I realise now that the line "We will have fun", repeated over and over again in the revised Final Fantasy 13 Chocobo song, is more of a desperate request than a statement of intent. Final Fantasy 13 is what happens when
Hironobu Sakaguchi and
Nobuo Uematsu are taken out of the equation.
Let me be totally clear - all of the earlier titles have something (or a number of things) wrong with them. 7 had a plot that frequently made little sense. 8 was a love story where nobody ever said "I love you". 9 nearly ruined itself right at the end with a final boss that just fell out of the sky with no previous mentions in the 60 odd hours of gameplay that came before it.
Ten? Ten had Wakka.
But still - those are small fry compared to the numerous issues in this title. This isn't a review, and I'm not going to give the game a score. The text below is littered with "here is the ending of the game" spoilers, so if you haven't completed it yet please stop reading right now. I'm just curious if anyone else came to the same conclusions I did in my 50 odd hours playing this game.
Let's begin...
The game feels endlessly patronising
I think I first started to feel uneasy when I looked at the manual and saw it list "auto talk" as a feature, and that "some may even begin conversing with you of their own accord, without the need to input a command".
When an instruction manual actually lists people talking to you
as a feature that needs explaining, we're probably going to have a few issues. Not that auto talk matters much - there's nobody worth talking to in the game anyway.
In one of the levels - a rather nice forest with a path through the middle - there are these round platforms every so often and as you approach, a light appears. They actually include a cutscene with one of the characters pointedly saying "We should follow those lights so we don't get lost", as if the player has no brain.
"Getting lost" would be quite the achievement, considering the level is one long path with no way to get lost if you wanted to. I must admit to being vaguely offended by this - I'm surprised they didn't just take control from you completely with "auto walk". This level also makes no sense; your two characters are on the run and hunted by an entire army, so they decide to run not through the forest itself but down the solitary well-lit walkway filled to bursting point with the enemy?
Finally, I find it somewhat pretentious that this game thinks the battle system it has is so complicated and indepth that it requires me to play the game with training wheels on for the first 20 hours or so of gameplay. You'll hear more about the battle system (and how it needs a serious tune-up) later on.
Design
This is one of the most barebones games I think I've ever played, in terms of actual things to do. Everything has been removed, apart from the fighting. Towns, places to explore (that don't revolve around fighting), people to interact with....there is nothing in this game, this 40+ hour game, apart from fighting. If you're not fighting, you've either hit the pause button or you're running to the next fight.
That really is it.
The fighting itself remains entirely static - over the course of the game, the ONLY time I can remember something happening that deviated from "run into enemy / fight enemy" was when I hit a switch on a lift - the lift dropped, and - you've guessed it - three enemy characters jumped down to have a fight.
Even then, they died in about three hits making the whole thing entirely pointless. But that's as dynamic as it got.
For the first twenty hours - and it seems there is little deviation from this magic number when talking to other gamers - you spend the entire time on rails, running down a spectacularly linear set of tubelike corridors. Doesn't matter if you're in a forest, or a lake that's been iced over, or an abandoned city....you'll still run in a straight line, all the time. You don't get to choose where you go, or how to play - you can't even select your party members (or which character you are) until you've played through those first twenty hours and reached chapter eleven.
When you consider there's thirteen of them in total, something has gone horribly wrong here.
Yes, we can cite older Final Fantasy titles as being "linear" - in particular, number 10. But you know what? It didn't matter, because the central idea of "mystical faith woman once every 1,000 years has to sacrifice herself or a big blob monster from the sky will destroy everything" played out so well and the game had a cast that wasn't full of douchebags. Linear games can be fantastic - Final Fantasy 13 is an example of a linear game that isn't. Let's put it this way: eventually you can jump in an airship and roam the land of Spira. In FF13, they dangle an airship in front of you at a key gameplay moment then take it away.
NO EXPLORING FOR YOU, JIMMY.
Everywhere you go is a virtual deadzone, with nothing to click on to make something interesting happen (unless you count conveniently placed buttons that move lifts up and down), or interact with, or people to talk to, or things to do besides, you know, run in a straight line and kill people for twenty hours. Someone on a forum likened it to running through the Holodeck on The Next Generation, except with all functionality stripped out of it - I'd have to agree.
In Final Fantasy Seven, one of the best moments in the game is when you arrive at The Golden Saucer. There's a lot of things to do (that don't involve fighting), you can actually go on some rides, talk to people, do a few quests (that don't involve fighting), go on a wonderfully twee date with one of the lead characters and you also get nailed by one of the best pieces of Final Fantasy music of all time with a cutscene that really hits you hard later one when said party member dies horribly (yeah, you Advent Children geeks can shut up - she's still dead).
Compare and contrast with the "theme park" here. Sazh and Vanille end up in some sort of fancy pants casino / theme park place, and they decide to kick back for a bit. You run past a bunch of people (well, there's no point interacting with them because they each spout one generic line each and never do anything else) and get to a cutscene where Sazh says "we might as well have some fun", and says it's time for "A Nautilus Park date with Sazh".
You know what you do next?
You turn a corner, then run down a few more straight corridors while interacting with nothing, because there is nothing there to interact with. Oh, eventually you get to play "find the chocobo" in a dreadful minigame. How is this any better than the content in a game that came out in 1997?
Even scenes in the game that cry out for development, or some character commenting, or
something are left to go to waste.
Late on in the action, the party reaches what was once the hometown of Vanille and Fang. You guessed it - the place is full of monsters. Now, think about that for a second - the game is fairly screaming the suggestion at you that all the transformed monster things are in fact old inhabitants of the town - people Vanille and Fang might have known, or been related to.
In a normal game, this might be brought up, or explored, or
given a solitary line of dialogue.
Not here. You just run right through, killing everything in your path before being sent on a fetch quest which makes you go all the way back to the start of the area, allowing you to experience this particularly mind numbing set of fight sequences twice.
This happens over and over again - there is barely any attempt to even pretend these characters are less than extremely rough sketches.
Another screwup of this lack of development gives rise to one of the most poorly directed scenes in any game I've ever seen. You have to go rescue Vanille, and spend what feels like about six years running through an endless series of identical walkways on a large flying ship.
When you finally reach her (after listening to Fang going on about this reunion for an age) both characters stand in front of each other lifelessly, you think someone is going to say something (like perhaps "Oh my, hello - you're not dead after all. Hooray") and then the game just clumsily skips to another fight - and
that's it. Once the fight is done, they eventually have a little hug or whatever, but you really don't care by this point - they had their moment, and they blew it with poor direction.
Any moment that requires a payoff like that one is consistently flubbed.
There's a poor attempt at stealth, which of course doesn't work. You get to a town full of enemy soldiers, and you're told you can "sneak up to gain an advantage in battle". You then realise the very first set of soldiers you see are placed in a way that means you
cannot sneak up at all. If you wait around for them to move off - too bad, they don't move. So you just do what you've done for the rest of the game, and run into them headfirst.
The whole section is like that.
Worse, there's a chunk of game that is explicitly designed to make you avoid the one thing the game lets you do (fight). You pop up at the top of a huge green mountain, and you're told the area is populated by "incredibly tough creatures", and it might be best to "avoid them".
So you go fight one of these creatures just to see what happens, and you realise your two hideously underpowered characters would be there for about six weeks chipping away health and th - oh, you died.
Can't fight them - gotcha. So you then do what it wants, which is to run down this mountain while making sure you don't run into a single creature.
A large area of game filled with monsters you can't fight (and you
can't revisit later when you're powered up), forcing you to do nothing but trudge to the next level.Why was this utterly pointless section even in the game? It's like they're
trying to make a point that if you don't fight, there is actually nothing to do. At all.
The elements that make up the setting up of your squad is a fiasco too, both in terms of how it operates and also how it segues into certain battle sequences. To my horror, I realised that once you set up your team of three, assign the leader and then spend a while setting up your six paradigms, the moment you change one character -
just one - the entire paradigm list resets itself to the three defaults.
So if I need to ditch Lightning for Fang so I can tank my way through a high damage dealing fight, the moment the fight ends (or I run off with my tail between my legs after dying) I have to go back in and needlessly change all the paradigms
again. Yes, if I change a character for another who doesn't have the same skills needed then of course it can't stay as is. But could they not have just tweak it afterwards instead of gutting the whole thing? Worse: even IF you exchange one character for another with the exact same skillset, the paradigm settings
still go back to the three defaults!
The camera is also terrible - during fights, it constantly zooms in, or spins around making it almost impossible to see what's happening. When a large part of getting the enemy stagger bar up is attacking at the same time as your AI squadmates, this is not a good thing for it to be doing. You're reduced to watching out for the telltale blue boxes that popup indicating what move your team mates are doing, but these frequently end up at the outer edges of the screen which frequently takes your eye off crucial information like how much health you have.
Another horrible design decision (no, I'm not talking about how it makes you sit through cutscenes before a boss battle. And while you can skip them, you still have to wait for the individual chunks to load in, then pause, then hit skip, then wait some more - this is not an improvement) is the way Eidolon battles are handled. The way these work is: you're given a short countdown timer, and if you don't stagger the Eidolon by the time it runs down, you're dead (yep, they want to "help you"....by trying to kill you. I love videogame logic).
When you run into these things, more often than not your team is suddenly altered and you become whichever character is having to face down "their" Eidolon. You know where this is going, don't you? You run into a specific area, a cutscene kicks in....and then your team has changed and anybody you haven't leveled up is horribly underpowered (amazingly, the game doesn't let you level them up before the fight). The team alteration results in all your paradigms changing from whatever you had them set as to a typically poor batch of "default" battle options. This means the moves you now use are all changed around, and you have an incredibly short timeframe to both work out what your paradigms are and how to kill the Eidolon.
Then a piece of baffling design kicks in:
only once you've died and the Game Over screen appears does the game now let you set your own paradigm tactics and level up your underpowered character!
Why would they do this? Why was I not allowed to change these things
before the fight started? The game seems to delight in taking control away from you, then putting you back into the danger zone in a worse state than when you arrived, with arbitrary tactics that don't work and characters unsuited for the roles they're given. Why does this game not trust me to make any kind of decision whatsoever?
Why are all of these things (and more besides) still lurking in a game that's been in development for something like five years?
Music
There are two major problems with the music:
1) The best pieces all sound strikingly similar to tracks from the old games, and unfortunately the older tracks come out looking superior. The new Prelude? It reminds me of a mashup of Terra, Final Fantasy 6 and the Overture from FF 8. Compare Desperate Struggle to the superior Summoned Beast Battle from FF10. The worst example of this is a six note motif in 13 that's one of the main musical signatures that reoccurs throughout the game. You can hear numerous versions of it in the main Pulse theme, first at 17 seconds in and then later with a note missing played by the strings.
Every single time I hear it, all I can think of is the line "I saw you smiling at me" from "Eyes on Me" in Final Fantasy 8 at around 47 seconds.
Reminding longtime Final Fantasy players of tracks from older titles that they may have some reverence for is just blunting the impact of the new songs, and when they're combined with an inconsistent game like this they need all the help they can get.
2) It isn't that the music is terrible; it's that there are no memorable gameplay moments for them to slot into. Play a track from an old title and 9 times out of 10, I can tell you what scene goes with it because the onscreen events complemented the audio so well. Here? Unless you play me the Chocobo theme, I'm not going to have a clue what part of the game the track is from, or what specific event it corresponds with.
If some of these tracks had been in older titles, no doubt I could pin them to the gameplay donkey; their impact in this title is weakened by the repetitive gameplay, horrible storytelling and mostly unlikeable characters.
The story is a disaster
I don't think I've seen a game with such a threadbare plot be as complicated as this to follow. Almost none of it makes sense, the characters repeatedly do things that are at total odds with their expressed intentions and endless fictitious words that all sound the same are used over and over again, like they're supposed to mean something to us.
L'cie, fal cie, pulse c'ieth, focus, cocoon, PSICOM, nora....imagine every second sentence full of those words, for the duration of the game. It's a terrible way to tell a story. It boils down to "two warring type of Gods select humans to perform specific (and usually destructive) tasks, and if they don't do the task they turn into horrible monster things".
I defy anyone to sit through endless mentions of the numerous kinds of "Cie" and not want to stick pencils into their eyeballs in sheer rage at the horribly confusing words they've chosen to define these various characters.
When the game first starts (and you hear "Cocoon" every five seconds, and how it's crucial that it's saved) you think, well, okay -
show me Cocoon. Due to the camera, you can't look up enough to see if you have sky above you, or rocks, or who knows what. It looks like you're in a cave. Is Cocoon a cave? Is it an underground society? What?
You go on a procession that involves forests, mountains, a flying city with clear sky overhead and a bunch of other stuff. Eventually you guess that it is indeed "this big planet thing" and not just a city, but you never see how each bit connects to the next, and you're never entirely sure
what bit of Cocoon you're fighting to save.
I never once actually cared if I saved Cocoon or not, partly because I didn't know what the Hell it was.
Again: not good.
There isn't really a main antagonist, apart from this creepy old Pope type guy who is in fact one of these God creatures bossing everyone around. I'm reserving my commentary on that guy for a later section, helpfully called "The ending is terrible".
The characters
In this game, everybody sucks. EVERYBODY. The main characters, the threadbare supports (not that anyone bar one or two people make more than one appearance anyway, they always die quickly so nobody has to bother developing them), oh and the entire population of the planet you're supposedly trying to save. Everyone is a douchebag. Everyone wants you dead, or approves of the military banishing civilians, or killing you, or trying to kill you, or killing you softly....you get the idea.
Not once in the game am I ever shown Cocoon inhabitants who sound like they don't deserve some fire from the sky. As for the main characters?
Well, there's Lightning, who despite being some sort of "trained soldier" spends the entire game being the exact opposite. When she's not going off in a hissy fit (it's this contrivance early on that repeatedly causes your team to be split up for no good reason at all - great tactics), she's threatening to leave a fourteen year old kid on his own in the middle of a hostile battleground. She never does anything particularly interesting, and she never gives me a reason to care about anything she's doing. Possibly the most underdeveloped, blandest "lead" of any of the modern day Final Fantasy games.
Snow? He's a moron who continually says "I'm a hero / we're heroes / this is what heroes do / I'll save everyone, because I'm a hero" while doing this ludicrous fist pump at the screen. That alone made me ensure I never, ever picked him for my squad unless he was forced upon me.
Hope? He's a fourteen year old kid whose mother dies at the start (given the game opens with her saying "moms are tough" about three times in a row, she probably deserved it) and then spend the rest of the game blaming Snow for it, but never doing anything about it. Oh, there's this one bit where he sort of considers it, but gets blown off a rooftop or something. Then all of a sudden they're best pals. Whatever.
Bad enough he keeps falling over and crying - he quickly starts calling Lighting "Light" (Hope...and Light....did a ten year old write this?) Of course, this means the writers can repeatedly use phrases like "Losing / finding / gaining / farting Hope".
Illustrating how woefully short the lead characters are on ideas, later in the game it's down to this stupid fourteen year old kid to give them ideas on what to do next, or inspirational and rousing speeches.
Get it? Because he's called
Hope.
Also, kill me now. One of the worst Final Fantasy characters ever.
Sazh is decent, if only because he constantly echoes the gamer by mentioning that he has no idea what's going on. Fang gets a pass for being blandly inoffensive, and Vanille?
I don't think I can talk about Vanille without wanting to strangle myself. Go look her up.
The fight system is a mess
People say "auto battle" is bad, but for all the wrong reasons. I have no problem with selecting types of character (medic, warrior, magician) in groups who then go on to select clusters of moves, or spells, or powers
in groups rather than punching them in one at a time.
The skill is in predicting what the best clusters will be at any given moment versus the clusters fired out from the enemy. Hey, it's something different from slowly selecting individual moves which we've all done a thousand times over.
There is a strategy to this, if only one that kicks in after the first twenty hours of play when the game actually lets you use it. It would be a great system....if it worked. The problems are these:
1) You can only control one character at a time, and you have to rely on your companion AI selecting the right move / attack / spell. As the game progesses, they seem to lose the power of logical thought and this results in them getting you endlessly killed. When you're fighting a boss and all of your characters have six ailments cast on them (and you have about 200 HP left), I can guarantee your last character capable of doing anything useful while you scream at the TV to have them cast a heal spell on you will start casting utterly useless nonsense at THE OTHER AI CHARACTER, and then you will die.
If you're going to make your battle system select the majority of the moves from a three person party, then you better make sure the AI isn't beyond useless.
2) If your game pops a "The End" screen if the character under direct control loses all of their health, you should probably think twice about having boss fights where the enemy (who can take up to 20 minutes to defeat) can randomly cast a one hit kill move which, you know, kills you.
Oh. Wait. You did do that.
I have no idea what the designers were thinking here. Despite using equipment which should guarantee "no instadeath", I frequently found myself dying right at the end of a horribly long boss fight "just because". Or they'd whip out the attack that does about 4,000 damage in one hit, and you'd die because the crappy AI was too busy spamming the other AI character in your party with "Faith" to get your health back up to something reasonable.
Don't forget the boss fights where the game decides that hey, you're taking too long, casting a countdown timer which will make you die in endlessly frustrating ways when your team just. Isn't. Doing. What. It. Should. Be. Doing.
And once again: THE WHOLE GAME IS THIS FIGHTING SYSTEM. That's 40+ hours doing nothing but fighting, with a fight system that doesn't work.
Pulse is just as bad as the first 20 hours
As a general rule of thumb, people saying "But it gets good after twenty hours" is not the seal of quality your game designers are hoping for. You suddenly leave the A to B world of Cocoon for Pulse, which is this huge green expanse of monsters and death.
You think you can go explore, but it all goes wrong quickly.
1) You have no indication of what you're supposed to go, or where you're supposed to go on the map, when you arrive. The world is, of course, empty of anything bar monsters. Can't have the programmers doing anything too tiresome like characters you might have to talk to or anything (and the developers already said they left towns out - and for towns, read "people you'd interact with and use to develop the story) because it was "
too much work". So you won't be getting any hints there either. Sorry guys, most of the plot details are in the Datalogs accessible from the main menu. No pesky talky stuff in
this game.
Me? I just randomly wandered around and got lucky, ending up at some passageway that took me to the next bit of the level. I could still be wandering around now, for all I know.
2) The map - somewhat crucial if you're going to put me in a huge open world setting - is a disaster. For starters, it rotates instead of being static. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING YOUR MAP SHOULD BE DOING. Additionally, it has a ton of checkpoint markers on it but no indication of what each marker is. Again, I only got out of there because I randomly picked the "right" one to explore.
3) In Pulse, you can go talk to these floating stones and they'll give you missions. The missions, unsurprisingly, involve killing things. Another thing that's unsurprising is that the designers failed to add the marker for your target onto the minimap you see onscreen. That's right - you have to endlessly go into the menu, then select down a few times, then open up the main world map to see which direction you're supposed to be going. This gets old real fast.
4) With no idea what you're supposed to be doing, and a terrible map to hinder your every step, this quickly becomes as irritating as the first 20 hours and you just want to get the hell out of there. This sensation of annoyance is greatly increased because
Pulse has been designed as the location for the post credits endgame content (not that you'd know at this point), which is why 80% of the creatures here will likely instakill you unless you manage to run past all of them.
Don't worry though, you'll eventually escape and find yourself back on another endless series of Holodeck tubes. On the bright side, you'll get the sole cutscene in the game where they work as a team and don't come across as a bunch of utterly stupid and massively unlikeable morons.
So there's that.
The ending is terrible
Not just the ending, mind you - everything that leads up to it. See, over the latter half of the game you're told your mission in life is to kill Orphan (the creature powering Cocoon) and that this will bring back the creator of everything in existence. Why? Never explained. Not sure why the creator wants to come back to lots of dead people, but whatever. Maybe he wants to build a throne made out of skulls.
Your characters have cutscenes where they try to work out how to avoid their fate, and they are really,
really not going to kill Orphan. So far, so good.
But then they remember that they are stupid. See, throughout the game this old dude - Barthandelus - turns out to be one of these God creatures, and is the one manipulating them into showing up at the home of Orphan and killing it.
At one point, the party is dumped into an area filled with monsters and one of them even says "I guess he put us here to develop our powers so we can go kill Orphan", or words to that effect. They're actively aware this manipulation of their actions by Barthandelus is taking place - and what do they do? PROCEED TO GO KILL EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.
I don't know about you, but if I were one of these guys, I'd probably stop to think at some point that endlessly doing what this guy wants them to do, AND commenting on how they're continuing to do it, would mean I was pretty damn stupid.
So anyway - after wading through a final level that goes on forever, you arrive at the last collection of bosses (Barthandelus again, then a Barthandelus remix, then - finally - Orphan). Despite spending half the game claiming you're going to not kill Orphan, your characters then randomly decide that yeah, you're going to kill it after all with no indication they have a plan for when the power goes down other than "fall to our deaths" (also never explained properly is why these creatures
want to die, but insist on making you sit through a 20 minute fight where they try to
resist death. Shouldn't they just be sitting there doing nothing while you carve them into slices?)
Fang
has a huge hissy fit when Orphan starts smacking Vanille around then for no reason at all and immediately after that scene she tries to kill her (I thought I'd fallen asleep and missed a cutscene here or something, but apparently not. I still don't understand what happened here). Fang then turns into some sort of orange monkey-lion (I think this was supposed to be Ragnarok, although it didn't look very Ragnaroky), your party magically comes back to life from having been turned into monsters (again, for no real reason at all other than "they had to so you can have another fight") and they kill orphan.
That's right - they go and kill the thing that they said they weren't going to kill because they'd been told doing so would be "the end of everything". The entire planet falls out of the sky on a crash course with Cocoon - and our "heroes" have absolutely no idea what they're going to do next apart from fall to their doom, I guess.
Then Fang and Vanille say words to the effect that they're "ready" (of course, the player has absolutely no idea what secret they're suddenly privy to or what they're talking about - ready for
what?), combine into a larger monkey lion and - I kid you not - shoot streams of fire and ice out of the ground, freezing Cocoon in midair and then turning to crystal.
This comes out of absolutely nowhere and
makes no sense at all, even as Leona Lewis begins to sing about her hands and the party members are suddenly reunited with characters you were never given any real reason to care about.
They then jump around doing the "we did it" dance, even though after 40 hours of gaming what they achieved was doing
exactly what the bad guy said they would do and dooming the survivors to a horrible death at the hands of the thousands of monsters roaming Pulse.
Six people blessed with Godlike powers could still die with one hit from a single monster on Pulse, and now those powers have gone and they're left with the Cocoon military service to protect everyone?
Haha yeah, you're all going to die. Well done, heroes.
The Endgame is poorly thought out
For the first time I can recall in a Final Fantasy game, you're given something to do once you've killed the antagonist and doomed the citizens of Cocoon to a horrible death.
You can run out into the fields of Pulse (basically, Chapter 11) and mop up all of those unfinished missions lying around the place. There are also a few bits of content that apparently weren't available first time around. While this is interesting in theory, it's not executed the way it should have been.
For starters, I don't like that the first time the game opens up after 20 hours gaming eventually turns out to be "the big slab of land that's only really survivable once you've completed the game". Don't give me post completion content as Chapter 11, give me Chapter 11!
Also: you have to pretend the end of the game didn't happen because you still have Vanille and Fang in your party. You can also go back and do the endgame fight again, if you really wanted to. Surely this is a missed opportunity? Wouldn't it have been great if you had to do all of those missions to ensure the survival of the people from Cocoon?
I haven't done all of the missions, so for all I know that could be what happens - but then you'd still have Fang and Vanille with you, which wouldn't make sense.
But then, this wouldn't be the first thing here that made no sense to me.
In Conclusion
Anyone got a Megalixir?
