"How does it hold up to the hype?"

Final Fantasy XIII has been a long time coming. To give you a little perspective, the game started its initial development on the PS2. Here we are in 2010, about three and a half years into the PS3′s lifespan, and the game has finally dropped. With teaser videos shown as early as they were, the game has been anticipated for so long that its release onto store shelves seems almost awkward.

The first thing you’ll notice upon booting up FFXIII is that it is an extremely pretty game. While some argue that there are more technically impressive looking games (have gamers really become this joyless?), FFXIII stands above most thanks to its superb art direction. Every enemy, character, and environment looks beautiful. Colors are vibrant, designs are ornate, and everything is a real treat to look at.

It’s not just poly-counts and art direction that make the game look stunning - it’s all the little things. Party members wander around the map freely, occasionally speaking context sensitive dialogue instead of following eerily close to your backside. One of my personal favorite touches; turn based battles don’t look turn based. Often times characters move around the field waiting for the right moment to attack, rather than standing in place waiting for their turn. It really keeps things visually interesting.

The game starts with you already partway through the story (with a few, short flashbacks sprinkled in later). As a result, there is almost no exposition to speak of. Being dropped into the game’s world like this is incredibly confusing at first. Lot’s of terminology is thrown around in the dialogue with no prior explanation of what any of it means.

While that might put off some, I found it intriguing as I immediately yearned to understand what was going on. Admittedly, the story never moved as fast as I wanted it to, even resulting in me getting annoyed by how incredibly frequent all the unfamiliar terminology is.

"The battle system is unique and satisfying."

When everything is said and done, there really isn’t so much emphasis on an overarching story and world as there is on the playable characters. Each character is brought to life with surprisingly convincing voice acting, with the exception of Vanille, who in stark contrast has one of the worst voices I’ve ever heard in a big budget title. While only Lightning gets her visage on the game’s box art, each of FFXIII‘s six heroes feel just as much the main protagonist as any. Both screen time and forced time as the party leader is divided almost equally among everyone.

What makes things even more interesting is the relationships between the party members. While some are strangers, others know each other in very interesting ways you don’t often see portrayed in games. As things progress, you’ll see their personalities and actions clash and tensions rise.

What’s disappointing is that when the characters solve their differences, it becomes more clear that the overall story outside of the characters isn’t very interesting. This is largely due to how disconnected you feel from the game’s world, even in the closing hours of the 60 hour game.

One of the prime causes of this disconnect is the game’s structure. The flow of Final Fantasy XIII follows a very rigid formula. Almost the entire game consists of you walking down an extremely narrow (but beautiful) path, fighting enemies and watching cutscenes to move the story along. Due to the lack of towns and level design that allows virtually no exploration whatsoever, it can be exhausting to play for long sessions (something I normally do in the genre).

"The extreme contrast when the game opens up comes so late that it feels awkward."

With the exception of one chapter in the latter portion of the game, you have absolutely no decision in where to go next. Whats more, most of the game is spent running away with very little in the way of objectives. It’s this lack of context that make each environment feel largely unimportant, despite how breathtaking it looks, and causes you to never feel like part of the world that’s being shown. Each level becomes nothing more than a vehicle to lead you to battle after battle. Thankfully, battles are by far the high point of the game.

FFXIII‘s battle system is very unique. While it is turn-based, you’ll only have direct control of the party leader. The indirect control of your party comes in the form of a fast paced job system. Instead of swapping out individual characters’ jobs as you would in Final Fantasy X-2, you swap at any time between an entire set. You’ll manage these sets (or Paradigms as the game calls them) outside of battle in your Paradigm Deck.

What this does is change the focus of where strategy comes into play. Micromanaging individual abilities becomes largely unimportant (and impossible for anyone but the party leader). Instead, most of your strategy takes the form of deciding which Paradigm to switch to and when is the right moment to do it.

This huge shift in focus is disorienting at first, but feels very refreshing once it sets in. Unfortunately, the game spends its first three hours without this fundamental system in place, making battles both boring and meaningless. It’s a terrible design decision that hopefully won’t prevent you from getting to the good stuff.

While you’ll always gain experience (except in those first three hours), the amount of it you can spend on stats and abilities is capped on a per chapter basis. This forces you to form strategies on how to fight enemies as efficiently as possible since you can’t rely on level grinding. Ultimately, this makes battles more satisfying since you’re never overpowered.

So as not to take up the whole review gushing about all the details of the battle system, I’ve provided a video explanation that provides a quick overview of what to expect.

What disappoints me most about FFXIII are the weapons. Many weapons I found throughout the game were no better than the ones I already had, which caused me to miss out on ogling their new in-game models (something I normally look forward to). On top of that, the game has one of the most unintuitive weapon upgrade systems I’ve ever seen. It’s such a chore to work with that I completely ignored it after my initial frustration until the very end of the game.

The most efficient way to level up your weapons is by using random odds and ends from monsters to fill up an experience multiplier. The problem is that both the points (if any) that an item contributes toward increasing the multiplier, as well as how many points must be achieved before the multiplier increases, are all invisible. It’s so poorly implemented that it makes me wonder why they even bothered putting it in.

Final Fantasy XIII is not a game for everyone. In fact, it’s not even a game for all JRPG fans. Many of the very things that draw certain people to the genre are completely absent. However, that in itself isn’t always a fault.

The game succeeds wonderfully through its fresh battle system, interesting character relationships, and superb visuals and music, but it trips up in just as many ways. The claustrophobic level design, the disconnect from the game’s world, the poorly organized inventory system, Vanille, and the snail’s pace of the non-battle aspects bring it down from a must-have title to one that only some will be satisfied with.

I didn’t find what I was looking for in Final Fantasy XIII, but I did find a game that I enjoyed overall in spite of its flaws. Whether or not you will too is something you’ll now hopefully be able to infer.

Tags: FFXIII, Final Fantasy XIII, JRPG, ps3, rpg, Square Enix, video, Videos, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.