THE FINAL FANTASY XIII TOPIC

Writing: Ever played (or made) an RPG where the plot was made up as the game went along? FF13 feels like one of those with a second scoop of "it'd look cool if we did this". The plot breaks down after it returns from its smoke break and the only way to make any sort of sense of it is to read the ingame encyclopedia AND the analects you get from doing fetch kill monster quests missions. The whole plot is incapable of conveying itself and by the end of the game I was in a perpetual cycle of going "WHY?" to facepalming and back again.

The only strength in the writing is the characters which is like racing a beatup but startable car against a fat kid with a bike. For the most part everybody is some mix between being a complete idiot, a psychopath, one dimensional, and at some point learning what a complete idiot they've been, completing their character arc, and becoming "IF WE TRY AND BELIEVE WE CAN DO IT". Sazh is pretty much the best character and not just because of :frocobo: but as a character who has the most believable motivations and reactions throughout the game.

If you look at any character beyond the playable cast and you're stuck with a cast so forgettable if I didn't have speaker names on I wouldn't know who was who half the time. What's worse is these characters have almost no impact on the plot at all to the point where most could be cut with no change to the plot. This is another issue with the writing: The support cast is completely forgettable. They show up about three times at the most and most of that isn't affecting the plot at all. One thing FF13 was sorely missing was a good antagonist. The villains in the early game barely exist at all and the next villain is almost as boring beyond being an Anime Space Pope.

Oh, and FF13 pulls an FF8 for removing tension from the story. It's like the old cartoons I used to watch when I was five.

Visuals: It was, uh, pretty. And bright. Too bright. Abusive of specular lighting. Which, to me, is a way of making things look pretty. To be fair it was only abused in two areas: That crystal lake place where everything is blue-white to white which gave me a small headache for being practically two colors and whitewood which was one (guess which!) and was borderline headache inducing. Besides that the settings never looked bad but at the same time they weren't very impressive either. Maybe it would've looked better if getting a good look at anything didn't involve wrestling with the Sonic 2006 quality camera controls, especially when moving. Unfortunately SE blew their budget on such visuals that they resorted to copy and pasting them to make dungeons longer with the Fifth Ark being the biggest victim of such design; forcing the player to go through the same looking segment at least three times.

Character design is both a step up and down from the previous games where the sheer absurdity of some of the designs could bend space-time. The main cast settled in a nice area between "what people would wear" and "stand out from everybody else" with a bias towards the former as opposed to Tidus and his multi-length pant legs. The supporting cast falls flat again though, with half of them looking like somebody else and the others standing out on virtue of being the only important character who would look like that (Sazh's son, Anime Space Pope, and Micro-Tie).

The enemy design on the other hand is mostly very good. Sure there's a few palette swaps or same-enemies-but-slightly-different but the base models are done quit well and I have no complaints about them*.

* the giant turtles have terrible looking faces **

** you knew this was coming!

Music: The battle theme is excellent and is one of the best of the series. There's a few other stand out tunes that I can't call by name and the rest are more atmospheric tracks which get tuned out or turned off for something more interesting. It isn't bad and there weren't any tracks that were a pain to listen to but it doesn't have the same kick as the soundtrack of other games. I do miss the traditional FF fare though, the new one is more like a riff before playing some generic music that I didn't care for.

Gameplay: The important bits! There were a few good ideas thrown around in FF13 but most of them fell apart during execution. Let's try to cover them!

Dungeon Design: Linear paths. Nothing you haven't heard before and are sick and tired of hearing at this point I'm sure. FF13 abandoned the illusion of linearity and the fixed/no-control camera maps in FF10 and before. Both of these did help with making dungeons more interesting though, even if they had a single path. There is literally nothing else in the dungeons either like puzzles. Mix in the repetitive settings (Fifth Ark I am looking at you no don't turn away you should come up here and show off your shame!) and you've got a disaster for dungeons.

This improves later on once you reach Gran Pulse. There's an actual place to explore. It's a nice break from everything above even if it doesn't last very long. The next set of dungeons also avoid having such a blatant single path to take and if they only started with those and expanded then the dungeons would be much better.

Lastly the map is terrible. You won't notice this at first when there's a single path but when it opens up you'll notice one terrible design decision: The map rotates based on where you're facing. In a large area like Gran Pulse you'll have to get your bearings (or find Cacoon and face that since it is always in the same place across every area) to use the map.

Battles: FF13's battle system is FF10-2's with some new ideas and a bit of FF12 in the base. In battle you have two options you'll use for 95% of the game: Auto-Battle where the AI uses the best moves in most situations except in certain situations where it completely fails (Saboteur where the enemy is immune to all possible status ailments, Synergist in general, Commando using blitz against huge/groups of enemies) and Paradigm Shifts. Paradigm Shifts are basically FF10-2 changing dress spheres except there's only six which cover all battle roles, everybody has to change, and you only get six setups for the entire party (which is enough in most scenarios). They're your main source of controlling combat: If a character needs healing you shift so you've got a medic or two out there to heal up before switching back to an offensive party and it streamlines fights so you're doing less busywork. Except without that there isn't much else to do. Avoiding Auto-Fight and punching in your own actions doesn't work so well for roles with multiple actions as the gauge is always filling even when you're (looking up and) punching in actions. Every fight comes down to making sure you've got the right roles set up and Paradigm Shifting at the correct times. If you've got these down almost nothing in the game will pose a significant threat to you.

One important aspect of battles is the Stagger Bar. You fill it up with Ravagers and use Commandos and Saboteurs to slow down the rate it decreases. As you fill it up you do more damage and eventually the bar will fill and the enemy will stagger which increases the damage they take and makes them vulnerable to certain moves and make status effects more likely to increase. For the most part it really is effective and it adds more strategy to fighting as you try to stay alive and keep the stagger bar up. The only issue I have with it is some enemies come down to staggering them because before that they are practically immune to damage and this can cause some fights to drag out far too long.

There's some smart moves. Full heal between battles removes the attrition the games have used before but random encounters can actually post a threat now (especially those flying bikes). You can throw healers on AI and for the most part you can forget about them and they'll do an acceptable job of keeping your party members alive (the dead ones are usually stuck waiting for the player to use a Phoenix Down). They reduces the number of stats to three and what each does is pretty clear. The Stagger Bar is nice with few exceptions.

Then you fight an enemy immune to most damage until you stagger them to knock off their physical immunity shield and they put it back up while staggered and you get angry at the game and the fight takes ages. Fuck those guys.

Shops, Cash, Equipment, Upgrading: Shops were removed and usable anywhere. Thank god. Having access to shops anywhere can be handy if you hit a roadblock and an item could give you the extra oomph to pass it. Or going between towns looking for that one shop (then back to another and back again!). Shops inventories expand as the game progresses and you also get new shops which sell different items. Nothing bad by itself.

Until the upgrade system rears its ugly head. This chore of a game mechanic shows all the bad ideas they had with handling shops. The first problem is money is limited in this game and getting any significant amount comes down to grinding enemies and hoping they drop their cash items since it's your primary source of income. Then you buy organic compounds to increase the experience multiplier to *3 and pump in techno-components which give lots of item-EXP but decrease the multiplier. The EXP will increase the item level until it reaches maximum level. Except you don't have any idea what the maximum level is and the item that gives the best $$$:EXP ratio is really expensive and all rollover EXP is lost. You're stuck buying shit components to avoid going overlevel (and wasting $$$) or buying the best component and hope the max level is high (and wasting EXP->$$$). Once an item is max level you can transform it into the next tier of item (if there is one) with the appropriate transformation catalyst. You don't know what item needs what unless you already have the appropriate catalyst and these catalysts are expensive. The worst case is a weapon for Sazh you get early on which needs a catalyst that costs ~900k gil. In comparison the best item you can sell for cash (Platinum Ignot) gives 150k and it requires farming one of the strongest (but death vulnerable) enemies in the game.

Thankfully upgrading is never required to do to beat the game but then the whole mechanic is wasted. Plus to be fair it is a much better idea (read: cheaper and more versatile) to upgrade Strength-boosting accessories than weapons.

Loading Times: The most impressive part of FF13 is the complete lack of loading times or screens. You ran up to an enemy and got in a fight and shapow you were actually fighting! No constant camera sweeps as the game tries to load or several second long pauses as the map was reloaded, just a near constant stream of game. Add this to large areas and detailed enemies and I'd label it as the best part of the game.

Bad guy: "I want you all to kill Orphan."

Party: "We aren't your pawns, we're gonna follow our own path!" *kills Orphan, anyway*

Party: "Take that, fal'cie! That'll teach you to give us orders that we'll b!tch and moan about and then do, anyway!"