Final Fantasy XIII

So much to say here. Since I haven't posted in close to three weeks, here comes a doozy of a ramble. I will try to organize my thoughts to the best of my abilities here.

Reputation

This game's been out for a few years now, and plenty has already been said about it. "The game is linear as hell, and doesn't even really 'open up' until you're twenty hours in," said some. And this was absolutely true. "The game takes a hundred hours to beat," said others. This one is patently false - my clock sits shy of 52 hours, post-credits, and I wasted a good four or five hours of clocked time away from the TV. "The new and revamped battle system is incredible," said some. On this, I partially agree. But we'll get there. Bottom line, most things you have probably heard about this game are probably true, and it is so drastically different from what I've come to know as a Final Fantasy game. But hey - maybe that's just evolution.

Gameplay

Final Fantasy XIII introduces the "paradigm" battle system, a dynamic that allows you to switch character roles on the fly. It's similar to Final Fantasy XII in that you have very little actual control over your party members, but it's so much better. The six roles available to you are commandos (heavy hitting fighters), ravagers (mage-like fighters who chain together combos), medics (heal, heal, heal), sentinels (human brick walls who absorb all kinds of damage), saboteurs (weaken and destabilize the enemies and make them more susceptible), and synergists (strengthen and stabilize the party). Since only commandos and ravagers dish out any damage, they're the roles you'll use most almost by default; since healing is vital, you'll likely spend plenty of time in the medic role. I'll admit that I had very little use for the other three roles, at least until the end of the game when they became essential to incorporate into any winning strategy. Battles were extremely fast-paced and chaotic in this game, which stood in stark contrast to the Final Fntasy games of old, where lots of time was spent simply waiting for meters to charge up. I don't think the system was implemented as well as it could have been - I'd have loved the ability to control each individual character's role on the fly, for instance, instead of being limited to six trifecta set-ups.

Story

Complete batshit insanity, which really doesn't make it so different from Final Fantasy XII... or Final Fantasy X-2, or IX, or VIII, or several others, really. There's this floating continent of sorts called Cocoon, ruled by a theocracy called the Sanctum. Below here is the rest of the world - Gran Pulse - where the Sanctum is starting to exile a bunch of Cocoon folks for no real reason. Both worlds were created by these mortal god-like creatures called fal'Cie, who at times decide to turn people into l'Cie, servants tasked with something or other. Really though, it's that vague. It's up to the l'Cie to interpret their own focus, and then to complete their task. If they can do that, they're turned into crystal (but given eternal life, maybe), and if they can't do it, they just kind of become zombie things. All of this is clear within the first hour of playing, and then your party all turn into l'Cie, and they spend the rest of the game just bumbling around trying to figure out what their focus is. At any given time, it seemed like one party member wanted to save Cocoon while another one wanted to destroy it, and one guy spent half the game wanting to kill another guy, and one girl was lying to everyone, and none of this mattered because you still got to control all six of them as a team regardless of their purported intentions. Immediately prior to the final boss, one party member turns on four of the others, and then the sixth one makes a few statements or something, and then all is forgiven, and it's final boss time. That final boss? I'm pretty sure it was this ominous looking space-Pope guy who had malformed into something sinister. No effing clue. Of course, the story itself hardly mattered since the game was so damn linear. Which brings us to...

Atmosphere

On the one hand, absolutely gorgeous and impressive. On the other, holy shit, nothing but lengthy corridors. The first two thirds of the game consist of little more than running down corridors fighting enemies and then watching cutscenes. I cannot stress enough how vital hallways were to this game. Sometimes they were caverns, sometimes they were skywalks, sometimes they were a shoreline, but they were always nothing but corridors. Then, finally, in the eleventh of thirteen chapters, the environment opened way the hell up and got really expansive... which only made exploration and backtracking ridiculously tedious. (Chapter 11 was something like fifteen hours long; the other twelve chapters averaged around three in length.) Anyway, then in Chapter 12, we're right back to corridors, which we're in for the rest of the game, fighting strong baddies, entering the menu to level up our characters, and watching cut scenes. The thirteenth chapter took place in what appeared to be someone's idea of how to render cyberspace, with hot pink streaks all over the ground and the sky, and hexagonal white tiles to walk around in. In a game that made very little sense, it stood out for making no sense.

Characters

Credit where it's due - this aspect of the game was a highlight that I expected to be a lowlight. Lightning is the game's protagonist, often described as a "female Cloud Strife" - hardboiled angst and attitude, but little else. (And unlike Cloud, there's no really cool backstory reveal that retroactively explains so many of the character's actions.) She sort of learns to be a mother figure early on in the game, at which point her development arc is more or less complete. Her younger sister, Serah is a l'Cie who has been turned into a crystal, implying that she has completed her focus; Lightning wants to bring her back to this side of the mortal coil. So, too, does Snow, Serah's fiancé, an ego-driven but genuinely self-sacrificing guy. A lot of players hated Snow, apparently. I didn't mind him. Sazh is just a dude who wants his son back, which made him the most endearing and relatable character. Sazh was black, which had me worried right out of the gate - Japan isn't know for being racially sensitive - and my fears were realized immediately when Sazh revealed that he had a tiny little bird living inside his afro. Fortunately, it never got minstrel-y in the least, and Sazh could have just as easily been white, Asian, or whatever else. Whew. (I'll admit, it crossed my mind once or twice that he was basically Michael from Lost - "I want my SON back!" - which, hey, maybe I'm the one being racially insensitive here.) One more aspect of Sazh's personality was that he was the designated "old man" of the group, at the ripe age of what seemed like 35 or so. Hope is a teenager who sees his mom die within the first thirty minutes of the game or so; he spends the next five chapters falling onto his knees in despair every cutscene, and many series fans have declared him the very worst Final Fantasy character of all time. Again, I didn't mind him. Teenage kids are prone to get mopey, especially when, hey, Mom just died! Hope pulls his head out of his ass midway through the game and, like Lightning, ceases developing as a character at that point. Vanille is a quirky young woman whose default running animation included flailing arms. She was dressed in a bikini top and a fur skirt. She spoke with an accent that took me hours and hours to properly place - Australian! - that started out sounding like weird-fetishized-school-girl-with-a-speech-impediment British. Vanille served as the game's inter-chapter narrator, and she was hiding a big secret from everyone. I liked her! Lastly, Fang is Vanille's old comrade from Gran Pulse, that oh-so-dangerous world below Cocoon. Fang was a token female badass, which made her no different than Lightning whatsoever.

Other Isolated Thoughts

• The way weapons and armor were treated here left a lot to be desired. Most Final Fantasy games - hell, most RPGs - have you pick up better and better weapons as you progress through the game. Here, there was a nearly-broken "upgrade" system that involved dumping all kinds of "found resources" into upgrading your weapons. I hated it. Also, there was no armor.
• The way you leveled up was by advancing through the nodes of the "crystarium," a sphere grid spin-off for anyone familiar with Final Fantasy X. I liked it!
• Time was everything in Final Fantasy XIII battles; with a few exceptions, battles were never really unwinnable, but some of them took absolutely forever if you didn't have the right strategy or just weren't strong enough. Nothing like spending twenty minutes on a battle only to receive minimal experience points. Blech.
• The battle difficulty calibration felt way off, especially late in the game. Some of the game's final bosses were absolute pushovers, while some of the standard enemies late in the game were absurdly hard to defeat. Most surprisingly - and I'm not exaggerating in the least here - the very final boss took me one minute to beat. A minute and eleven seconds, really - they time the fights for you and everything - which made me just kind of drop my jaw a little bit, especially since the penultimate boss had taken me five tries and probably close to an hour to overcome. Even that fight, by the way, was really difficult until one time when it just sort of wasn't; using the same strategy for the fifth time resulted in a dead boss really quickly, whereas I'd spend three times as long chipping him down to half health in the other four attempts. Again, the battle difficulty calibration felt inconsistent.
• Dying in battle didn't lead to a "Game Over" screen and a reload from the last save point, thankfully; it meant selecting "retry" on the battle over and over again until you won. I was so thankful for this feature.
• The direct sequel to this game, Final Fantasy XIII-2, is already on my backlog. I'm cautiously excited! I didn't hate Final Fantasy XIII, and it sounds like the sequel is more or less the same game, but shorter and completely wide open. I'm not saying it's the next game I'll be playing, but I'm looking forward to it.

Lastly, this is the first time in my life where I can say I've beaten every Final Fantasy game in the main series. (Except for XI, the online-only enigma. Whatever.) Now that I'm here, I want to briefly offer up my rankings, from best to worst, of the twelve non-online main series games. No explanations necessary, but feel free to hit me back with your own rankings in the comments. Here we go.

1. Final Fantasy VI

2. Final Fantasy VII

3. Final Fantasy X

4. Final Fantasy IV

5. Final Fantasy IX

6. Final Fantasy VIII

7. Final Fantasy V

8. Final Fantasy XIII

9. Final Fantasy XII

10. Final Fantasy II

11. Final Fantasy

12. Final Fantasy III

These are, of course, subject to change.