3/5 ★ – Silabus's review of FINAL FANTASY® XIII.

Final Fantasy 13 Total Playtime: 85 Hours I first played FF13 in 2010. I remember being the only Final Fantasy fan in my group of friends and I was so excited for the latest release. As we sat on the sofa for an hour and I walked down that initial hallway, my heart sank. It certainly didn’t leave a positive impression on my friend group. I was heavily disappointed. I watched the trailers. Kept up with pre-release information, everything! The graphics blew me away! But that’s all it was, graphics. It was a hard lesson to teenage me that graphics don’t matter. A few years later, 2013, I’m in university. I have a whole new friend group with interests that are closer to my own. (Isn’t it interesting how in school you make friends with the best of what’s there? And the ones who stick around after you leave school are actually cool and the ones that don’t were just “cause they were there” friends ‘thinkingEmoji’ annnywaayy) We were talking about our favourite and least favourite Final Fantasy entries. I brought up FF13 and how I had felt burnt by the game when it released. One of those friends, bet me $100 to finish the game. I was a broke college kid so of course I beat the game. Since nobody in my friend group had actually beaten the game, they were eager to hear what the story was about, and I retold it with exaggerated anger. It was the era where angry game reviewers like AVGN were popular in my defence. Long story short, I got my $100 dollars. I actually got another $200 to finish the other 2 games in the series. Not a bad deal. 10 Years later, an online friend of mine creates the blood-pact, where I play games to 100% that he’s chosen and vice versa. One of the games I chose is FF13-2. But he insisted on doing the whole thing, even though I hadn’t 100%’d FF13 myself. So almost 10 years to the day, I embarked on my second play-through of FF13 and I found out a truth so shocking that it puts the moon landing and the JFK assassination to shame. I like Final Fantasy 13 Without the pressure of creating content for one friend group, or over-hyped expectations; When I could just sit down and play the game, I enjoyed it. When I was out of the house I was thinking about the game, which accessories I wanted to use, how to make doing x more efficient, etc. I wanted to take days off work to play more. On the weekend I had to make a choice between playing FF13 or Starfield. I picked FF13 every single time. So what makes this play-through so much different than the play-throughs previous? I’m not entirely sure myself so let me write and hopefully we can come to a conclusion together. I want to talk about audio first because it might be my favourite part of the game? The soundtrack is absolutely stellar. Certain areas stick out to me not only because visually they are distinct from previous areas but because the songs in those areas evoke a “lemme hum along to this” emotion. Particularly the Sunleth Waterscape, the main battle theme, the boss battle theme, the end theme, and the chocobo theme. There are so many bangers on this OST and during my first full play-through of the game I said the only redeeming factor of the game was the soundtrack. I own this soundtrack on CD I like it that much. It’s interesting because Nobuo Uematsu was the composer for Final Fantasy. He did the music for 1-11, the ending song of 12, a good chunk of songs in 14, and a few songs in 15 and 16. At the time of the games release, people were really concerned because 13 was the first game that the franchise’s famous composer would have no input whatsoever, and they knocked it out of the park. I love Uematsu music and while 13 isn’t my favourite Final Fantasy OST, it’s in my top 5 for sure. Audio is not just music unfortunately, it also covers voice acting and sound effects. FF13 was the first game that could utilize Blu-ray and so they crammed as much audio and graphics into the game as possible but, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It’s a lesson that games learned as space stopped becoming a consideration for developers but here, you can see what over-saturated voice-lines sound like. The characters don’t shut the hell up in the over-world, after battle, in cut-scenes. It can be grating when doing a repetitive task such as grinding. The voice actors I felt did the best they could do with a bad script. The only real complaint I have with the VA’s is Vanille. Vanille can’t decide whether she’s British, Australian, American, or a child. Her character would not be half as grating if she just had a consistent accent. So, the story. This is one my big issues with the game. The general premise of the story is very simple to understand. There are people called l’cie that are cursed with a vision. If they do the thing in the vision, they turn to crystal. If they don’t do the thing, they turn into a zombie. There are 2 planets with each planet being ruled by deity-like beings called Fal’cie. The Fal’cie choose who becomes a l’cie and what their vision is. Usually it’s related to the destruction of the other planet. The planet with all of civilization on it, feels threatened by the cursed people so they push them onto the other planet and oppress them with military force. Society assumes the other planet are creating lots of l’cie to destroy their way of life but the leadership of the main planet might be more involved than they are letting on. So our heroes are in a desperate search to unravel the truth, put an end to oppression, save their loved ones, and themselves. Unfortunately the game never simply tells you this. From the first minute in, things like fal’cie l’cie Pulse, Cocoon, Psicom, Nora are dropped on you with no context as to what any of this means. In order to actually know what anything means, you need to read the data-logs for it to be explained. I really dislike crucial story info being hidden in text-based data-logs. You can put auxiliary lore in the datalog, that's fine (This weapon was forged in the furnace of firefuck! There were only 5 of them made but their whereabouts or owners are unknown. Something like that is fine to hide.) But things that are crucial to understanding the story or the world shouldn’t be hidden in text, it’s sloppy storytelling in game-play form. It’s a game, either let me play the part, or show me. Don't hide it. Let’s introduce our characters. First you have Hope. His mom was in a resistance guerrilla army fighting against the oppressive military dude’s. An explosion blows her off a ledge and Snow tries to save her. He let’s go and she falls to her death. Hope blames Snow for killing his mom and whines about how much he hates Snow all game. Lightning is the main character, She was a Psicom Soldier until her sister became a l’cie. Knowing what that means for her and her sister she breaks out of prison and tries to find a way to help her. Also, her sister got engaged to Snow. Lightning hates Snow because Snow is involved in resistance group activities and his involvement in them could put her sister in danger. Also the 2 are on opposite sides of the issue. Later, she blames Snow for not being able to protect her and she punches him out like 3 times. Very good cut-scenes. Snow is an irresponsible loser who is always smiling and positive even when everything is terrible. His attitude is “everything will work out in the end because we are heroes!” It’s because of this positivity immediately after Hope’s mom dies that Hope hates him because he doesn’t show any sadness. Snow basically hides all the suffering in his life with more positivity which makes everyone hate him because he refuses to acknowledge the reality he is in until he himself becomes a l’cie and then he freaks the fuck out, gets knocked out by Lightning for being a loser and then everyone just kinda leaves him while he’s having his emotional breakdown. So he fucks off for like 8 hours of game time by himself and comes back with a smug grin riding a naked lady motorcycle summon, but meanwhile he actually hasn’t done anything. So his new positivity is unwarranted and it almost gets him killed in the next chapter where he tells Hope “You can kill me if you want bro but it won’t bring your mom back lol” TLDR, Snow is an irredeemable shit. Sazh was a fellow prisoner that Lighting broke out of jail with at the start of the game. He’s got a (Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon) vibe. I’m too old for this shit! He has 2 guns and an afro and is the coolest character in the game. It’s a shame his stats fall off a cliff in late game. His 6 year old son was turned into a crystal. When he learned Vanille was the one who caused it he put a gun to her head. It was one of the most bad-ass cut-scenes in the game. Vanille is the childhood friend of Hope. Shes supposed to be like 19 but acts 12. 1600 years ago she was supposed to bring the end of the world with Fang. If she did a fusion dance with Fang they would summon Ragnarok and destroy the world. Fang did it by herself to protect Vanille from being a participant. Since it was only a half summon it wasn’t powerful enough to destroy but it was enough to create the fear that the society world has. Since they technically fulfilled their vision they were frozen in crystal. When they woke up Fang lost her memory because of the transformation but Vanille remembered. Vanille went and became friends with Hope and because she remembers the events 1600 years ago, people she interacts with become l’cie so she indirectly caused Sarah and Sazh’s kid to turn to crystals. (They become accessories to world destruction basically) Fang is a badass who wants to protect Vanille at all costs. They don't say explicitly that Vanille is her love interest but its heavily implied. She’s very direct, straight forward, says things simply, and gets shit done. Also her stats are OP as fuck. Easily the best character in the game. While everyone mopes shes like. Why are we moping let’s just do the thing. Fang would make a better main character, lore wise, stat wise, and personality wise. The worst thing about her is that she doesn’t have a character arc. She starts off as a badass and remains a badass, and that’s what makes her the most tolerable in my opinion. If the characters grew naturally as the game progressed her writing would be a questionable but because of how the story progresses she’s one of the best. As you can see, the characters are heavily flawed in multiple ways. I actually don’t have a problem with this. One of my favourite games, .hack//G.U has a flawed protagonist, Haseo. He’s an asshole at first but grows as a person over the course of the game. The issue with 13 is that these characters don’t grow. At best, they learn to tolerate each-other to work towards a common goal but they retain their most egregious personality traits. Hope stops hating Snow but still mopes. Lightning stops being angry all the time and just becomes emotionless. She was more entertaining when she was punching Snow, although that’s true of everyone. The second issue I have, is that characters don’t have “cross communication” Everyone has a relationship to the MC, and to a character in their story but outside of that they have no connection. For example, Sazh and Lightning communicate because Lightning is the MC and has a connection to everyone. Sazh and Vanille communicate because Vanille is the reason Sazh’s son is a crystal. Sazh and Fang don’t communicate. Sazh and Snow don’t communicate. Vanille and Snow don’t communicate. How am I suppose to believe these people are friends at the end of the game when they have little to no dialogue with each other? As with most other Final Fantasy’s this game has a ton of cut-scenes but I feel like they didn’t communicate the story to the player very well, they didn’t endear the characters to the player, and they didn’t show these characters interacting with each other. 2000 words in and I’ve just been talking about the narrative. Let’s talk about game-play. It’s a mixed bag. I think a part of game-play is level design. The meme about this game is that it’s a straight line. It is!...for the first 20 hours. I think a majority of players give up within the first few hours because the hallways are so brutally boring. Walk straight, cut-scene, walk straight, fight, cut-scene, repeat for 20 hours. The game takes forever to introduce it’s combat system and for this 20 hour period you can click auto battle and win easily. Mash X and walk forward. However, when the game finally opens up and you can use the full party and battle system, it becomes something really special. Rather than worry about selecting individual commands you have to switch between different roles on the fly. Auto-Battle would be better worded as “optimize” The individual things that you put into the ATB bar don’t matter. The roles you switch to, and the set of roles do matter. In the last 5 hours of the game you may want to manually put in commands so you can do things exactly how you want but for a majority of the game the combat is fast pace and encourages experimentation. If you get a game over you can restart at that exact battle so you are free to swap out equipment or edit your teams. I really like this feature because in a lot of RPG’s you pick the biggest number equipment and ignore the rest but here you might go into a battle with a certain sword or equipment and then in the next battle you would swap out the equipment. While it makes the treasure discovery part kinda meh as the stats are all roughly the same, it really shines when things are leveled up and you can choose certain gear pieces for certain situations. The level up system sucks. After each battle you get points that you can put into your role to advance the skills and stats. It’s a straight line with no choices to be made. You’ll max out everything by the end of the game. Basically every so often you open up the level up screen and hold X until your level up points are gone. Too simple and lacking in choice, meh. The upgrade system has the opposite problem. It’s overly complicated for no reason. All weapons and accessories have a tier. This tier starts at level 1. to upgrade them you need to use monster parts which drop rarely or purchased from the store. There are organic parts which give little experience but boost the multiplier, and mechanical parts which give lots of experience but lower the multiplier. Each monster has different drops with different exp and multiplier values. Once you get your gear to max level (each piece of gear has a different max level) you can upgrade it to the next tier by buying an upgrade stone, which is very rare and expensive. There are multiple upgrade stones and what uses which is pretty random. Most things have 3 tiers but some things like HP boosting accessories have like 6. Status effect resist equips have 2, etc. Have I illustrated how overly complicated the gear upgrade system is? Without a guide this process is confusing and frustrating. It’s no wonder that for new players that new gear they find is unexciting. In order to make it exciting, they have to wade through this mess of an upgrade system! If you’re going for the 100% you better be using an online guide to find out exactly how much of each thing you need or you will easily double your playtime grinding for money. Even the added easy mode in the PC port will do little to alleviate the grind. (I played on PS3 for the record) I’ve talked about a lot of the problems I have with individual storytelling elements or game-play mechanics. These are concrete things I can point to and say “I didn’t like this” but I want to talk about this esoteric idea about the game that I enjoyed. My first Final Fantasy was 4 and it was mind-blowing to me because it was a video game with a story. Previously, the only games I played had been platformers like Mario. FF5 added a job system, FF6 added mechs and changed the setting from medieval, FF7 was in 3D, FF8 had the controversial draw magic system. The point I’m making is that even since the earliest entries of the series the games were never the same from one entry to the next. It’s a series that continuously innovates and it’s that innovation that prevents stagnation and makes each entry in the series something special. It’s not like a Call of Duty where the games blend together, each game is distinct in terms of game-play, mechanics, graphics, setting, literally everything. When I played 12 after 10, I was upset that the game wasn’t turn based and thought "it wasn’t MY Final Fantasy", but the truth is, Square Enix hasn’t made a main entry turn based rpg since 2001. I was upset when 12 came out but I’m over it now. Since then, I go into each entry wondering what kinda crazy thing Square Enix will do to mix up the formula. FF13 removed traditional stores, NPCs, towns, controlling each individual party member, lack of comedic relief and mini-games, etc. Some of the purists will look at these changes and say “This is why it’s a ruined Final Fantasy!” But these things were never the things that defined the franchise. It was an experiment that failed but I find the guts to try removing that stuff to be very interesting and the things that came after FF13’s release to be interesting as well. The reality is, that in 2009-2010, when this game came out, JRPG’s popularity was the lowest it had ever been. Nobody wanted to play turn based games, and the games that did come out played to the tropes of the genre. FF13 was a flawed experiment that tried to streamline the turn-based experience and mix it with a serious story. It tried to innovate inside of a space that was floundering in order to save the brand and I find that much more admirable than “playing it safe” What came after, the direct sequel, undid a lot of the most unpopular changes that FF13 had made. It was a much more traditional JRPG experience and they still added time travel and branching timelines to that! Afterwards, FF15 added cars and more action combat and 16 became M rated. All of this negative feedback that 13 received didn’t dissuade Square Enix from constantly changing and evolving what it means to be a Final Fantasy game and I think that is a trait worth celebrating in an industry full of creatively bankrupt corporate suits that churn out the same game every year with minimal changes and an increasingly predatory monetization model. I could continuing talking about some of the cool things I liked such as each character having a specific character arc that, if done better would have been incredible. Vanilles character arc is about accepting and dealing with guilt. Hope is about how harbouring grudges can be toxic, etc. These things I feel are better left to your own personal play-through or a video essay on Youtube. To conclude my own thoughts on this game. It took me 13 years to finally 100% the entire trilogy and put this game in my rear view mirror. It’s almost poetic.I think one major factor in my enjoyment this go round was the timing. At launch, games like Fallout 3 and GTA 4 were showing just how expansive an open world game could be. FF13 felt lame by comparison. Whereas now open world games are literally everywhere. In fact, I think I tripped over one this morning and landed in a pile of open world games near the grocery store. Playing such a linear game right now was a nice change of pace and refreshing. I still need to finish 15 to be truly done from the Fabula Nova Crystallis era of Final Fantasy but for now I need a palette cleanse. Do I recommend the game? That’s a tough question. If you are a fan of Square Enix? Yes. If you are a general JRPG fan? Maybe leaning on yes. If you are a general RPG fan? Maybe leaning on no. If you just like games and aren’t a fan of a particular genre. I’d caution against. It’s a real mixed bag and you have to go into it with an open mind and a lot of patience to find the fun. I don’t hate it, but I’m not it’s biggest fan either. It’s not going to be in any of my top 5 lists any time soon. Despite this, It’s a game that is deep enough that I can easily write double this much and discuss it for even longer. I hate giving number scores and you’ll notice I never do that at the end of my reviews cause I think they’re meaningless but if I had to, I’d give it a 6, or a 7/10 on the IGN scale. It’s an above average game with content for those who look for it. In today’s landscape its hard to justify putting so many hours into an average game but for those who are interested in exploring EVERY aspect of mainline Final Fantasy both good and bad, I think an intriguing adventure awaits you in FF13. I give it “an attempt was made”/10. Whether that’s for better or for worse, is up to you.