Shockingly thin but not without merit
This review follows my second completed playthrough of Final Fantasy XIII. My first attempt at finishing it came in the time around its release, but I didn’t make it more than a few hours in. I just couldn’t get into it and felt annoyed at how much it restrained my options. My gut reaction at that point was that FFXIII sucked and wasn’t worth playing. A year or so later, I decided to give it another chance for whatever reason, slogging through the opening hours and finally hitting those blessed moments of freedom. This playthrough was the one I originally finished--and actually enjoyed. It wasn’t my favorite RPG by far, but I could see some smart, fun things that everyone seemed to be ignoring. When the series recently made the jump to PC, I wanted to go back one more time to finally experience the entirety of FFXIII--completing all the achievements--and have a complete opinion of it. Unfortunately, this playthrough made me realize just how little the game has to offer, outside of a few good ideas. Final Fantasy XIII is a thin game, lacking in content and direction, and pales in comparison to the remainder of the XIII trilogy.
Final Fantasy XIII’s story is a bit of a convoluted mess at first. It’s packed with jargon--l’Cie, fal’Cie, Cie’th--that is quite hard to wrap your head around without greater context. After a bit of time, and possibly digging into some of the game’s Datalog entries, it does become clearer. The story is character-focused, highlighting the struggles of a group of newly marked l’Cie attempting to defy their fate no matter the risk. The fal’Cie, the beings who brand humans with these marks, run the show in this world, deftly maneuvering their created l’Cie to best suit their own needs. As such, Lightning and her companions’ rebellion can easily be interpreted as an act against the “gods” of this world (even though the actual gods play into things in future games). It’s an interesting, if not cliche, storyline for a JRPG.
Unfortunately, this story is told in a poor way. For the first twenty hours or so, story beats are drip-fed to the player through present actions of the gameplay and a neverending stream of flashbacks. The way the game handles this jumping back and forth in time is terrible, revealing important parts of the story too infrequently and instead focusing on small moments that don’t have much relevance to the greater story. It’s nice to see more of these characters, learning about who they are and what they want, but it doesn’t do much to service the greater narrative. For nearly half of the game, XIII leaves the story in the background and focuses entirely on your characters attempts to run from the enemy forces. This storytelling choice also has the adverse effect of separating the main characters on a regular basis, meaning your team at any given moment is up in the air. This first 20 hours or so is easily the worst part of the game, and it has various detrimental effects on the more than just the story.
Predominantly, this style of storytelling leads to a very linear game. Since your characters aren’t all together very often until the 20-hour mark or so, you aren’t given the freedom to do what you want. This applies to exploration of the game world, your options in combat, and choices of who to bring along. You are very much at the whim of the game during this time, no matter how much you may hate some characters or tire of some locations. Tutorials also plague this section of the game, painfully unraveling the gameplay mechanics over the course of several hours. This is the part of the game that will deter the most people, smothering them until they just can’t take anymore.
To make things worse, Final Fantasy XIII limits your ability for character growth as well. The Crystarium, the leveling system of the game, only expands at key moments in the story. It’s very possible to play a section, run out of things to spend your CP on, and have to wait for new levels of the Crystarium to be granted to you before you can level further. Furthermore, you aren’t given access to all six of the roles (classes) on each character until that 20-hour point, further limiting your options. It’s a huge hassle that defines the ways you can effectively play and who you are forced to bring along. I don’t really understand why the game was designed in this way. Did the designers think the combat system was so complex that several tutorials were necessary? Was the linear gameplay a result of the story design or vice-versa? I don’t really have the answers to these questions, but these issues make the whole game feel uncomfortably restrictive.
XIII does eventually open up in Chapter 11, letting you explore the vast lands of Gran Pulse. While you may think this would be a cause for celebration, this explorable world is still lacking in scope. It’s certainly larger and less linear than everything prior to that point, but that doesn’t make it worth exploring. There’s one large “hub” area, with a bunch of confined areas that branch off it; think Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect. There is some decent area design and creature variety to be found, but most of the content in these side areas consists of fighting a bunch of enemies to grind CP and searching for treasure orbs, none of which hold anything revolutionary. There’s no incentive to go out exploring on your own.
Aside from bland exploration, there’s really only one form of side content: Cie’th stones. These stones spawn the game’s side quests, tasking the player with hunting down and killing a monster. This means wandering around the empty, boring world until you find the right area/monster, engaging it in battle, and overcoming it to complete the mission. There are 64 of these and many of them are quite boring--hell, most of them feature enemies you fight normally throughout the game anyways. This is literally the only side content in the entire game: no great treasures to find, no minigames like Chocobo breeding, and no ultimate bosses to fight. The hardest boss fight in the game is a quick and easy ordeal if you’re even competently geared and leveled. The only other activity is grinding for items to sell for money in order to upgrade everyone’s weapons to their ultimate forms, a tedious and overly complex task. This lack of bonus content is a huge disappointment, particularly for those who have come to expect more than just a linear story in a Final Fantasy game. It’s almost as if the team ran out of time to add more to the game.
There’s one shining beacon to find in Final Fantasy XIII: the combat system. While many people don’t seem to like it due to its automatic nature, I think it is quite brilliant. Instead of forcing the player to choose to heal when someone is hurt or use a particular spell against an enemy’s weakness, the game does all that for the player. You can choose your spells from a list--and need to for certain tougher encounters--but it’s almost always better to let the game do it for you. Instead, the player’s concentration is on the Paradigms of the party. Paradigms are class layouts for each of your three party members that you can set (up to 6) and switch between in combat. If the party is about to take a lot of damage, switch to an all-Sentinel team to absorb it at a reduced rate and then use an all-Medic team to heal up. Or, at the start of the battle, use a Synergist-Saboteur-Medic combo to both debuff the enemy and buff your team. This system is most important for Staggering foes, sending the enemy reeling briefly and doing massive damage in the meantime. Commandos (physical-based damage) keep the Stagger meter from draining quickly and Ravagers (magic-based damage) fill it more quickly, making Paradigms featuring both important: going from a Com-Rav-Rav party that buffers the Stagger gauge to a full-RAV party is the best way to handle most encounters, pushing the meter quickly and allowing maximum damage. This system is the reason why the combat is so enjoyable, letting the computer do the busywork and instead tasking the player with reading the flow of the battle correctly and adapting his or her strategy as necessary.
Even with all its strengths, there are two major concerns that greatly hinder the combat system here. Most annoying is the fact that the death of the party leader results in an instant Game Over. This means that your leader must be protected at all costs, as an otherwise unharmed party can be quickly brought to its knees by one lucky blow. When using a weaker party leader like Hope, this can be particularly frustrating; throw in enemies with Instant-Death attacks and anger can easily ensue. My other concern is that shifting between Paradigms is a bit sluggish on the whole. The first shift of every fight has a longer animation that can’t be skipped--worse yet, the enemy can still attack during this time. Subsequent switches are a bit faster, but they still lack the pop that you would really want in dire combat situations. Thankfully, both of these changes are made in the (vastly superior) sequel, XIII-2; at least the developers learned from their mistakes.
Final Fantasy XIII is a gorgeous game from top-to-bottom. I love the design of the characters, each very unique and smartly reflective of their personalities. There’s some very interesting design to be found in the environments and enemies as well, particularly the high-tech stuff found on Cocoon, but these can get a bit repetitive by the end of the game. The best parts are the multitude of CG cutscenes found throughout the game; these are a treat to behold, even for being a few years old now. A few of these, particularly a lengthy and combat-filled one that sets up the end-game sequence, are must-see examples of Square’s CG talent. The music is quite good as well, although it doesn’t manage to make the impact that other games have managed in the past. Mostly, it gets a bit too repetitive, especially the weaving of the main theme throughout.
I should speak about the PC version too while we’re here. For the most part, it’s a quality port. There’s not a lot of graphical options to be found but what’s there gives enough options to suit most builds at an optimal level. The resolution does only go up to 1920x1080--after a recent update which added the option--but that’s more that enough to do this game justice. Sadly, these graphical options are only editable outside of the game in a pre-launch window. In fact, the game’s options in-game are barely changed, only adding an option to switch between button prompts and keyboard prompts and the ability to switch between English and Japanese voices--a nice add for fans of the series. This also means that the only way to quit is to hit the ESC key, an annoyance for those who want to play with a controller instead. Finally, I had a few random crashes with no warning through my 80-ish hours with the game: not nearly enough to be a concern but still frustrating and potentially progress-losing. All in all, this version is a passable one.
At this point, there’s really only one reason for me to recommend playing Final Fantasy XIII: you intend to play the other games in the series. The things you learn about the world and characters are important, playing heavily into both XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. I know that the events of those games wouldn’t have had so much impact for me personally if I hadn’t played this game first. As such, I think it was worth it to do so--just barely. For other people, however, I don’t think I can make that suggestion. It’s crazy to see just how many corners were cut here, with only the combat system worth taking for use in another game. Even knowing how impactful some of the events of the story are, I have a hard time recommending Final Fantasy XIII to anyone but the most masochistic or compulsive. Most people would be much better off just heading directly to the MUCH improved sequel, potentially reading a wiki first to get caught up. You’ll likely have much more fun.
