Final Fantasy XIII review

Ladies and gentlemen, Final Fantasy XIII - the review:

The reason why I’m not giving this review a full fledged intro is because this isn’t really one of my typical reviews where I discuss the game according to different things like sound, graphics and so on. This was what I had in mind for this game, but right now, all I want to do is just talk about it. No flashy intro, no well thought of jokes, no in depth description of anything. Just me, talking about it. Well, writing about it. But you get the point. So, the only way I find myself able to talk about this game is to go for it the old fashioned way. By dividing it in good, bad and ugly.

1) You’re ugly

2) In the end, there are plenty of good things that this game brings to the Final Fantasy franchise. For one thing, there’s the battle system. Without a doubt, XIII has one of the best battle systems that I have ever seen in an RPG. For one thing, it creates this cinematic feeling during a battle by having your character do not one attack per turn, but multiple. You see, the ATB bar fills up as usual, only this time it’s divided in to smaller bars. Each bar is one attack. Albeit some attacks require multiple bars. This way, if you have like 5 attacks stacked up, your character can move in and take three slices, jump back and pull the trigger on her gun and then launch a Ruin magic sphere at your opponent for the killing blow. Although they tried to make it a tad too cinematic by adding a auto-battle function. Which basically is something to get through the mob battles faster. All you need to do is press X from the moment the fight starts, change the channel and have a few laughs at some stand up comedian before you change back a minute later.

I was talking good things, wasn’t I? Good, good, good. Euh. Oh yeah, back to the combat. So, another good thing is the stagger bar. For me it was a huge aid for getting through a lot of the boss battles. Usually they have a shitload of health and that usually means that the battles will take forever. BUT, filling up the bar has the illusion of being faster at times but most of the time I end up killing the enemy before that bar is filled.

The Paradigm system is also quite awesome. And I do mean awesome. So, you are given control of only one character during battle. But, the good news is that this character is the party leader. And as a good party leader, you are able to give commands. These are the paradigms. Not exactly the most specific of commands but they do the trick. Because, a paradigm is basically a macro. Let’s say you have two paradigms. All you need to do is hit L1 in combat and you get a pop up screen with the different ones you have. Select the one you want and the battle immediately goes in to that paradigm, no matter what is happening on screen at the time. Now, what exactly does it change? The classes of your characters. So you can have a medic paradigm, a stat paradigm, a battle paradigm, a stagger paradigm and a few more combinations. The enemies themselves are tuned to this system as well so many times you’ll have to switch up and use your head for a change.

Besides the battle system, I also liked a few of the characters and all of the settings. I mean, the setting are just drop dead gorgeous. Most of the time I just need to stop and soak it in. The music is quite alright as well. But I’ll be damned if I’ll ever like the chocobo song with lyrics.

Now, what I really like about the characters is the fact that the lip synching has been completely redone to fit the English script. And I do mean completely, as the in game scenes and the CG scenes are all almost perfectly synched. It’s just so beautiful to behold. Someone with brains doing the synching! AND IT FITS. I never thought I’d see it, truth be told. In an RPG at least. To be frank, I also think that this game has some of the best voice acting in the franchise, ever.

Oh, I absolutely love Lightning. She slaps around most of the characters like it was nothing and totally gives them the cold shoulder for like 15 hours. Besides her, the only likeable characters are Fang and Sazh. Especially Sazh. Stereotype to the bone, but one hell of a story behind him.

Lastly: Shiva sisters <3

3) Now here’s where I really get in to gear. First of all, this game is NOT an RPG in the terms of: Role Playing Game. It’s more like a Rail Playing Game. For 25 hours straight, all you do is follow a preset path laid down by corridors. Why the game even bothers with a minimap, I don’t know, but it’s there. The fact that you’re being guided by your arm like you’re a retard is even more apparent when you know that you trigger cut scenes just by going forward. In other FF games you had to backtrack or find the place first. But here you’re being guided to it from the get go. There’s no vague directions, no clue, no text. It’s just a fucking dot on the map and the mini map where you need to get to in order to reach the next cutscene. You know that time in an RPG where you’re being guided through an event? Like after you went through a dungeon and there’s just a few more hallways of bad guys or a hallway with an expeditionary cutscene. That is the entire game in a nutshell. Those twenty or less minutes stretched out over hours on end, only given one time to really stretch your legs and explore. Unfortunately this is pretty hard if you don’t have the right tactic. (There’s like the one Behemoth King close to where you first save in the basin. All you need to do is surprise buttsechs him so that you can pre-emptive strike him close to his stagger point and then launch him in the air where you triple commando his ass to death.)

Once your team gets back together, you find yourself unable to give a rats ass to switch up your characters from time to time. Because, if you do, you’ll just waste resources and time. Just pick a team and stick with it, to hell with the rest. For me, I’m sticking to Fang as leader and Lightning and Hope. This is the best team in the game in my opinion, once you get their crystariums up. And this royally sucks for me. I kind of liked having to keep your head in the game because paradigms, skills and people changed every chapter or so.

Oh and the crystarium is the biggest fucking bullshit in this entire game. I mean, come on people. This is a magician blowing smoke up your ass. All it does is that it gives you the illusion that you’re actually contributing to the character’s skill evolution. Let’s start at the beginning. At the end of every battle you’re not awarded EXP but CP, or Crystarium Points. These CP are to be spent at the as such designated menu. Inside this menu you get the selection of characters and within these characters a selection of classes. And you can level these classes as you see fit. The problem is, every character is already given a set of standard crystariums. After you open up all classes for each character, you’ll be damned if you start changing it up then. Sure, you can make it for that little something extra, but basically all character’s paths are preset. Unless you want to make a specific paradigm. I leveled Hope in Commando until he was a level 1 COM. Then I just stopped there. This way I had 3 commandos for when the enemy was staggered. Luckily I did that or else I would have been more pissed that I had been forced to give Hope strength nodes. On that subject, let’s take a closer look at Commando. It’s basically a set of circles connected by one line that goes all the way from the top to the bottom. You can light up the bar to show progress and also the nodes on that line to get the bonuses or abilities they contain. Some times the line branches off but there’s only like one or two nodes on that line. Sometimes that line splits up in to two as well but that only goes so far as well. It’s quite terrible. It’s a waste of time and effort really. Give me back my leveling system, please.

The other thing you need to level up is your gear. Sometimes you get loot. That loot can some times be used to upgrade your weapons. Which is a total crock. You barely get Gil to spend on extra upgrade items because you’re spending it on accessories and items when you can. So the few upgrade items that you do get only get you so far. So after like 10 hours, you realize that switching weapons is impossible by now because you’ve already leveled your weapons to the point where they’ll be better than what you pick up. Restart leveling these weapons? Fuck that noise.

And you’d think you at least had some place to rest up, talk to characters and buy your things. You know, catch a break from all that combat and stuff and just submerge yourself in to the world for just a few minutes. But noooooooooooooooo, there’s no towns. Everything is done via save points. (of which there’s like a fuckton, I tell ya. Once I was near the of a “screen” and I had to pass to another. Before I did, there was a save point. I passed the screen and VOILA another save point just behind it. There wasn’t even a long assed cutscene to warrant that save point.)

Let’s dig in to the story now. Because that one’s a real doozy. From the get go, you have no fucking clue as to what’s going on. The only reason you know who to cheer for is because that bitch is right on the box art. Everyone standing next to her has to be a good guy, right? Then comes text. They say a lot of things but most of the time you’re sitting there with your eyes wide open and your brain doing overtime, trying to think what the hell you just missed. Because you’ll often hear terms, names and whatnots of which you’ve never heard before. And the game assumes you understand every words that’s being said. After that cutscene, they have the BALLS to give you a datalog in which you can find explanations for every term, name, event and whatnot that you just saw. It’s a joke, I tell ya. A crappy one to boot.

What really tickles my balls in this story are these Fal’Cie. Big assed fucking deities that basically watch over humans, as said by the humans. Buuuuut, some of these Fal’Cie need something done. They’re extremely powerful beings and they … well, they go to humans to help them. The thing they do is simple, they enlist humans by unwillingly branding them with this tattoo. This tattoo develops over time and if it completes, it turns that person in to either a Ceith (a zombie basically) or it turns you to crystal for eternal life. During the branding, the human is given a focus. Which is their job that they must complete. That focus however is nothing more than a vague dream and most of the time these humans (called L’Cie once they are branded) have no fucking clue what to do. All they can do is shove their thumbs up their asses and call it a day. If they fail, they become zombies. If they win, they turn crystal. Wooptie fucking dooda. Let’s recap that, shall we. A great deity forces a human to help him by giving him a dream which gives the human only the vaguest clue on what to do otherwise they’re totally boned instead of just regularly boned. Yah, good plan, jackass. And this is like a major plot point in the game. Seriously, all these guys bitch and moan about is their focus. One guy thinks that, one guy thinks so. Snow thinks they’re supposed to save the planet Cocoon. Lightning slaps Snow around (<3)>

Oh, now they we’re at the characters. What the flying fuckballs on a pogo stick is up with Vanille? How on … Cocoon … is that girl even alive? I mean, she’s barely capable of being serious, she’s borderline insanely happy, she’s childish and most of the time she acts like there’s not a care in the world. And most of the noises that she makes. Djeez wiz Louise. Someone needs to choke a bitch, I tell ya.

In the first ten hours or so of the game, Hope is quite annoying as well. It’s like Tidus, Vaan and Squall all rolled in to one brat. Luckily, he grows in to a good character but still, come on, for crying out loud. Nobody liked Tidus and Vaan. And everyone basically loathed Squall with a fiery passion.

One more problem with this game’s characters is that Snow looks like a 30 year old man whilst his FIANCEE looks like a 16 year old girl. Stinking creepy.

I honestly can’t get over the fact that there’s no deviating off the set path. It’s like a million corridors all stitched together.

Lastly: Eidolons are worthless. Yeah, they look pretty and whatnot. But in the end you’re better off if you just use your paradigms on the boss. It’s not like they do major damage or anything. They’re basically a cheat code. Get a few inches of health of your enemy and reset your health to full and remove status ailments. Yeah, but … I don’t know. It’s just a waste to summon them in my opinion because all they do is remove like a minute of battle time, tops. And acquiring these monsters isn’t exactly well handled either. I mean, at first the writers tend to build up to this. But after it’s known WHY these guys show up, the writers are like: Eh, fuck it. And they just randomly toss them in there for me to fight against. Reason why to fight them as well. One moment there’s nothing going on and the next the character … well, you know what happens if you’ve already played the game.

I think I’m going to wrap this up now or I’ll be here for a whole while longer. Now, what am I going to rate this game? It has its ups and downs. Once you have reached the grinding basin, you can basically max out your crystarium in a few days and then you’re on easy street for a long while. (I beat up this one boss that everyone found very hard like he was Rihanna.) This way it’ll be over faster. The overall story isn’t all that great and all that keeps you going is that you want to know how it all ends for your favorite characters. It’s … I don’t know … a solid:

6/10

Don’t get me wrong, a six isn’t bad. It means that I find this game to be above average and borderline good. It has the potential of being so much more. And I’m hoping that all of these flaws will be fixed when we get to Versus XIII, whenever that is. This was a really tough call for me to make because I really wanted to like this game. But most of the time I’m just pressing X to JASON … euh, wrong game. I’m just spamming the X button, that’s what I meant. It might look like there’s a lot going on on screen, but it’s just so boring in the end. Although it’s quite gratifying to finish off this boss you’ve been drilling for about 12 minutes. Slowly chipping away at his health and whatnot.

I’m definitely not recommending that you rent this game first. This game takes a long, long time to get in to and unless you have a free schedule for an entire weekend to get to the 15 - 25 hour markers …

This has been Puddle Jumper with a review of the Square-Enix videogame: Final Fantasy XIII. See you later, alligators. … I promise I’ll never say that again.