Final Fantasy 13: Initial Thoughts

So I have my friend Kiyo to thank for letting me borrow Final Fantasy 13 after she beat it, roughly a week ago. Since then, besides studying and working on my Honors thesis and playing another game that I’ll be talking about shortly, I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 13. I’ve been playing it for at least 25 hours, so I’ve more or less reached the end of the ‘tutorial’ phase of the game that holds your hand for the longest time. After posting my Final Fantasy 12 log, I’ve received a few comments saying ‘You’re going to play final fantasy 13, right?’ ‘I want to hear your thoughts about final fantasy 13’. Well, I figure I might as well give my initial thoughts.

So what can I say after playing 25 hours of Final Fantasy 13 within a week? Well… I’ve played 25 hours of Final Fantasy 13 within a week. It’s held my attention for that long and to be honest, I have stayed up to the bleak hours of the morning just playing this game, getting further along. The story is interesting, once you get a grasp about all the terms in this world you’re sort of thrust into. For starters, the game does the smart thing and has a explosive intro, where the player assumes the control of the various main characters in the middle of a big rebellion against the PSICOM forces, who are trying to force people off their planet (I assume it’s a planet) just because they happened to near something called a fal’Cie, that are pretty much demi-gods, in fear that the fal’Cie will make them l’Cie, essentially slaves in fear to the fal’Cie. Rather than get rid of the fal’Cie, the humans of the world live with them because the fal’Cie well… sort of give everything to humans, food, electricity, and so on.

There are two types of fal’Cie, Cocoon fal’Cie and Pulse fal’Cie, which represent fal’Cie from two different planets which are in a cold war situation that neither planet wants to directly attack the other planet, but the fal’Cie force this through their l’Cie. L’Cie in general are hated and feared because they’re considered ‘monsters’ because the Sanctum says so. And when you become a l’Cie, you HAVE to a task called a Focus in order to not become a zombie.

Phew.

That is basically the essentials to understand the first couple hours of the plot and why the humans react the way they do and they’re not really spoilers, because they’re all within the datalogs of the game. Did I take the time to read these datalogs? Hell no! Games where you’re sort forced to read datalogs in order to understand the major aspects of a story early on is annoying as hell. Luckily, over time, you more or less get the idea of what every term means, but early on when they’re speaking the terms that make no sense without further reading. It is bad story telling. Over time, the story telling gets better, but as a initial impression, they throw so much terminology that it’s easy to get lost.

Which leads me my next problem, the first two hours of the game are SO BORING! Yes, it’s in the middle of a rebellion against heavily armed, power-filled military and there’s explosions and stuff happening everywhere… but I just don’t care. There’s a lot of fighting too… a lot of fighting that ends up being absolutely pointless, due to the fact that you don’t experience for it… or if you do, they don’t really show you. I want to level up! I want to find purpose in fighting random, faceless guys. Honestly, me playing through the first two hours essentially involved me holding forward when out of combat, while pressing X when in battle; all while watching something on my computer. Which, like I mentioned earlier, only make fighting in the first two hours pointless.

After a certain point, you get introduced to the Crystarium, a sphere-grid like system that’s… pretty nice to be honest. There’s three main classes for each character to focus in, in whatever order you prefer, and even after a certain point, each character gains access to level into classes that they originally weren’t able to, which allows characters to essentially do everything, yet at the same time, not every character gets every ability. Granted, they get a lot of the same abilities, but moves like Firaga and Blizzaga are only received by certain characters, so each character is unique. One of my favorite things is that in the story, the party gets split up into groups of two and you constantly switch between the through chapters. Because of this, all the experience you get with one group carries over to another group, so after a large series of battles with one group and you go to another, you’ll check their experience points to spend and you’ll have like 10000 points to spend. It’s awesome. Better yet, one of my problems with the Final Fantasy 12 ‘limit breaks’, Quickenings, were never thoroughly explained. In Final Fantasy 13, the limit break equivalent, Summons (in a odd way), have their own cutscenes and battles to earn them.

One of the strong points of the game is definitely the combat system, though there’s a sense of detachment as you have no direct control of your partners and even though you control your party leader, you only choose what actions you do on your turn, but not actually moving the character around, which could have lead to some interesting battles where you need to avoid area of effect attacks a la Parasite Eve, but it’s a wasted opportunity. That said, the combat gets a lot of fun later on, when you fight very difficult opponents and even then, the rating system sort of encourages you to do you best and reach the staggering point for your opponents. It’s satisfying to see over 10,000 damage occur in a single attack.

Another thing I like is the characters. Or rather, how all these characters have a reason to be accompanying each other, if a bit unwillingly at first. Though, I’m sure everyone has the same sentiment of hating Hope and for good reason. For at least a third of the game, more than half things he says is completely illogical and stupid, seeking to blame without any form of thinking before hand. He gets better though, as do a lot of the characters. Also, I thought that I would hate Lightning, but after she starts opening up emotionally, she becomes a lot more likable. In fact, she’s probably my favorite character… or at least running for favorite in competition with Sazh, who is definitely the voice of the player and is possibly the most relatable in the characters.

I would get into a long drawn out racial debate on the fact that Sazh is black, has a fro, uses guns, and a pet chocobo… but in the end, there’s just one thing to note: Whether or not Sazh is a racial stereotype or not, does not mean it’s completely bad. It’s only bad when the stereotype portrayed is a negative stereotype. There was once a comment made about Sazh going along the lines of “Could America get away with a black guy with a fro, uses guns, and has a pet chicken. Nope, only in Japan” And all I could think of is, “Cause everyone was up in arms about the racial depiction in San Andreas.”

Overall, I’m fairly entertained with Final Fantasy 13. I’ve been playing it a lot, so it’s definitely captured my attention, but to say it’s the best final fantasy as a few of my friends have been saying is a bit of a exaggeration. It’s a fun game. It’s better designed that Final Fantasy 12’s combat, but there is one more thing I have to mention and that’s the linearity of the game.

Everyone’s talked about this and have made arguments as why this is or isn’t bad. So here are my thoughts. I think it’s stupid when there’s 4 people grouped together, but I’m forced to only use 3 of those characters and the 4th guy can’t be switched in at all, until the game allows you to. It’s one thing to have basically long halls with branching paths that lead to treasure, but it’s another to take control from the player when it’s so logical to at least give them a idea that you can do something so simple early on. Final Fantasy 9 sort of did this that you couldn’t switch out party members until roughly the third disc, but the different is that characters constantly came and went and that there was never more than the max party limit of 4 at a time. This was done to better tell the story and it worked effectively. The same sort of applies here, but they basically wave Snow in your face going ‘Ninner-ninner-ninner!’ while you’re forced to use Lightning, Hope, and Fang. And it’s not like Snow can’t fight at this point. He’s there, he talking, he’s fighting in cutscenes, but you can’t use him until the game says you can. It’s infuriating cause sometimes I wanna use Snow more than say… Fang, cause he has more health or something.

That level of linearity is annoying as hell, but I’m surprised how many people just sort of shrug this off as ‘It’s for the sake of the story.’ Once again, this is just bad story telling for me. But whatever, at the moment, I’m enjoying the sudden, ‘Holy crap huge place to explore!’ And the difficulty of the regular enemies and the large amounts of experience and possible abilities that have opened up. So yea, I’m happy with the game. It’s not fantastic, but it’s fun. I’ll report more, probably after I’ve beaten the game at the rate I’ve been going. Anyway, this is Gem, signing out.