Better late than never: Final Fantasy XIII

I wanted to wait to sum up my feelings on Final Fantasy XIII until I'd actually finished the game, but I've come to accept that that may never happen. As long as there are more interesting things to do (like play games that are actually good, get my eyebrows waxed, or bang my face against a concrete wall), Lightning and friends will probably forever be stuck just steps away from the climactic final boss. Seriously, when you stop playing right before the end of the story the game has completely lost you. I think I only got that far because at the time I didn't actually have anything better to do, and I felt some sort of sick obligation given my deep love for earlier entries into the series.

FFXIII received good reviews from many sources I'm familiar with, though mostly each was a different way of saying that Square Enix had "distilled the JRPG genre down to its essential form". In my opinion that's a positive way of saying they stripped all the interesting bits off of the genre's mouldering corpse and wrapped it up in snazzy new graphics - not something I generally give gold stars for. Oh wait, they didn't strip away all the interesting bits like exploration, complete freedom to pick and customize your party - you just have to play through the 30+ hour story first. In abstract I can see what the developers might have been thinking, since most people who play JRPGs do all the extra bosses and side missions and such before going to what should be a stirring and emotional final battle. But since they've done all those extra things the party is so powerful that you can kill the final boss by trotting up and swatting it firmly across the nose. Anti-climactic, but that's the nature of the beast. And hell, usually by the time I get to the final boss in one of these games I'm so impatient to see how the story ends that I don't mind an easy battle.

But moving all the fun extra stuff to "post-story play" might have worked if the story was interesting enough and the battle system was fun. Neither of these things are true, but I'll start with the story. It made about as much sense as a wizard hat on a giant turd, and about three hours in I was ready to stuff most of the characters into a sack and hurl it off a building. Lightning I would allow to live, mostly because she spends a good portion of the game being as annoyed with everyone as I was. Its as though Square knew they were creating a bunch of annoying twats, but it was all ok because you get to vicariously knock the crap out of one of them through Lightning. Some of them get less annoying later in the game (I'm looking at you, Hope) but by then the ship of my hatred had already sailed. Anyway, back to the story. You have your two cities who may or may not be at war with each other, giant god-things that were responsible for the well-being of all citizens and could inflict quests on mortals to serve their ends, but if the wrong god-thing gave you a quest you were branded a traitor and chased to the ends of the lands. And if you finish your quest you turn into crystal and sleep for a thousand years. Or something. Really, I stopped paying attention halfway through and just enjoyed the pretty cutscenes. Because for all its faults, FFXIII is a damn good-looking game. You might say that I can't remember what the story is about because its been a few months since I played, but I swear to you it really is that weird and confusing. Now I'm at the end and I know which god-thing I need to kill, which might destroy the world or it might not, but at that point I was just too tired to care.

And so I arrive at the battle system, which is what most people were referring to when they talked of distilling the RPG formula down to essentials. You only have two stats, Strength and Magic, and each character has a limited number of jobs they can do. The point is, or so the game assured me, is to find cunning combinations of the various jobs to beat the enemies most efficiently. All well and good in theory, but for the most part there is a limited set of job sets (called Paradigms) which are actually useful. Sure, you can use other Paradigms - if you want to get your face eaten off by the first wobbling lump of gelatin you come across. So the combat basically boils down to switching between the same five or six Paradigms and mashing the Auto-Attack button until you get thumb cramps. The attacks are another example of the "Sure, you CAN do it this way... if you want to lose" type of "freedom" FFXIII contains. You CAN pick your characters' attacks manually, but the combat is so fast paced that by the time you do so some brightly colored monstrosity has already kicked your balls in. One could argue that the Chain Stagger system adds strategy to the whole mess, but you are still just mashing the same button only it might help if you timed your mashings a bit. The only redeeming quality is the same as what got me through most of the story - its really pretty to watch. So even though all I was doing was jamming the same button down over and over at least I could watch Lightning and Fang flip around like the laws of gravity were merely a polite suggestion.

Around Chapter 11 (which is VERY late in the story), you finally get some freedom to wander around the landscape. But the game makes a not-so-subtle point of letting you know that you should not do that until you finish the story. Most of the monsters range from being inconveniently hard to downright impossible, and there are several areas of the map that are completely inaccessible until you... wait for it... finish the goddamn story. Because presumably at that point you will be high enough level to take them on. In fact, if you read the game guide it flat out tells you to just keep going and come back later. Well fuck you, I said and proceeded to get myself sliced up proper by a giant wolf-lizard. This only made me more determined so I doggedly searched for the right combination of preemptive strikes and weapon combinations until I handed its ass right back to it - and then repeated the process until I had enough experience to beat the next tier of inadvisable fights and so on until I got to the limit of the current skill tree. That's right, you can't fully upgrade your party until after the story is done, and by this time I felt like the developers were beating me about the head with the damn story so I gave in if only to make them shut up about it for a while. Of course, all my ill-advised free ranging had powered my party up a considerable amount so even though the following fights were probably supposed to be challenging, I was breezing through them with little more than a couple titty-twisters and a whack on the head. So if the developers were trying to avoid the super-powerful endgame party problem, I found a way around it anyway. Teach them to railroad me.

And shortly after that came the point where I stopped playing. I'm not sure exactly what distracted me away from FFXIII, but that doesn't matter because a ham sandwich could have done the job at that point. As I've said before, generally once I get this close to the end of a game, I'll stop all the piddling about on side missions and race to see how the thing ends. But here I saw the end in sight and all I could say was "Meh". I may go back and finish it, but only if there is absolutely nothing else to play. And the sad bit is the thing did so well with the critics that Square is probably going to decide this dumbing-down of the RPG battle system was a good idea and continue something like it down the line. Which would mean a permanent end to our relationship.