For those who have not met me, or rather, those who have not conversed with me over the thrilling topic of video games, I should point out before I write another word that my feelings about the mega-popular Final Fantasy canon are constantly stuck somewhere around the area of general distaste. To say I'm not a fan of the main series is slightly understating things, though this is mainly based in me questioning why I lovey-love with all the love in my heart many of Square Enix's other gifts to the gaming world, while their main work tends to drive me away angrily. I consider Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG to be among the all-time great games, and I heartily enjoyed more recent spin-offs like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Tactics Advance. This serves to make my hatred of the main FF canon even more consuming, seeing that Squeenix is capable of such great things, yet seems to take none of that into account when making their main series (Though I'm more lenient on FF6 and FF9, which seem to get it slightly better.)
So then. It is with these feelings that I went and got Final Fantasy XIII yesterday.
I still don't know why I did it. This is a game that I am going to hate. I've seen a number of reviews and heard scores of opinions from sources I trust telling me that I will hate this game. I know going in that this game has received scores of comparisons to FF7, the game which gets the largest portion of my ire, mainly for its success encouraging Squeenix to try to emulate it. I know, going in, that it will be one of the longest, most difficult quests I will ever undertake, if the number of "It starts getting better around hour 20" reviews mean anything." And yet I got it.
Why? Maybe I was struck a little deep when a friend of mine mocked me for hating on the game without having played it. Maybe the fact that I just graduated from college has given me plenty of time to undergo a long haul of a game. Maybe because I was getting the game for free anyway, thanks to a Christmas gift card. Maybe I felt better about getting it because I was also acquiring Batamn: Arkham Asylum and 3D Dot Game Heroes, games that I am pretty sure are made of a condensed awesome rarely seen in this world.
Whatever it was, I got FF13. And now I have to play it.
I managed to get 5 hours into the game last night, an amount of time that, in any reasonable RPG, would be the point where the plot becomes clear - sure, a twist or two is extremely likely around hour 30 or 40, but I at least have some idea as to what the hell I'm supposed to do. In Final Fantasy, however, this is the point where the characters all come up where their own ideas as to what the plot is. One decides that he must save the world(tm), another keeps trying to tell character #1 "YOU KILLED MY MOM", but never does because he's a gigantic pussy, and the rest apparently aren't even trying. I would mock this more, but as I said, this is Final Fantasy - the inability to tell a sensible story is, apparently, a charm point, so I don't need to think about this too hard.
Any other RPG, for example, would start by slowly introducing its players to its world, to get a sense of what they are dealing with. Again, not FF. It's as if there was a school for how to tell a story - a storytelling school, if you will - and FF was the jackass jock who decided to skip every class because he could. Go play Persona 4, for example - the first hour or so is spent slowly introducing the characters and setting before shit goes down. The first two hours of FF13, on the other hand, was akin to a hurricane of confusion, as characters, terms and sheerly massive objects were whirled around with little explanation given for any of them. Admittedly, it was a very pretty hurricane, showing the painstaking effort that Squeenix put into this games graphics, while at the same time reminding me that they chose not to spend that time on making a sensible story.
As with every FF game, the plot elements that are important in XIII are so ridiculous that no human language can properly convey their meaning, leading to Squeenix just making up words to describe them, many of which use the apostrophe in ways that it was never meant for. The game slings around terms like "l'cie" and "fal'cie" in its first few hours while giving absolutely zero explanation as to exactly what they are. I still, after five hours, don't know what exactly a fal'cie is. Considering that they seem to be the central element of this game's plot, you'd think that this would be something that requires an explanation, but you would apparently be wrong.
To make it better, the characters and writing are just plain awful. For example, when creating our main character, Lightning, the thought process seems to be, "Make her act like as much of a bitch as possible, so that she can - surprise! - show that she's really not that mean later on." While I'm certainly in favor of strong women in lead roles of games, when Lightning's every line is calculated to make her look completely unlikeable, then - and this might blow your mind - I'm not going to like her very much. Character number 2, Snow (By this point, I'm expecting every other character to be named Earth, Wind, or Fire) is your classic hot-headed hero-type, made even more noticeable when every single character that sees him for the first few minutes calls him "hero", up to and including himself, even though when know that he isn't , because Lightning's on the cover of the game, not him. Honestly, I thought he wasn't that bad at first, but his constant "Time to be the hero!" refrain and tendency to bring out the worst of Lightning's bitch factor are starting to annoy the hell out of me.
The other characters can wait until later, because this post is long enough as it is, but the writing is its own miserable mess. As if the constant slinging of 'cie wasn't enough to drive me mad, the plot has so many horrifically done cliches that I want to scream. The greatest moment of this was after Snow and his gang of clearly unimportant characters save refugees, and the refugees decide to help Snow fight. One of the characters who volunteer manages to get one line off - one line! - before I knew that she was going to die. Five minutes later, guess what happens? She dies! They didn't even bother having her stick around for a few hours, developing her character and thus deepening the emotional impact when they eventually whacked her - they just straight up killed her for no good reason, to move the plot along.
I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say about this game - god, why am I doing this - but I pardoned myself after about my five hours of pain to drink, watch sports and finish up the day with Arkham Asylum, which has allowed me to do more in an hour and a half than all the FF13 I've played put together. Until next time.
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