Final Fantasy is a franchise I’ve experienced quite a bit of but not always enjoyed. I decided this year to commit to playing 13 all the way through, especially with it being on the 360. It only took me a short while before I realized I had made a huge mistake.
This game redefines “drawn out,” it’s absolutely insane how much time this game takes to give you literally 10 seconds of narrative, or to trust you with a new mechanic, or do anything. You’ll spend most of your time walking forward and pressing the a button through what feels like an infinite horde of enemies. Levels are almost purely a straight corridor so there’s not a lot of choice or exploration or anything to break the monotonous tone they seem super-intent on setting.
Breaking from the tradition of the series it attempts to streamline a lot of the gameplay but ends up removing a lot of the strategy in the process. Character development and equipment is pretty simple, and due to the new paradigm system ends up blurring together so that characters have less of a distinct feel to them. As far as the combat goes it’s sad that they removed most of the point of issuing single commands and being strategic, instead you just shift roles to do what you need. Especially when the AI doesn’t employ the advanced tools that a human player can and gets you killed in the process. The problem with taking away control from the player over their entire group is that they sometimes stumble and don’t behave in the best way and it’s not readily apparent why. It just makes the worst parts about the change stand out more.
I would suggest that the combat should instead be a stance control system like shifting paradigms, a targetting setup so that you can flag enemies as the active target, and allies as the active heal. Then add in some of the abilites like big spells to be used sparingly. Get rid of this idea of controlling one character, it’s pointless since you only use it to change targets, use items, or unleash spells/summons. All of those could be made a group function and it would fit the metaphor much better. But that probably would have been too radical and would have pissed off too many of the fans who want this nonsense. They ended up architecting themselves into a corner and it just ends up feeling awkward, like most “designed-by-committee” things tend to.
None of the characters are likable, believable, or interesting. They are all awkward and apparently like to be vague and mysterious emo-types. It’s as if they wrote a single bullet point for each character and then torture you by spending 2 hours revealing it through choppy cheesy dialog. But by that point you’ve already easily guessed the gist of it and it’s no longer interesting. It feels very thrown together and dressed up, as if they are trying to trick you into thinking there is a deep and involved back-story where none actually exists.
I was determined to complete FF13 but it was apparently more determined to stop me. You win this round, I’m going to go back to playing games that treat me like a grown up, until next time…
