yay, tacos!

Much to the delight of Emily, I’m sure, I’ve finally finished Final Fantasy 13. Emily was not a fan of this one, and stopped paying attention back at about hour 7 while I logged a little over 66 hours total. I’ve given myself a few days to reflect on the game and let some of the thoughts become coherent enough to put them down .

Final Fantasy games are a little hard to quantify though – like the stories of The Crow franchise, they’re meant to stand completely alone with a few obvious exceptions. Is it fair to compare Final Fantasy 13 against the original Final Fantasy, or even the 9th? In the end, I decided that while the games may be disconnected, the invocation of the Final Fantasy franchise name makes the comparisons apt and permissible.

Measuring stick
Let me be up front here. My preferences in regards to FF games tend to differ from most people. Of the more recent era of games, I find 8 to be my favorite while I severely disliked 9 and couldn’t even finish 12. 7 was great, but generally overrated. I also enjoyed X and X-2 a lot.

JRPG vs RPG vs Interactive Movie
I saw the headlines last week where Bioware said FF13 was not an RPG. I didn’t bother reading the article because I didn’t need to – I’ve read similar arguments against JRPG’s over the years and having played this one could probably bullet point out every argument they made for you already. The Final Fantasy games may have epitomized what console RPGs were long ago, but no one will argue that they’ve also created the stereotypical JRPG – and many people hate that. I understand it. I get it. For a large part, I agree. A true RPG should allow you open-ended play. Take on quests; don’t take on quests. Progress your characters or don’t. Progress the story or don’t. Final Fantasy games have always had storylines for the player to follow. Over recent years, they’ve become increasingly stricter – but they’ve typically permitted a modicum of freedom. With FF13, that freedom was almost completely stripped away until you hit about the 24 hour mark. That’s right – for an entire day the player has little to no freedom. I think it was until hour 16 that you didn’t even have the choice of who was in your battle party. There was no exploration of any sort – just keep pushing forward and button mashing the fights.

Once you hit about the 24 hour mark (arrive on Grand Pulse), the world and the game opens up a bit. You can finally choose your battle party and you can start partaking in a lengthy side quest. You can even finally backtrack a little bit and do a little bit of CP farming (FF13′s equivalent of level grinding – more on this later). The game finally switches from an interactive movie to something resembling a JRPG.

You can finally change your battle party, but you probably won’t
Gamers are already familiar with the concept of roles and classes and the idea that certain characters are just inherently better X than Y. Here, each of the six characters has one role that they’re the best at of the entire party – and one other role that they’re pretty good at. With this concept of super specialists and secondary roles, you can choose your battle party and set roles in ways that you never need to change your party – ever. The standard party is Lightning, Hope and Fang. Between them, you’ve got solid versions of every role in the game. Vanille, Snow and Sazh? Completely pointless.

In previous games, characters not in the battle party either received no experience, or received only a percentage of experience. Here, everyone receives full CP (Crystarium Points – 13′s version of XP) whether they were in the battle or not. This makes it easier to level up the entire party – but there’s no need to – the standard party can get you through the rest of the game.

Leveling up the entire party was sometimes necessary for single multi-party battles in previous Final Fantasy games. You’d be going up against some huge boss where your party would be split into teams – and you’d switch from team to team to coordinate efforts. There is no such battle here. You can completely ignore half of your party members and there’s no downside to doing so.

Who’s your favorite summon?
One of my favorite things in past Final Fantasy games has been summons/Aeons/Eidolons/whatever. Usually, but not always, only one character can call each summon. Sometime that’s due to classes, sometimes it’s story based. Final Fantasy 8 had a really interesting way of doing things with the junctioning of the Guardian Forces. You could set up any of the characters to be able to summon any of the GFs, but doing so increased the relationship between the character and the GF. The result was that the higher the relationship, the stronger the GF’s attacks. So it paid to associate one or two characters with certain GFs.

In 13, it’s story based. Each of the characters is selected by a specific Eidolon and only that character can summon them. Great, nothing wrong with that – that makes sense. The problem is that since you only control one character – even during battles – you only have access to one summon at any given time. This right here is the only reason you’ll ever have to ever change your party – or your party leader. Otherwise, if you’re in a fight with someone who is weak against fire and you want to bring out Bahumut – tough luck – you’re stuck with Odin since you’ve got Lightning as your party leader.

In the 66 hours of gameplay, I think I called Shiva once and Odin maybe three or four times. They’re really just not needed. This is a big departure from the previous games where there were a number of fights where you just had to bring out the big guns.

Set them and forget them
The paradigm system is interesting – allowing you to set switch between defined and available roles/classes at will. You can set up super offensive, defensive or balanced paradigms. Give yourself two healers and a sentinel (Combat Clinic) for those times where you’re desperate and need to heal everyone quickly. Build up the chain gauge quickly with two ravagers and a sentinel (Mystic Tower).

Thing is – that like with the lack of need to change the party members/leader – there is very rare need to ever use anything different than one set of paradigms: Delta Attack, Mystic Tower, Relentless Assault, Evened Odds, Protection and Combat Clinic. With those six, you’ll be pretty much prepared for anything that’s thrown at you. This isn’t a horribly bad thing – but it leads into the next point.

Collect underpants, ?, profit
By now you’ve probably noticed a recurring theme: you never have to change pretty much anything in your settings. The same holds true for your battle strategies. Aside from a few of the bosses/major battles, you can go through every battle with the following set of commands:

1) Start with Delta Attack – use at least long enough for the Commando to attack once. The Commando slows down the depletion of the chain gauge. Not having a Commando attack at least once prolongs most battles far too long as you’ll never stagger your enemies.
2) Switch to Mystic Tower – with two Ravagers, the chain gauge will fill up quickly.
2a) If the chain gauge ever depletes completely for some reason, restart at step 1.
3) Once the chain gauge fills and the enemy is staggered, switch to Relentless Assault to finish them off.

If you need to heal during the battle, switch to Protection or Combat Clinic depending on how dire the situation is. Sometimes, if you know the enemy is susceptible to status ailments or you know you need some status enhancements, start the battle with Evened Odds or Protection to get things going before moving onto Delta Attack.

That’s it. 99% of every battle can be won with that simple strategy. Why? Because of the AI of the characters who automatically choose the proper attacks when you choose Auto-Battle – which is the first and default option for every turn.

Doesn’t this game have any games?
One of the things that Final Fantasy has become known for is the massive number of side quests. Usually, there are optional stories/missions and a sub-game that’s completely different. I’m referring to things like the Chocobo Racing, Blitzball and my favorite: Triple Triad. These are those side games that are so addicting that they double your logged play time. 13 has a distinct lack of them. There are basically two here: The L’cie Mark Hunts and the Chocobo Digs.

The L’cie Mark Hunts is pretty extensive – I’ll give it that – but it’s really boring. There are markers throughout the game. Once activated, you can choose to undertake a mission – find and kill a certain enemy. The enemy is marked on the map – so it’s no great mystery as to which one it is. Kill it and other markers activate. There are about 60 throughout the game, and some of them are mandatory to progress through the story.

The Chocobo Digging quest can be done in tandem with the Mark Hunts. While riding the chocobos through certain areas (they’re only available in basically one area), they’ll perk up and notice that there is a buried item in certain places. Find that place with a hot/cold radar system and dig up the item. Find 20 items and get a trophy/achievement. The items are decent, but nothing extraordinary.

But that’s it. There’s nothing that will draw you in like Blitzball or Triple Triad, and that’s disappointing.

There is an area on Cocoon that is supposed to be some sort of domed pleasure palace like the Golden Saucer in FF7. You visit there once, and there seems to be no way back later. This seems like it would have been a great place to have some side games.

I’m lonely, someone talk to me
One of the biggest criticisms of this game is the lack of towns and an airship. If you go through the L’cie Mark Hunt quest, you can unlock points that you can teleport back and forth between, but that’s hardly as cool as the standard airship that has become a fixture in Final Fantasy games. They also only allow you to teleport around Grand Pulse. There seems to be no way to re-visit any of the early locations in the game. The distinct lack of towns leads to an absence of NPCs to talk to. There is an empty town on Grand Pulse where the only survivor is a robot hidden away – he offers you a short side fetch-quest that you can finish in 20 minutes. The rest of the NPCs are on Cocoon, and every one of them is cowering in fear. The exception to this is a short 5 minute flashback scene with a small handful of NPCs and a few more in the domed pleasure palace I mentioned earlier. Personally, I like hearing all the things that the NPCs say and missed that from the game.

You can’t finish this until after you finish this
Some of those L’cie Hunt Marks are so difficult that you need to be super powerful to complete them. “Ok, great, so I’ll grind and farm some CP to level up my party.” But therein lies the rub – at least for me. In order to unlock the last level of the Crystarium (which you use to boost your stats/abilities), you need to complete the main story. So… before you battle the last boss, you can grind as long as you want – but you can only boost your guys up to a certain level. Grinding and farming CP will give you a headstart on filling up the Crystarium after you unlock the last level, but I personally start losing a lot of interest if there’s no more real story to drive me forwards. Beyond that, there’s just trophies and achievements. I love trophies and achievements, but I’m not a fiend like some people. Your mileage may vary, and that’s ok.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up
I realize my reviews end up reading like a laundry list of complaints and gripes. I guess they are. But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the game. I did – I just didn’t love it. I liked the characters and the story was enjoyable enough to get me through it. Battles, while monotonous in the lack of strategy needed, were fun. The character/monster design was interesting most of the time. In the end though, I decided to quit about 3/5 of the way through the L’cie Mark Hunt side quest because there was just no real reason to keep going besides trophies – and what was left was going to take a lot of grinding – more than I was really willing to commit to any more.

Final Fantasy 13 is a fun game, but sometimes it only resembles a Final Fantasy game if you squint your eyes and turn your head sideways.

Rating:

Added bonus – FSF: frequently searched for
since I’ve noticed a lot of people searching for these things and hitting my blog.

Yuj, the blue haired guy
I don’t know why people seem to be so obsessed with him. He’s not that interesting – and his total screen time comes out to about 30 seconds. Sorry for all you fans out there, but after his intro, he and NORA only show up for one more short cut scene. He may have been in the short flashback scene when you play as Snow looking for Serah, but I didn’t notice him. If he was there, he was just an NPC with 2 lines.

No retry bonus
No, there does not seem to be any sort of bonus for beating an enemy/boss without retrying the battle. It seems like there should be one, but there isn’t.

The Registration Gift
It’s just an item for FF14. It’s not any sort of DLC for FF13.

Now, onto a real RPG – Dragon Quest: Origins.