Guest Article: A Final Fantasy XIII Review
by Richard "jedirnc" Chang
by Richard "jedirnc" Chang
I’ve been busy as of late, and every
time I get busy I make other people do this kind of charity work that I do for
you for me. Is that confusing? It should be, because stuff like this should
never have to happen, but dammit, here we are, aren’t we? Life sucks,
sometimes.
Anyway, I’ve never played Final Fantasy
XIII, but I have friends with whom I’ve talked long and hard about it and by
their kind hearts and wretched opinions, I feel strongly averse to it. Averse
enough to publish a review that essentially tears it apart and really talks
about why it’s so terrible. Also, I can’t say no to free material. Unless it’s
from you, so no, don’t ask me to publish your stuff. Well, only sometimes. I have
to read it first.
Anyway, here it is.
Final
Fantasy Episode XIII: A Ridonkulously Long Review
By
Richard “jedirnc” Chang
Final Fantasy XIII is Star Wars Episode
I: The Phantom Menace. It was a new version of a classic series, both highly anticipated
and beautifully designed, but ultimately, falling far below fan expectations.
Lots of reviews have already gone through its flaws (the linearity of the game
and the lack of certain keystone final fantasy rpg elements) and I'm here to echo
those sentiments briefly as well as to add a bit more of my own take on it.
First off, let's talk about hype. The
trailers were beautiful and the game itself did not disappoint visually. A
futuristic world? Gunblades and fast, real-time active battles so your
characters don’t look like they're just standing around half of the fight? A
sassy black man that we've been missing since Barret? AND he has a chocofro?
I'm in!
But, I could say the same for The
Phantom Menace. Remember the excitement of seeing a trailer for Episode I back
in the day? Exciting moments were captured, such as Obi Wan meeting Anakin for
the first time, new characters and worlds, and even fantastic heroes and
villains! A dual sided lightsaber wielding Sith?! Fast-paced action and
lightsaber battles? I WANT.
But, when it came down to it, flashy
visuals couldn’t make up for flat characters and boring plotlines.
Story
I'll be honest with you. I tend to be a cutscene skipper. I want to jump right in and start fighting. Since this is the case, I made a purposeful effort to pay attention to Final Fantasy storylines. But, Final Fantasy XIII's plot did not manage to captivate me.
So my version of the story sounds
ridiculous I realize, and that’s fairly intentional. Sometimes the truth is
just ridonkulous.
Here’s my problem with the way the story
was presented: at the start the game, the war is in progress. The characters
have been fighting and experiencing hardships for a while. As the audience,
however, we have no knowledge as to why the fighting is occurring, who is
involved, and what the stakes are. On top of that, the usage of unfamiliar
terminology complicates an understanding of the world.
The way the world is introduced in the
beginning of the game assumes the players have sufficient background knowledge
to understand what Fal’cie, La’cie, Focus, Cocoon, and Sanctum are. Now, I
realize that you learn more as the game progresses and you’re caught up to
speed eventually, but I’m not a huge fan of this form of narrative. The problem
is that it’s difficult to feel immersed into a world in which we are strangers
and have few ways to identify with it.
The characters are basically on their
own track with or without us and it feels like we’re just outside observers watching
them do things rather than allowing us to take the role of the character (hence
the genre: role-playing game). What
happened to the Final Fantasy games where you could name your character
anything you wanted? You made “Buttface” your own character and you experienced
all his (or her) adventures vicariously.
For a great review of The Phantom
Menace, look up the review
by Red Letter Media on Youtube. It basically covers this point in detail.
Often in movies (and games) we have a main character we can identify with, and this
person guides us through the story as they learn and grow themselves. Someone
who is new to the circumstances of the storyline, who takes us through the
world and the story. But Final Fantasy XIII
lacks this. The point that the reviewer, Plinkett, makes is that the
Phantom Menace didn’t have a “main” character(Anakin? Qui-Gon? Obi-Wan? who IS
the main character?) and here, though Lightning is the title character, there’s
no reason (other than seeing her on screen for the majority of the time), to
really feel connected to her.
Characters
I like most of the character designs but
dislike most of the characters because they lack personality. What they do have
is a lot of emotion, and I feel like this is what is substituted for real character
traits.
Here’s what I can say about the
characters: Lightning is a stoic character. We've seen this before in many
other Final Fantasy’s such as with Cloud and Squall, but we’re given very
little to work with in terms of her dialogue and back story, which makes her
seem very boring. With characters like Squall, we get to see his thought process,
letting us understand why he doesn't want to associate with other people and
why he doesn't want to react to others sometimes. Lightning stands around
looking pretty and miffed all the time.
Snow is the polar opposite. In the
story, he is Serah’s (Lightning’s sister) fiancé and he is determined to save
her after she becomes frozen. He’s always yelling: either angry at the world,
jubilant that something went right, or depressed from a failure. Also, he wears
a hat.
Hope is my least favorite character. His
mother dies at the beginning of the game, an indirect fault of Snow, and he’s
emo from that point on. He evolves from being a grumpy little kid who wants to
kill Snow into a sad little kid who wants to play with the big boys. He's a
civilian with no training and it's not very believable to me that he'd be able
to hang with all these soldier characters in battle. His primary weapon is a
boomerang, but it’s about as effective as a nerf gun. Of all the characters, he
is the one that actually grows and changes the most, but after his story arc
where his feelings about his mother’s death and Snow are resolved, he fails to
maintain a strong role on the team.
Vanille is another bipolar character (and
something about her voice acting is just a bit off). She tends to take the
narrator position and I can't quite put my finger on it but she has an accent
that really bothers me. It’s some hybrid of a British, European, Australian
accent? Or maybe it just changes in every cutscene?
Most of the characters have their own
mini story arc where we learn a little bit about their past. Story progression
also generally involves the characters being angry in the first phase, followed
by becoming severely depressed and suicidal, and ending with them inexplicably
uplifted and positive. And then they get some vehicle/summon hybrid like a
motorcycle Shiva or a railroad train Alexander (and you thought the Power
Rangers went out of style).
As an ensemble, I don't see these
characters having much chemistry. A few of these characters have histories with
one another, and some others just meet in the course of the game. Friends, family,
and loosely tied strangers simply tossed into a quest together. The problem is,
I never felt like there was much of a bond between any of the characters.
Previous Final Fantasy games had
parties that had characters that were formed from a ragtag crew, but eventually
it was shown that they supported each other, worked together, and grew together
as dysfunctional families. In Final Fantasy XIII, I don’t see any of these
characters wanting to associate with each other once the game is over (besides
the people who are related or married or something).
Gameplay
It’s been said in almost every review.
The linearity. Yes, that was a fairly big deal breaker. It changed the genre
from being an rpg to an action game with an rpg system. Basically it was a game
where you followed a non-branching pathway and encountered events along the
way, without being able to turn back. Other than what the story dictates,
you’re not allowed to interact with the world or the people in it. How is this
an rpg? Instead of having towns where people sell you items, everything is
online. The world is just so devoid of life and you’re given the minimal amount
of freedom. It comes down to three elements in the game. You walk, you watch
cutscenes, and you fight. This leads me to my next point.
I had mixed feelings about the battle
system. When I first started playing it, I liked seeing the characters active
in more fluid ways, chaining combos together, and the flashy animations with
the summons, magic, and limit breaks. The more I played it however, the more the
lack of control became obvious, and the more sterile it felt.
In this rendition of the battle system,
you have control over one character, and the other 2 members of your party are
assigned roles while the AI takes control of their actions. For example, you
can set Snow to be the Sentinel to tank the damage and Hope to be the White
Mage to heal your party, while you control Lightning to be the damage dealer.
It was an interesting concept, and you could mix and match different
combinations within the battles. After a while though, I felt that having the
system control your characters just didn’t give you the complete management of
your party that you really need to make you feel like you’re actually doing
something. Everything is too automated and you can even set the one character
you have the ability to control to actually follow an automated sequence.
By the end of the game, I felt like each
battle consisted of watching the fights and intervening only when characters
needed healing. With having fairly minimal control over your battles, it feels
like you’re just playing survival matches, intervening only to keep your
characters alive until they defeat the enemies at hand. In another means of
overcompensation, your characters can do high amounts of damage (that explode
into huge numbers!), but enemies have ludicrous amounts of health too. It basically
makes the numbers for the damage you deal essentially irrelevant and make the
battles drag on far too long without engaging you in them
Music
*Sigh* So while the Phantom Menace at the least had John
Williams going for it, Final Fantasy XII
falls flat here too. Nobuo Uematsu was the regular composer for the Final
Fantasy series up until Final Fantasy X,
and the music was brilliant. They all had epic, orchestral feels to them, even
though the early technology was fairly limited to MIDIs until the most recent
entries. The use of thematic music was well thought out and appropriate to
scenarios to express elements of drama, humor, and personality. Battle themes
pumped you up, boss themes gave you the sense of urgency and power, and the
following fanfare signified victory and reward. Music was able to express the
personality of the characters and the emotion surrounding a scene as
effectively as any amount of emotional yelling in the voice acting of Final Fantasy XIII. The Nobuo Uematsu
era of Final Fantasy music was epic.
I wish I could say the same for Final Fantasy XIII,
but I can’t. Most of the music in the game is ambient, jazzy background music,
which is unremarkable and tedious. The only music that stuck with me was the
main theme, which they repeated in nearly every flashback or dramatic cutscene
involving Serah (Lightning’s sister/Snow’s fiancee). I equate it to “My heart
will go on” from Titanic (that’s not a compliment). The battle themes and
fanfares were absent and as a whole, it was fairly disappointing. There was
very little to stimulate you along your journey and combining the repetitive
battles with the soporific music led me to several naps while playing.
Summary
So there’s so much more that I can say
that I disliked about the game, but this is already a fairly lengthy essay for
a blog post. I realize that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is out already and some of the snippets of
reviews I’ve read about it comment that they’ve changed the linearity and a lot
of other complaints people had about the first game, but that doesn’t make me
want to play the sequel any more.
I’ve seen the world of Cocoon and I
don’t have any desire to learn more about its history, and I certainly don’t
want to hang out with Lightning and her friends if they don’t want to hang out
with me.
For more Star Wars related humor and
webcomics, check out my site: www.retcon5.blogspot.com
