Final Fantasy XIII Impressions – Part 1
Platform: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 (version tested)
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Final Fantasy XIII is a huge game: Huge in budget, huge in scope, huge in hairstyle height and degree of difficulty, huge in expectation from the gaming community and especially huge in length. There’s apparently a good 50 hours of play time including the story, side quests and some healthy grinding. So rather than deliver one huge review when the game has sunk out of relevancy, I’ve instead decided to publish my thoughts as the game sinks out of relevancy. So with that, here are my first impressions of Final Fantasy XIII, having finished the first of three discs of the Xbox 360 version and accumulated about 7.5 hours of gameplay.
This edition of Final Fantasy starts off in the city of Cocoon, a city closed off from its underworld, Pulse. Both are overseen by their own fal’Cie, giant magical organisms which rule over the humans. The people of Cocoon are in constant conflict with Pulse to the point where citizens who have come in to contact with anything Pulse related are sent off to be ‘Purged’. A group of assorted characters, including the former soldier and current protagonist Lightning, come in to contact with the Pulse fal’Cie and are branded as l’Cie, unwilling servants to the fal’Cie, and as enemies of Cocoon. Having landed themselves in this, our heroes need to escape from the Cocoon authorities and discover why they’ve been branded l’Cie. World saving ensues, presumably.
They’re all waiting for the game to get good
Let me get my major gripe out of the way: Final Fantasy XIII is incredibly slow to start off. The game trickles information about its world, its story, its characters and its mechanics so horribly slowly. Until about four hours in to the game, you don’t even have a major goal apart from move forward. Even after all this, the game still reveals very little. I can respect that this is a narrative choice by Square Enix, leaving the player as confused as the characters, but they could have left a much better impression if they hooked us in immediately with even a sliver of story or a flesh of character (and no, the flesh exposed by the cast’s lack of costume does not count).
The problem with this withholding of information is that for the first couple of hours – for half of the first disc – there is no real hook to draw the player in There’s no real incentive to keep on playing other than the pretty graphics, the lustre of the Final Fantasy name and the promise that the game becomes ‘good’ about 20 hours in. It’s as if Square Enix assumed that this would be the first Final Fantasy and, by extension, the first JRPG many of its players will be experiencing, and decided that speaking down, speaking loudly and speaking slowly is the only way to treat them.
Numbers? Bars? Hair? Yep, it’s a JRPG alright
They take a similar stance in introducing the battle system. Admittedly, it is a somewhat unconventional system, one which focuses more on broad tactics than on micromanaging individual characters like in past Final Fantasy games. The horribly named Paradigm system has you switching character classes on the fly depending on what’s required. For instance, you default as the all-assault Paradigm, with one character dealing physical damage and the others using offensive magic. But if you need healing, you’ll need to switch over to a defensive Paradigm, one with a healer class. Like everything else in the game, the combat mechanics are handed to you piecemeal – you don’t even have full reign of the battle system by the end of the first disc. It’s almost insulting how much the game underestimates its players.
This horrible pacing sounds like a deal breaker. But here’s the thing: Beneath the perpetually condescending tone, beneath the exposition that’s at once dense and sparse, beneath all the slog is the makings of a great video game. The story doesn’t seem like it will be anything remarkable, but the open conflict between the main characters – something we don’t see until hour five – is something I want to see more of. What I’m most keen to see through to the end, though, is the combat system. Though the battles are mostly simple seconds-long affairs in Disc 1, I anticipate epic battles that stretch for minutes, switching Paradigms after almost every move and strategising the hell out of the screen-filling enemies.
Purdy!
I should make a note about the graphics, considering every fanboy and his blog has done so, counting Ps and Is until they go blind in one eye and are forced to live out the rest of their lives as one-eyed fanboys. To put it simply, Final Fantasy XIII looks fantastic. From the enemy designs to the environments you traverse to the slick and polished menus, this game exudes style. The only issue I have with the Xbox version is the blocky bits of compression that pop up during the pre-rendered cut scenes, something which borders on distracting. But by and large, the game looks technically and artistically impressive.
So it is with high hopes that I swap out the glorified tutorial that was the first disc and move on to the second disc. I am eagerly waiting for the game to stop holding my hand, untie my kid-leash and cut the umbilical cord and let me fully experience its universe, its story and its battle system. If Final Fantasy XIII fails to deliver on these counts, heads will roll... for a little bit until the gallons of hair product bonds them to the ground. I’m expecting something epic, Disc 2. Don’t fail me now.
Progress report: Completed Chapters 1-4, the equivalent of Disc 1 on the Xbox 360 version. Elapsed game time: 7hrs30mins.
