consumers of games, maybe. Enthuasiasts of a genre, perhaps. Convincing someone to pick up an interesting book, CD, or go to a film is one thing; with games... it's much more difficult, it seems, and it's only getting harder thanks to everyone's shrinking reserves of money and time. One thing I realized over the years is that a large contingent of gamers who were suckered into playing Final Fantasy VII for its groundbreaking cinematics and engrossing story actually weren't that happy about it. They may have enjoyed that experience, but they began to become frustrated by and by, and other games in the genre perplexed and bored them. Many, many people didn't value what I valued in games -- and I don't just mean turn-based combat or pop existentialism. People simply didn't value stepping out of their comfort zone. I just didn't realize how true this was until my comfort zone started to shrink and become more and more irrelevant. It's now well-known that Microsoft approached Activision and Infinity Ward and asked them to deliver Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360's launch, because Halo 3wasn't going to be ready. While that's not the whole of it, it might just be the inflection point where things changed. By 2010, we know the story by heart: Western developers who'd never had access to an audience like this before had the console market hungrily in their sights and, driven by ambition and talent, made bold games that made what had come before look rudimentary. Meanwhile, the reliability of Japan's market and the peculiarity of the way its businesses are run had created somnambulent companies which attracted university graduates with a promise of reliable jobs rather than creative possibilities. Of course, these things are, to an extent, cyclical. It's not over yet. Things are changing. Square Enix is reputed to be a vision-driven company with strong creative minds in charge. Its president, Yoichi Wada, has complained that the staff's creative pursuits delay its titles from shipping on time. The most famous man at the company is Tetsuya Nomura, an illustrator who got famous for creating characters so memorable that it enabled him to get his thumb into the majority of the company's creative output within a decade. On the other hand, Final Fantasy XIII was the company's first real step into the next generation; it's a humongous production designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. For all of these reasons and more, Final Fantasy XIII is, most obviously, a bizarre compromise. In his borderline incomprehensible -- through no fault of his own -- GDC 2010 talk, the game's director Motomu Toriyama described how, over the years, the creative process for developing Final Fantasy titles changed from a collaborative to top-down structure thanks to the workflow demands put on the teams by technology. In the immediate aftermath of the development of Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom, the team bullshitted up some ideas for Final Fantasy VII. But when it came time to produce that game, the decision had been made to move to the PlayStation and deliver a Hollywood-style cinematic experience. Still and all, the game was put together piecemeal -- and if you remember its wild inconsistency of play, it's not a surprise to hear that now. From to snowboarding to defending Fort Condor to performing CPR to motorcycle combat to the Golden Saucer, the game provides arguably too many diversions from its core gameplay. By the time Final Fantasy X rolled around in 2001, said Toriyama, "An impact on experimentation took place. From this [game], scenario had to be fixed first, because of motion and voice [recording]. So each staff person we could not incorporate their comments or opinions, since just a small number of people were working on the story creation... It was a major change in Final Fantasy X." Throw in a platform shift for which the company was totally unprepared, a mandate for visual perfection, and a production team in the hundreds, and Final Fantasy XIII, as it is, is born. Still, I haven't even approached Final Fantasy XIII's greatest and most fundamental sin. * * * "It starts to get good after about 12 hours," I said. "Twelve hours? I can't believe you give that game such a huge by," said Lulu. "It's not a by," I responded, lamely. She turned away. Zak looked at me. "I just know that if he sticks with it..." She shook her head. "The fact that they can rely on that kind of loyalty --" "...if he sticks with it -- I'm not talking to everybody, I'm talking to Zak -- he'll enjoy it." A few moments later: "You're right. It's a by." The biggest sin of Final Fantasy XIII is that the developers assume that once that disc slips into the drive, gamers are commited to seeing the ending credits. The developers assume that everybody wants so much to play this game that they will simply plod through it all. This sin is compounded by Square Enix's obvious, terrifying mandate to make the biggest, most popular Final Fantasy game since VII, and bring gamers into the fold who've never before been interested in the series. And it is complicated by their total misjudgment of the demands of today's audiences after years of increasing sophistication in games. * * * Let's play a game. No, not Final Fantasy XIII. Let's pretend that Final Fantasy XIII came out in December 2007, a year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, much as Final Fantasy X did in 2001 relative to the PlayStation 2's launch. And since we're already enmeshed in this fantastic scenario, let's take another little leap: let's pretend that the Xbox 360 never existed. Boy, Final Fantasy XIII seems pretty fucking excellent now, doesn't it? Yeah, it may not be the best game in the series, but I can't wait to see what these guys are going to do when they really come to grips with this next generation console technology! That's the world this game was made for. There were just some complications... * * * Thanks to Call of Duty, mainstream audiences of unparalleled size are getting used to the production style pioneered by Square Soft in the early '90s. These games are so complicated and huge, somebody thought, we ought to bootstrap a few teams and get them rolling into production simultaneously, so we can have a continuous flow of product for fans. At some point, this production process broke down. By the time of Final Fantasy XII's hideous and unprecedented delay, FF production was critically wounded; it has not recovered. Motomu Toriyama showed one deeply confusing screenshot of Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 2 in his GDC presentation. I've privately been told by someone who'd know that the game was unconventional in a way that the Final Fantasy XIII that was manufactured and shipped to retailers is not. Something happened during the production of the unconventional, deeply flawed Final Fantasy XII to kill experimentation at Square Enix. Something happened during the troubled birth of Crystal Tools to complicate Final Fantasy XIII's production until a group of very intelligent and experienced developers were forced to pare down the design document to what would obviously and flawlessly function. In his GDC talk, the lead game designer of Assassin's Creed II, Patrick Plourde, talked about the production of the first game. Half an hour after he joked that "the Final Fantasy guys are probably the only others who face these problems" -- putting together a 30+ hour game with a team of hundreds, that is -- he explained that a separate team designed and implemented the assassination missions in the original Assassin's Creed. These missions were stapled onto the core game and, though they formed its primary gameplay objectives, they had nothing to do with its core gameplay. Ubisoft Montreal's production processes had been designed to produce different streams of content simultaneously and bolt them together at the end -- a method that was retained but completely rethought for production of its sequel. In a strange coincidence, Motomu Toriyama was sitting next to me during this presentation. * * * Most people who had anything to say about Final Fantasy XIII shortly after its release were those who were repulsed by early design decisions the team made about the game. And while I don't think production realities excuse a shitty game, they sure do explain it. If one thing's clear, it's that production ramped up on Final Fantasy XIII before there was a clear plan on how things were going to be bolted together. As Tim Rogers points out in his review, "A producer of Final Fantasy XIII explains that there was 'enough discarded content' from Final Fantasy XIII to make a whole other game. The 'content' in question is mainly levels -- game-play areas." He draws the correct inference: the production process for this game was so deeply flawed that artists were being paid to create content that the core creative team was unsure if it would have any use for, just to make them do something. As I explained to Zak and Lulu, the really bad part of Final Fantasy XIII is not, as many have said, the first two hours, in which you have no meaningful choices in combat and cannot earn Crystogen Points and so cannot level your characters. The worst part is also not the next five hours of the game, which establishes the core of the game's narrative premise and slowly and surely delivers its gameplay systems one after the other -- the tutorial. No, the worst part is between hours 8 to 14. This is the most vapid and superfluous part of Final Fantasy XIII. This is the painful and tedious point where the game has firmly established its core gameplay, its cast of characters, and then... refuses to give over. From the second half of the Gapra Whitewood to the end of the Sunleth Waterscape, Final Fantasy XIII is a tedious mess made by people who clearly don't understand what they're supposed to be doing. Here's my quick guide into making Final Fantasy XIII not suck shit. It'll sound pretty easy when I explain it. Immediately institute gameplay. Without changing the scenario at all, allow players to experiment with special abilities and raise levels in the Crystarium -- even allow them to raise the levels of the NORA troops Gadot and Lebreau, though the player won't ever use them again (notably, in the release, Gadot and Lebreau's HP are listed as ??? instead of numbers because they're NPCs.) Nobody will resent wasting this effort; certainly no more than they did being held back from experiencing gameplay for the first two hours of the game. By the time the party assembles for the battle against the Pulse Fal'Cie in the Pulse Vestige, they should have earned a few abilities in the Crystarium. (If there's one thing this game is spookily good at, it's balancing the distribution of CP as it effects gaining abilities and fighting boss battles, so I don't doubt the team could balance this well.) You don't have to unlock much, but just enough to give the player a sense he is making decisions: enough for advanced players to know what's in store and little enough for novices to stick with it. Remember, the novice audience wants to learn how to play your game. As the party escapes to Lake Bresha, lay on the tutorials, just as you did. There's a debate to be had here about teaching the player how to play the game by presenting challenges that require him to exercise the options at his fingertips -- remember that battle in Palumpolum which forces you to play the Sentinel role? like that -- but let's just assume we're not changing things that drastically. It'll work. The Vile Peaks proceed as normal, though perhaps the roles of some of the characters have to be tweaked. But here's the crucial difference. By the end of the Vile Peaks, the entire Crystarium must be unlocked and available to players. You have to be done with your lessons approximately... now. There's time for introductions to more advanced gameplay later, but the core: we're done. Here comes a tough part. Narratively, I don't see a way around having Hope and Lightning come to their own understanding in the Whitewood as Sazh and Vanille later do in the Sunleth Waterscape and Nautlius. A mix of cutscenes, structural changes, and judicious and much-needed cutting would have to happen here to make the game tolerable and well-paced. Get players to Palumpolum as fast as you can, and once the six party members gather in Hope's apartment for the game's first real climax, you've just delivered an adventuring party that will never be split up again. If you've balked at my earlier suggestion to unlock the Crystarium fully, now's when you really have to do it. You will never again force the party formation to follow the whims of the plot; that was annoying enough in the 16-bit days in what I would consider the most irritating game in the series, Final Fantasy VI, and it's excruciating now that we know other games actually give us a credible illusion of control. After Palumpolum, Palmecia. And after Palmecia, Gran Pulse. And in Gran Pulse, which we should get to much sooner, something besides mark hunts. "Something", in fact, like the second half of the game. "The answer is staring them right in the face. Gran Pulse should have been the World of Ruin. What were they thinking?" I said this out loud. It's very likely nobody else was in the room. * * * Let's talk core gameplay mechanics. I theorized, in December, that at some point there was a meeting in Square Enix's Shinjuku headquarters where things were decided that altered the course of Final Fantasy XIII's development profoundly. I'm not wrong, of course -- there were probably dozens of such meetings. But let's visualize this for a minute. Yoshinori Kitase, Motomu Toriyama, Yuji Abe, and the rest of the team is sitting at a conference table. The light is bright and fluorescent. There's stale coffee, 330 ml bottles of French spring water, and, since this is Japan, there might even be cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Production on Final Fantasy XIII is not, to put it lightly, going as planned. Crystal Tools is nothing like done. In the back of his mind, one of the men is wishing -- for not the first time and not the last -- that Matsuno's fucking team had got Final Fantasy XII out the door in time for FF13 to hit the PlayStation 2 before its market died, and that Crystal Tools could have been sorted out before production had begun on a next-generation title. Toriyama looks at Kitase. Kitase looks at Toriyama. "What are we going to do?" somebody asks. I tried, and failed, to write this scene with drama and snappy dialogue, but let's be fair: this is a Japanese office. One of the junior planners walks around the room handing out sheafs of stapled A4 paper to everybody. This is what they're going to do. They've identified the strenghts of the series: its characters and story, courtesy of Nomura, Toriyama, Kazushige Nojima and others; its battles -- thank Toshiro Tsuchida and Yuji Abe; its beautiful environments, Isamu Kamikokuryo; and the character leveling system, the Crystarium. Everything else is expendable -- it either has to be tied into the plot, or has to serve the purpose of getting this game out the door. When I talk about Final Fantasy XIII's battle system, I get excited. People can hear the excitement in my voice, and they get interested. I have actually seen this happen in real life. That's a measure not just of how much I care about the game and the series, but my genuine admiration for the level of execution of this absolutely core facet of the gameplay. Their plan almost worked -- or perhaps could have worked -- but it didn't. It fails in some very fundamental ways that mostly have to do with the developers' control and complacency. * * * Time for pure gameplay complaining: the Crystarium stinks. Let's do some comparing and contrasting and background here, since we might as well. At some point -- I guess Final Fantasy X -- the developers at Square Enix decided that traditional experience points / earn a level-style leveling systems were passe. I don't in the least bit blame them, since how you grow your characters is one of the best gameplay aspects of an RPG when handled correctly. The Sphere Grid, which was Final Fantasy X's stab at delivering that sort of gameplay, was compulsively addictive to me. It was essentially linear for a good portion of the game, but starting not terribly far in, you'd be forced to make decisions about what to unlock when, and how to balance your party, and soon after that what secondary sets of abilities you wanted your characters to develop. One of my absolute fondest memories of FFX is running in circles in Zanarkand raising levels for an entire day. Final Fantasy XII's leveling system, the License Board, is a pathetic thing, paltry and simple, trivial to exploit. It encourages you -- or at least it did me -- to rob your characters of any distinct identity and instead gravitate to what delivers the best advantage: my party were carbon copies of one another by the end of the game; bizarre hybrid mage-warriors with no trace of specialty nor identity. It's worth noting that when the game was rereleased in Japan, this entire gameplay mechanic was deleted and replaced with something new (called the Intenational Zodiac Job System, fuck knows what that is. I certainly don't care.) The Crystarium is not that bad. But it is not very good. I think one of the real flaws with it is that it's split into six: each role has its own distinct set of bonuses and abilities, because each role has to be defined within the context of the game's Paradigm System battles, which are in fact quite excellent. Unfortunately in concert with this, there's no freedom of movement, and your only decision-making process is which of the jobs you wish to raise first. But that complaint is really irrelevant compared to the real flaws in the system. The Crystarium is divided into levels, and levels are locked. They are not locked, as would be logical, until you complete one; they are locked until the arbitrary point in the game -- always after a boss battle -- where the developers deign to unlock the next stage of Crystarium growth. Frustratingly, too, in my experience, the game perfectly metes out experience points throughout so that you're just about ready to hit the next level of the Crystarium by the time you get it. This is one of the many things about playing Final Fantasy XIII that makes you feel like a rat in a maze. There's an ominous awareness of someone in control, just out of your field of view... And there is a severe and obvious flaw with this: gamers don't all enjoy games the way the developers intend them to. Gamers don't all enjoy games in the order developers intend them to. And gamers do not all enjoy games at the speed which developers intend them to. This is the first game in the series which does not allow for this, and that is a severe flaw. There are six potential roles for each character (pretentiously renamed in the U.S. version to Commando, Ravager, Medic, Saboteur, Synergist, and Sentinel from the readily comprehensible Attacker, Blaster, Healer, Jammer, Enhancer, and Defender.) However, for the first two thirds of the game, you aren't allowed to access any but the three the which the development team assigned to each character at its outset. The CP (Crystogen Points, or experience points) you earn are only enough to really concentrate on the three jobs you are given anyway. This, in fact, holds true for the whole game, including the last boss, unless you do a tremendously unpalatable amount of grinding, even when you have access to the other three jobs. This sucks out all player choice once again. Since you effectively can't raise optional jobs, since the CP costs are so astronomical, you can't really experiment with new party builds without swapping characters in and out to form the party you want. All I accomplished by trying to make Lightning a Saboteur was putting her behind Hope in primary job progress, and I quickly abandoned the idea. I got a slight benefit out of making Fang a low-level Synergist, but since you also only have six Paradigm slots this became irrelevant, too. There just wasn't room for that Paradigm. The worst aspect of the Crystarium, though, is that not every character gets every ability in every job. For example, as a Synergist, Fang gets Shellga and Protectga. I assumed Hope would earn access to these abilities soon after -- when his next Crystarium level unlocked. Nope. He never gets them -- ever -- and Synergist is one of his three primary jobs. Worse yet is that without consulting a FAQ, you'd never know this, so it's impossible to plan ahead for the ideal party without researching online -- and personally I like to avoid FAQs as much as I can. In the end, the Crystarium is just a linear leveling system in a Sphere Grid disguise, and it's probably my personal biggest disappointment with the game. Tim compared the game to busywork in his review, and it's not wrong -- by removing meaningful choice, the Crystarium has transitioned from a thoughtful system into something akin to stuffing envelopes. * * * All the same, when I look at the game, I'm more sympathetic to many of the mistakes the developers made because I came to the realization that they are tremendously determined to get players through this game, fully understanding its gameplay. And I also laud them for turning up the challenge at the point at which they believe players should fully understand it -- which is one of the most satisfying sections of the game, if not the most satisfying section -- the Battleship Palamecia. It's obvious that this is why the game is so drawn out, and derisively (though somewhat fairly) called a neverending tutorial by gamers. Gamers, for one reason and another, don't like to be condescended to, and this was a miscalculation on Square Enix's part. But it's not so simple as that. This isn't just about teaching novices to play the game. It's about making sure everybody gets it. Really, really gets it. This is necessary because with previous titles in the series, it was fully possible to get to the very end without understanding their gameplay. Not just possible, in fact, but likely. The most obvious culprit here is Final Fantasy VIII -- the game is complicated, more than a little broken, very abstract, and full of gameplay loopholes. On reading what people have had to say about it over the last 11+ years, I have certainly realized that I -- no newbie to Final Fantasy or RPGs in general by that point -- got to the end of the game without really understanding its gameplay in more than the most rudimentary way, and I was hardly alone in that. In fact, I never actually beat Final Fantasy VIII. I got to the last boss, but I never did defeat her. Let's go back to that word "abstract". When it comes to core gameplay, RPGs are the most abstracted of all established game genres. In a shooter, you shoot someone; he dies. You physically move the aiming reticule over a target; you pull a shoulder button like a trigger. It's simple. Game developers are forever adding abstract, complex gameplay elements to titles of all genres, because the kinds of people who buy Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games enjoy these abstractions. Only RPGs are build their foundations on them. Even relatively simple concepts like "equipment" tend to be so complicated by either special abilities or innumerable choices that they lose a great deal of their concreteness. There's the famous example, of course, of Dean Takahashi's review of the original Mass Effect -- in which he forgot to level Shepard. Dean is not a stupid guy. At this year's GDC, Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft research indicated that more than 60 percent of the Fable audience understood less than 50 percent of the series' gameplay. Fable is not as popular as Final Fantasy. The answer that BioWare and Lionhead have posed to these problems is to streamline the everliving fuck out of Mass Effect 2 and Fable III. The Final Fantasy XIIIdevelopment team tried that, too. However, where the paths diverge is that the Western teams have gone to great lengths to make their gameplay systems concrete. ME2 is a full-on shooter; Fable III doesn't have levels anymore: you gain followers, and that power is reflected visually by your character. Instead of moving towards action or something else easier to understand, Final Fantasy XIII completely retained an abstracted, command input-based tactical battle system with text and gauges and jobs and hit points -- they just tried to teach players to use it. As a hardcore gamer who loves abstraction (and in particular loves this battle system) I sure do appreciate it. But it's easy to argue that Square Enix is going both against the grain of the collective wisdom of the industry and also working against the mainstream audience they want to cultivate. One solution -- and I'm not even sure this is precisely intentional on BioWare's part, but if it is, it's genius -- would be to split Final Fantasy into hardcore nerdy and open and casual variants, in the same way Mass Effect and Dragon Age compliment each other. No significant number of BioWare otaku who want the D&D-inspired bollocks of Dragon Age's gameplay resent Mass Effect 2's simplicity. And they will buy every scrap of Dragon Age content thrown to them, and most of them will buy Mass Effect, too. Like i said, if this is intentional, it's pure fucking genius and probably what I most respect BioWare for right now. I've talked to a guy online -- a smart enough guy, an adult and avid gamer, who got to the end of Final Fantasy X without understanding the Sphere Grid and couldn't beat Sin. Despite my problems with FFVIII, this never occurred to me, simply because I understood FFX so well. And, more troublingly, I know a guy online who's gotten past the point in Final Fantasy XIII where the developers assume you understand the game and just throw everything at you -- far past, with the help of strategy guides and a level of perseverence that's difficult to credit but so refreshing to see -- and I'm not quite sure he really gets it. He certainly can't reliably execute it. Because of the tight control over the Crystarium he can't grind his way out of tight spots; because of the developers' faith that their style of teaching players how to play is adequate, he has to resort to following online strategies. Even the official guide isn't enough. So as much as I like the impetus of teaching novices to understand Final Fantasy -- because how else are you going to convert them into fans like me who live, breathe, and love JRPG gameplay? -- I don't think Square Enix pulled it off. And worse, they alienated a good chunk of their existing audience by making it sit through kindergarten, or as I like to call the beginning of the game, Disc 0 (think about this in PlayStation 1 FF terms and you'll get it.) * * * So while I'm on the subject of gameplay, let's keep this going and talk about the fucking battle system already. The best -- if not most appealing -- way I can think of to explain the Paradigm Shift system is that, in a regular FF battle system, you were the grill team in the McDonalds kitchen, all working to produce the meal. In FF13, you've been promoted to manager. Rather than making the same, repetitive individual decisions moment-to-moment, you control the overall flow of battle via the Paradigms. Once the system gets cooking, you get the same intense and strategic push-pull of a traditional turn-based battle system in maybe one fifth of the time. So each Paradigm you set up, to back up a bit, is a party build. Each character has three jobs (let's say three, because as I discussed, five or six is a lie and even four is pushing it.) Your job is to switch between Paradigms which offer the most effective mix of jobs (and thus, skills) for current battle situations -- you become the mini-general, flipping your troops' jobs around. And it's not just that you must tell them what (generally) to do; you also have to be mindful of how their skills compliment each other. That's before you take into account enemy behavior. To say that the battle system is challenging and addictive would be an understatement -- this is the compulsive and most highly polished aspect of the gameplay, bar-none. The problem is that it doesn't fucking get that way until the aforementioned Palamecia section... like 15 hours into the game. Sigh. But once it kicks in, it's fucking kicked in for the whole rest of the game; smacking the everloving shit out of the last boss was a highly amusing pleasure. There's also the extremely fast pace to laud, and also the strange but addictive process of Staggering enemies. Until you Stagger an enemy, damage is negligible, and you need to hit them with both physical attacks and magic to make them Stagger. This really is the way in which the Paradigm Shift system is unified with basic damage dealing, you see, and the icing is the game's maniacal reliance on buffs and debuffs later on to add another layer of tension and make your finger itch on the L1 button as you shift Paradigms compulsively. This is the good shit. This is where it's at. And when you Stagger (or Break) -- I definitely prefer the Japanese version's "Break", it's more forceful, more aesthetically appealing -- So when you BREAK an enemy, there's a skill called Launch that the Commando class gets which throws the fucker up into the air. When the enemy is up in the air it can't do jack shit -- it can't attack you at all, and just wriggles helplessly. This is so super fucking satsifying that I can't even articulate it. It makes me giggle. And to answer one of the questions Tim raised in his review of the game, yes, it's inherently satisfying to see giant fucking numbers (representing damage) pop out of enemies when you hit them. Of this I have not the least shred of doubt. * * * Let's talk about the whole NO TOWNS thing. The game does not fucking need towns. Towns would not solve this game's problems. The whole towns thing reminds me of people talking about Steven Spielberg's A.I. A lot of people didn't like the saccharine ending of the film and said that the movie should have ended with David staring at the Blue Angel, implicitly forever. No -- that would have just been a different shitty ending. In the same vein, stapling some classic-style towns to Final Fantasy XIII would not solve anything. What people who are asking for towns are asking for are two things, and one of them is valid and one of them is bullshit. 1. Give me what the series has always had, because I am old and I fear change. (Bullshit.) 2. Give me something that would improve the game's pacing, and add agency and variety. (Correct.) Let me be clear: I have no interest in seeing towns come back to Final Fantasy as towns were once executed in the series, that's for sure. But something needs to come in -- a solution must be devised. The bit where you chase the Chocobo chick through Nautilus: that was simple, and stupid, but fun. The way I much more miss towns, in all honesty, is that so many of the cutscenes in this game feature people just stopping in some corridor in some dungeon and having a conversation, and the context they do this in has absolutely nothing to do with that conversation, and it starts to feel extremely false and disconnected from any sense of reality. This is to be avoided scrupulously in future games in the series, in my opinion, and one of the ways to do that is to make sure that the important story sequences are context-driven. And to have context-driven story you need, well, a fucking context. Obviously. Things like towns are meaningful. Giant blue glowing forests, while totally fucking awesome for smacking the shit out of rampaging biological experiments in, are not so great for having a conversation about your dead mom. * * * One particularly notable object lesson in this is the segment of the game which takes place in Palumpolum. The game goes from romps through attractive but irrelevant video game backdrops to a struggle against fate in a city populated by civilians. Context comes flooding in to illustrate concepts that were so recently abstract. There's an army, there are buildings that make sense, there's the whole scenario with Hope's dad in his apartment. Things just gel fabulously here in a way that totally makes sense, and stands in stark contrast to the last several hours of the game. The Hanging Edge. Gapra Whitewood. Sunleth Waterscape. No. Vile Peaks. The Fifth Ark. Kind of; good enough. Nautilus. Palumpolum. The Palmecia. Eden. Yes. * * * Let's talk about the characters and story. The Final Fantasy series has been pretty hit or miss when it comes to antagonists. This game is pretty much a miss. It's really not until the last fucking battle that you begin to get a real understanding for what actually drives the antagonist, who is an Old Man In A Dress, the Fantasy Pope -- which is a lazy cliche, while I'm complaining -- to push your party around, try to kill them, et cetera. This is what I like to call a Big Fucking Mistake. Until then, you're confronted with the fact that he's just a floating asshole who pushes you around and lies to you. It's easy to see why the characters dislike him, but as the player, it's not so easy to feel strongly about it. Also he's a big stupid monster / god thing, really, it turns out, of course. And I found this particularly boring because, oddly enough, the real world's Evil Old Man In A Dress has been in the news a lot lately. And he has been implicated in multiple coverups involving child molesters. And while the whole complicated tale is heartbraking and infuriating, it's also a human story, one that has real heft and weight: I'm more interested in taking my band of adventurers to Rome and knocking Cardinal Ratfucker out of his Prada loafers with a hail of Blizzagas than spitting on Primarch Dysley, FF13's antagonist. Think about that rich and complicated story of venality, ambition, insensitivity, and arrogance and compare it with what motivates FF13's Pope, which is "I'm a god, but I don't like being a god that much." Right. That said, stories of gods pushing humans around don't have to suck. I mean, we have the whole pantheons of Greek and Norse mythologies, and those are just the ones I am immediately familiar with as a white nerd. Those are some fucking interesting gods. And beyond that I can think of examples from fantasy like Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series, or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, or Diana Wynne Jones, or Neil Gaiman. These gods have many of the same qualities of the Fal'Cie -- aloof, manipulative -- but they're used effectively. That's because the action of the story rests on the decisions of the people, even when the gods command; FF13 does, to its credit, try to do that, too, but it doesn't come together until the end. Let's detour quickly into "Fal'Cie." We already have a word for gods, and it's "gods". Bad fantasy overuses superflous terminology like Fal'Cie that obscures both the meaning and, to my mind, seriousness of its story, and this is a prime offender. I have a theory that Japanese people are more willing to accept bullshit katakana terminology because their language is full of it -- bear in mind that everyday concepts like Personal Computer and Digital Camera and Internet and Sony PlayStation are all made up fantasy words to the Japanese, more or less, and it seems easier to understand why their games are full of them. Then again Dragon Age has shit like the Grey Wardens and (gag) Darkspawn, which sound just as bad to me. It's a problem. Fantasy people: restrain thyselves. One of the really frustrating things about this game is another aspect of the Disc 0 problem I alluded to earlier. It really, really extends to the development of the characters. Plenty of people I've talked to (aka The Whole of the Internets) really hate Snow, Hope, and Vanille. I do not hate them. But I can understand it, because for the first chunk of the game, they are boring do-nothing characters. Contrast the Sazh who stumbles around the Hanging Edge with the one who talks about his son, Dahj, in Sunleth Waterscape and Nautilus. In my opinion, Hope's problems make sense, and he begins to speak and act intelligently and with conviction earlier on. But Vanille is in a way the linchpin of the plot, or many of its mysteries, and you have no bloody idea until way too far into the game. There's a reason she's narrating the thing, folks. Snow, well... Snow can't really get into gear until he and Hope have it out, and thanks to the game's shitty pacing, that just takes far too long. Someone I know said "the plot seems like it's always an hour away from getting good", and that's apt. I've also heard it said that the text Datalog entries add necessary details to flesh out what's going on -- and that's true not in terms of understanding events (I had no problems) but it's very true in terms of shading. In the end, I'm not wild about the cast. They're not as sympathetic as the Final Fantasy X crew, somehow. I felt for them, but not strongly. I think the context problem I wrote about -- Talking In Dungeons -- and the boring antagonist help screw them up. The lack of a real focused main character (aka Final Fantasy VI-itis) is also a problem. Lightning never comes to life as a character -- she's an idea of a character, a representation, a simulacrum. She's fascinating to watch in motion and she spits out some great lines -- love her attitude -- but there's no her. Sazh, on the other hand, is dependable and sympathetic, and one of the only in the party capable of surprising you with his actions. How in the fuck did Japan deliver the one of the first truly rounded and sympathetic black characters in a game (and deliver him with a Chocobo chick in his afro, and make it work?) Talk about an unexpected triumph. Snow is a stock character. Snow is not a badly-written version of that character, but he does not exceed those bounds enough to become fully three-dimensional. He's important to the story, though, and I forgive it. He's kind of like this game's Wakka, with a role that exceeds his depth, yet somehow a less interesting conflict to resolve within himself. I had thought Hope was going to be a Shinji-type character, but he's really not, or not for very long. He's a believable adolescent; his background really comes into play for his character in ways I didn't anticipate (observations easier for me to make, perhaps, because he's the one I identified with most.) You can tell he's well-educated though he never really talks about it much; later you see he's a child of privelege who grew up in the big city, and his attitude and demeanor makes sense. Characterization Success Get! He acts in ways that are logical, and if anybody sells the whole Fal'Cie/l'Cie thing, in the whole cast, it's Hope -- through both his reactions to the situation and his knowledge. Vanille... is a conundrum. First up, she's the worst character design Nomura has shit out since... Irvine Kinneas? Long time. Part of that's a cultural Japan/America thing, and part of that's a borderline misogynist "girl skipping around in a short dress is tough to take seriously" thing, let's face it... but part of it is that she has just a hideous outfit and ridiculous hair. Even Hope looks like he's dressed to walk around a bit. She... well, it'd be an okay outfit for a summertime date. If she didn't expect to have to sit down and get hit in the back with that... beaded... thing, that is. When her role in the story becomes apparent, though, suddenly she's really interesting. I can't think of another character in an RPG who lies so much, and for such believable reasons. Usually RPG characters only lie because they're Secretly On The Other Side or whatever -- normal fantasy turncoat bullshit. That's it. You know, totally unlike real people, who lie all the time with both good and bad intentions. Not so, Vanille. And Fang is kind of dumb but she looks awesome, is gorgeous, kicks ass, has a rockin' Australian accent, and is just generally too much fun to not love. And you can easily pretend she's a lesbian. The game's real strength, though, is the dynamics of the characters -- their interactions. Lightning and Hope. Hope and Snow. Sazh and Vanille. Vanille and Fang. Japanese writers seem to have a facility for group dynamics and this frequently shines through in FF13's story more than the actual plot point that's occuring. * * * Chris Hecker has warned us that if we're not careful, games will become like comic books. What he's talking about is cultural ghettoization. I think we're already there -- we're just there at a profitable scale for a wide audience, unlike comics. And in many cases we're at an even bigger disadvantage -- it's much more challenging, and at times impossible, to step out of your preferred genres and either enjoy or comprehend the games. The FF13 solution, as I already outlined, was to teach people to enjoy it. Sure, Square Enix was less than fully successful there (though the guy who I spoke about who's struggling loved the game so much -- his first JRPG ever -- that he kept at it, and has pushed through the points where he was stuck, and even crossed over into JRPG fan territory by buying the CD soundtrack!) But I digress. My brain has been programmed by long exposure to love the JRPG genre. The experience of playing genre-based games is to gradually understand them more. As long as the games are good, your accumulated knowledge makes them more enjoyable. Hell, even mediocre games in a genre that you like and understand tend to be somewhat entertaining, because they lightly caress those synapses. Your decisions are driven by your tastes, but your tastes are reinforced by repeated exposure, until you start to think about buying games you think look terrible because they have good aspects -- for example, Eternal Sonata, which I though about buying I don't know how many times before I finally gave up on the idea. Its adorable vapidity repulsed me too much to sit through just to experience a battle system which looks pretty nifty. One thing I love most about the JRPG genre is its visual panache, and one thing that the deveopers of Final Fantasy XIII prioritized beyond perhaps all else is delivering those visuals. They are stunning. The character animations in battle and exploration are excellent, the scenes burst with detail, the environments are eye-catching and complex and unexpected. The amount of art generated for this game is nuts -- especially because that's the most expensive part of current generation game production. When I saw Lake Bresha for the first time in December, I said -- out loud -- "this is why I bought a PlayStation 3" and I was not kidding. There was my $600, three years later, right there. When I had the chance to speak to him, I even brought Lake Bresha up with Toriyama, and here's what he said: That body of water you were mentioning is crystallized, and technically it's very difficult to create something that's basically half see-through to bring that frozen effect. So it's not only that artistic vision, but it's also providing that technical expertise to create that; and that's something that really sets us apart from other developers. Other developers I don't think can really create that. You know what? It sounds arrogant, but the blend of techniques, aesthetics, and Japanese orientation to detail represented by Final Fantasy XIII is unmatched this generation. This game is a visual masterpiece. Sure, it's not subtle; The Lost Guardian is going to be more refined. But FF13 can encompass so much about what's great about current generation visuals in one game: it brings in elements of all genres and all aesthetics and blends them together and makes them work, stunningly, and in realtime. And that was something I could always fall back on and enjoy, because it's something I love. And that's what being a genre fan means. Tragically, so much of the most beautiful, exciting content is saved for late in the game. The developers just presume you'll get to Gran Pulse and see its impressive vistas. What if you get bored and sell the game before then? I don't think that thought crossed anybody's mind. That. Is. Fucking. Nuts. The same goes for the game's soundtrack: Masahi Hamauzu, long relegated to Square's B-titles, does a fantastic job here. Yes, it hews close to the aesthetics that have been long established in the genre. A friend of mine, whose music taste I respect a great deal, called it terrible. I got really annoyed. But it's hard to see something like this the way he might: not as a fan of JRPG soundtracks, but as a fan of music. I actually have plenty I could say about the topic in its defense, but that's for another time: it's enough for me to put out that, in another aspect of its conventionality, this game excels. * * * Though all games don't feature strong narrative elements, I think it might be true that games are a unique medium because they are both complex software systems and content-driven media. Together, they forge a context. It's an important tenet of fantasy writing to be embroiled in worldbuilding, of course, but games literally build the worlds they describe. One of the problems that complicates both creating and reviewing games is that they are both software and media. To create software is to create function; to create media is to create feeling. The place where things get interesting is in where these two aims, which don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other, intersect. When they diverge too obviously, pain lies. In a narrative-driven game, both the story-related events and the gameplay systems are expected to come together -- and when it works, this combination is more satisfying than either element would be alone. This dual strength allows you to forgive the flaws. Though game stories are routinely, and not unfairly, criticized for the fact that they would be dissatisfying as a linear narrative (say, a movie) I also think it's valid, and I feel comfortable saying, that the intersection point is what allows games to become more than the sum of their parts. I fully believe this. Games are satisfying because they are a synthesis. They may rountely be a clumsy synthesis in 2010, but their success is still built on this. This is not an argument against games striving to improve both in narrative and play contexts, but it explains, to me at least, my immense satisfaction with flawed experiences and failed experiments. By the time you put it to bed, Final Fantasy XIII proves both that its story is functional and its gameplay is sound. But unfortunately there is a continuous shifting and even breakdown of forged context for a great deal of the adventure. What it's trying to accomplish keeps changing. The game has something like an act structure -- not as most narrative media does because the characters make decisions that propel them forward, but because it's assembled from parts and the seams are visible. The hand of the creators is all too evident in this work, and this is even worse than it could be because it's clear the hand is shaking. And that brings us back to the fundamental problem with FF13, and, finally, to the end of this text. The team have erred seriously in their assumption that players will simply, left with no other option, like the game. Their assumption is that players will, by the end, understand the game; their assumption that, in doing so, players will inevitably care about the game's content. It always comes back to that, in every facet. I would argue that it would be ridiculous to assume someone who doesn't like what Final Fantasy has to offer should or could be catered to by a Final Fantasy title. I can't play Madden just to enjoy what it does well despite a near-total lack of interest or understanding of football. I will never develop an appreciation for Halomultiplayer, even if I can understand what makes it so compelling to so many. I don't really care to try, frankly. That attitude, which I think is common, is an important part of what makes games a tough medium to create in. Even if you allow, as you should, that the game is made for an audience that could potentially enjoy it, Final Fantasy XIII takes this assumption too much to heart, and in doing so severely tries the patience and, some would say, insults the intelligence of its audience. That is a profoundly dangerous place to go and a precipice the developers absolutely must back away from. Final Fantasy XIII For PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Released: March 9, 2010 Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Square Enix Three stars out of five