Final Fantasy XIII Video Game Review 55/100

I don’t plan on doing this often but I thought it might be good to talk about this game as I put about forty hours into it and found it to be a highly flawed yet fascinating experiment.  Now myself qualify as a big fan of the final fantasy series, having played and completed Final fantasy’s 1 through 10, 12 and now 13. Seven was my very first introduction to the very concept of an RPG and Eight was the first one I ever finished. I have a lot of love for this series so I guess that’s why I can label this with confidence as the worst main Final Fantasy title. Of course going into it I knew this wasn’t going to be a stand out title. I heard many of the complaints about it, all of which are sadly true.

 

This game is liner, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The majority, if not all, of the game has you running down a straight hallway with little deviations and while your surroundings may change that straight line doesn’t change. People say that 30 hours in the game opens up but what this really means is that at the 30 hour mark you reach a area called the Archylte Steppe and it gives you a taste of what this game could have been. But it’s only one wide open plane, before long you are forced into the corridors again. It is true that final fantasy games in general are linear as you need to follow a path to reach the boss but in those cases at least the path had branches that lead to items and at any point you could just exit the area, climb on an airship and go somewhere else. 30 hours into FF13 you are offered a teleport system but this pertains to a single part of the game and it just allows you to go to other parts of a pretty linear path. In this regard its as though the game is putting in gameplay as an obligation and gives you only the bare minimum to achieve it. Here’s a path, kill everything on it and get to the next part of the story. When taking this into account, the actual gameplay of Final Fantasy XIII feels like padding.

 

So what about that story then? Surely if the focus was on the story it’s bound to be something special right? Well that’s what I figured. FF13 story has ambition, and I can respect that but it has massive problems. First off, voice acting has not done the series any favors and during this game I had a number of moments where I felt I would think more highly of this story if the lines were not being spoken. Final Fantasy titles have their share of dialogue that sounds good when read but when a voice is put to it can cause it to sound quite stupid. The story itself is needlessly complicated and yet very simple when you get past all the terminology. Humans live in a world called Cocoon which is fueled by Summons/eldions/Fal cie which is under a dictatorship by a pope like figure who has been forcing people to relocate to a survival of the fittest hellish nearby world called Pulse. Our heroes are cursed and given an unspecified mission by a Pulse summon when attempting to fight back against a relocation. If they don’t finish the mission within a unspecified time they turn into monsters. If they do finish the mission then they turn into crystal where they remain till given a new mission. The rest of our story us our heroes wandering about aimlessly trying to guess what their mission is till the big bad shows up and tells them. Though in a game with 13 chapters the villain doesn’t show up until the tenth. So our heroes don’t agree with the big bad, wander about on Pulse and then end up doing exactly what he wants anyway. But everything turns out alright because two characters pull a deus ex machina out of nowhere and save the day. Ladies and Gents, with that paragraph I saved you forty hours of your life. As you can tell by that, a lot of the game is our heroes going about without any direction on what they are supposed to be doing. Most of the time the characters end up committing to some arbitrary goal only to do a heel turn and do something else. One particular moment is when the party goes to Pulse do to the big bad saying so and for no real reason all decide to make their way to Vanile and Fangs hometown in some vague notion that something might happen. What actually does happen is they encounter the big bad again and decide to go back to cocoon basically making the whole Pulse section one big pointless Journey when they are already short on time.

 

Characters can make up for a lacking story and due to the haphazard nature of the plot I think that’s what was intended. However while some characters have potential, it’s not quite realized. Lightning is an absolute mess of a character. From my understanding and what I believe was intended, she is supposed to be a female version of Cloud from Final Fantasy 7. However Cloud had an arc as well as a character whereas I spent forty hours with Lightning and still don’t get what she’s about. At most I gathered that she’s incompetent, dangerously impulsive and suffers from massive mood swings. In one fmv scene she went from happy to aggressive to encouraging to hopeful and then tears all in the span of about three minutes. She decides to go on a one man assault on the enemy headquarters, convinces a boy to join her and along the way after one single sentence on Summons she does a complete heel turn and begins to try and convince the boy she already convinced otherwise that the attack is foolhardy. She is just a barrel of Mary sue whose actions are purely determined on what the plot needs at that point. Sazh is the best character of the game, being quite likable with a interesting arc involving his son. Some of the best parts of the game involve him and while his son is a bland Gary sue it does give him the most engaging drive in the game. There’s not much to say about Fang. She’s decent strong character who I say some might grow fond off. Only real downside is when the plot forces her into annoying situations such as one where she needs so sort of demotion emotional breakdown in order to gain a summon which involves her saying they should destroy Cocoon instead of saving it. A hissy fit that comes out of nowhere and is immediately forgotten once the summon is beaten. I like Snow, or more I like the idea behind his character. Snow is essentially what happens when you take plot armour away from a stereotypical hero. Snow talks lofty and embraces the risky nature of heroic gambles. However most of the time things which would go perfectly for a action hero, turn out disastrously for Snow. In the beginning he inspires people to take up arms and fight the oppressive army. As a result he gets them all killed, including a party members mother. However not a lot is done with it and he basically remains the same by games end. His relationship with Lightning’s sister is also rather off putting as she looks 14 when he looks mid twenties. Hope is a character who starts of the worst but slowly becomes more tolerable over time. His character arc is given quite a lot of attention but has the problem of concluding too early. He had an interesting chemistry with Snow as Snow mistakenly thought Hope looked up to him when in reality Hope was more interested in killing him for causing his mother’s death. Ultimately he learns to let things go and for the rest of the game becomes a tag along who only says a uplifting speech around the end. Vanile is a very hated character which I can understand as to why. She starts off so alien that I was under the impression that she wasn’t even human and had difficulty with human concepts. Seeing as her dialogue generally made no sense. As the story goes on her weirdness is hugely toned down and any gripes that remain would be about her rather annoying voice. As for minor characters, they don’t make much of an impact. Most of them are there to provide the mains with some sort of revelation or understanding and there are not many appearances from them in the entire game. One particular moment that comes to mind is when a character called Raines showed up as a boss. When he appeared everyone acted familiar with him but I couldn’t recall just who this guy was. I later remembered that he was a man who appeared in one cut-scene for a few minutes about twenty hours ago.

 

Let me be frank, the Paradigm system may be good for managing fast paced combat but the depth of its mechanics is lower than that of the first Final Fantasy. Here’s the basic rundown, you can assign different roles to each character such as Medic, commando, ravager, etc. Each of these roles is setting the CPU to a certain manner. In this case, Healing, Attack and magic attack. You cannot control your other party members, only the leader.  You can switch between six different variations like Commando, Ravager, Ravager or Commando, Sentinel, Medic. You cannot switch the Paradigm of a single character and if your character is set to one role they cannot use abilities from another one. Meaning you cannot have a mage alternate between attack magic and healing without changing the roles of the entire party. Same for you, if you are a Commando then you are stuck using physical attacks. This cuts down the number of strategies immensely but what makes matters worse is that you will barely be strategizing at all. Here are the two things you will be doing for the entirety of FFXIII. Switching Paradigms and pressing auto battle. True you can pick your own commands but it’s often pointless as auto battle picks the best ones already out of your limited move set. And you might occasionally make use of items and summons. But this is pretty much how the majority of fights go in FFXIII, Switch Paradigm, auto battle. The system has been simplified down to the level that they might as well just make the main character a CPU too. Another part of the system to mention would be staggering, where once you dealt enough attacks to a enemy it stuns them and allows you to attack it for a time with your damage dealt being increased the more punishment you dish out while its staggered. This basically makes the battles a rush to stagger your enemies as it is the only time you put out real damage. Due to this in FFXIII, speed is everything.

 

The the equipment and leveling is equally abysmal. You get two pieces of equipment, a weapon and a accessory. That’s it. No Armour, no shield. Nothing. Later on you can level up to equip two more accessories but unless you are trying to stave off a status effect the difference is negligible. There are also no defense stats. You can level up your weapons and accessories by using materials gathered from enemies which makes getting new ones pointless as they will always be weaker than what you currently have. Leveling is a pain as instead of getting exp and leveling up random stats automatically, you are given something called CP which you use to level up your character up a chain of upgrades to health, attack, magic or gain new skills. The path is strictly liner though and adds only a layer of tedium as every time you gain enough CP you need to go into the menu, and manually level up each of the six characters one at a time. There is different paths for each Paradigm role but you only unlock all the roles near the end of the game and it takes twice as much CP to level up a character in a role that wasn’t set for them and even then they with never learn the same amount of skills as someone who is set in that role. So what your characters are going to be has already been determined by the time you get the option to level them up differently. But the biggest problem is that regardless of how much your character’s stats go up, it never feels as though you have gotten stronger. I could be adding over a hundred points to strength and yet barely be doing much more damage than before. The music is just decent which for a final fantasy game is fairly disappointing. The battle theme is good and the main theme is alright though heavily overplayed throughout the game. For the most part the soundtrack isn’t that noticeable and there is a song played in the Pulse area of the game which is a tune similar to a elevator wait music. The game is admittedly graphical beautiful which is pretty impressive for a game six years old. In reflection FFXIII is a hard game to recommend. It has numerous problems and while it is a fascinating experiment, it misses more than it hits. There were times I enjoyed FFXIII, but for any moment of fun there was three moments of tedium. It wasn’t an easy game to finish and at times I had to force myself to play it. Still while I am glad I played it, I don’t recommend it. I am just hoping FFXIII-2 fixes a number of problems that were in this title.

15 thoughts on “Final Fantasy XIII Video Game Review 55/100

  1. Nice review Aidan, I wouldn’t mind seeing more JRPG reviews from you. I know you play a lot of games ;). Pretty much agree 100% with what you’ve said. I haven’t played nearly as much of the FF franchise as you (7,8,10,10-2,12,13) but this was easily the weakest. Exploring and completing the missions in the Archylte Steppe was the most enjoyable part of the game for me. I finished all the missions but didn’t bother to kill a Long Gui… Really wanted that titan to be an optional boss. The story and characters didn’t interest me enough to bother with the sequels though.

    You looking forward to FF15? I was excited for it back when it was vs13, but it’s been so long now I’m almost indifferent at this point. Watched some videos of the demo, back when it first came out, and the real time combat looks a bit unpolished. Although we’ll have to see when the full game is finally released as it is only a demo. The massive world looks amazing, however they need to be able to fill it with enough interesting things so that it doesn’t feel barren.

    1. When I saw that giant titan I ran straight towards it to fight only to be disappointed when I couldn’t. I mean you don’t design something like that only to leave it in the background.

      The way they decided to base the main characters on a boy band already throws me off. I hear there are female characters who will be playable but the way Square is marketing it it seems they are trying to get the female demographic. The real time combat looks good but I think this is a matte where Square is more concerned with how it looks than how it plays. Seeing how intricate the animations are makes me think the whole thing would play sluggish. The open world looks good but like you said, they need to have things in it and chances are they will go the dragon age 3 route and put collectables all about the place. Honestly it looks like the game has diverged far from what Final Fantasy is. Ever since FF12 they have been trying to reinvent the combat system but Bravely Default shows that the combat system was perfectly fine. I just don’t see this game being good.

  2. I’m not quite as down on FFXIII as you are, but I agree it should be below the midpoint of anyone’s ranking of the FF series.

    The story is kind of weird, but most of the FF context stories are kind of weird. The characters not knowing what’s really going on though much of the game is pretty common in FF (VII or X for example).

    I took the time to complete all the missions, all the battles in the Faultwarrens, and get the ultimate weapon for every character. The latter was by far the least tolerable of the tasks — it involved beating adamantoises for a dozen hours to collect the required rare-drop Trapezohedrons. Ugh.

    It’s nice that you’re looking forward to FFXIII-2, and it does seem to try to fix some of the issues with XIII (such as its linearity). But I found it less enjoyable to play than XIII… though it has been a few years, so the memory is a bit hazy. (And for the record I liked Lightning Returns less than either.)

  3. Oh! Game reviews! Nice! I haven’t played FF so I can’t really comment. What other games do you like? I’ve always been a fan of Pokemon, Mother/Earthbound, Phoenix Wright, Kirby, and Katawa Shoujo.

    1. Other Games I like? That’s a long list. I have been a gamer for a very long time, longer than I have been an anime fan. I played pokemon red when it came out and I had Sliver but then I got out of Pokemon. Though Pokemon Y is on my Backlog. Played Earthbound and Mother 3 is also on the backlog. Finished Phoenix 1 and 2 and Katawa Shoujo.

      Games I am fond of…well to start. Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, Final Fantasy 7, Castlevaina Sympathy of the night as well are the other igavaina’s, Zelda’s, Mario’s, Crash Bandicoot trilogy(Though I prefer the Spyro Trilogy over it), Shadow of the colossus, God of war 1 and 2(3 was ok), Act Raiser, MGS1 and 3, Smash Bros, Tekken, Kingdom hearts, Resident evil 4, Bioshock, Portal, Batman Arkham games(Namely city), Metroid series, Starfox series, Dark Souls(Inculding Demon souls and hopefully someday, Bloodborne), Conkers Bad Fur Day, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Megaman series(Namely the X series), Persona Series, Prince of Persia Sands of time and surely many many many more that slip my mind at this moment.

        1. Much appreciated. Though I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who dislikes the majority of that list.

        1. Earthbound didn’t impress me too much so Mother 3 is pretty low on my list. I will get to it eventually but I doubt I will like it all that much.

  4. I would argue that there is more strategy compared to previous FF titles and most people are put off by the auto-battle which clouds their judgment regarding how the battle system actually works, because there is actually more strategy when it comes to this battle system.

    Here are my reasons:

    1. Auto-battle essentially just lets you do things “faster”. You don’t need to use it, but it does not really plan anything. If chooses appropriate elements, if the enemy is scanned, but that’s it. It doesn’t battle for you.

    2. The battle system incorporates timing and tempo. I feel this is what they really wanted the ATB to be. The ATB system really fails at timing and tempo though because you end up just spamming strong moves and don’t really need to time anything. This is not the case with FF13. Adamantortoise is a great fight example. That battle CANNOT be won without a strategy and appropriate gearing of characters. There’s a great guide out there detailing how to beat it at different gearing points and stat points as well. In turn, how did I beat the weapons in FF7? How did I beat omega weapon in 8? I spammed my limit breaks/KotR/strongest skills. There was no strategy, I just beefed up and beat the bosses down (and yeah, it was fun). Whereas taking down an adamantortoise requires paradigm shifting and using the appropriate strategy for different parts of the battle. There are still videos of people detailing how they took down these turtles in sub-minute times.

    I agree with your distaste of the leveling. It was pretty much just not what I wanted. Especially compared to previous titles that had such interesting systems in place. Materia, junctions, sphere grid. All interesting systems. Not so much here. This is also one of my pet peeves vs FF9. The totally uninteresting leveling/gameplay system in place.

    Equipment I disagree with. The extra accessory spots essentially just equal the spots you would get in any other FF title. Plus, FF8 did not have equipment except the weapon and it was not a detriment to the game. Would you feel better if they labeled each slot as “armour”, “leggings”, etc? And what about a game like FF7? There were 2 equipment slots. Weapon and arm, compared to FF13 that has 4 slots. And YES it makes a difference. For certain fights you can start with “auto” skills like haste, you can just fill it with stat boosts for attack or magic, etc. Not like FF12, but ff12’s whole gameplay system revolved around the equipment.

    In the end, I really enjoyed FF13. I’ve enjoyed every FF title I’ve played. FF13 just just another game where they implemented a different gameplay system and some people got it and worked with it, and some just didn’t get it and didn’t try to get it. FF8 is a really good example of this. The junction system is one of the best gameplay systems they’ve done IMO, but a lot of people are put off by it.

    In the end, the story was…not great. The characters worked, but that part of the game ended up kind of a mess…

    Good luck with FF13-2. It’s got a really cool monster breeding system, but the game is way too easy, so it doesn’t really make use of it unless you go out of your way to really get into it. Cool gameplay systems again but story-wise I found it a mess.

    GLHF with it though! Sorry if this post is long-winded but I’ve always been a defendant of FF13 despite the hot mess it kind of is 🙂

    1. “Auto-battle essentially just lets you do things “faster”. You don’t need to use it, but it does not really plan anything.”

      It’s really a matter of convenience. Sure you can choose your attacks for your main and do it like that. However when given a choice between jumping into menu’s to choose attacks manually and a button that chooses them automatically it’s naturally to use the latter, especially when the end result isn’t much different.

      “In turn, how did I beat the weapons in FF7? How did I beat omega weapon in 8? I spammed my limit breaks/KotR/strongest skills”

      You didn’t heal? Buff? It’s a little easy to break it down but I am sure you were doing more than just spamming powerful attacks, unless of course you overleveled and considering that you had KotR, that seems to be the case. Any boss in a FF game is easy if you overlevel.
      How did I defeat Orphan? Cast deprotect and wailed on him while he was staggered. I was really surprised at that too seeing as I was having so much trouble with him as the battle was mostly just switching between healing and a attack paradigms. But then again the first time I died was cheap because he cast death on my main character and regardless of whether you have a medic who can bring you back to life, the minute you die it’s game over. It’s possible that I wasn’t using the system correctly but I still feel that by removing control of the parties commands and separating the abilities into roles it cut down the number of strategies you could use.

      “And what about a game like FF7? There were 2 equipment slots. Weapon and arm, compared to FF13 that has 4 slots.”

      That’s disregarding the materia system. True you can only equip a weapon, arm and accessory(It had 3 equipment slots) but you could also place material in that equipment which would change your stats.

      “And YES it makes a difference. For certain fights you can start with “auto” skills like haste, you can just fill it with stat boosts for attack or magic”

      The auto skills aren’t much use as if you just make one of your party members a synergist at the beginning he gives you all the buffs and they last much longer. And as I said in the review, I would be giving my characters strength boosts of hundreds and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The only real time you start dealing significant damage is when you stagger a opponent.

      There are part of FF13 I like but too much of it rubs me the wrong way. Oh but I really liked FF8. I think people give that too much hate.

  5. I played FF13 once more as the PC version with the Japanese dub came out a few month ago and still had some fun. There sure are some flaws, but if you accept the game as some kind of interactive movie, its style and graphics can be overwhelming.

    You should try out FF13-2, where at least some of the design mistakes of FF13 were fixed – the return of the element of exploration sure adds to the game.

    BTW, is Xenoblade Chronicles missing in your game list? That was one gem of modern J-RPG. It had many classic elements that are missing from many of its recent counterparts.

    1. I played Xenoblade a good bit back. I know I finished it before America got it. I really liked it and I kinda regert just going for the main story instead of doing the side stuff. But when you got limited time you got to prioritize. Though two things really bugged me about it. One was that you couldn’t do any damage to anything 5 levels above you. When you tried to fight something too high a level the game would just set all your your damage to 1 or so. And two, I tended to follow the same routine with battling after a while. Back slash, side slash…etc wait for cooldown…back slash, side slash….
      Also played and finished Xenogears and Xenosaga is on my backlog. A game that was really underrated for the Wii was Pandora’s tower. I loved the story of that game and the gameplay was pretty good too. Sort of shadow of the colossus like in it’s atmosphere. Ah and Sin in punishment 2, fantastic shooter.

  6. nice review, i don’t even finish this game not because i become old, i still want to replay my psx final fantasy but not even bother to this..o by the way the real final fantasy for me is final fantasy 9 because many secret and surpirise is there, like you can beat the game with lvl 1 party if you move right..

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