Working as Intended

As is my custom on weekends or stretches of time which involve me doing absolutely nothing of importance or worth (ie: 99% of the time anyway), I was browsing some gaming news sites on the Interwebs and came across a rather interesting article. It's an in-depth discussion of Final Fantasy XIII by director Motomu Toriyama and developer Akihiko Maeda.

While the knee-jerk reaction from most commenters on any site it's been posted on (commenters on the Internet being just one step above your average primate in terms of intelligence and judgement) are "LOLZ DEY R SAYIN TEH GAEM IZ BAD LOLOLOL" the discussion between the XIII crew does bring up some interesting insights to how Square-Enix was operating at the beginning of this generation.


If you've read any of my Final Fantasy related posts on this here pointless journal, then you'll know I actually hold Final Fantasy XIII in very high esteem (Yeppers). It's certainly not perfect, but on a personal level it contained and focused entirely on what I enjoy about JRPGs, and the Final Fantasy series in general. I've gotten quite a number of IMs and emails and whatnot from people who either strongly agree or disagree with my opinion regarding XIII. So, since I'm going through the game a second time and the XIII crew's discussion has nothing I can really add to the table, I thought I'd go over my opinion of the game, the fanbase its developed and the series in general.

The Final Fantasy series has one of the most polarized fanbases of any series I've seen. Some people religiously defend the new games, some do the same with the old. Each and every game in the series has people who swear up and down that it's the best or worse of the bunch. The series prides itself of changing so much of itself from title to title, which has spawned this sort of mentality.

Personally, I look at each game as its own little entity. Something that should be looked at and judged by its own merits and faults, and not in comparison to the titles that came before it. I know that's an odd mentality for a video game sequel, but each Final Fantasy title changes its setting, character, battle system, progression system, monsters, storyline, pacing, music and themes so much that it's almost impossible not to.

Contrary to what people on gaming forums seem to believe, people play the Final Fantasy series (or any game at all, really) for a variety of reasons, which I think is what's causes so much discomfort with Final Fantasy XIII. As I said in my previous post, if you're coming to Final Fantasy XIII looking for a very heavily story-focused game, then you'll most likely leave with a very positive outlook. If, however, you're in it for the focus on gameplay and side-quests galore, then, yeah, I can easily see where the annoyances would lie.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy XIII is nothing but a series of cutscenes, like, say, Metal Gear Solid 4 (which as far as I can remember was 12 hour movie that occasionally stopped playing until you hit some buttons on a controller). The game does actually have a very bombastic battle system that, in my opinion, wipes the floor with the rest of the series. Even on my second playthrough (where I'm going for nigh-100% completion, because it's fun) I'm about 80 hours in and still having an absolute blast coming up with the right Paradigm set-up and strategy for defeating foes.

I could just be because I'm a weirdo, but I enjoy the versatility and number of possible outcomes the Paradigm system brings over, say, three people standing in a straight line and only hitting Attack or Cure constantly, where the victor is usually whoever has the highest arbitrary number. Not to say that mentality doesn't appear in places in XIII, but it's definitely not as huge a factor as it was in previous titles, thanks to being able to customize so much of your battle strategy.

Final Fantasy X-2, for all the complaints it rightfully got, actually had a really fun and freeflowing battle system which also places emphasis on job combinations and whatnot. XIII feels like a very natural progression from what the battle system designers created in that game.





You could argue that losing 'complete' control over two of your characters is a downside compared to older FF titles, which let you control all three one at a time, but the major increase in battle speed and pacing makes up for being able to tell everyone exactly what to do, especially when 9/10 times the command you're going to give them is simply just 'Attack', 'Cure' or 'Highest Magical Attack You Currently Have'. Cut out the unnecessary middle-man and vastly improve the flow.

As far as the constantly criticized 'linearity' point is concerned, my opinion stays the same. Yes, it's highly linear, and no, I don't especially care. I mean, if Square-Enix announced that Final Fantasy XV was going to open itself up a lot more than XIII I'd go, "Cool beans," and want to see how it turned out, but I still don't see what the fuss is entirely about. If you don't like linearity then you especially won't like XIII, but I sort of figured that if you were playing a Final Fantasy game then linearity wasn't a problem. Especially if you were a fan of X.

Every game in the series has been one degree of linear or another, and while that doesn't mean everyone has to love every incarnation of that sort of progression, to claim that XIII is linear unlike the other games in the series is just being foolish. Even with a World Map in I-IX you only had one (and only one, bar sidequests at the end of the game) destination to go to at any given time. The World Map only served two functions:

1) You run from one town/dungeon to another town/dungeon, which is usually a straight-line traverse.
2) You run around randomly on the map, find nothing and encountering 323,985,781 random battles.

It was a smoke and mirrors approach to fooling the player into thinking that they had more freedom then they actually did. XIII opens up when you reach Gran Pulse (to showcase how wild the lower-world is in comparison to the highly nurtured and constrained Cocoon), and shows that, really, World Maps aren't that big a deal. When most people reached Archylte Steppe on Gran Pulse, which has a wide variety of events and things to take part in, what did they do? They skipped it and instead made a direct line to where the story continued. Exactly what most people do in this series.

Now, to be fair to the criticisms of XIII (a number being totally legit) dungeons in the game (if you can call them that) are very much just straight-line runs, unlike in previous games where you'd explore the caverns for a while, find the magical whatits needed to open the final door and progress from there. There is none of that in XIII. However, as someone who absolutely despises dungeons and pointless fetch-quests, I can say I'm glad they're gone and I'd have fired them into the Sun, given the chance.

I'd go on more, but I think my first entry regarding the silly game has covered everything else. Going through Final Fantasy XIII for the second time has really done nothing but re-enforce my opinion regarding it. They haven't really changed, and I still loves it to bits. Again, it's not perfect and I can easily see why people would find it to totally not be their thing, but I still think it's one of the strongest entries in the series and has a lot of mechanics and general improvements that other JRPGs could really learn from.

And it is certainly not a 'bad' game. You can not like it until the stars themselves fall from the sky, but to claim it's a bad game is just being stupid, really.

If nothing else, Final Fantasy XIV's general shittiness is drawing the trolls and idiots away from the XIII forums, so the large group of people who like the game (those 6-7 million copies didn't sell themselves, you know) can finally have some nice conversations about it. This happened with Final Fantasy X as well, where for about a solid year the forums were abuzz with "OMG NO WORLD MAP" "OMG NO EXP AND TRADITIONAL LEVELS" and "OMG VOICE ACTING SUX" and generally regarding the game as the downfall of mankind until XI came along and gave them a new group of people to piss off.

Same happened with VII, until VIII was released.

It's a tradition for the series, apparently.