My Evolving FFXIII blog
By thwak 2 Comments
Hello and welcome to my Evolving FFXIII blog. It's evolving because I'm going to be updating it every single time I play the game and give my thoughts afterwords. This will mean aggressive use of the edit feature. If you wish to follow me on this journey all you got to do is keep reading!
Prologue
Before I actually begin to play FFXIII I should explain my thoughts on the game going in and what lead me to create this blog post. I procured this game on black friday 2010 during amazon's sale for along with Dracula the Legacy Collection.
I got dracula primarily so I could be eligible for free super saver shipping but that's beside the point. The reason why I got FFXIII was because I wanted to see how bad the game really was.
Yes, I'm not going to BS you and say that I'm going into this game expecting it to be good or some nonsense like that. I bought this game knowing full well it's reputation for being one of the worst games in the final fantasy series. I bought it simply out of morbid curiosity. Now will this sway my opinion of the game as this blog progresses? I don't know. I just felt that in the interest of full disclosure I should tell you this. I don't expect the game to be as bad as everyone says it is, but I don't think this game will be GOTY 2010.
I plan on playing this game absorbing as much content as I can. That means I'll try to read as many of the codex entries and story as I possibly can. Will I skip over some things? Most likely yes. But I'll try to get as much information as I can. Everyone knows it's more fun to rips something apart when you know what you're talking about!
Finally, right before I pop the game into my Xbox 360 (hey that means you can track how far I am by looking at my achievements!) I will tell you that I'm going to be comparing this game to persona 4. Why? Well they're both JRPGs, and they're both extremely linear. Plus if you're on giant bomb you probably have some familiarity with persona 4.
So with out further ado, let this masochistic experiment begin!
Day 1
So the game starts with a cg cinematic that makes me think of avatar, I select new game, and then see a train with narration that says "on the 13th day all will be gone" or some nonsense.
My inital impressions are that the game looks and sounds amazing. Now the art design may get a bit too japanesey but overall the protagonists are designed well (so far) and the music aint bad.
The battle combat so far has been thus: tap A twice. I know this is the beginning of an RPG but that's all I've been doing.
As far as the story is concerned, it's presented badly. I don't know who's idea it was to put all the exposition in the datalogs but whoever it was should be fired. This explains a lot of the hatred of the game, because if I wasn't reading the datalogs I would have no idea what the hell was going on. That said the story so far is ok I guess.
There's this sky world called cocoon and a world beneath it called pulse. Pulse is apparently really dangerous and full of magic. The government of cocoon doesn't want anyone to enter pulse or vice versa. Someone/something from pulse apparently sneaks onto cocoon which causes the government to initiate genocide on any citizens that came into contact with the person/thing. During the genocide or "purge" one of the citizens, Lightning, breaks out of the train carrying her to her death. She is followed by Sazh, who acts like danny glover.
Because of Lightning's breakout, the government of cocoon goes crazy and all out war between the government and it's civilians commences. I have no idea how one person escaping from a train causes this much chaos, but then again I wouldn't put all the exposition in the datalogs.
We then follow the character Snow as he leads the rebel alliance against the empire. He fights by punching dudes in the face. Along the way he encounters a mother and son with the mother choosing to tag along with snow while her son stays behind. As you can surmise this leads to tragic irony with the mom saving snow, only to get killed a second later while her son watches.
Cut back to Lightning for a random boss fight and some giant robot thing emerging from the sky. Cut to Snow beating up dudes and feeling guilt for letting the mother die. He then makes sure that the rest of the rebel alliance is ok as he drives some weird floating motorcycle thing towards the giant robot. Cut back to the son, who was with the rebel alliance, hijacking another flying motorcycle to go after snow with some spunky girl in toe (I'm using spunky the american way, so stop having dirty thoughts british people) and that's the end of chapter 1.
Chapter 2 begins with us learning what the names of the son and girl are, and they're both Hope and Vanille respectively. After hearing about how annoying vanille is I decided that this was enough final fantasy XIII for a day.
Day 2
I would like to begin this by saying that the way the story is conveyed is terrible upon reflection. When you have all of this exposition it's imparitive that you make sure that the audience follows it. You don't make all this exposition easy to overlook.
The majority of the story that I wrote down in day 1 came from the datalogs. The only thing that didn't was hope's mother dieing. Everything else was not explained in game. That is terrible. You don't do that when you're writing a story, it confuses the audience and that's unacceptable.
Let's look at how persona 4 opened as a point of reference. Persona 4 takes 2 hours before the game starts, literally 2 freaking hours. In that time frame characters in the game explain the setting, and give a general sense of what the sorrundings of inaba and the tv world are like. Was it a slow start? Yes. But atleast I knew what was going on. If you don't read the datalogs in FFXIII all you see is crazy sci-fi nonsense that would confuse the ever loving hell out of george lucas. It's like they wrote a bible for all the fiction, and figured that the audience just knew it inherently.
Anyway I started playing today doing what else, reading datalogs! The story so far is that Hope drove the weird air motorcycle thing into a lair of the fal'cie in search for Snow. What the hell are the Fal'Cie you may ask, well they're mystical beings that when humans come into contact with them they become slaves, or l'cie, and have to set out to find their "focus". Fal'Cie from pulse tend to make L'cie that want to destroy cocoon. So the whole genocide thing from before came from a fal'cie who was from pulse making it's way onto cocoon. Got that?
So Hope is looking for Snow, while Vanille proves that she's australian or something. They introduce a gameplay concept that's basically the same from the persona series, if you sneak up on an enemy you get a bonus in enemy encounters. Cut back to snow and we find out that he's looking for his fiance in the lair of the fal'cie. He presses a switch causing a tomb raider puzzle to appear.
Cut to Lightning and Danny Glover outside a door to the lair of the Fal'cie. Lightning figures that if she just hacks at it with a sword it will open. Spoiler warning: It doesn't. She then tries the next best thing, and sweet talks her way into getting the door open. Cut back to Snow who activates another tomb raider puzzle, and then cut back to Hope.
Hope and Vanille explore the sanctum some more, and they encounter rejected resident evil 4 monsters. Thankfully Snow finds them and punches the rejected resident evil 4 monsters in the face. Hope has an emo moment, and then they decide to follow snow.
Lightning and sazh meanwhile start exploring the sanctum and the writers finally figured out how to put exposition into the actual game as Lightning explains that she's looking for her sister who's a slave to the pulse fal'cie, which happens to be the same predicament of snow's fiance. Dun dun dunn? Anyway this little exchange explains that the rejected resident evil four monsters are actually fal'cie slaves that didn't complete their mission. He then informs lightning that her sister is probably one of the resident evil four monsters, the writers try to develop lightning, and I now know why people like sazh so much. Apparently sazh is the only character that square enix thought to give a voice actor who can actually deliver melodramatic lines of dialogue. It's actually pretty amazing how Sazh can say the most melodramatic crap and not have it come off as goofy.
Anyway lightning and sazh fight more resident evil 4 rejects, they eventually encounter lightning's sister who is now confirmed to snow's fiance. Snow and the gang meet up with them and lightning's sister turns into a crystal, because hey this is a final fantasy game and crystals have to be in there somewhere. Exposition on how this is what happens when a slave of the fal'cie complete their orders, melodrama erupts between snow and lightning which accumulates in lightning turning the tables on snow and punching him the face. Afterwords they decide to run into a door where they encounter the fal'cie and initiate a boss fight.
After the boss fight the fal'cie sends them into some crazy water floating thing, and the fal'cie then begins to tentacle rape everybody. End of chapter 2.
Chapter 3 begins with a flashback of snow proposing to his fiance, afterwords we return to our group where we now find out that they're all l'cie thanks to the fal'cie tentacle raping all of them! More exposition, hope has another emo moment, and then we're introduced to two brand new gameplay concepts!
The paradigm shift system which assigns configures your party AI to do certain roles, and the leveling up system which involves crystals.
Here's the thing about leveling up systems, no one gives a crap if a leveling up system doesn't have depth. No one has ever had this complaint so why square enix decides to make the leveling up in final fantasy games complicated is beyond me. Now to be fair to FFXIII this isn't that complicated, but this has been a pet peeve of mine for a while now.
As far as the paradigm shift system is concerned, it works. It's like if you were to play persona 3 in real time. There's not much else I can really say besides that. It's functional.
Anyway the gang's in a sea of water that has been crystalized. Here they talk about what has happened to them and what they should do, with lightning punching snow in the face for good measure. Eventually snow gets tired of being punched in the face and stays behind while the rest of the party moves into another area.
Cut to snow still in crystalized sea world, and he decides that he wants in on this boss battle shenanigans as well and then proceeds to fight the game's m ost notorious summon, the scissoring shiva-cycle. Yeah... I'm not going to defend the design, it's pretty stupid.
Cut back to lightning and the gang and we see some human politician who's so evil he doesn't keep good care of his finger nails. Disgusted by his unkept fingernails they crash land in some weird jungle enviorment and that's the beginning of chapter 4!
And holy cow look at all that nonsense I wrote! See ya for day 3!
Days 3 and 4
So after a while I decided to finally play some more FFXIII. I'm combining both days together because this is chapter 4 and... not that much happens in chapter 4.
But before I get into chapter 4 let's talk about the linearity a bit. The game has been criticized for being linear, but I don't mind it all that much. What I do mind is that the levels aren't designed with the linearity in mind. The levels just aren't paced well. The linearity kind of creates this, almost modern FPS, type of pacing where you go from one set piece to the other with enemy encounters inbetween. I don't know if it's just me, but this game kind of invokes a call of duty feeling because of that. The problem is that in call of duty a level may take 10-20 minutes to complete, while here it can take up to 4 hours. This creates a feel of repition, or grind, when in reality you aren't really grinding all that much.
Sadly the soundtrack doesn't help matters. To put it simply, there just isn't enough songs in the soundtrack for it to be effective. A good RPG should have around 30-40 songs composed for it, so the themes don't become repetitive. FFXIII has around 20. And to make matters weirder, they don't even have the 2 songs you need for a final fantasy game, the prologue music and the victory chime. How the hell did they get away by not including the victory chime?
Back to chapter 4. The only major gameplay concept that's presented is how to upgrade items, which helps break up the pace somewhat but not by much. As far as story goes, not much happens. The group gets stranded in the wastelands of a war from the past. You fight steampunk esque creatures while the story tries to deliver character development. Eventually the group splits up into 2 teams: Team A being Lightning and Hope while Team B is Sazh and Vanille. Before that happens though there's a great bit where lightning starts talking about how she hates snow, which is odd because it comes out of nowhere. Infact Sazh even points this out by asking why she hates him. So even the game knows that this development makes no god damn sense.
Anywho, lightning and hope go one way with some almost maternal bond forming between lightning and hope, the end result is lightning being able to summon oden. And god damn the summon designs suck in this game.
The same parent like relationship extends to Sazh and Vanille.
The story for most of this chapter isn't bad, and they do try and create some character development, but nothing really moves the story forward at all. And as far as character development is concerned, very few of the cutscenes actually have anything resembling character development which leads me to wonder why chapter 4 is as long as it is.
And finally, it ends with us going back to snow, where he confronts this game's Cid, who looks exactly like destructoid news editor dale north. Something happens, and snow is still pussy whipped by his fiance. Then we get a flashback to earlier and holy hell this love story sucks.
I'm serious, the love story between Snow and his fiance is terrible. It just seems so half-assed and contrived, it's like the developers only put it in to satisfy all the fanboys who complained about the lack of a love story in XII.
Anyway, that ends disc one (WOOO HOO) I'll see you back here when I beat chapter 5.
Day 5 (chapter 5... and 6!)
Chapter 5, or lightning and hope walk around in a cool looking area for a while. Ok what really happens is that they're walking to hope's home town, and square enix decided to take this time to add EVEN MORE character development.
And this is where square F's up hard. We'll start with hope first because it's easier to explain. The problem with hope is that his entire plotline could be resolved if he just talked to snow when he had the chance. Everything could have been resolved with just a simple conversation. Because of this, his development just seems wrong, like we know he could be developing in a more sincere way.
As for lightning... well let me say this. There's a fine line between creating a tough, strong, female character and creating a total bitch. FFXIII oblviously passes that line with a flashback. A flashback, that is among the worst cutscenes in this game, and perhaps among the worst cutscenes in video games released in the year 2010. It's not the worst (metroid other m beats it) but it features the line "worst birthday ever".
I get that the intention would have been to show how she was before and how she's growing as a character, but this is handled so poorly it just makes lightning completely unlikable. It just seems like another example of FFXIII having good intentions, but screwing up the execution.
Finally, chapter 5 ends with an annoying boss fight, and hope and lightning make their way towards hope's home town.
Chapter 6:
yeah I beat another chapter in one day. I was surprised considering how tedious chapter 5 was. I was also thoroughly surprised to learn that chapter 6 is REALLY REALLY GOOD.
There are two reasons for this: Number 1, chapter 6 Is told from the viewpoint of vanille which indicates a more light-hearted tone. The other reason is this is the chapter that we finally learn about sazh's past, and it's done really well. It's funny because his backstory is done so well, and everything else is done so poorly it makes you wonder why they couldn't just let whoever was in charge of sazh's story be in charge of the entire game.
To avoid spoilers, Sazh's back story makes him feel like an empathetic character. It's a bit cheap, because the way they make you feel empathy for him is to just have horrible things happen to him, but his personality is what really sells it. If they were to give sazh a more emo, or whiny personality it wouldn't work. But since they gave him a more mature, almost guiltful personality it succeeds tremendously.
Now as far as what the hell they're doing in chapter 6, they're just walking through a forest to get to FFXIII's interpretation of casino night zone. The chapter's nice and short and definitely doesn't feel like it's wasting your time. Now why couldn't the other chapters do that?
Day 6
I tried really really hard to beat chapter 7, but holy hell is the third boss fight in chapter 7 poorly designed.
This has been a common complaint about the game, that the bosses aren't well designed, and I got to say after loosing to this boss twice I got to agree.
I've played JRPGs with hard bosses. I'm a fan of the shin megami tensei series, so hard JRPG bosses aren't foreign to me whatsoever. The bosses in Final Fantasy XIII are TERRIBLE. It seems to me that square didn't test play any of these bosses to make balance changes. These bosses aren't hard, hard would imply that you could overcome their bullcrap. These bosses are simply unfair.
Anyway, chapter 7 for most of it is ok. It's too damn long, but it does accomplish a couple things story wise.
Chapter 7 begins with Hope and Lightning exploring hopes home town. They encounter the food storage fal'cie and talk about how citizens of cocoon are pets of the fal'cie yada yada yada. Eventually the military confronts them and it seems like they're doomed, untill Snow and some austrailian woman shows up to save the day. And yes, Snow is riding the shiva-cycle. God I had that thing. After snow clears out the military, hope and lightning split up with hope now following snow, and lightning following this australian chick.
So does this mean that Hope and Snow can finally have that discussion to resolve Hope's issues? Well after 2 hours of running around Hope's home town, he finally decides to say something! I do have to give credit to square for resolving the issue in a natural way, but I just wish they resolved it a bit sooner. But that's more of a personal criticism than a real problem.
After they resolve their issues we cut back to Lightning where we find out that australian girl's name is Fang. Fang is terrible gameplay wise. She seems completely useless because all the stuff she does, other characters do way better. As far as story goes, I can take or leave her.
Fang does reveal one thing very interesting though, she's from pulse, she was a pulse l'cie, and vanille is from pulse as well. Funny that the two characters from pulse have australian accents. Makes me want to think that this entire game is a metaphor for english-australian relations.
Anyway, Fang and Lightning fight some dudes, they set up a rendezvous with Hope and Snow at Hope's apartment. Once they get to Hope's apartment we see Hope confront his father. Through out the game Hope seems to have contempt for his father, but once he confronts him he's fine with his dad. Which makes me wonder why he even held something against his dad in the first place. If his dad is the loving father that we're presented with, why on earth did Hope hate him? This just seems like a plot point that went absolutly nowhere.
After they meet up, the military appears outside Hope's apartment and the third boss fight that I still can't beat shows up. So that's where I have to leave it for today.
Day 7
I beat that god damn boss.
Turns out it was one of those "destroy these other parts of me before you can kill me off" bosses. Which is fine I guess, except for the fact that I couldn't tell that there were other parts to the boss. The wounds of that boss fight still haven't healed so... yeah F that damn thing.
Anyway after you beat that boss, another sky tank appears in a cutscene with fang saying "great we have to fight another one of these things" and me shouting "F###!" so loud an entire city block could hear it. Thankfully some random guy (who I at first thought was cid, but turns out is someone completely different) comes to save the day.
So now we're at chapter 8, which is a Sazh and Vanille chapter and therefore awesome since these are the only chapters square enix put any thought into. As I said before, it's Sazh and Vanille exploring FFXIII's version of casino night zone, where they see such amazing things as a cirque du solie performance and chocobos!
And the audience finally get to hear the chocobo song. With the amount of stuff that isn't familiar to the final fantasy series, it's nice to know that they atleast put in the chocobo song... and then ruin it by adding lyrics. But my elation for hearing something familiar to the final fantasy universe far exceeds my disgust for these insipid lyrics.
After you mess around with some chocobos, the military attacks and s### gets real as your blasting fools in neon disney land. Just for that I can almost forgive the problems with final fantasy XIII... then the ending of the chapter comes.
The ending of this chapter is a mixture of good and bad so opposite of one another it summons a creative tornado which obfuscates any constructive judgment. What happens is this, Sazh's empathetic story line gets resolved in the worst way possible while vanille's guilt story line reaches it's climax. That part is good. The problem is that there's another female character revealing this information who acts in such a cold hearted manner it's impossible to take her seriously. She's such a bitch, she makes nurse ratchet look kind.
After that part, there's some really well done character devolpment between sazh and vanille, sazh's summon fight starts (his summon turns into a go-kart), and then... sazh kills himself. Which is possibly the biggest cop out ever.
Why? WE JUST GOT HIS SUMMON! WHY WOULD YOU KILL OFF A CHARACTER AFTER YOU GIVE HIM AN IMPORTANT GAMEPLAY FEATURE!? The point being, we know he isn't dead, or something is going to bring him back.
And that's how chapter 8 ends... yeah I don't know what's going on. I'll see what happens in the future.
Days 8 and 9
Chapter 9 begins with the rest of the cast being informed that Sazh and Vanille are held hostage on an airship. They decide to storm said airship in order to rescue their fellow party members.
Anyway, we're informed that Sazh didn't kill himself... and no one's surprised. Eventually they escape their prison.
The crew reunites on the outside of the ship, just in time to fight a boss that's pretty pathetic. Some more story happens and we're finally able to customize our party!
Except we can't switch out Lightning... so we can sorta customize our party just not in a way that makes sense.
Ok let me say this, by this point in the game it becomes apparent that the best party is Sazh, Vanille, and Snow. Why? Well Sazh and Vanille are both really good at buffing and debuffing, and Snow is a good tank. So you could have Snow draw aggro from enemies while Sazh and Vanille can set up buffs and debuffs to make any fight easier. Plus Vanille is actually a really good medic, so you don't even have to worry about dying.
But hey, square doesn't want us to exploit the game just yet. Anyway you make it through a couple more corridors, there's a joke about the 9/11 terror alert level (yes they do a terror alert level joke, I'm sure when they wrote it originally it was timely) and then we confront the main boss of this chapter.
Ok remember when I said creepy guy with long fingernails is probably the main villain, turns out he is infact the main villain. Not only that, he's not human (gasp) he's actually a fal'cie... that also has long fingernails! Upon revealing this information he exposits more information regarding everyone's focus, and then shows us his fal'cie form for a boss fight.
This boss fight is interesting because it made me think I was playing bayonetta again. Everything about it just seems like it's a boss fight from bayonetta. The music, the boss design, the only thing that's missing is Bayonetta herself performing a striptease. Maybe square cut that because they knew it would make the game better.
Anyway, you beat long fingernail guy and chapter 9 ends with a cutscene. And not only is that the end of chapter 9, that's the end of disc 2 as well! So now we're onto disc 3, the final disc of final fantasy XIII! wooo!
Day 10
Remember when I said that the team of Sazh, Snow, and Vanille completely breaks the game? I WAS RIGHT! in chapter 10 the crew crash lands in an armory for pulse l'cie where they're supposed to train to destroy cocoon or something. This finally allows you to choose your party at will, and I of course chose the party that completely breaks the game.
They also introduce a mechanic where now you can give any party member any job you wish. And I ask, why? Why spend the extra exp. for a party member to learn a new job when I can just switch in a party member that already does that job and be better off? This just seems poorly thought out
Anywho after completely crushing the enemies in the armory (which allowed me to get an achievement :D) you come across Cid. He explains the motivations of long fingernail guy, which are dumb as all hell.
The entire reaso n long fingernail guy wants to destroy cocoon (yeah he wants to do that now) is so the fal'cie can meet god. He figures if cocoon is destroyed, god will come down from the heavens and rebuild life.
That is ridiculously stupid. After explaining this Vanille points out a couple plot holes in this plan, and cid just kind of acknowledges them and moves on.
And then Cid turns into a character from dynasty warriors strike force!
After that I laughed really hard, saved the game, and was amazed that this chapter was still going.
Log in to comment