Final Fantasy 13 Posts Index

Just to put the table of contents on top again.

Intro

1st Failure: 25 Hours of Linearity

2nd Failure: Unintuitive Open World

3rd Failure: Mortally Repetitive Combat

4th Failure: Eidolons, Agents of Uselessness

5th Failure: Pointless Crystarium

6th Failure: Confusing Equipment Upgrade System

7th Failure: Terrible Storytelling

8th Failure: Dialogues

9th Failure: Characters (MAJOR SPOILERS)

10th Failure: Villains (MAJOR SPOILERS)

11th Failure: Lightning (MAJOR SPOILERS)

12th Failure: Poor Design Choices

13th Failure: Repetitive Theme (MAJOR SPOILERS)

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 13): Repetitive Theme

(spoiler town)

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The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 12): Poor Design Choices

Possibly the biggest recurring rebuttal that I could get for all my gripes about FF13 is what I’d call the “big picture” rebuttal. It happens when people say I can’t appreciate the beauty of the product as a whole because I concentrate on picking apart its finest details. After all, I should, as they say, acknowledge FF13 for the thought that has gone behind its designs, its sceneries, and its wondrous spectacle. I should like its “big picture”

To which, I respond: No. I don’t like FF13’s designs. I think they could use a lot of work.

Sure, if you’re talking about the abuse it must’ve given the graphics processor, I will acknowledge that the amount of graphical details rendered in FF13 has yet to be surpassed by other games. When considering that its characters wear elaborate accessories, it’s mighty impressive that neither the accessories nor the hair clip through themselves or other objects. Other games have struggled, mostly failed, in rendering 3d objects that don’t clip with each other. I praise FF13’s graphical department for this feat.

As for the design, now that I will pick on. I found that all the sights, the sceneries in FF13 as nothing more than glorified recycles of the earlier games. Sure, I think there’s a target audience who will be thrilled to see some locales from earlier FF games rendered in full-3d, but I’m more of the camp who, whenever he/she plays an FF, expects that it would be unique, with different feel from its predecessors. Not so with FF13, no. Specifically, its many futuristic interiors, forests, and cities felt like cutouts from FF10 but with brighter lights and greater details. With the exception of Gran Pulse, which, really, was but one great field of plains, none of the locations left a mark to my memory. So I guess a plain is what I would associate FF13 with. Not impressive. I had a steampunk city of Narshe for FF6, a cyberpunk junkyard-town of Midgard for FF7, a moving school of Balamb Garden for FF8, a seaside town of Besaid for FF10, and a sprawling medieval marketplace of Rabanastre for FF12.

Even the characters designs felt uninspired. I hinted at this when I talked about Eidolons, but Square Enix’s characters’ fashion styles have become one of my favorite stuff to ridicule because they, like Rob Liefield’s characters’, reveal weird fetishes. Since FF7, at least one character in a Final Fantasy or other SE game, notably Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You, wears superfluous belts, zippers, and pouches, and is asymmetrically accessorized. It looks jarring. Not just that, some of the characters in FF13 reuses previous designs. For instance, Hope…

looks like Vaan (FF12).

Lightning and Princess Ashe (FF12) share the same color scheme.

Snow…

looks nearly identical to Seifer’s Kingdom Hearts’ incarnation.

They also are one-dimensional, overused anime archetypes: Hope is emo, Snow is heroic, Lightning hates people, Vanille is hyper, Fang is the strong female, Yaag is ruthless and has a name that sounds like a yell (YAAAAAAG!!!!), Jihl is sadistic, Dysley is the evil pope. They lack identity in how they look and in how they’re written.

I hate saying this because I would come off as a writer who knows better and could do better (when I probably couldn’t), but if there’s one thing I learned about reading various books and instructive writing guides, it’s that if you’re crafting a fantasy world, you’re going to have to make the world come out as alive as you can. Meaning that people can get immersed into it. I realize that “immersion” is a loaded word warranting further, more academic scrutiny, but all I could give you is, I hope, a primer, and why I think FF13 fails in immersion.

First I’ll talk about how FF13’s world-building runs counter to the qualities that would make an involved world. FF13 has all these locations that the player will have trouble connecting. Some people would think that this problem stems from the game’s lack of world map, and that makes sense, but I think that even without a map you could somehow comprehend its world’s scope if you could get a feel of how each areas are related. FF13 fails here, because it constantly whisks your party members from one location to another without giving you a sense of which direction they’re going. Is it north, east, south or west? Who knows. Yes, those cutscenes with planes and various assortments of vehicles may impress as technical showcases, but they’re done at the expense of obscuring how a forest connects with the base you’ve left, how this city connects to that tower, how far the mountain is from the airborne base, and how the world below and above can come into contact. I’ll repeat the last one: the central plot of FF13 has to do with the above and the below world, yet it’s too much to ask to know how they connect.

Much has been made about FF13’s lack of towns, it being the hater’s greatest knock on FF13’s failure as an RPG. While I don’t necessarily think that towns are a requirement for an RPG, I believe that they help give significance to its main crisis. A good 90% of videogame’s stories (and RPG’s specifically) are about saving their world, and I hate to put this bluntly, but I really don’t have the time and the desire to save every fantasy world. A game has to make me feel something about its world — and for that to happen, I have to feel something about its people. I have to feel that it matters for its people to be free of all sufferings.

A game with good towns accomplishes this. For example, Fallout 3’s Big Town. Now, Big Town is an optional area, and you may finish Fallout 3 ignoring it altogether. Yet, when I visited and heard about flesh-eating orcs (or mutants, as they are called) coming here to abduct its residents, I was impelled to go the trouble of rescuing all of them by going into the mutants’ hideout. I returned to Big Town having rescued the abducted, and stayed behind so that I could help defend its residents against another mutant attack, sending mutants message that no, we’re not taking your abuse anymore. After I succeeded routing the mutants in Big Town, all of its residents cheered me on, thanking me for all the help that I’ve brought them. By then, I got a rush, a joy I rarely felt elsewhere, because of a sense that what I did actually mattered.

By keeping the towns and their interaction at bare minimum, FF13 gave me none of the satisfaction to care about its world. I don’t – I can’t – get involved with anyone populating it, even in the barest minimum way. Support casts, those not part of my group, come and go within a matter of 2 minutes, without appearing again. Even if I get to see people partying and watching light shows in cutscenes, when I’m playing, its world might as well have been an unpopulated dystopia. If someone nukes its whole world down I would’ve felt nothing, no remorse because I don’t have anyone to mourn for! Not for the kid who gives me pies, not for the drama club schoolgirl who has feelings for me, not for the granny who gives me foods for thought, not for the shady merchant who welcomes me out loud whenever we do business, nobody. Since no one mattered to me, why should I be compelled to crush its enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of their women? Why should I care to defeat its evil rulers who intend to annihilate its world?

Sure, I get that some people are annoyed by the quests that come with towns. But you know what? So long as they’re optional, are enjoyable, and don’t require insane amount of time commitment, I don’t mind. Besides, don’t we all play RPGs to earn rare items? If performing these chores would reward me a legendary weapon like a lolcat-slayer-DX, I’m all for it.

In terms of story, the game often looks like it’s going out of its way to be as anti-immersive as possible. For instance, the gobbledygook. When you’re talking about a fantasy story with lots and lots of fantasy proper nouns, you’re going to have to warm the readers up about what these nouns mean to ensure that you’re not losing the readers. Which isn’t what FF13 did. What FF13 did is start off with characters talking to each other knowing full well what’s going on, but not cluing us in because we’re nothing but ignoramus viewers – so screw us! Go read the bloody datalog and if it bores us we only have ourselves to blame! And when the dialogues aren’t confusing, they’re hilariously hokey. How can anyone possibly take a drama seriously when its people say “moms are tough” twice before dying?

(The wikiquote entry of FF13 is somehow longer than The Godfather, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars combined. I don’t know if that’s a sick joke, but at least I can always refer to it whenever I’m feeling down and need to “revel” on gems like “We live to make the impossible possible.” Or “When prayers turn into promises, not even fate can stand in their way.” Or “Here comes the Hero!”)

It’s not even for a fact that FF13’s terminologies couldn’t have been made more comprehensible had they made certain design choices. Since Fang rose to the upper world by her lonesome, she would’ve spent time understanding what’s the deal with all the l’Cie and fal’Cie. Wouldn’t it have been better for FF13 to tell its story in Fang’s POV, instead of Lightning’s? Someone care to tell me what Lightning’s worth is again?

Finally, we come to player’s output. When I play a game, I just want to feel like I am of any import to its world. In the modern era of gaming, we’ve reached a point where the illusions of choice are seeming less like illusions. Game like Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3 oblige the players to make some tough decisions, which would affect the course of the game. Even the older games that we’d consider “retro” now allow more freedom than FF13. FF7 permits you to date various party member when you visit Golden Saucer. In Chrono Trigger you can fight Lavos anytime and get different endings from it. Can you do anything in FF13 that would alter its course even in the slightest? Well, the greatest variation of your experience from others is if you see the poorly-animated optional cutscenes from Gran Pulse, which are nothing but fillers, like most “deleted scenes” from DVDs/Blu-Rays. That aside, everyone playing FF13 gets the same story, follows the same linear path, and does the same three things over and over again: to fight, walk, watch cutscene. Fight, walk, watch cutscene. Fight, walk, watch cutscene. You can’t even interact with the objects rendered by this game with its supposedly jaw-dropping visuals. All the columns, the forests and the faunas here, the cars and the statues there? Meaningless window dressings.

So there you have it, the elite RPG company that is Square Enix spending millions of dollars on a game that is so counterintuitive to everything an RPG offers. The gameplay is broken, the story is silly, the world-building is ignored in favor of all its overcompensating, yet pointless, visuals. Messed up priorities if you ask me.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 11): Lightning

(Yep, spoiler central again)

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The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 10): Villains

(includes major spoilers)

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The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 9): Characters

(with major spoilers)

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The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 8): Dialogues

“Moms are tough.”

“We live to make the impossible possible.”

“When prayers turn into promises, not even fate can stand in their way.”

Need I say more? In FF13’s dialogue, you’re either sifting through confusing made-up words, or enduring hokey dialogues. Sometimes, both; Sazh said, “Cie food”.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 7): Terrible Storytelling

I’m getting something out of the way now: FF13’s story should be judged as a movie. I know some people might carp about my comparing FF13 to movies because “games are not movies!”, but let’s stop pretending that FF13 isn’t a movie. Tell me, do you interact with anything in FF13 that would alter its plot? When talking about a narrative that takes advantages of the medium of videogames, it’d have to involve some player choices, no matter how small. At the very least it shouldn’t be excluding you from its adventures. If you can put down your controller while watching the cutscenes, you effectively are watching a movie, in the same way that the outcome of Blu-Ray movies like The Godfather won’t be affected by the remote. FF13 would be a BD-ROM where the movie gets interrupted so that you could walk in one direction and fight monsters, and then it resumes. Pause, attack, play. Repeat this a few thousand times and you get the whole product.

See? It’s a movie!

Besides, director Kitase wants you to think of FF13 as a movie:

“Yes, Western RPGs are more about freedom. But Final Fantasy is a different sort of game. It is much more akin to watching a movie, where you appreciate the world and are immersed deeply in the story. You get to experience dramatic moments and big events. In that sense, the concept of FFXIII is much more like a first person shooter such as Call of Duty.”

Isn’t it fair that we judge the game based on the vision of its artist? So FF13 = movie. And, really, I don’t mind a videogame that tries to be films if it has a gripping plot.

I’d like to think of myself as open-minded. Meaning, whenever anyone expresses an opinion I don’t agree with, I would always be able to understand them and could come to terms with our differences. Yet, Final Fantasy 13 betrays my romanticized view of myself. I have read pretty much heard what every camp has to say about FF13, and there is one praise of it that I cannot tolerate, which is that it has a good plot. No, please, FF13’s plot is indisputably bad — I don’t care if you start all this “all opinions are subjective” debate. Sure, why not. Not all opinions are created equal too. Some are plain stupid. Like the opinion that FF13 has great narrative.

And now, a surprise: I loved every minute of its story. Yep. I said it. Compared to the combat that I found insufferably repetitive, story is what I most enjoyed in FF13. I don’t consider it a delightfully campy, so-bad-it’s-good variety of entertainment in the same veins as Commando (which they are inexplicably remaking as a serious action movie). It’s not; FF13 is more of a self-indulgent passing-itself-as-high-art spectacular failure. That, right there, is why I love it. As a struggling writer, I can’t find a better guide on how not to tell a story, thus I thank Square Enix for spending millions on this delightfully vexing tale. You could not find a company with a nobler goal, which is why I hereby forgive them for suing the Chrono Resurrection fan project. Pft. What do Chrono fanboys know; by devolving Square’s storytelling quality, FF13 is the true progressive!

Regressive! 

Here’s how the game is set up. You have this shiny luxurious hermetic spherical little world above, and you have this vast plains world below. Both have ruling godlike entities; they can brand a person into fulfilling missions – fail and you become a zombie, succeed and you turn to a crystal. Entities from above do not like those from below, so they tell the populace that their world is constantly at war with the sinister world from down low, and anyone who comes in contact with below are exterminated by militaristic forces. A girl named Serah, from the village Bodhum, has recently come into contact with an entity from below, which propelled the military to start an extermination operation for Bodhum. Serah surrendered to the military to save Bodhum, but this led resistance fighter Snow and the ex-soldier Lightning into infiltrating military bases, where they find her turned into a crystal.

I managed to make that paragraph as direct as possible; directness not being a quality that you can appreciate when you’re playing FF13, with its in media res pomp confusing the viewers into curiosity. But, of course, that has always been how Final Fantasy games begin. Where the rest differ is that they feed you the info required to appreciate their settings — and by setting I mean not just the environment, but the facts and circumstances surrounding them. FF13 hides all those info beneath mounds and mounds of texts, in an in-game encyclopedia called “datalog”. You will have to read the datalog time and again if you want to know the history, politics, and religions of FF13’s world. You will have to peruse the datalog to know the supporting casts’ backstories. You will have to consult the datalog to get a faint sense of what the hell FF13 jargon means.

By burying myriad plot details in datalog entries that you are expected to read, FF13 fails as a movie. Can you imagine an actual film doing what FF13 did? You go into a theater, and then a warning tells you: The Little Mermaid has a complicated story. Here, take this Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales. Read this while Ariel sings! No movie should present its story by obliging tedious researches. Gee, it’s a visual medium! Isn’t the adage “show, don’t tell” so old it has grown a long white beard, yet still relevant and true that it’s engraved “subliminally” into backmasked recordings? (Try playing Stairway to Heaven backwards and you’ll hear someone say “Dial 666 for showing and not telling mwahahahahaha”.) A datalog should only be used for supplemental info (like what’s done in Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect), and not be a requirement to somewhat comprehend the tale!

Yes, somewhat, because Heaven helps you wrap your head around FF13’s dialogues. Boy are they littered with needlessly dumbfounding jargon! FF13 writers got the wrongheaded idea that if you want your story to be deep, you have to fillet it with techno gibberish. A normal dialogue exchange in FF13 has an unhealthy dose of fantasy proper nouns like Cocoon, Purge, Pulse, fal’Cie, l’Cie, Cie’th, Focus, Eden, Orphan, etc. (Orphan being the name of FF13’s world. Who on earth names a world Orphan? What’s it abandoned by, the sun and the moon?) To understand just how confusing this is, I will rewrite the settings paragraph from before as though running on a babelfish from English to FF13’s ‘Cienglish:

“In Orphan, there’s Cocoon, and Pulse. Both have fal’Cie; fal’Cie can turn a person into l’Cie and an l’Cie has a Focus – fail and it becomes a Cie’th, succeed and it turns to a crystal. Eden dislikes Pulse, telling Cocoon that they’re at war with Pulse, and anyone who comes in contact with Pulse l’Cie will go through Purge. A girl named Serah, from Bodhum, has recently become a Pulse l’Cie, which propelled Sanctum to start a Purge in Bodhum. Serah surrendered to PSICOM to save Bodhum, but this led Snow, of Operation Nora, and Lightning, an ex-soldier of PSICOM, into infiltrating PSICOM bases, where they find Serah turned into a crystal.”

I spent 50 hours playing the game, yet had never grown accustomed to hearing those gibbers. When a story is populated by people whose dialogues are exercises in code breaking, you know it will have a difficulty in getting an audience immersed in its world.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 6): Confusing Equipment Upgrade System

For the most part, FF13 does a good job instructing the player various bits of its gameplay, but then it gets lazy about equipments. Here’s the gist: you can upgrade every weapons and accessories by using components in them. Depending on the components used, you’d get varios exp points, and when they reach set numbers, they level up the weapon/accessories. For weapons, it means they can deal more attack and magic damages, and for accessories… I don’t know what.

Final Fantasy 13 for the DS! the top pic shows the machine where you do the upgrades. the bottom pic is the upgrade menu

I hope you didn’t sell off those components early into the game because of the way they clutter in your menus and because you were short on gils (FF’s grueling-to-earn currency). The components can be counterintuitive and you’ll wonder what they have to do with anything. Realistically, why would oozes and fiber optic cables and kitchen sinks enhance your weapon? The game doesn’t say and they just do, so shut up and play look at the HD graphics we spent millions on these guys! Each component adds varying points and some will add multipliers so that the next component’s points double or triple. But the game does an extremely terrible job instructing you which of them multiply, and how many you have to use to multiply - and yes I know this sounds confusing, but that’s exactly how this works. Sometimes, you might toss component that raises a very insignificant number you wonder why you bothered, and then you learn later that they could’ve and should’ve been sold for thousands of gils instead of disposed for upgrades. Then you hate yourself and contemplate starting the game all over again. Then you remember the 25 hour needed for the game to get good, and you flare up and write some emo entries on a site with the letters F, M, and L.

These will make your swords better. Especially the Christmas lights.

When your equipment reaches its maximum level, you can make it “evolve” by using a specific transformative component. Does the game tell you which component you need to evolve your equipment? No. Is it easy to get transformative component? No. Can you buy them? Yes, but they’re prohibitively expensive, and good luck earning gils in this game, to buy a component that might turn your sword into a bigger sword — but wait it might not so you either have to buy another prohibitively expensive component or reset your game and sit through loading screens. Wee.

Of course, all these confusions are meant to lure you into purchasing a guidebook, which is an absolutely reasonable $20 in case you don’t think you’ve spent enough ($60) on this snoozefest of an RPG.

so worth it!

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 5): Pointless Crystarium

FF13’s crystarium is by far the stupidest most time-consuming waste of man-hours ever constructed by Square Enix. The name sounds stupid too. You see this elaborate but linear 3d nodes and lines and you ask, “Why can’t Square Enix either make it two-dimensional so that it won’t be so confusing to navigate, or ditch it completely and stick to the traditional way of leveling up?”

In their podcast, Pitchfork and Spydakween speculated that the crystarium must’ve taken thousands of dollars to make. For what is essentially a linear skill-learning and stats-increasing system. You collect CPs from battles, then you use them to improve your characters by going to the crystarium and holding a button and a direction for 5 seconds per node. This is the extent of a minigame FF13 has, and it’s pure drudgery.

And, I know, some people are going to stop me right there and defend crystarium by saying, “But it allows you to choose how you want to build your character.” Yes, it does, but in a simplified and contrived manner. In most chapters, you can max out your main classes’ crystarium easily with all the CPs that you get. Even if side classes open up eventually, why would anyone spend points getting a commando-saboteur-sentinel character to be a medic when the skills cost more than if you’ve simply focused on his/her main skills? When - for what amounts to minimal stat increase and low-tier ability others have learned 10 hours ago - they aren’t rewarding?

If SE insists on using crystarium, couldn’t they at least have made it so that all you need to do is go to a node, press a button and PING! you learn skill or raise stat? Why should I be forced to wait for a gauge to fill up? Why waste so much time? You spend so much dead hours in this menu and it’s about as much fun as pumping gasoline in your car.

Shouldn’t Square Enix have spent the time and money they used for crystarium for better features? Such as, I dunno, towns?

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 4): Eidolons, Agents of Uselessness

In a future when the slang buzzkill becomes part of the dictionary, you’ll find a huge picture of Odin as a horse, with zippers all over its saddles because Tetsuya Nomura can’t take his minds off of belts and zippers. (Have you ever seen his “interpretation” of Mickey Mouse in Kingdom Hearts? Eck.)

Also,

Before acquiring each of the 6 summoned creatures (Eidolons), the player has to fight it to gain its approval. Unlike most of fights where you OOL1O until falling asleep, these are more involved in that they require more planning and will have you reconsidering roles that you often ignore (such as Sentinel, which I had otherwise pretended to not exist). In other words, they’re exciting, unlike a normal encounter or even a standard boss encounter.

Once defeated, they transform into cars or horses or motorcycles (among other dumb-looking things) and pretty much invite you to use them. A disconnect with the story occurs here - you’ll have Sazh riding on a sports car Eidolon by the end of the battle and then when you’ve returned to normal mode he’s on the same place but walking, his new toy nowhere in sight. What!

Newsflash: you won’t be driving it

Why oh why can’t you summon Eidolons outside of battles, have them transform into vehicles, and ride on them, when your characters do that on teasing cutscenes? If you can’t ride them in game, what’s their purpose? Even in cutscenes, they are inessential because nothing they achieve are related to the plot, and they’re but technical showcases. You traverse Gran Pulse on foot for hours and then a mission will permit you to ride chocobos, not those shiny Eidolon sports car that accompanies you all the time. Please don’t tell me that a giant chicken is faster than a sports car!

And how do they fare in combat? How about emasculated? Summoning them costs 3 TPs, which, may I remind you, takes long to replenish and is required for scanning your enemy’s attributes. Yes, they revive and heal your party, but for a steep cost of 3 TPs. In terms of power, there is none! They could barely kill a dog and they don’t damage foes enough to be viable substitutes of your party members. They’re Godzilla-sized and should be completely tearing apart buildings, not killing dogs.

Talk about being anticlimactic! You survive dramatic Eidolon battles, for essentially nothing. Thanks a lot, Square Enix!

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 3): Mortally Repetitive Combat

Remember when I said a while back that FF13 becomes hard as it opens up? Some might respond by saying, “If the combat is fun, then you should be treating the increase of difficulty as an impetus to be better at it!” I agree. My problem with that statement though is that it assumes that the combat in FF13 could hold my interest for 50 hours. In my book, FF13’s combat, like Adam Sandler, stands as a classic example of a novelty that gets old fast.

And it didn’t have to be like that. From my impressions of the trailer, I surmised that the story would bomb, but I anticipated FF13 for the combat, which promised to have the most action of all FFs. That bit is true, but with the catch being that you’re only involved in the action the same way as coaches are in a sports game. Maybe less because at least a coach has the satisfaction of yelling at players and seeing their reactions.

like, maybe want to be Greg Poppovich so you could fire naughty invectives at Tony Parker. what smugness. Eva Longoria Parker not good enough for him?!

You may have heard it: the player doesn’t directly control any of the 3 party members. Well, technically, you can manually input commands for the leader, but they are so nested in cumbersome menus, you’ll be sticking to the automation fast. So let’s just agree that the combat is automated, where all you do is choose auto-command and let your character decide his/her action. The player’s role is to assign each member classes like damagers, spellcasters, buffers, de-buffers, healers, or defenders (called Commando, Ravager, Synergist, Saboteur, Medic, and Sentinel, respectively).

To do this, press a shoulder button to bring up a “Paradigm Shift” menu (fancy word for class change) and choose one from up to six available party formations, which you can customize anytime you’re not battling; i.e. you can make formations of Commando-Ravager-Medic, Saboteur-Synergist-Sentinel, Commando-Ravager-Ravager, and so forth. Meaning you can’t change the classes of the member individually. Meaning you can only change everyone’s classes at once.

Sometimes you’ll encounter a new enemy and will want to know its attributes so that your characters won’t do stupid things like casting fire on a living ball of fire. So you’ll use 1 Technique Point to scan your enemy’s weaknesses and immunities, and your computer controlled team will learn to exploit these information. You can store up to 5 TPs, which you use for reviving party members, for summoning monstrous Eidolons, and for other abilities (that I never used). Your TP recharges slowly per battle. It takes 10-20 to replenish a fully depleted TP.

None of this sounds as bad in execution as in theory. Although I prefer a more manual, hands-on approach, for what it’s worth I got some thrills from FF13’s combat. A foe, when hit repeatedly, breaks. Then it loses its defense and becomes very vulnerable to your attacks. Your commando can then toss the foe up and then your party members can pile on it midair for devastating air combos. Watching your team abusing an airborne and helpless giant monster can be immensely satisfying.

So what’s wrong, then? Well, battling is the only activity for the entire game. Everything in FF13 revolves around the combat - outside, you enrich your characters by learning skills, equipping and upgrading their equipments, so that they can fight better. You can’t do anything else. Other FFs, and RPGs in general, you have to micromanage your team outside of battle because you need to ensure they survive whatever quest they’re partaking. You stock up items, conserve MPs, or learn survival abilities, so that they don’t enter a battle badly wounded and unprepared. In FF13, you don’t do that because your HP fully recovers after every battle. It starts to suck by the time you notice that in each chapter all you’re doing is fighting the same monsters over and over again, for hours. The same soldier, the same dog, the same flan, the same giant incomprehensible blocky thingamajig, you only need to know how to kill ONCE, but then the game keeps throwing them at you as if it’s stimulating to keep repeating the same combat over and over again. For hours. This gets worse later when the enemies’ HP becomes higher, and you battle them for 5 to 20 minutes, over and over again. For hours.

Think of it like being forced to solve the same tangram puzzle fifty times, and you’ll get the idea how mind-numbing FF13’s combat becomes after a while. To its credit, chapter 11 offers a greater variety of enemies, which is why it’s the good part. The remaining 12 chapters are monotonous.

Assigning paradigms may sound strategic, but you won’t need to do anything else anymore once you figure out the 2, maybe 3, “magic” formations (which I won’t reveal here because it’s going to ruin the game for you, turning it from challenging to stupidly repetitive. Yes, I realize this sounds contradictory because I have stated before that the game gets tough if you don’t level-grind, but without level-grinding you’ll get wiped out anyway regardless of what you do. Anyway, 2 or 3 magic formations). With all these, every combat is “start with formation A, then pick autocommand (press O button) for a while, and then switch to formation B, and then press O until the combat ends”. Over and… yeah.

For normal encounters with enemies that have tenths of thousands of HP (they’re common), the flow of the battle goes like this:

O O O O O O O O L1 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

Eventually, I started to multitask by holding a controller and mashing O on one hand, and browsing the net with a mouse on another.

Boss battles cranks the difficulty up to a point where they take longer to finish, and a misplaced shift of paradigm might kill you (what do you mean I L1′d after nine O’s instead of eight and I die?! This game is deep!). But, essentially, it still looks like…

O O O O O O O O L1 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

…except longer and you might want to L1 again some time so that you could safely O O O O for the next 20 minutes. It’s telling that in the forums I participate or read, every moderate FF fan who initially liked the FF13 ended up weary of its combat. Try fighting the Proudclad boss and tell us we’re wrong.

The Failures of Final Fantasy 13 (part 2): Unintuitive Open World

After 10 chapters, 25 hours, countless amount of fanboys praying that the tides will finally turn for FF13, and countless others who are only holding out for this promised land before trading it in, it opens up.

Now, you are presented a vast plain (called Gran Pulse) where you can fight assorted monsters and - get this - take detours.

Detours! High five! Pop champagnes! Holy mother of hysteria land for everybody, right? Isn’t this game an epic made of…

Here’s the thing: I enjoyed the part where the game opens up for a while. Early on, FF13 is tantamount to traveling a desert with no end in sight, and chapter 11 is finding an oasis, with the caveat that its spring is polluted. I couldn’t care less about the potability of the spring at first because I was so desperate for water that I drank as if I wouldn’t stop doing it until all the spring has emptied. But then as time wore on I got more discriminate, and then it became clear to me that the spring was dirty, and had a taste of urine that I mysteriously ignored a few minutes ago.

Which is to say, before long, Gran Pulse’s major flaws become apparent.

I’ll get technical here. A minimap sitting on the top right corner of the screen has an arrow indicating where you should be going. In chapter 11, you are presented a field. You can take hours exploring every areas, Or you can just keep following the arrow on the minimap anyway, if you want to keep progressing with the story and not having to mess around with the open field.

that circle thing at the top right is the minimap. the yellow arrow points to your destination. also, photo is by Aaron Lecciones

Good luck doing that though. The foes from here on up to the endgame are 5 times as tough as anything before. You’ll die a lot. I happen to have followed the main path right away, and then I encountered mandatory bosses that knocked me out in 15 seconds. Thus I am compelled to turn back and grind for hours. If you beelined from chapter 11 to the end like you’ve been doing for 25 hours before, you won’t survive. At this point FF fails as a newbie-friendly game due to the difficulty spike, as if after hours of hand-holding you get tossed off below a well and you’re on your own finding ways to climb back to surface.

But, ok, what if you have no qualms about grinding? If an RPG had a great combat system, then the grinding wouldn’t feel like work anymore, right? Well I sure hope you feel that way about the combat, because your patience with it will be tested, because the game suddenly feels the need to make you level up painfully slowly. As tough as the game has become at this point, it’s nothing compared to the rate by which you’ll be leveling up. It took me around 8 hours to get my party to reach the cap for their 3 main classes. To put this into perspective, that’s how long it takes to blow past 3 chapters. You want your characters to be stronger than mine, so that all your characters can play any classes? Sure, you can do it for a reasonable price of only 8 more hours!

And that’s not all, because even at chapter 11 the game caps your level-up. Once you get to chapter 12 and 13, the cap goes away, so you have to grind again, which takes 5 more hours for main classes. To add, if you’re sick of all the hallways pre-chapter 11, boy are you going to love chapter 12 and 13! They are like chapter 1-10, but more confusing; {SPOILER, highlight to read} chapter 13 is covered in crimson, just like Nintendo’s beloved Virtual Boy, with cacophonous techno to boot!{SPOILER ENDS}

Anyway, back to Gran Pulse. You can multitask your grinding by taking missions (sidequests, basically). Access points that let you take missions are strewn across Gran Pulse, and all these missions, which are optional, tasks you to slay monsters. The catch is, you can only take one mission at a time. Meaning, when you take mission A, you’ll have a travel a distance to monster A. If you passed by access point B, you can either kill monster A and come back to point B later, or you can take mission B to kill monster B, but with monster A gone until you go back to the point A. All these may take from 5 to 30 minutes of traveling and backtracking. I know exactly how much you love backtracking - you bought a PS3 for it, for an activity that you’ve been doing in survival horrors of PS1.

Still not enough reasons to convince you that Gran Pulse is a dreck, exposing Square Enix as hermits oblivious to Westerns games like Fallout 3? Then how about this problem with the maps and minimaps: In Fallout 3, when you take a mission, guides appear on the minimap. You don’t have this in FF13. You’ll need to open the entire map screen where you’ll find some confusing indicators, such as the active access points and the finished access points being marked by the same color. You can spend 20 minutes going to an access point, to discover that you’ve already finished its mission. And I hope you have a 20/20 eyesight, because the mission locates its monster by a star as small as the lowercase o’s in my blog.

btw, you can click on any photos to view it full-sized. this is gran pulse’s map. the red star points to your mission, and the yellow, phallic symbol thing with the arc on top is your access points. both active and finished access points use that marker.

o well, at least the combat is fun, right? xoxo

The Failures of Final Fantasy XIII (part 1): 25 Hours of Linearity

(pic from Dueling Analogs)

A weird habit that I keep seeing from FF13 defenders is how when they respond to criticisms, they flip-flop about the earlier games. FF13 a drastic change? Every FF is a major overhaul, a fresh take on the franchise! FF13 too linear? Every FF is linear!

Am I wrong to ask FF to include player freedom in its overhauling?

To be sure, I know my FFs and I know that they are linear in the sense that, often, there is only one absolute way for progression. I can put up with this. But I can’t put up with FF13’s way of telling you how to progress - without offering anything else to do besides progressing. No exploration, no significant optional elements, and no backstories that can either be seen or missed. Don’t you find it odd that a consensus exists among reviewers that 25 hours, not 13 or 30 hours, is how long it takes for the game to open up? If it seems like it takes everyone the same amount of time to reach that point, it’s because it does, which should be telling about its restrictiveness. You can’t go anywhere but forward. Occasionally there will be fork, but the other path only has treasures. And yeah, you can grind until you reach a cap, but that won’t take too much time because it’s low. In the first 10 chapters (of 13) the game literally carts you forward on straight, narrow, boring, indoor corridors.

I repeat, the FF13 that took years and million dollars and is touted as the prettiest game ever, refuses to let you explore and take in the sights of the world for a good 2/3 of the game! Imagine that you’re on a train to Paris but are only allowed to experience the locales through the windows. That’s how FF13 feels like.

Let’s see how this works in real life. Welcome to Museum of Modern Arts, and you’re gonna love our offer: once you spend 3 days staring at cubisms, you will be granted 3-hour exclusive access to all the Dali, Riviera, Frida and Van Gogh!

  Remember, guys. Three days of that before Starry Night!

Hence, why I can’t accept the 9s and 10s it got from various gaming sites. They tell you outright of its sluggish beginning, so why are they so quick to lavish praises on it regardless? If you submit a movie script or book with FF13’s pacing to publishers (and let’s not get into its atrocious writing just yet), don’t be surprised if you don’t hear back from them. Doesn’t matter how good your story gets in the end; if the first few pages, or even the first few paragraphs, don’t engage your agents, they’re going to toss your stuff straight to the shredder and not print them out for the public. Why is FF13 being held to a different standard by the mainstream gaming media? Even if it’s widely acknowledged that it takes 25 hours for the game to get good, why does it get free passes?

The counterpoint I hear that makes sense to a degree is the notion of the linearity as a way to teach its mechanics to newcomers of RPG (not that this has stopped anyone from being very critical of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which was made for the same purpose). I can accept that FF13 should be commended for this - even if in-game tutorials shouldn’t take hours - but then from this perspective, what happens after 25 hours can get problematic.

My Final Fantasy 13 Experience

“The crazy thing that has been bothering me lately is this whole Final Fantasy 13 hate-steria. The major question I want to ask is if everybody hates this game so much according to twitter and forums and conversations, why is everyone still playing it?”

- WillyBeans, from gaming the media podcast, episode 8.

Ouch.

Released in March 2010, Final Fantasy 13 was reported to be the fastest-selling FF game to date. Yet, for a game of massive commercial success, its reception between the mainstream gaming presses and the average gamers (like myself) have been rather divided. In Metacritic - the aggregate site that averages review scores of movies, music and, videogames – it earned a high 83, as in “generally favorable”. But in twitter or forums, it’s more “generally unfavorable”, as there are many posters don’t like it. Yet, WillyBeans observed, they keep playing it. Why?

I periodically wrote tweets about my displeasure with it while I was playing it for 3 weeks. The question raised by WillyBeans was an interesting one to me because I kept playing while harping on it. What’s sad is that from the moment I saw the trailers, I already suspected that something, such as the story, was shaping up quite badly. So why did I bother? Curiosity. Which ok, most people would understand. But to finish it all the way through instead of giving up halfway? Crazy, right? Here’s two reasons justifying my insistence to beat the game:

1. Its Final Fantasy brand compelled me to finish it. Even if I may not like all of its games, I’m drawn into playing any Final Fantasy because of what it means to the industry, and even to me. Final Fantasy has the game that led many gamers into RPGs. To say that it is an important gaming franchise is an understatement – if you point at the Final Fantasy released in the major non-handheld consoles of the generation and say, “that’s the zeitgeist of Japanese RPG’s”, you’d likely be correct. Hence, why I think FF13 gets special treatments even among the naysayers, such that even if they hate it, they act like they have an obligation as RPG gamers to finish it. If you want to be more anal, then yes, its Final Fantasy brand also spurred a lot of spiteful comments. On the other hand, you can accuse the more positive camp of being led in by the brand too. Read the reviews and you’ll find that most were more of defending their high score of the game than actually examining it on its own merits. Even if they acknowledged that it only gets good after 25 hours in, they gave it a 9 or 10 out of 10 anyway. Why is it acceptable for videogames that has the fundamental flaw of taking so long to get good to net such a high score? They wouldn’t tell you, but I presume its being a Final Fantasy helped, and I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that had it been titled Enchanted Tunnel of Love, the gaming media would’ve been as quick to lavish praises on it. Or, for the matter, its critics would talk about it much.

2. I wanted to review it, out of a bizarre desire of being a rare negative review from an author who have played the whole game. Negative articles about FF13 exist, but they have all given up on it (e.g. Zero Punctuation, Topless Robot, Hellforge, Destructoid). Fanboys keep telling them “well you have not finished this game! teh worst review evar!11”. As if its final hours will hand out a soma, making you forget the bad bits and turning everything into a hedonist bliss. But whatever to that. I beat it, and I’d hand it a score of 4 out of 10. Any contention along the lines of “a gamer has to beat the game before reviewing it” is moot here because I have finished FF13 and I still think it’s terrible (although nothing will stop people from accusing me of not playing it right or from scraping the barrel for other fanboy ammunition. Bah. I won’t address those).

Originally, I intended to submit my review of FF13, but decided against it because I can’t fit everything I have to say in a required word limit from the sites I wanted to see my review published. I have too much comments on FF13, and that’s why I’m posting all of them in my blog, in a series titled “The Failures of Final Fantasy 13”.

1st Failure: 25 Hours of Linearity

2nd Failure: Unintuitive Open World

3rd Failure: Mortally Repetitive Combat

4th Failure: Eidolons, Agents of Uselessness

5th Failure: Pointless Crystarium

6th Failure: Confusing Equipment Upgrade System

7th Failure: Terrible Storytelling

8th Failure: Dialogues

9th Failure: Characters (MAJOR SPOILERS)

10th Failure: Villains (MAJOR SPOILERS)

11th Failure: Lightning (MAJOR SPOILERS)

12th Failure: Poor Design Choices

13th Failure: Repetitive Theme (MAJOR SPOILERS)