If you’re looking for the best movie of 2010 that’s based on the Final Fantasy franchise, look no further than Final Fantasy XIII. Perhaps its most distinctive feature is the interactive segment where you determine the outcome of combat between the main cast and the monsters they fight.
I am already 30+ hours (game time, according to the clock at the bottom of the menu) in the game, and I don’t feel that I have my expectations shaken and challenged. I felt an impact playing FFVI and FFXII for at least half of those hours, yet somehow I feel jaded for the latest installment. Don’t get me wrong: FFXIII is a good and well-presented piece of entertainment, but it’s hard to defend its claim as a role-playing game when the biggest kind of exploration you do is backtrack a linear dungeon just to kill respawned enemies, or just explore what seemed to be the game’s overworld until you realize that it’s just one huge, goddamn circular map.
Before you start opening your mouth and type furiously and accusing me of trivial things, let me clarify that I get JRPGs. I get the fact that in a JRPG, I have my hand being led on by the storytellers and directors and follow their path of the story and kill lots of fantasy things in the way. But what I don’t get is that you would think that Square Enix, after years of making these games, would have it down to a science and expand their formula further. They did that with FFXII, they did that with even FFX-2. Even some parts of FFVII and FFVI with its huge central story lets you deviate from the path and let you include not-essential-to-the-story characters (Yuffie pre-FFVII-whore-out-bonanza, Gogo, etc.). One would think that FFXIII would evolve beyond that.
However, in its own demented way, it did. There isn’t any unnecessary padding to make the dungeon-trekking sequences any longer than they need to be. No stupid time-wasting puzzles present that make you backtrack through wades of enemy encounters. Speaking of which, random encounters are taken away; you can now see enemies wandering around and choose whether to attack them or not ala Grandia 1 & 2. Even in a losing battle in an encounter or boss fight, you can always hit Start and restart the battle a few steps away before the encounter.
Yes, you heard me: you can “escape” from boss fights, set up your party, and start the battle over with your items and HP intact. So far, I manage to get by the entire game without the need for excessive grinding. Except for backtracking to kill an enemy or two, you can make it out of all the major fights through using your head instead of just using bigger numbers.
Said battles aren’t a cakewalk too, just like in the old days where you are presented with a number or set options and tactics which need to be exploited and used against enemies. You can’t rely too much on the number of items you have or spam certain class attacks; you need to adapt your combat tactics on the fly. You need to plan your Optimas ahead of a boss fight or a particularly grueling battle. In addition to a character’s main Optima types, you can spend additional Crystal Points (i.e experience points you get from killing things) to branch out to different Optima types later in the game. FFXIII’s blazing fast combat wouldn’t work as such if you actually have control of all three characters.
Even with the fractured bits of the story I piece up from wiki-pages and notes from forum-trolling, I did find FFXIII’s story intriguing. It delves onto the allusion of castes and discrimination in a tasteful manner, and its cast of digital thespians are interesting and fun to watch. Even if one or two of the main cast fall into the category of pandering to those who like their females with excessive moe factors or males to be like Shinji Ikari, two archetypes I dislike with a hint of passion. Sazh and Lightning are well fleshed-out characters that stand out to me well that I can forgive Square Enix for said pandering. Sazh has both the comic relief schtick as well as his own interesting agenda for joining Lighting, and Lightning herself is what happens when you take the good parts of Cloud and Squall, and make her likeable.
Did I forget to mention how pretty the game looks? Just watch it in motion, and don’t forget to pick up your jaw from the ground.
There is always a price when it comes to progress. In FFXIII’s case, it’s the total absence of freedom. No plethora of sidequests to plow through (no, killing targeted monsters on the supposed overworld marked for you don’t really count), no puzzles to break away from all the fighting and exposition, no secret characters to recruit, no chance to even rename your characters, no chance to control a vehicle or some futuristic airship that’s on display in the cutscenes (yet, anyway). The sad part is that the last game (FFXII), for all of the flak it got from fans of the series, shows off monumental upgrades in the genre in terms of combat, story, pacing, and interactive bits.
But as I stated early on, I’m only 30+ hours in. Who knows when and how the game will surprise me until I reach the climax? As for now, let’s hope that at least Square Enix (or any other RPG-creating company) improves upon the groundwork they’ve laid out here in the near future.
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Camping for the English version to be out.