It’s been a ser­i­ously long time com­ing. Final Fantasy XIII was announced over 5 years ago and it wasn’t until around two years ago that foot­age of the actual game was released to the gen­eral pub­lic. With the announce­ment of the Xbox 360 ver­sion hell has been unleashed with many Final Fantasy pur­ists claim­ing that the game will never reach the height of its pre­de­cessors while other gamers have praised Square-Enix for finally break­ing its exclus­iv­ity. Finally after 5 long years and a 3 month wait after the Japanese ver­sion the game has finally hit Western shores. Was it worth the long wait or is this fantasy finally turned stale?

Story

Final Fantasy XIII starts off with a very strong bang. All hell breaks loose as Lightning and Sazh fight towards a Fal’Cie to res­cue Lightning’s sis­ter while Snow and his mili­tia fight off PSICOM so he can reach the Fal’Cie to save Lightnings sis­ter who also hap­pens to be his fiancee. Along the way they pick up Vanille, a crazy ener­getic girl and Hope, a silent angst-filled teen­ager. Soon they real­ize that fate had brought them all together and the Pulse Fal-Cie brands them as L’Cie and gives them a focus they have to fig­ure out before it is too late and they turn into Ci’eth. Eventually they meet Fang, a saucy and power­ful female war­rior with a mys­ter­i­ous past. After the run-in with the sup­posed main vil­lain they decide to chal­lenge fate and save Cocoon.

Final Fantasy XIII’s plot has many prob­lems with the biggest prob­lem being pacing. The story starts very strongly as we’re intro­duced to most of the char­ac­ters and the prob­lem is laid right out in front. However after the first five hours the game hits a major prob­lem. The story lit­er­ally stops and a large major­ity of the chapters are spent on try­ing to develop the char­ac­ters which of course isn’t a bad thing by any means, except Square went about it in the worst way pos­sible. The game con­tin­ues to present itself with very long game­play seg­ments and then give a couple minutes of expos­i­tion that only enhances the first impres­sion of all the char­ac­ters, which is gen­er­ally neg­at­ive. Eventually the story picks up and remains strong for about three chapters, but once the char­ac­ters are trans­por­ted to Pulse, the inhos­pit­able lower­world, that the nar­rat­ive is dropped again until the game goes back to Cocoon. This also cor­rel­ates to info the game tries to present. From the get-go the game throws out terms like the player is already sup­posed to know what each of them means. While they do explain some stuff later to those who are patient, and there is an in-game encyc­lo­pe­dia, novice play­ers will more then likely have a dif­fi­cult time find­ing it or even fig­ur­ing out one exists.

The char­ac­ters are also some of the weak­est in a Final Fantasy in a long time. From the begin­ning till around 20 hours in the char­ac­ters are built strongly upon the first impres­sion received from them which are mostly neg­at­ive. Lightning is strongly presen­ted as being Callous, Snow is self-absorbed, Hope is an angst filled teen­ager bent on revenge, Sazh is too con­cerned about other people, Fang is the only nor­mal one since she arrives pretty late into the game, and Vanille, well lets just say that she is prob­ably one of the most annoy­ing char­ac­ters ever cre­ated. Over the many hours spent play­ing the char­ac­ters do break out of their molds and most of them become likable. Even Vanille man­ages to have some pretty spec­tac­u­lar moments.

Final Fantasy, while is known for craft­ing good her­oes, is also known for craft­ing spec­tac­u­lar vil­lains. This is where XIII takes a giant hit because it just doesn’t have a cent­ral vil­lain. The game con­tinu­ously throws many dif­fer­ent vil­lains at you without mercy, and man­ages to dis­pose of each one rather quickly before they are developed. At around half-way through the game the sup­posed vil­lain is finally shown but he is on for one battle but then exits for another 6-10 hours. Due to his absence from the game little is known about the char­ac­ter and there­fore lacks the pres­ence or effect as Seymour, Sephiroth, and Kefka had. They all had giant screen time and strong motiv­a­tions for what they did.

XIII’s story isn’t bad at all. In fact its pretty good. However its held back due to the poor design and poor char­ac­ter devel­op­ment.

Score: 7.3/10

Design

Final Fantasy XIII has been gain­ing huge amounts of cri­ti­cism due to its sup­posed lin­ear­ity. While pur­ists have been quick to point out Final Fantasy X as also being lin­ear, the fact is X included towns, an air­ship to travel in, and the abil­ity to back-track. XIII con­tains none of this and is in fact just a straight line with pretty tex­tures cov­er­ing it up. It’s always a straight run through each loc­ale towards a giant yel­low marker on your mini-map which either trig­gers a cutscene, a boss fight, or both. Square has made it aware that Pulse will con­tain that open feel gamers used to have and they are right… barely. Pulse con­tains a huge sec­tion of open land that play­ers are free to roam around and battle on. However once the sec­tion is left, it turns back into a slog from point A to Point B.

Pulse also allows play­ers to go on grand side-missions. Ci’eth Stones appear to the player which open up mis­sions to take on rare creatures and acquire spe­cial items nor­mally not found. The stones are what remains of Ci’eth after they’re lifespan runs out. These side-quests are excel­lent diver­sions and can really eat up pre­cious time. The game can last any­where from 30-60 hours which offers up plenty of play for your cash.

XIII’s lev­el­ing sys­tem returns back to Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid with the Crystarium. Crystal points are awar­ded to all party mem­bers which are then able to be spent in the Crystarium to upgrade the classes. Within the classes lie abil­it­ies and status improve­ments such as strength, magic, and health. The Sphere Grid got many com­plaints mostly deal­ing with it being intim­id­at­ing so its only nat­ural that Square went in and cleaned it up for XIII. While the Crystarium is much more stream-lined then the Sphere Grid, it is very pleas­antly presen­ted and works strongly within the game.

Final Fantasy XIII puts for­ward some brand new ideas for the fran­chise. The Crystarium is eas­ily one of the best new addi­tions as it allows play­ers to freely upgrade the char­ac­ters in any form they choose. The lin­ear nature of the game isn’t a bad thing at all, but it weak­ens the story when you’re forced to run miles just to get to a cutscene, although when the nar­rat­ive picks up the lin­ear nature is much appre­ci­ated.

Score: 7.5/10

Gameplay

It’s no joke that XIII offers up some of the most excit­ing game­play ever seen in a Final Fantasy while still main­tain­ing enough strategy for the hard­core fans. XIII uses an ATB battle sys­tem gauge that fills as time passes. A total of 5 actions can be fit onto the full gauge with all char­ac­ters hav­ing to start at 3 at the very begin­ning of the game. The more power­ful the attack or spell is, the big­ger the space it needs on the gauge. The battle menu is com­prised of Auto-Battle which fills the gauge with whatever the AI feels best suits the cir­cum­stance, Abilities which allows you to fill the gauge with whatever you want, Techniques which include sum­mon­ing and other power­ful abil­it­ies, and Items where potions and other trinkets are held. Once the gauge is filled the char­ac­ter then pulls off flashy anim­a­tions that will be sure to delight the senses.

Most battle do end up with Auto-Battle being the only selec­tion chosen. Abilities is use­ful every once in a while to try out new moves but it just isn’t as pre­cise as Auto-Battle is. Techniques are great because they allow sum­mons to be called forth or allow Libra to be used which details all the enemies stats to the party, how­ever they do have lim­its as they all have points that draw from Technique points with sum­mons cost­ing 3/5 of the points. Items are pretty much use­less as the Medic class can heal and cure status ele­ments in a jiffy and restore more health then any potion ever could.

Speaking of the classes, XIII offers up 6 to be mastered with each char­ac­ter start­ing out with 3. Commando (Deal melee dam­age), Ravager (Black Mage), Medic (Heals), Sentinel (Takes the Damage), Saboteur (Debuffs enemies), and Synergist (Buffs allies). Each class adds a thick layer of strategy to battles as each is needed to com­plete later battles which heighten the dif­fi­culty and require the 3 lat­ter classes a lot more. To make it easy to cre­ate a bal­anced party Square cre­ated the Paradigm sys­tem which allows the switch­ing of roles of all the 3 act­ive party mem­bers. As the game pro­gresses the Paradigms become imper­at­ive to suc­cess because a quick Shift could mean the dif­fer­ence between a win and a loss.

Eidolons are the names of the sum­mons within the game and have taken cues from both X and XII. As the Eidolon is summoned, the other party mem­bers depart the battle and leave the sum­moner and sum­mon to duke it out on the bat­tle­field. Before this can hap­pen though the sum­moner has to fight the sum­mon to prove that they are worthy of a being of such power. These battles are con­sid­er­ably tough and require full use of the Paradigms. Once under your con­trol the sum­mon can join you and once the limit bar under the play­ers health bar is full the sum­mon can go into Gestalt Mode. This is basic­ally where the sum­mon trans­forms into some sort of vehicle for the player to ride. Upon them the player issues orders to them that decrease the Gestalt Gauge until only the use of their super moves are avail­able. The Eidolons are great, they feel strong and can eas­ily help turn the tide of battles. However some of the Eidolons are clearly more power­ful then the oth­ers mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to choose cer­tain char­ac­ters as party lead­ers over oth­ers. As they don’t gain strength or any­thing of the sort this leaves some of the Eidolons unused. Also there are only 6 sum­mons (One for each char­ac­ter) which is kind of dis­ap­point­ing. Some more sum­mons would’ve been nice with a lev­el­ing sys­tem to make sure the older ones don’t remain untouched later in the game.

Final Fantasy XIII is an exhil­ar­at­ing game to to play. Its fast, its fun, and it still requires strategy to play. This is one area where XIII truly shines.

Score: 9/10

Presentation

Final Fantasy games have always held high regard in the present­a­tion depart­ment because all the games tend to be mar­velous and very far ahead visu­ally com­pared to other games. This isn’t the case with XIII. Yes the game does look good, but its a little late to the party. The best thing going for the game are the jaw-dropping anim­a­tions. Every anim­a­tion within this game is silky smooth and is enti­cing to watch. Every creature moves like it was a real creature and the each of the indi­vidual char­ac­ters anim­a­tions are near per­fect and its a blast watch­ing them pull off all kind of acro­batic moves in battle.

The next amaz­ing thing has got to be the mod­els. The mod­els are some of the best to grace any game. They all look pro­por­tion­ate and some of the mod­els that accom­pany some of the other creatures and big­ger mon­sters are handled del­ic­ately and come out look­ing per­fectly. The tex­tures plastered onto the mod­els for the most part look great. The main char­ac­ters and most of the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters have pleas­antly detailed tex­tures with few prob­lems. NPCs and a lot of the creatures have repeat­ing tex­tures, palette swapped tex­tures, and even muddy tex­tures.

Environments are hit and miss. Areas like the Gapra Whiteood look fant­astic while places like Eden and the Archlyte Steppe fea­ture muddy tex­tures. In fact a lot of the envir­on­ment designs feel like they were ripped right out of other Final Fantasy games. The Archlyte Steppe feels like an exact car­bon copy of the Calm Lands from X with other areas hav­ing the feel­ing like they were taken from other titles.

Special Effects in-game look great but have been seen and done bet­ter in other games, such as, great explo­sions, fire, ice, and other effects. While it doesn’t look bad, it doesn’t push any of the lim­its that Square-Enix claimed the game would.

Final Fantasy has always been cutscene heavy so it was a good thing Square put in the time and effort to make them look good. In-game runs at 576p on the 360 and at 720p on the PS3, while CGI scenes can run at 1080p on the PS3. In-game cut scenes look stun­ning which makes it even more sur­pris­ing that Square would use CGI scenes which show­case the weak­nesses of the games graph­ics.

The final point, and a very strong point is, the Soundtrack. In pre­vi­ous Final Fantasy games Nobuo Uematsu com­posed the soundtrack, this time around Masashi Hamauzu stepped in and did a fant­astic job.

Score: 7.2/10

Final Thoughts

Final Fantasy XIII isn’t a bad game by any meas­ures. The story is deep and emo­tional once it gets going and the game con­tains some of the best game­play the series has ever seen. However a lot of the exper­i­ments Square used just didn’t pay off. The game ends up being so lin­ear that it loses a lot of its expos­i­tion to it. It also loses a lot of the magic that made a Final Fantasy game spe­cial. Once again, this isn’t a bad game, it just ends up feel­ing like a missed oppor­tun­ity.