Final Fantasy XIII - 1: Voodoo Magic

Tonight my friends, I take you again to another world. Here, humanity lives inside a manufactured moon of sorts, called Cocoon. Inside Cocoon, beings of great power called Fal'Cie keep the climate controlled, the sun alight, and the food flowing to keep the human population content and docile. However, if Cocoon is a moon, what is it moon to? That would be Pulse... the planet below. Although few have any first hand knowledge of this place, Pulse is regarded on Cocoon as a dangerous place of fire, death, and despair like "Hell on Earth." It is because of this fear that a recent event has been initiated... called "The Purge" innocents who may have been contaminated by contact with Pulse remnants are gathered to be purged to Pulse. However, are they truly to be sent to the planet below, or is simply an execution? Given the legends, is transfer to Pulse an execution in itself?
 
Last Wednesday I was all geared up to start my play-through of Final Fantasy 13, planning to get back into a modern game. I've moved a couple of times since I last played it though, and couldn't say for sure if I had the disc with me. After looking through my things, I was forced to admit it was probably in storage back at my parent's place. After this small disappointment, I decided I would be willing to purchase an additional copy if it was less than say... $20. Unfortunately, unlike it's sequels FF13 is not available online for download on the Playstation network, so I could not satisfy my jones immediately. A quick look online showed FF13 available pre-owned for $9.99 at my local Gamestop. Cool, no problem. While at the ol' brick and mortar store, I also picked up copies of Dark Souls 2 and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, both games I plan to play but as yet did not have a copy of.

Dark Souls 2, mm-mmm, that's good stuff.

So I was all set! It just so happened that I woke up very early and couldn't get back to sleep one night soon after my purchase. I slid in my new disc... only to find it didn't read! What? Thwarted for a second time? To help me work through my pain, I played Dark Souls 2 for a couple hours, which thankfully works, and has so far been as great as its predecessor. Afterwards, I figured I'd pop in FF13 again and see if it might work. It did. Not only did it work... but the same thing has proved consistent. Turn on the PS3, FF13 doesn't read, play Dark Souls 2, then it does. I can only conclude that there is a voodoo spell upon my disc, and Dark Souls is the counter-spell. Or, more likely, the caster of the spell requires that I play a quality game before it will let me step into the more suspect FF13.

There is a high possibility this is the spell caster who enchanted my disc.

Enough shenanigans... on to the... good stuff?

Final Fantasy 13 puts the player pretty much directly into the action, starting with a combination of cinematics and battles. Overall, the first 6 or so hours of the game have seemed like a combination of a game play tutorial and a movie. The cinematic sequences have served to introduce the characters and set the story in motion. A slew of terms are used such as Fal'Cie, l'Cie, PSICOM etc. without much explanation. There is a database, that is automatically filled in as the player progresses, that explains these terms and some background on the world. It's sort of strange that the game lets so much of the dialogue go by without explanation, when it is insistent on hand holding the player through anything related to the battle system.

Snow on the exploration map, with enemies ahead.

I remember liking FF13 the first time I played until I got near the end really, so I'm going try to remain as objective as possible as I play through it. It's easy to be negative about the game, as it definitely gives me a general feeling of smoke and mirrors, and that in the end it won't deliver, as well... since I had this experience already.

Vanille and Hope.

The player is introduced to the combat system early, however, at a very minimal level originally. The game features an "Auto-battle" button, where the AI decides what your character will do. So, conceivably you can play the early battles simply by hitting the X button every 10 seconds or so. The game does make you mix it up a bit by using a potion when your hit points get low. Since the early game, in my opinion, is more about the introduction of the characters and story, I'll save the details of combat until the next post.

The main characters, the playable ones, are:

Lightning: who is the somewhat nominal main character, as the third game in the series is named after her... but not really. She is a hardened soldier. She's a little hard to find believable, because who the f' would leave a child alone in the wilderness? (That child is Hope... wait... maybe that would be understandable)

Lightning, with Sazh talking in the background.

Sazh Katzroy: The most likable and relatable character in my opinion... and honestly the only one I really like. He's an African American (or not... because this isn't America is it?) with a huge 'fro, which is ripe for stereotyping, but I really like how Sazh avoids the possible pitfall here, and is the "average joe" or "straight man" amongst the team. I like him the most, because I think he reacts the most realistically to the events of the storyline.

Sazh in front of a crashed... something or other.

Snow Villiers: Snow is a "hero", you know this, because he and his buds talk about it non-stop for the first hour of the game. He is a super positive dude, somewhat annoyingly so, he's prone to somewhat big swings of emotion. Really... he's just kind of immature, a bit of a "bro" if you will, but at least he means well. He reminds me of this Onion article about Wes Welker.

Vanille: She fits into the high-pitched voice, cheery, stereotype of many japanese female characters. However, she bucks that at points. Though not as good as Sazh, Vanille is surprisingly one of the more sane and likable characters if you can get past the cutesie-ness.

Hope Estheim: Here we go again... another whiz kid. He's different because he is not confident, unlike FF10-2's Shinra and FF5's Kryle. However, he's annoyingly under-confident. Hope? "Hope-less" would be a more fitting name, but perhaps they were going for irony with this one.

There is also "Fang" however, she makes scant appearances in the first 10 hours of the game and is not yet playable, so I'll save her.

Here's some combat for ya.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here about the story, it is definitely interesting, however, so far I've found the dialogue to be atrocious. The characters are overly emotional. To quote one reviewer there is "more cheese than a dairy farm." The reviewer went on to say that it won't be anything Final Fantasy players aren't used to though. I disagree. Granted, we are watching fantasy people go through traumatic situations and it's hard to say how someone might really react... the problem here is the characters are hard to relate to, not particularly likable, and worst of all... don't use much logic. The interactions involve a lot of huffin' and puffin' (the grunts and groans are noticeably annoying in the cut scenes), emotional arguments (sans logic), and lightning punching snow in the face. Case and point, Hope's weeny-whiny self witnesses his mother die after volunteering to help Snow fight. He blames Snow, saying he tricked her (or something like that...) then decides to take revenge by killing him. This sort of fuzzy logic might be a realistic reaction, I don't know, but it happens awkwardly, and quite frankly makes Hope extremely unlikable. I mean, the game makes me play as these assholes!

Lightning looks towards the "Pulse vestige" where they just defeated a powerful foe.

You might be saying at this point "Hey Bard, but isn't there anything good about this game?" Well, It's best feature is easy to call... the game is freakin' beautiful! Even having come out some 4 years ago or so, I'm not sure anything quite as pretty has come out since. However, this obviously came at a cost, as the characters are heavily railroaded through the game's paths. In the end, there is tons upon tons of eye candy, but you can barely interact with any of it.

Here are waves which have been turned to crystal by the death of the Fal'Cie.

Lake Bresha, which is depicted in the nearby screenshots is a lake which has been turned into massive crystal waves... it's quite impressive.

I captured this rare moment wherein a branching path was available, leading to treasure!

To summarize, as I finish this post I'm a little over 10 hours into the game, and it overall feels like a gameplay tutorial intermixed with a movie, that may or may not be related. The combat is entertaining sometimes, but so far... FF13 would have been better off a movie. Oh yeah, although the soundtrack got mixed reviews, I'm a fan of it. So far we have brilliant visuals, a solid soundtrack, and a decent story. Hmm... this is a game, right?

The Purge was indeed a cover for execution... the Sanctum, rulers of Cocoon, decided it was better to make those people disappear than to leave them to the vagaries of a future on Pulse, where they still might cause trouble. What does this mean for Cocoon, and our heroes? To find out, come back soon... for This Bard's Tales!

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