This review is extremely nerdy, and is not for the casual gamer. Read on at risk of your own mental health. However if you have played a RPG or contemplated buying FFXIII, read on knowing that you are still probably at risk for overwhelming nerdiness.
Alright now to hell with the roman numerals for a bit. I really liked Final Fantasy 9, it being my first Final Fantasy and all. When 10 came out that was when I knew how hooked I was on the series. Everyone always harkens back to Final Fantasy 7 as when they knew, but I came in after that so I had to wait a little bit. Anyways, I put countless hours into 9 and 10, after beating the game and going back and doing side quests, in 10 playing another couple dozen hours of Blitzball (most underrated side game ever!). Then Final Fantasy 11 came out for PC as an MMO, and even though I wanted to play it, my computer sucked to bad, so I skipped it. Then at long last Final Fantasy 12 came out. I rejoiced! I played for a couple of hours.... then.... I stopped. I don't remember why I stopped now. It was mid-summer I think, so I probably just had better things to do. But then I went back to it last year when I was bored and I realized, "This isn't any better than 10!" Pretty much cause the story sucked.
So then when XIII came out, I got all excited again, especially with the announcement that XIII was going to set the stage for the next decade or so of Final Fantasy games. As reviews started coming out I kept hearing the same thing, "The game doesn't really start until about 20, 30 hours in." While I was a little perturbed, I threw plenty of hours into X and Kingdom Hearts 2, I thought, "I can spare 20 or 30 hours."
So I go out, get the game, and I mean Wow. When they say the game doesn't really start for a while they mean it. I had no idea why I was fighting other than a few random cut scenes for the first ten or so hours, and I had no control over who was in my party for another ten or so hours after that. Albeit, after you get to that point the game picks up, but I mean really Square Enix? You couldn't have cut off a little bit of running around fighting level 1 monsters with a glorified attack selection system, that could only select "Attack"? I mean I couldn't use magic until this tutorial-intro phase of the game ended.
So after that point, when the story gets going, and you start picking up on the differences between Fal'cie, l'Cie, and Cie'th (all actually names of concepts in-game) you start thinking, "Okay time for some good ol' fashioned Final Fantasy exploring!" Wrong. Unlike every other FF incarnation to date, including almost all the spin-offs I've played, there's no World Map, no way to back track, no real honest to goodness exploring. That hurt. They took out a lot of the good things that in my opinion are quintessential aspects of the series including:
- Exploring
- Dungeons
- Towns
- Mass Weapons
- Mass Money
I guess when they did this, they started from the top and just went down the list taking things out. Without exploring, you don't need dungeons to explore. Without dungeons, you don't need towns, or hubs to go to to stock up on new weapons and items. Without a wide selection of new items, you don't need a lot of money! It all makes perfect sense- if you feel like ruining a tried and true system. And another flaw, is the Weapon Upgrade system they created to replaced this system. It is similar to the new system used in Mass Effect 2, where lots of progressively better weapons were scrapped in favor of an upgrading system with fewer weapons. The problem being that it would completely sap all your cash if you tried to upgrade all your weapons, and even though I tried to save up as much money I could in the game, almost 1 Million Gil, if I wanted to get but one of the character's Ultima Weapon, I would have needed another million. I did not like this system.
But on to things I did like! While yes there were some fundamental problems, I did finish the game for a reason. After the story picked up, I actually cared what happened to my little group of heroes, which is always a good thing. Though a bit convoluted at points, and I was never quite sure how the whole magic crystal thing worked, or what exactly my characters were supposed to accomplish, it was good enough to keep me playing till the end.
The new combat system was good too. Switching between 1 of 3 different classes initially available to your characters (all of them are eventually accessible to unlock), and setting up different combination lists, like Fighter-Mage-Healer, Mage-Mage-Mage, Buffer-Saboteur-Defender, etc. all ended up playing vitally into your strategy when fighting bosses at later stages in the game. The only bad thing about this system was the difficulty/reward ratio of your enemies. Using the "Crystarium" system that opens up after the tutorial-intro, your characters can use points they get from beating enemies to progress upwards towards new abilities. Every once and a while, beating a boss will open up a new rung for your characters to climb through. While this all works in theory, I found pretty often that when I entered a new area, the difficultly level would jump drastically higher, without giving enough rewards for me to catch up, almost to the point where I felt like every time I got comfortable fighting the enemies in a level, some newer, stronger ones would come along and the process would start anew. I spent a long time in the only really "open" part of the game, where you can take on a series of missions, fighting these progressively harder and seemingly optional enemies, only to find when I got to the end of the missions, that there was no way I could beat these monsters without spending another 5-10 hours exclusively leveling up. Then after moving onto the next area, I found that I was still barely comfortable with these newer enemies. I shudder to think how great my disadvantage would have been if I hadn't spent hours completing these missions.
Where the game really shines though, is in it's visuals. There were cut scenes in the game that really were just astoundingly beautiful. I'm sure they were even better on the Blu-Ray version of the PS3, but us 360 players still had a little eye candy feast. As well as the cut scenes, the backgrounds of the game were polished to the point where you could eat off of them. The most intricate details could be seen on mountains or buildings far off in the distance, with the lighting being perfectly placed to the point where running through some of the long spaces with no enemies was almost kinda pleasant, except for the constant "Thunk Thunk Thunk" that you heard from your characters footfalls throughout the game. That never ceased to be annoying.
This game had a lot wrong with it. I think Square Enix took a risk, and attempted to broaden the appeal of the game by taking out a lot of the core RPG elements that it's predecessors pioneered. This might have worked if they didn't make the game take 50 to 60 hours to complete. Sure, I have that time, cause I'm a die-hard fan, and I have enough time to waste at college to beat it. But even then, it took me over a month, just because of the sheer daunting of going back to the monotony was at times too much to bear. For the average gamer, they simply can't, and often times won't play much longer than 20 or 30 hours. Sometimes even less than that. Which is understandable. With all the video games that come out of blockbuster caliber, devoting that much time to one game is denying yourself of two or three other really good games. Games that most likely everyone will be talking about in the months to come. So in the end, it comes down to a couple of questions. Do you have 50+ hours to spare on one video game and do you like Final Fantasy a lot? Cause if you answered yes, then good. Get this game, and play it through. It's apparently going to be important to all these other Final Fantasy games to come. But if you don't, don't even bother to rent it for the weekend, or just play a couple of hours to see how the game is, cause you're not going to get anywhere near the meat of this game unless you really work for it. Overall, I'm going to say this one is for die-hards only. It's getting a 6/10.
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