Final Fantasy XIII sucks a lot like XII

Left to right: Sazh, Seifer, Tidus, Cloudette, Paine and Rikku.

I knew Final Fantasy XIII wasn’t a good game. I told everyone this. I had told everyone not to get hyped up. I warned that review scores would be overinflated because it’s Final Fantasy and not the Tales series or anything by Sakaguchi. I knew this because Square-Enix haven’t made a good game in…What? Ten years? Every ‘big’ game they have made has merely been both pretty and stupid. Oh, and usually sell millions because Final Fantasy is in the title, or characters from that series are.

What can I say? I hold some resentment against a company that made it impossible for me to google or discuss a certain game without getting an eyeful of their terrible retconning, triple belted spinoffs.

In a shameful moment of weakness and hypocrisy, I decided to rent Final Fantasy XIII last week.

By the way, the opening two hours are possibly the worst time I’ve ever had with a game. It wore me down. You run forward in two boring places, each with a really conservative set of textures.  Battles consist of pressing a button twice, waiting and repeating this. Then you’re assigned a meaningless score and a rating for how fast you did that. There is no experience, nor ability points for these first two hours. Since the constant awful cutscenes also show the characters fighting, all of this ‘gameplay’ could’ve just been removed and you’d miss nothing.

Anyway, going in I knew the story was going to be nonsensical anime garbage that beats you over the head with every point it wants to make – something best exemplified by Hope’s speeches. It’s all very ‘Xenosaga’.

But it was the gameplay that ended up being worse than I expected. Yet again, JRPGs reduce themselves to being dungeon crawlers.

Unlike a lot of people, my main issue with FFXII was the fact that it was a 50 hour dungeon crawl. The combat would’ve been great in small doses, but sucks when it’s the entire game. FFXIII is similar. In fact, it’s similar in quite a few ways…

Drab dungeons

Dungeons with a handful of textures repeated for too long.

In FF12 (from here on I’m going to use numbers rather than numerals to save confusion) The towns don’t serve much of a point, the two and a half minigames are half-baked ideas. Even the areas that seem big and open are mapped like dungeons. It’s all just about running through places filled with monsters and fighting them.

That’s also all of the gameplay in FF13.

I thought we were past this in 1998. FFVII and VIII kept dungeons short and sweet (with a few choice exceptions) and the games were better off for it. You want to get on with the story and just have some fun – not play Diablo. Hell, even comparing FFVI to IV shows the improvement with regards to less dungeon crawling as gameplay filler.

Current generation JRPGs seem to have gone the opposite directions. Likely due to graphics improving and costs skyrocketing – space and finance for lots of varied dungeons and lengthy RPGs is much less. So they stretch out all the dungeons to make the games as long as they’re expected to be. It also means more linearity. FFX was a stride in the wrong direction, FF12 and 13 are hikes.

The same way the Tomb of Raithwall in FF12 got boring, a lot of the dungeons in FF13 tend to copy/paste textures for the entire area you’ll spend hours in. As pretty as Lake Bresha or the Tesseracts looked the first time you got there, you can’t tell me you weren’t sick of them by the end. Don’t expect the story to advance while you’re in these places either, the story is usually between locations.

For the record, I’m all for simplistic and linear dungeons, I find them much more manageable and fun than Phantasy Star style labyrinths. But it’s when that tunnel stretches on for an hour that things start to go awry.

To be fair, in Palumpolum (no, seriously, that’s what it’s called) the game stops copying and pasting textures and puts some variance into the ‘dungeon’ and it makes a huge difference as you go through all kinds of different city environments. Even places with actual people!

Oh, the wonders of modern technology!

I'll give you a minute to spot the parallel.

Then there was this area in which everyone had told me the game stopped being so shockingly linear and got good after 30 hours of the same thing.

But it was exactly the same kind of thing as FF12′s open areas.

Do you remember that Wild Saurian in the Dalmasca Estersands? You know, you had to avoid the big T-Rex monster that could kill you in the first area of the game? The exact same gameplay is in FF13 – on Pulse, you avoid the big things.

Sure, it’s less linear than the rest of the game. There are directions to run in other than forward, but it’s still just running around fighting stuff for no reward but ability points. (or Crystarium Points, more accurately)

It’s a bad sign when the best part of the game in the first fifteen hours is a two minute segment in which you run across a gorgeous beach, go into a bar, talk to someone and then run outside to the pier.

Poor storytelling

FF12 had a terribly inconsistent narrative. With the bizarrely unnecessary Ondore memoirs spoon-feeding you information that should’ve been told through creative exposition, or that you knew or that you didn’t need to know.

It managed to make talking to people in towns completely pointless. All the history and attitudes towards events in cities and towns were exposited in these memoirs, the bestiary or the cutscenes.

Not to mention the overcomplicated, muddled mess of half-arsed national politics  and war. The first disc of Final Fantasy VIII was more political. I mean, how many people remember the difference between Nalbina, Nabradia and Nabudis?

In FF13 the entire story is told through cutscenes. All of it. It mostly cuts out talking to the civilian populace and giving the world any texture or personality. There are a few parts where you can talk to people but the game even has to recycle their pointless dialogue.

Vanille’s (think Yuffie meets Rikku meets Selphie, take away a few IQ points, add one bafflingly Australian accent) narration breaks immersion just as much as the memoirs in FF12, even if it doesn’t break the pace as much.

Much like FF12, all interaction that could be in-game is put into cutscenes. Even simple things like making save points shops, takes away valuable interaction and keeping a distance between the player (or viewer, rather) and the world of the game. There’s no interweaving gameplay and story here, it’s all clearly segregated.

If FFVII were done by the FF13 team, the entry into the Sector 1 Mako Reactor would be all cutscene, down to the fights. Then the Reactor would be half an hour of corridor with no Materia or EXP. Then planting the bomb, running away as the timer counts down, rescuing Jessie and getting out of there would all be in cutscene form.

People can claim this is ‘streamlining’, but if you can get all the story from watching just the cutscenes, it defeats the point of it being a game.

In those hateful first two hours (and take some time to think of the great movies you could watch in two hours) all the story got across was:

• Cloudette is a bitch.
• Sazh is pretty okay.
• Tidus’ mom died.
• And I THINK, I’m not sure but I THINK that Seifer wants to be a ‘hero’. It’s hard to tell with such masterfully subtle characterisation.

All the rest of the words hurled at you (l’Cie, fal’Cie, Focus, PSICOM, NORA etc.) are meaningless until about ten hours later by which time most of them have been explained through constant flashbacks with a weird day count. It’s like the whole thing starts in medias res, without ever properly just sending you back to the beginning. It’s flat out bad storytelling.

The Occuria and the fal’Cie

They’re the same damn thing.

nuff said.

Other story-related similarities

• Replace the Nethicite MacGuffins with the Focus of l’Cie.
• Replace the Pharos with Taejin’s Tower.
• Replace the airship combat at the end with magical summoning deus ex machina. (both endings even involve the same “oh no falling thing will kill people”)
• Dalmascans have American accents, Archadians have British accents. Coccoon has American accents, Pulse has Australian accents. (although they British up some villains)
• The dialogue of FF12 jarringly turns to bizarre and faux Shakespearian about halfway through. FF13 saves this till the end boss.
  
• “The reins of history back in the hands of man.”/”Humanity’s fate rests in its own hands!”
• Mark hunting/Stone missions. (technically gameplay but shh)
  
• Oh and SPOILER: you fight Cid.

Xemnas and Quistis there have about as much personality as Zargabaath and Drace. If you even remember them.

Gameplay flaws

Delete as applicable to game: These Espers/Eidolons, such as Belias/Brynhildr are totally pointless, they don’t do much damage and cost too much of your Mist charge/TPs. And you need them for Quickenings/Libra. They sure look purty by 2006/2010 standards though.

FF12 had the gambit system, which people seem to forget was optional. It helped to remove some hassle in fights, but could be a little unbalanced. Well, FF13 has that big shiny Auto-Battle button. You’ll be hitting that for the entire game. All your other interaction is the troublesome but somewhat clever paradigm shift.

In FF12 magic was useless outside of buffing and the occasional aerial enemy. In FF13 you can’t aim cure spells at more than one person at a time. You barely have time to assign actual commands (instead of hitting auto-battle), never mind paradigm shift troubles – like getting attacked while shifting to a cure paradigm. Why can’t you just pause and select roles for each character, instead of set paradigms anyway?

Perhaps it’s worst sin; FF12 was designed with places like GameFAQs in mind. Remember the license board? Remember the Zodiac spear – those random chests every walkthrough told you not to open so one chest in an optional dungeon with the hardest enemies would contain the ultimate weapon? Yeah, the devs said this was to build community. It was actually incredibly stupid and evil.

FF13 is nowhere near as bad as 12 in this regard, but still: Eidolon battles.

Finally, this is a small issue, but both games throw distracting text at you at certain points. FF12′s just adds to it’s uneven presentation. In FF13 thinking about your star rating for how fast you won a fight is an immersion killer.

Music

The music in Final Fantasy 12 was largely forgettable. There were some nuggets of gold in there though. (Ending Theme, Theme of the Empire, Sorrow – Imperial version, White Room, Rabanastre Downtown, etc.)

Although a lot of people disagree with me, I found that when the music in FF13 wasn’t forgettable it was offensively bad.

From droning about ‘stepping into the rainbow’ or ‘making wishes come true’ (I wish I was making these up), to the frightening lyrical Chocobo theme (‘WE WILL FIND THEM WE WILL FIND THEM’), to the overly sentimental but never quite emotional plinky piano tune.

That said, like FF12, there are a few good pieces in the soundtrack. Fighting Fate is particularly good – despite the games efforts to make you sick of it. There are also some good tracks that are more ambient like like Dust to Dust and Mysteries Abound. Those for the Purge and even the awful Serah’s Theme have good parts as well.

Wonderful worlds

Ivalice and Pulse/Coccoon sure are nice to look at.  Both complete with magical hover technology.

The design of the cities and the FMVs showing them off show a great attention to detail. They each have their dull areas, but for the most part there’s quality work put into building these worlds. It’s a stark contrast to the lazy writing and lazier gameplay design.

Futuristic fashion

Is this a thing now?

Whoops, wrong game.

Conclusion

FF12 and 13 are both full of potential. From Sky Pirates to the cruel machinations of being made a l’Cie. There’s also the shared idea of the interesting dilemma between gods (or god-like creatures) and the freedom of mankind.

To top it off, they both look great, and a lot of their flaws could’ve been easily fixed.

You can’t help but wonder if they’d only kept Basch the protagonist of FF12…Or if they’d started FF13 at the beginning of the story. (I personally think it would’ve been brilliant to open with Lightning killing a l’Cie on duty in-game, before it turns out her sister is one)

But at the end of the day, the potential was missed and when you factor in the gameplay design – they’re just not good games.

What shocks me though, is that so many people that identify themselves as FF fans, have bought into 13 whole heartedly. Despite it being (to exaggerate) basically the same game as 12, which they seem to universally hate. 12 is discounted like IX and XI is in the fandom.

Note that 12 has a nine point higher Metacritic average than 13, which surprises even me.

Is it all down to people preferring Tetsuya Nomura’s shiny, samey, belt-filled character designs like in Final Fantasy X? Maybe it’s because people clamoured for character interaction, so Square-Enix filled the game with cutscenes of these one dimensional and unlikable characters having equally shallow conversations with each other? I can’t profess to know.

What I do know is that the heart, soul and creativity of Final Fantasy left a long time ago. (It’s now continuing in the form of games like Lost Odyssey and Last Story, made by ex-Squaresoft helmsman Hironobu Sakaguchi. The former game even includes an grumpy old engineer/pilot called Sed!)

It just bothers me that Square-Enix make all the money for making these inferior games, while something like Valkyria Chronicles sells about twelve copies.

Seeing the fanbase that reacts well to a game that’s so similar to one they hated, it’s looking like the Final Fantasy cashcow will never die. Now the spinoffs are on their way.

The horse may be dead, but there’s obviously still some beating to be done.

And in two hours (just think of the movies you could watch in that amount of time) all the story got across was:

• Cloudette is a bitch.
• Sazh is pretty okay.
• Tidus’ mom died.
• And I THINK, I’m not sure but I THINK that Seifer wants to be a ‘hero’. It’s hard to tell with such masterfully subtle characterisation.

All the rest of the words hurled at you (l’Cie, fal’Cie, Focus, PSICOM, etc.) are meaningless until about ten hours later by which time some of them have been explained.