Forget Spirits Within and Advent Children: Final Fantasy XIII for PlayStation 3 is the best Final Fantasy movie ever.
Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your perspective. Final Fantasy XIII, released Dec. 17 in Japan, is nominally a videogame. But the big draw is that it features the most lavish, jaw-dropping and just plain expensive-looking cinematic cut scenes I've ever seen. Much like Square Enix's films, the storytelling isn't exactly Shakespeare – but the visuals are exquisite.
All this cinematic beauty came at great cost: A lavish (and totally fake) trailer for Final Fantasy XIII was shown at E3 Expo in May 2006, and at that time no one would have guessed it would take nearly four years of development between the announcement and the real thing's U.S. release, scheduled for March 9, 2010.
But besides the giant pile of cash that's clearly been spent on its development, XIII's filmlike grandiosity has also taken a toll on the gameplay. Final Fantasy games, while generally a bit more linear than other RPGs, have historically given players an assortment of ways to approach their role-playing adventure. In sharp contrast, XIII's gameplay is as narrow and streamlined as the cut scenes are extravagant and detailed.
Having played the first 17 hours of the game, I know it can sometimes be fun. But I'm shocked at just how radically the developers have redesigned Final Fantasy, usually not for the better.
My save file says I'm 17 hours in and just starting Chapter 8 of (apparently) 13, and if I'm about halfway through, that means we're looking at a 30- to 40-hour game, consistent with previous games in the series. The fact that the game is neatly divided into two-hour chapters should strike Final Fantasy fans as odd. It is. XIII isn't a big, open, explorable world. It's a series of discrete maps that you run through and forget about entirely, once you're the hell out of there.
There are (so far) six playable characters, and the game swaps them in and out with reckless abandon. One moment you're adventuring with Lightning and Sazh from the demo, the next you're following the adventures of Vanilla and Hope. The game keeps coming up with more-and-more-contrived rationales (plane crash!) to split your party into different groups.
You can have up to three characters in your party, but only when the game says so. And here's the real kicker: You only control one of them during battle, and you don't even get to pick who that is. At least for the first 17 hours, you only control whoever the game tells you to, and the computer picks up the slack on the rest.
I'll explain below why this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But going from an all-time high of five playable characters in Final Fantasy IV all the way down to one in XIII is pretty much indicative of the general ratio that informs this game's design: For every five things you could choose to do in a previous game, XIII offers only one.
With precious few exceptions, the first 17 hours go like this: battle, movie, repeat. There are almost no towns, nonplayable characters to chat up, extra side missions, hidden sequences, fancy equipment to save up for and buy, or reasons to run around and grind enemies for extra level-ups. Heck, there's no need to even wonder what to do next.
When I referred to previous Final Fantasy games as being "linear," I was at least speaking metaphorically. Final Fantasy XIII is a straight line. Every level is one long Hallway of Death, and you run down its interminable length, never moving left or right, always running forward. There is always only one thing to do next, and it is always either fight a short battle or watch a long movie.
These never-ending fight-tubes are the single most ridiculous part of XIII's design. "Monotonous" is the word for it, sometimes excruciatingly so. But it's how the game corrals you into fighting its scripted battle sequences in exactly the order it wants you to.
It is quite important that you fight all of Final Fantasy XIII's battles in order. The first half of the game feels very much like an extended tutorial about how to play Final Fantasy XIII. The Death Star doesn't go fully operational until halfway through, because the system is so fast, convoluted and just plain unique that you wouldn't know what on earth to do with it without starting at the basics.
The nuts and bolts, as we saw in the XIII demo version earlier this year, aren't that different from previous games: You pick a variety of commands (fight, magic, special techniques) from a menu, then watch your character go to town on the enemy. In XIII, you string together three or four different techniques at a time, then launch them all separately.
At least that's how it worked in the demo – but it's not how you play the real thing. First off, although you could string together a custom list of actions from the menu, this takes a couple of seconds, and these battles go far too fast for you to spend time thinking. So what you do is select the all-purpose Auto-Battle command at the top of the menu, and the game automatically strings together a queue of the best commands for your given situation.
This is why the fact that the rest of your party is computer-controlled doesn't make that much of a difference, because you're just relying on the computer to pick your attacks anyway. Only difference is that you, the clunky, meat-based human, just have to press the X button to get your character's part accomplished.
You're not really controlling an individual character. You're using the Paradigm Shift system. Final Fantasy XIII's playable characters can all be assigned to different Roles, which, like the Job systems in previous games, give the character a specialty. There are six:
- Attacker: Fight with weapons.
- Blaster: Cast offensive magic.
- Healer: Cast curative magic.
- Defender: Attract enemies' attacks and guard against them.
- Enhancer: Cast strength buffs.
- Jammer: Cast debuffs on enemies.
The game lets you arrange sets of these abilities, which you can flip between at a moment's notice. To name a simple example that'll take you through a great deal of the game, you might use Attacker-Blaster to take down enemies until they've dealt you too much damage, at which point you'd flip over to Healer-Defender to absorb the blows while you get back up to full strength.
That may sound like very simple gameplay, and for a great deal of the game's first half, it is. Most of my time in Final Fantasy XIII spent not watching movies was just jamming on the ol' X button for hours on end, occasionally shifting Paradigms, confident that the automated battle system wouldn't let me down.
If I ever slacked off a little, the damage was never permanent: If you die, you start right back on the screen before the battle, with no penalty. Heck, if things ain't going right, you can just choose to restart the battle before you kick the bucket. Oh, and you're automatically healed to full strength after each battle.
But there's something that throws a wrench into it all: the Break meter. You're not just chipping away at your enemy's health bar. You have to keep chaining together attacks to fill the orange meter in the upper right corner. When this fills, the enemy becomes weakened, and in many cases this is the only chance you have to do real damage. But the Break meter slowly decreases, and if you take too much time healing yourself or otherwise futzing around, you'll lose the accumulated damage. As you defeat enemies, you earn Crystarium Points, which allow you to upgrade your characters. Although you can choose which Role you want to enhance, you'll likely end up getting enough points to fill all of them up at once.
Fighting all the battles that the game thrust me into has been enough to keep my characters at or near the level cap for each chapter. It's only recently, by which I mean the last hour or so of gameplay, that things really picked up for me. Choosing the right actions for each battle became important when it became clear that only with a calculated, precise combination of Paradigm shifts could I beat up on the bosses enough to Break them while not dying myself. I just wish it didn't take 17 hours of relative tedium to get there.
Whether or not you love Final Fantasy's story will depend largely on whether you like the sort of passionate Japanese melodrama where what you say doesn't matter nearly as much as how loud you yell it. I have at least some leftover fondness for this, which is why I don't mind so much that Final Fantasy XIII's story of lovable rogues caught up in a senseless war is less about plot twists and human emotions than it is about dressing up in runway-model clothing and using impossibly ornate weapons.
Square Enix just doesn't want to give up on its dream of making movies. I wouldn't be surprised if there were as much money and manpower invested into the purely non-interactive sequences of Final Fantasy XIII as there was with the theatrical release of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within. Certainly the scenes are as beautiful – and there's a hell of a lot more than 90 minutes of them.
But here's the problem. Movies abhor nonlinearity. Though Final Fantasy is considered to be one of the game series that pushed the medium toward cinematic storytelling, the RPG genre is now (ironically) one of the least amenable to a strictly linear storyline told with highly detailed graphics. Every bit of customization in an RPG – tweaking your characters, taking branching paths, completing side missions – restricts the designers' ability to create a thrill-ride, action-packed movie of a game.
So Square dumped it all. Well, not all of it: The developers kept just barely enough that Final Fantasy XIII qualifies as a videogame, not a movie. It's got one gameplay mechanic: battles. It's got Gil, shops, Chocobos and Potions, but all these things seem vestigial, there because they have to be, not because they serve any compelling purpose.
I've got half the game to go, and I'll definitely be finding out what's next. So far, Square Enix seems to have accomplished some interesting things, but not nearly enough to make up for what's been jettisoned wholesale.
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