Final Fantasy XIII

Thoughts

Final Fantasy XIII was a grand experiment in building the first motorway JRPG, where you can mostly just turn off your brain, run down a hour long corridor, fight 20 copies of the same boring enemy, and make minimal tactical decisions.

You should not play it.

Combat

Gameplay in Final Fantasy XIII is based on the Paradigm system, where party loadouts are changable mid-combat at the press of a button, and where each party member has a role (Damage dealer, Chain builder, Tank, Party Buffer, Enemy Debuffer, or Healer) and is exclusively able to perform the functions of that role while in that role. The theory behind this design is that the player act as a sort of Sims-like god, guiding your automatic minions by them by changing their paradigm to what is appropriate at the current time in the battle.

While an interesting idea, it paves over the classic tactical choices found in the older Final Fantasy games. You can choose to manually select actions on the party leader, but all party members (including your leader, if you use auto-attack) will automatically use the appropriate elemental spell if known, and if the enemy type have been inspected (using the more-or-less free action Libra), so you might as well let the AI take the wheel.

Most enemy encounters are thus flattened into roughly the same structure:

1. Use Libra if enemy type is not known.
2. Start mashing auto-attack and don't stop until done.
3. Use a Paradigm with a Buffer and a Debuffer for 20 seconds, to build up a layer of defences and debuffs.
4. Switch to an aggressive Paradigm composed of only damage dealers and chain builders when party has plenty of health.
5. Switch to a balance Paradigm with a damage dealer, a chain builder and a healer once health dips a little.
6. Switch to a defence Paradigm with a tank and two healers if the damage dips a lot.
7. Repeat until done.

Some boss encounters require slightly different approaches, but most are just this repeated ad nauseum.

The booster and debuffer roles both start relatively useless, and end the game being pure powerhouses, that can halve the time spent in the longer fights.

The Final Fantasy series runs on callbacks and recurring story elements and gameplay mechanics; one of the most important ones - which makes fights interesting - is the elemental system: Each kind of enemy has different reactions for the different elements (generally Earth, Wind/"Aero", Fire or Ice), whether that be to take additional damage, less damage, ignore damage entirely, or even possibly to heal life instead of being damaged. While not innovative nowadays, it is a core part of Final Fantasy's identity, and a core tactical part of the experience; Each encounter requires the player to correctly evaluate the situation and react appropriately, by using the correct actions at the correct times.

As mentioned before, in Final Fantasy XIII the party members will just do the tactical choice for you. "Oh, this enemy? Well obviously we should just use fire." And such that all battles are not over in a few seconds, all enemies have tons of health, so each battle, even the most rudimentary, will take roughly a minute off of your finite time on Earth.

Other Gameplay

The game is known as a "hallway simulator", and well... it's correct, most of the game is hallways. Endless hallways, that, just like a motorway, curve slightly around the beautiful scenery, but just barely, so as to allow you to keep the pedal to the metal.

There is a single open world-ish area, containing optional areas and side quests, but don't worry, if you like me, have open world sickness, you can get back to the hallways in roughly 10 minutes.

That said, that area is so much more fun that the hallways, because you actually have some agency in what encounters to take on, and what your priorities are: Explore the world, look for materials, upgrade your weapons? It's a shame because the game contains countless RPG mechanics, but they also feel as hallway-y as the hallways.

The game's upgrade tree (The Crystarium System) is boring and mostly linear with small off-shoots.

The weapon and accessory upgrade system is obtuse and overly complicated (at least for a game that is what the rest of the game is): Materials gives exp, and either give or drain exp bonus multipliers. So you need to upgrade the item with those that given multipliers up to the max, and then upgrade with the items that give the precise amount of exp that you need to level the item to max; otherwise you are wasting materials. You can only know the exp you need by looking at a walkthrough (this is a nice one).

While you don't really need a walkthrough to complete the game, it can help with a few catcha's. For example: Once you arrive in the open world, you can do some side quests. Some of these side quests require other side quests, and some side quests are very far from the few teleporters on the map, so if you haven't unlocked the side quest once the main quest takes you through that area of the map, it might be a long time before you can do it again. Worst of all is that these side quests also unlock teleporters, which would make your trek back less of a waste of time.

Plot

The plot - what happens in the game - is boring. Emotional characters emote at each other a whole lot, and it never really goes anywhere except they learn to accept each other for who they are, then they emote about how much they're gonna kill The Pope... and then they kill The Pope. The explanations for why the party is going somewhere is often flimsy, but luckily they always meet somebody who can point them in another flimsy direction.

"Let's go to another planet!"

"Why?"

"To get stronger or something, IDK LOL."

At one point one character says to go to their village for help as it was right nearby. After walking through some mines, taking a the rolly polly taxi, walking through some underground springs, crossing a desert, climbing a tower, fighting a weird dragon machine thingy, and then crossing another desert, you finally 5 real world hours later arrive at the village

The world and story concepts on the other hand are exciting and intriguing.

The story start with the heroes being deported from the isolationist theocratic state of Cocoon, a Hollow Earth, floating above the wilds of Australia Gran Pulse. They are believed to be L'cie, a human marked by a godlike machine entity called a Fal'cie and tasked with destroying Cocoon, otherwise they will become mindless monsters. Even though the party isn't marked, they end up marked within the first hour of the game, and must now either destroy their own home, or accept their eventual zombification. Then all of the emoting happens.

To be clear, I am not against characters experiencing strong emotions and talking about them... but they need to be more than paper cutouts for all of it to feel like anything. But as it stands, most of their personalities are defined by their relationship to each other, and their varying enthusiasm for killing The Pope. Yet they incessantly repeat how much they love each other, or hate each other, or hate The Pope.

It is revealed midway through the plot that it was set in motion by The Pope (who is actually a Fal'cie) and then the rest of the plot is just doing what The Pope wants the party to do. Even when the heroes say "I won't do that", they do it, not because they are manipulated into it, just because... they do it. Until the end, when they almost do it, but choose not to.

It is during this midway reveal that the larger plot is brought into focus: That eons ago the Fal'cie and humans lived together in peace under a watchful God; the Fal'cie created to terraform the planet and humans... I dunno, to enjoy it? When God eventually left, everything became worse. The Fal'cie, stipulating that souls leave this world in the same fashion as the creator, create Cocoon as an breeding ground for humans, so they can be ritually slaughtered to open the gateway to God... to bring him back? The human heroes are forced into this tale as the instruments of destruction, as Fal'cie are programmed with something like The Three Rules of Robotics, and cannot themselves cause this event.

Except that the plot completely undermines the cannot cause the destruction part, as the finale starts when The Pope begin teleporting dangerous fauna into Eden, the capital of Pulse, without input from any humans.

While I really enjoy the backstory, it is just backstory. Lore to tingle the synapses, but not really the core of the experience. The experience of playing the game is often at odds with the concepts that play out in the background.

One pet peeve I must discuss is the fact that the paradise breeding world of Cocoon is also completely infested with dangerous animals of all kinds. If I was an immortal machine god, building a people farm over the course of centuries, I would maybe not keep the humans in the same area as the flesh-eating demons. I would though institute an omnipresent fertility propaganda program, base my morality system on ability to rear kids, and give per-living-child tax cuts, all of which The Pope did not appear to consider!

The game is in general bad at illustrating the world that the heroes are trying to save. Cocoon is experienced in the same way you experience a motorway: In a blur and far from anything interesting. There is no towns in the RPG sense, and there are no creatures to talk to. All shopping is done in webshops over the internet, which somehow also deliver to the forbidden hellplanet of Gran Pulse.

The only dialogue you hear outside cutscenes are generic barks. "We can do this", "Take that!", etc.

Graphics, Designs, Music

The game is stunning. Not as technically impressive as for example Metal Gear Solid V, but capable of using the PS3 to great effect. The designs of bosses and the world are impressive, sometimes leaning into overstimulation. The details in the linear sections are nice, exploiting the linearity of the game to hide plenty of loading zones. The open world section suffers a bit on the graphics front, possibly due to the reduced ability to hide loading zones, but this area makes up for the lack of details by having stuff happening everywhere on screen at once: Bird monsters flying around in the air, beasts running around, chocobos doing their thing, weather effects, and a huge robot walking around behind the mountains.

The skyboxes are impressive with their details, often times being much prettier than modern games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Many skyboxes on Cocoon demonstrate the curve of the Hollow Earth, and during night scenes the sky glimmer with the lights of cities on the other side of Cocoon.

Chocobo roundup time: The Chocobo chick that follows one of the main characters is really cute. The adults were slightly ugly, and only slightly cute, but do not intrude most of the time. You can ride the Chocobos in the open world section, which is always a plus. I will give Final Fantasy XIII the Chocobo rating of: Good.

Menues are really stylish. I love that the portrait of the characters are almost always on the screen; either side by side, or one-by-one, being resized depending upon the context.

Music is also great, though somewhat repetitive, reusing the same battle and field music for almost the entire game.

Conclusion

Final Fantasy XIII is not a bad game, it's just a painfully mediocre game that demands more time than you should give it.

Don't play it, and even if you want to, put it as the back of your backlog, and then forget about it, spend the remaining years of your life doing something productive or at least fun, blissfully ignorant of the experience of wasting your time on Final Fantasy XIII. If you really want to do reckless and frustrating time wasting, at least do it on an interesting game, like maybe Drakengard.