Read the datalog and done looking through it (might still be a big rant
). Time to post my ramblings/review.
It's not really all that
SPOILER-heavy despite the wall of text implying it may be, but I guess this should be a fair warning of
SPOILERS.
I just felt like letting all of my thoughts on this game out, I don't really mind if no one reads all this. :/
Characters, story, and world
This is a game that focuses on the six playable characters above anything else in terms of the writing, and it shows. Everything is put on the backburner in comparison to the characters: the villains, the plot, and in some ways, the actual conflict itself. Whole chapters aren't really that dedicated to advancing the plot, but rather to advancing the characters. This leads to many of the "middle" chapters (2-8) being heavily focused on the characters and their experiences, not what's going on around them. To some extent, this never really changes, with a pretty small cast NPCs, villains that have about a page of dialogue then disappear, and several moments still dedicated to the character's and their actions and feelings rather than their goal. Though if you ask me, the characters were a strange cast, some good, some annoying, some just boring. I never really felt Final Fantasy games had a strong cast of characters outside of a few though, so eh.
I thought all of the the characters had their share of bad dialogue and annoying personality traits, hate it or love it. Lightning had some of the worst lines in the game if you ask me, even worse than Snow, with an even lamer personality that's somewhat made up for through her super kung-fu antics. Snow is the chummy guy, similar to what you'd see in an anime/manga for kids/teens, and he never really changes that trait into something more "realistic", much to my dismay. Vanille...is like a carbon-copy of the "sugar-rush girl with 'dark' hidden thoughts", though I admit she was less annoying than Snow at times. Sazh is my favorite character of the game, now one of my favorite FF characters, and the best of the cast in most aspects imo. Outside of the unnecessary fro, he had a somewhat natural personality, he's a pretty strong and likable character from the beginning to the end, and while he was the "comic relief", it was usually so tastefully spaced out Vanille and Snow feel more like joke characters than he does. Hope is a terrible character at the beginning, wimpy and whiny with a somewhat flawed obsession with revenge. As the game progresses, however, he develops into a stronger and more assertive character, and manages to outshine nearly everyone else in the cast. I thought Fang was kinda boring most of the time, and by the end I ended up feeling neither positive nor negative about her. The cast is certainly a good case of "your mileage may vary". Some people dislike characters that others like, and vice-versa.
The other characters of the game, including many of the antagonists, get little to no development at all, and it doesn't seem like they wanted you to know much about them in the first place. You can summarize nearly every non-playable character in about one or two sentences. There's never really a moment that the focus switches to an NPC character to strengthen their...character, and even though the playable characters interact with them, it still feels like you should be paying much more attention to the playable character(s) and not the person they're interacting with. Many of the NPCs only have about one lengthy scene, and you either never see them again or the next time they appear, they get a few lines then have nothing else to contribute.
As I said earlier, it feels like the story is put in the backseat in favor of the characters, and if you're trying to focus more on the progression of the plot a huge chunk of the game is going to fill like filler. Nearly all of the early chapters are dedicated to making the characters interact and develop, while nothing particularly new gets added to the plot these characters are all intertwined in. You progress from area to area, watching cutscene after cutscene after cutscene, and the characters change, reveal small details about themselves, etc., but you never really discover anything new about your goal (hell, you never really know what the heck your goal is in the first place) until you're several hours into the game. The early chapters feel designed to get you acquainted with the characters, so when they actually start doing stuff, you might actually care.
But when the plot moves, it moves
fast. Terms are shot right at you in quick sucession, characters already know each other before they meet within the game's series of events, and/or everybody's already running around kicking ass, leaving the player to have catch up and figure out what the hell is going on. It's as if you've been thrown right in the middle of a Sci-Fi action film. The characters already know about the several things they encounter while the player doesn't, which probably causes a good chunk of what could have been the "story" to have already been told before you ever even finished the opening cinematic, and forcing you to read the datalog to get anything out of the weird terms they toss around constantly.
The pacing of the story jumps all over the place however, due to the way they did things. You get a TON of exposition thrown at you, then it's nothing for hours, then another huge clump of it gets jammed in your face, then nothing once again, then another big piece jumps at you, then the game's over. It causes a strange sequence of events where sometimes you never really know if this person you meet or the things you do are really going to have a great impact on the plot in the end. I ended up feeling like nothing really happened by the end of game, like I never experienced much despite the amount of time I put into it. It's a similar feeling XII gave me, to be honest.
As for the world of Final Fantasy XIII, it's pretty well-realized. There's lot of small details that can be explained through the datalog. Cocoon and Pulse feel like two different places, with their own distinct traits. My biggest problem: you read more than you experience. You hear about all these objects, people, and locations, and you experience with them is either extremely limited or non-existent. It was kind of a turnoff because I'm not really getting supplementary data on something from the datalog to make something of interest a bit more detailed like these codex/journal-type things usually do, that pretty much
is all the main data I get on it.
Graphics, music, and presentation
This game looks good. There's honestly not a lot to say here aside from a few aspects looking pretty weak (the ever-so-popular grass texture in Pulse discussion, for example). They animate pretty well, though maybe too exaggerated and floaty in some cases. The CG's bright and vibrant, and mostly used at all the points where it'd have the maximum possible impact. It was nice to just take a look around and examine your surroundings in a few areas. Though sometimes I thought the art-direction could be all over the place, most of the character designs feel out of place with each other, and though it might have been due to the structure, many areas on Cocoon didn't feel cohesive at all.
Which reminds me, the camera in this game is pretty damn bad. For some reason(s) that I'll never understand, they decided to combine a fixed camera with a controllable camera. This results in the game being an ~40 hour battle between you and game over who should be able to see anything. This ends up causing some annoying enemy encounters, and/or just made navigation in general difficult. Pick one style please, don't try to combine both.
Much of the music in this game blends. Personally it ends up being both a bad and good thing because I end up forgetting there was music playing in the first place and it makes it harder to find anything about the soundtrack memorable, but I also get some tracks that make for absolutely wonderful background music. The vocals in a number of the songs are interesting, just make it harder for most of them to be memorable and stick in my mind, but the remixes of some tracks are pretty awesome. The battle tracks are good, and I absolutely love every single character theme. Also gonna take this chance to rage about the victory fanfare, which I find to be a really boring track, and I don't even care about the lack of the classic one.
The game has a pretty good cast of voice actors. I consider no one aside from Vanille to really be "bad" (though maybe "annoying" is a better word in this case), and thought the best work came from Sazh, Hope, and despite the dialogue, Snow's voice actors. The only lines I thought were particularly strange were the voice clips during battle, particularly the grunts and screams, from Lightning's old lady squeal, Fang's whoops and growls, and Vanille's moans of sexual pleasure.
Also, I'm going to randomly say that the font is pretty good. It's at a fairly bearable size, and pretty attractive to look at. There's a lot of RPGs (games in general?) this gen with fonts that are pointlessly small and aren't even that nice to look at, so Tales of Vesperia and Final Fantasy XIII take the cake so far for fonts that are adjustable and/or already look okay. The menus are also pretty attractive, with a minimalistic but stylish look that really impresses.
Gameplay and combat
I consider this to be the meat and bones of Final Fantasy XIII (well, I consider it to be so in most games really), and it's where I see the most of the flaws and good ideas in this game.
I'm gonna start with the linearity. Personally, I don't mind if a game, even an RPG, is linear, I had fun with X afterall. The problem is, they don't do anything to make up for the linearity and even take advantage of it. There's a consistent "cutscene->move forward->battle->move forward->battle->move forward->cutscene->boss->end of chapter" format (oh wait, every now and then you take an alternate path to a dead end with a treasure sphere with junk in it), and they do almost nothing to make that less monotonous. X wasn't exactly a great example of good level design here, but that's what makes the fact that there's no real improvement so disappointing in my eyes. There's no real down time, no ability to backtrack out of this area to do something else, no sidequests, and only one part that kinda did something new to the format. You just push forward, finding and opening a treasure sphere every few minutes. You're even forced to use the leader/party they want you to use until later, which makes the experience feel even more structured into a particular format that you can't really escape from.
They could've just made a special story minigame using the Eidolons, and it would've have made things less monotonous and provided you didn't need a perfect score or something, they might even be fun. It would've been interesting to have an Odin minigame like the motorcycle chase in FFVII, a race against the PSICOM soldiers on airbikes using Shiva, and driving Brunhyldr through the crazy and fun areas of Nautilus.
Then after about 15-20 hours of this format, the game drops the Pulse bomb on you. This place is pretty big, at least in comparison to anything you've seen in Cocoon, and there's a large number of place to go and monsters to fight, some appropriate right after arrival, some not so much. The problem is that game doesn't really ease you into this at all, which is kinda overwhelming at the amount of stuff they can now do (or at least do more easily).
In many previous FFs, they eased you into the increasing freedom, as you obtained things like canoes, chocobos, and boats, which allowed you to access places you couldn't before. This all comes before you eventually obtain your ultimate mode of transportation, the airship, and you now have free reign to go almost anywhere you want and do almost whatever you want. The player usually isn't too overwhelmed by this, because they were already accustomed to gaining increased freedom after getting other modes of transportation.
Going to Pulse in XIII is like doing the opening scene of FFVI, then being given an airship right afterwards and the freedom to do whatever you choose (I would compare it to getting the airship in X, but it just doesn't fit, as X had more backtracking than going anywhere new). It's a lot to take in all at once, and now you'll probably want to (maybe even have to) spend time adjusting to this "free" new world, which messes up the pacing they established in the first 20 hours. It's an interesting format, but I don't really get what was going on when they put all that together because of how basically jumps from one to the next in an instant.
Jumping from the linearity, I'm going to the Crystarium system. Basically, it doesn't seem like much but a really simplified and even more streamlined Sphere Grid. You get Crystogen Points, pick a role, and use the points to progress a character to their next stat boost, ability, or other bonus within that role, in a very boring path with no interesting branches or deviations. Always came off like a generic leveling system that got stretched out. Your progression can go only go so far, with the Crystariums being limited, expanding only when you defeat certain bosses. There aren't that many abilities with unique properties, so along with the limitations, you aren't that open to pulling off any neat "tricks" with the Crystarium system. You get each character's three missing roles later on, which you would think would make for more interesting party setups, but the game makes it really difficult for you to go beyond each character's original three Crystariums, with it costing like two or three times as much to master as the character's original roles, with somewhat insignificant bonuses at that. It's a really dry progression system, and a terrible "customization" system.
And from the character growth is the weapon growth. This is easily the weirdest, and possibly the worst gameplay mechanic in the whole game to me. The explanation given to you when it's first unlocked is terrible, basically telling you to "throw junk together until the weapon/accessory levels up and gets stronger". Unless you have a bit of help, it's your job to just throw crap at the wall until something sticks. Even in the post-game, it never got interesting to me.
And the two above details come together within the Paradigm and Active Time Battle system, which in my book is easily the most polished aspect of the entire game, even though it still has issues. The system is fast, and basically breaks up the ATB bar seen in IV-IX, X-2, and XII into several segments, with an action (or actions) corresponding to those segments. This redesign helps the the combat fight against the occasional down-time that showed up in those games, with something almost always happening during a battle. This keeps combat active and helps to retain your interest, which is nice. The Paradigm Shift system is fun, being a lot like the Dress Sphere system of X-2, which I liked a lot, and the idea is made easier to understand and use in this game. Every now and then you'll be switching them a lot, and changing your deck a lot, which keeps you on your toes sometimes. Though personally, I never really felt like the system made it so each player's gameplay experience can be very unique, like I would with Dress Spheres and other job systems. Also, the game has a retry option, which in the case of some fights is basically the same thing as a "run" option, but it's welcome nonetheless because it can be used on bosses too!
The bosses were the most enjoyable part of the game. The only ones I disliked were the Eidolon battles, because nearly all of them are nothing but trial and error. Most of them throw you into battle without warning, in many cases changing your party and Paradigm deck without even letting you adjust, and I don't even know why these fights are speed runs to the death. You basically keep dying and retrying until the winning strategy works, or until you find the winning strategy (which you keep retying until it works). Not very fun.
Now that I'm done with the things I thought were interesting and/or good, there are things I dislike. First of all, I really don't like if the leader is KO'd it's game over. I just don't like how when other party members being KO'd it's perfectly fine, but my character being KO'd apparently throws off the laws of the universe and I have to get Game Over before the universe implodes. Second, going along with the first thing, I don't like how one can't change the Leader mid-battle. I'm not asking for full party control, it's just that if someone's acting in a manner where I'd have an easier time if I were controlling them for a moment, I'd like to have that option, along with the option to have some amount of ability to adjust the AI.
The Missions of Pulse are an interesting aspect that was sorta nice to see return from FFXII, but it's pretty much the only sidequest to do just like in that game. I kinda miss talking to certain people, doing some kind of other sidequest, and/or visiting some secret area to find special weapons and other awesome
surprises. Also, the Marks in FFXII were pretty impersonal, but this takes it to another level. The people that are the stones have no names, their story is short and kinda hard to relate to or care about, and it's basically nothing but "this monster caused trouble, go to its location and kill it", with so far only one Mission requiring you to do something different to draw the Mark out. I found XII's hunts addictive, but I get burnt out on XIII's.
Overall, the gameplay is fun, but a lot of is too strict and feels designed to maintain a certain experience that you weren't really intended to deviate from. The game just ends up feeling really simplistic and straightforward about nearly everything, and the story/characters didn't fascinate me too much outside of Sazh. As I said before, I would have really liked a New Game+ that fully unlocks the Crystarium from the moment you can use it, lets you level all six roles the moment Crystariums are unlocked, decreases the insane CP cost for the extra three roles to something normal, increases the item drop rate, and lets you change your party and leader from the beginning. As it is, the game like zero replay value for me, with nothing to push me to touch this again after this first fun.
I'm not good at making numbered scores, but I think I'd give the game a 7.5/10. It's on the middle or bottom rung of my favorite FFs, it's not even in my top three (J)RPGs this generation, and I found myself pushing through pretty much because of the combat, which was beginning to wear thin by the end as well. But it was in a way addictive and I felt like I just
had to go on, even if by the end I never felt like I could ever replay this game. What I ended up getting doesn't equate to worth a four year wait imo, but at least it wasn't outright bad.
