And it’s with a heavy heart, Square-Enix, that I feel we should reevaluate our longstanding relationship. We’ve had so many good memories together since 1987 when we were both so young, filled with curiosity and wonder. As one of the oldest and respected gaming companies I’ve enjoyed growing old with you, from the earliest days of FFI, to Secret of Mana, to Chrono Trigger, to FFTactics, to FFXI, to even those different times like Vagrant Story, Front Mission, and Parasite Eve. But with your latest project, Final Fantasy XIII, I feel like you’ve slipped away from what’s made you so amazing. I feel like we’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even exist anymore except to sit and watch you like I’m a ghost. I’d hate to think all of the time we’ve spent together has now come to this but since our relationship now is on the edge of possibly ending for good, I think it’s best just to spend some time apart.
While I wish game company relationships were a little more straightforward like this, the complexities of what make a good customer/product provider relationship can depend on many things, and to keep that relationship strong over time, a company has to evolve to an ever changing world. Final Fantasy XIII from Square-Enix, which is the longest running game series for consoles filled with its own self-titled irony, is in all respects an attempt to adapt into a new decade of possibilities. It is another train stop from a quite triumphant and glorious game company. It’s on the level with an almost decade of searching for the next big pop star, regardless of the country.
With such a powerhouse company with many notches on its belt, it’s hard to imagine finding a game to dislike, especially one within their cash cow series. Picking apart the previous 12 games, searching for identifiable aspects that make the Final Fantasy the series that has captivated gamers since its conception, one can easily find some of the best written stories games have to offer, character sets who have grown and developed as the age of games gets older, musical scores that are now performed by sponsored orchestras, and one of the most copied RPG battle systems since consoles were first born. Yes, there are also a lot of Japanese culture-esque informalities from gigantic chicken/ostriches to white demons that have a very extensive vocabulary of one word, but all of these can be brushed to the side as you focus on the vital portions of Square-Enix’s games.
In FFXIII, the story, characters, and entirety of the game is all separate from previous games once again. In XIII there are six characters all unique with interlacing back stories. The main story itself is quite involved, containing a boat load of cutscenes to move it along, probably giving XIII an unofficial award for amount of cutscenes ever in a single game (I’m still searching for a montage of the words focus and choice on youtube as they become the most overused words throughout all of XIII’s cutscenes). The voice acting is beautifully done with the addition of Australian accents for a couple characters that are supposed to be from a separate planet. Like much of the RPG genre, at least 50-60 hours have to be spent in order to finish this game. This should not come as too much of a surprise though as the game is contained within three DVDs, an amount of memory the original FF could only dream of having in it’s time. And while having dreams of ramming a Delorean to 88 to give NASA the processing power of today before we ever landed on the moon, FFXIII spits out a long story reveling within itself to the well over three hour mark of a total movie. So make sure you bust out your entire box of Orville because there is a lot of sitting time.
While you’re taking in all of the sights of the story, there is a lot of music to be had and all of it seems somewhat muted or swept beneath the rest of the game. When the music does awaken, you realize it’s repetition has become rampant. This is also expected as leveling within a Square-Enix RPG has previously taken people to the point of mental instability, the same place in your mind where you begin to argue with yourself over dye numbers used in Twinkies and names of actors from your favorite 80’s sitcoms.
The idea of repetition is not the terrible notion in XIII unlike other RPGs or even older FFs, and this is due to its linearity. Whilst you dungeon dive with your minimap is on, all crevices and hiding places are within short walks, enemies are all visible, some can be avoided, and enemies no longer drop currency. Gone is the idea of off the beaten path for dungeons, the idea of towns to explore has faded, and leveling is done differently as exp is now awarded directly as points to purchase abilities and stats under a system with few choices. Stats have been whittled down to strength, magic, and hp alone making the understanding of their correlations easier. Gone are mana bars and item management (to keep health high) is negligible as health is reset after each battle. Dropped items and treasure sold is almost the only way to make a living in XIII, fully immersing players in the old unused economic system of bartering. And since most are out of touch with the going rate of sheep’s wool and tiger fangs, be prepared to be swindled and taken for all your worth; every piece of scrap metal and dead carcass feels like a rare drop. Items dropped are used for weapon and accessory upgrades (no armor or equipment whatsoever) and require a large amount of farming and input to be worth the effort. All of these tiny facets of XIII make for a simplified RPG compared to all of the predecessors appealing to a wider age group.
Everything described, small similarities or differences, are just offsets of something deeper. It might be tough to figure out where all my earlier disdain comes from; in fact, with the barter economy, every gamer should have the same amount of excitement as a kid opening a Nintendo 64. If you search anywhere on the big I you’ll find it quickly as it is the largest topic of discussion. Skipping your Topeka searches, and right in time for Easter, Square-Enix has decided to put all its eggs in one place: the battle system. Map designs, storyline, simplification of stats and leveling, etc, are all based off their interactions with the system. Everything else meshes well in regards to the system in FFXIII, but this is where I decided to take a step back and really wonder why I began to rush right to the end of the game to be done with it, rather than become engulfed within the enjoyment of playing it or bothering to scrounge up every treasure.
The battle system is the core of any RPG as it puts the player in the driver seat, enveloping the gamer as a part of the story, deciding the destiny and outcome of its characters. In XI and XII the battle systems were quite a step away from the turned based types of the previous ten. For FFXI, the real time system made sense as the game was MMO in nature, and the idea of a turned based MMO combo is about as bad as kitty boxing without youtube. For XII, the system mimicked XI being very difficult to handle at times in a single player way, but battles were fun and actually worked well, being closely relatable to Bioware’s systems. So where does a company go from making ten turned based games and a couple of real-time? Well if not improving either one, why not combine the two?
It sounds like an interesting idea, one that would spice up the series again and be different and unique enough to call it another milestone. Well pay close attention and try to picture how this system works. The system is first set in such a way that it takes the first twenty five hours to go through the entire tutorial for it and gain total control of your squad of six. (The first twenty five hours you run a constant gauntlet of battles and cutscenes while heading in only a single direction.) A party is set up of three members, each of which is made up of mix of three out of six classes: two offensive (commando/melee and ravager/magic), a buffer (synergist), debuffer (saboteur), a healer (medic), and a tank (sentinel). During each battle you only actively control one character and passively control the other two. What this means is you can only control the class your other two characters are using and their chosen abilities are automatic. Not only are theirs chosen automatically but you can hit one button to automatically fill in abilities to be used by your active character. As time passes, your action bar fills and abilities with differing amounts of your action bar can be chosen and executed but only for the previously chosen active character (you cannot switch while in battle). This means that for almost all of your battle time you pound on one button on the controller to autofill the action bar and the other times you are just switching class sets back and forth (class sets are also prechosen and you can only choose six sets prior to battles), i.e., Commando/Ravager/Medic and Medic/Sentinel/Ravager, etc. Trying to individually choose abilities of your active character is slower than autofill and leads to enemies feeling hastily aggressive since battles are still in real-time.
To sum up everything about the battle system take a game series that contained twelve games each having the complexities of chess and throw in a thirteenth that feels much like checkers. Ok maybe a slight step up like 3d checkers but very limited in its control of battles. In turn that dreaded repetition found in every Final Fantasy game appears only this time it’s in the wrong place. The game is still a challenge regardless of the system but the difficulty is unforgiving and more frustration than outthinking an opponent as damage predictions, life bar watching, and enemy action patterns run wild and are almost too fast to keep up with. Blind luck at times seems to be cause of outcomes because a poor switch of classes can quickly lead to your party leader’s death (only one needed for) and game over and the same pattern of choices the next time will work even if everything is copied identically. Battles now are timed and item rewards for successes are based on hitting goal times to attempt to keep your battles on the offensive side, dancing with luck in the pale moonlight. Even with the drive to finish battles quickly, battles become quite lengthy and combinations of class sets utilizing the sentinel class draw out battles to the far side of madness. A nicely implemented retry option allows for less save point reloading frustration after a game over, but the amount of retries I needed to finish the entire game was more deaths than I ever remember having in any of the previous FF games. So add in all the lost battle time to bad luck, timing, or poor predictions, and you’ll find your two feet ever closer to the edge of the cliff.
After unwrapping it all, starting with that little bow on top, the surprise you find in the box is a shiny movie. The game portion of FFXIII feels like a boring and frustrating blockade preventing the player from the next cutscene. And even though the cutscenes are all an amazing presentation of the story, the $60 pricetag for a game where the interactive portion is not fun makes for a very expensive movie. Maybe it was the amount of love I had for Square-Enix before this release and the length of time between XIII and XII that makes the gaming relationship hurt so much. No matter the causes, the consequences are hard to forgive. So Square-Enix, I tried to understand some of the reasons for your latest changes, but jeopardizing the loyalty of an already long existing relationship can cause terrible effects for both sides for years to come. Buy it used if you must, enjoy the movie, and maybe we’ll see something different in a few years.
Rating = 3.0 {out of a –10 to 10 scale}
Ok Go – This Too Shall Pass
