Final Fantasy XIII [2014 (PC Version) - Square Enix]

[Starfox]

Originally published March 04, 2015

I had never played a Final Fantasy game before so I decided in order to not die dumb to try out at least one of them (two in fact, they did come as bundle) to see what all the fuss was about. So I started with Final Fantasy XIII and I can only guess that it's a fair representation of the franchise -- but that may not be, maybe it's like saying that Deus Ex: Invisible War is a fair representation of the Deus Ex franchise. Anyway, let me start this review by giving you two numbers 60 and 40. 60 is the number of Gigabytes the game squats on a hard drive (more like 58 but when you get to that number who cares about 2 GB more or less?). 40 is the number of Gigabytes for the movies alone. Add to that possibly half the remaining game weight in cut-scenes (which technically seems like movies but are not).

What I'm trying to say is that: despite its classification as a RPG (JRPG to be precise) Final Fantasy XIII is really an interactive movie (although saying that is a big overstatement about the importance of the interaction part as your choices are reduced to nothing -- the characters on the screen do the choices and you just watch them do it). There's no quests to speak of until about the middle of the game and even then the "side quests" are just missions involving more monsters to destroy and during which the main difficulty is to find the damn monsters which is due to a peculiarity of this game (the map system in which both the mini map and the main map are rotating which makes you loose your bearings more than once at one point in the game; the rest of the game being "on rail" though, it doesn't really matters -- there's little exploration in this game); that's not the kind of game involving a lot of thinking or puzzles challenging to your neurons. When you look at the end credits you realize that the game had a whole team of developers devoted to the combat system, another whole team for motion capture and a whole bunch of people in the cinematic and animation department but for the gameplay design other than combat? Zero.

In fact even the basic programming is lacking. Here's the PC version of the game that one can play with a controller (nothing amazing about that as most games nowadays come with controller support and after all, Final Fantasy is a console product first and foremost), what is astounding though is that you can't quit the game on the PC version using the controller; yep that's right you need a keyboard with an ESC key otherwise you won't quit the game... at all. Would it really be a bother for the developers to add a "Quit" option in the main menu? And when you hit the ESC key you're presented with a standard Windows dialog OK/Cancel which is well, pretty cheap and lame and remind me the good old day of the first Windows 95 games. And that doesn't stop there. Sound... Every single game nowadays has some feature to control sound volumes for different aspects of the game, music, effects, voices... In fact that has pretty much been the standard for the past 20 years on PC right? Wrong... At least one doesn't have any option of any kind related to volume, Final Fantasy XIII (and it's sequel XIII-2 or any Final Fantasy game ever released for that matter as reported by people who know the series better than I). But hey, when the music gets too loud so you can't hear what the characters are saying at a crucial moment (and trust me, that happens), subtitles are your friends. For a game claiming to have sold more than 6.6 million copies, this is ridiculously pathetic especially considering that they had 5 years between the release on consoles and the adaptation to PC. What's more? Unlike most recent games, Final Fantasy XIII is curiously unable to make the difference between using the keyboard or the controller so one has to manually indicate in the settings if you want the on-screen prompts for the keyboard OR for the controller. Those aspects shows the level of attention paid to the PC port, that and the almost complete lack of graphic options aside from resolution and AA.

One thing you can't argue with however are the nice fantasy graphics and the high quality of the videos (with the size of the game, it would be a shame to have previous gen graphics with crappy quality videos). Of course graphics are nice IF and only IF you like Japanese anime style if not you're in for a tough time because anime it is.

The combat system reminded me a lot of Anachronox one (meaning a mix between turn-based and real time) with a bar slowly filling up until the characters are able to deliver attacks, either normal or special. During this time, the enemy bar while invisible to the player is also filling up and they will deliver attacks at their own rhythm. Once the bar is empty, it starts to fill up again and so on until all enemies (or the player's party of up to 3 characters) are defeated. Unlike Anachronox though, character's position on the battlefield is not relevant, the combat bar is segmented so one can queue up several combat moves and the battles are a somewhat faster and it's a good thing considering that you'll be doing that a lot -- the enemy re-spawning constantly as soon as you move a few dozen meters forward -- so typically one has to fight the way in and if it is necessary to go back, to fight the way back with the same monsters. The battle can be done the fastest when you take the enemy by surprise (which is done by approaching them without giving them time to detect you) in which case one triggers a "preemptive strike" which puts every enemy at the "stagger" limit before the battle begins; once an enemy is in "stagger" damages done are multiplied. Of course if the enemy is alerted before the battle begins one has to reach the stagger limit by dealing sufficient damage which may take longer (infinitely longer for bosses). The player has to get use to this anyway since fighting is the only extended gameplay feature of this game. The rest is pretty much automatic. Characters automatically jump when they are in a location where it's allowed, automatically talk to people when it's needed to... The only actions required from the player are battles, inventory and character management (and I guess the few freedoms given in these areas are enough to some to grant the RPG label).

But the combat system in itself is not the problem, it is nice enough and due to its nature offers good looking animations that unfortunately are ruined by the display of numerical damage in very big figures (that can't even be turned off). No, what is the problem is the sheer number of battles you'll have to do in this game. Now that depends on people but I tend to quickly grow bored when you throw at me a battle similar to hundred others for the nth time in 5 minutes. Too much of something may kill a game, especially when this something is not mitigated by some variety in gameplay design. Unfortunately, not only XIII as only one gameplay feature, its combat system, but they hammer it to the death. Pretending to have a gazillion of different enemies you can fight doesn't help as one has in reality a couple dozen or so different types of enemies and the rest are variations of those basic enemies (sometimes even merely changing the color seems to be enough)

So to put it simply, what Final Fantasy XIII does right: Full HD videos -- check; relatively nice graphics -- check; voice acting -- check; combat system -- check. What it does wrong? Well I wouldn't say the quests because it doesn't do any at all, really. Null optimization for PC -- my graphic card during the whole game was absolutely silent (meaning, it was running at about 50 degrees so no stress at all) and still there were more than a few areas that got choppy especially with heavy fighting. That may have to do with the fact that my octocore CPU was running at about 18% even in the heaviest fights so yeah, you guessed it... the game only uses one core which in this day and age is also... dated. But no need to worry as technical people knowledgeable about Final Fantasy report that the framerate killer is the game engine itself no matter how powerful one's rig is. The HUD seems particularly to be a constant problem (pain in the ass more like) as it is really sluggish most of the time.

But something must be OK with this game as I didn't give it the worst possible scoring... Yep, if you like manga style stories with heavy Japanese design philosophy -- meaning very heavy and stereotypical characters in a world where you have black and white but very little grey and where the main themes are vengeance, honor and redemption -- then you may enjoy the story at times. I had some good moments following it. Sure it is confused and only make sense if you read a lot of the "Datalog" in the game (kind of a codex) so you can understand the thing better. The confusion is not helped by the fact that although there is a central character to the story, a girl nicknamed "Lightning" (voiced by Ali Hillis so now and then I couldn't help but picture in my head a blue girl with weird cranial features), you'll find yourself switching a lot from one character to another without being an option to remain focused on the supposedly "central" character and in a lot of instances early in the game the so called central character is not even there. It's only half-game that one can finally take control of the party and decide who goes in it and who's the leader. But the story is nice enough nevertheless.

Now if you ask me if this story justifies adding one gameplay element (fighting) so Square Enix can pretend it's a game instead of doing just an animation movie... I think not. Problem is Square Enix doesn't deal in animation movies so they prefer to pretend doing a game. What is aggravating there is that they insist on calling that RPG which is a bit stretching the definition of the genre. Granted the genre definition was extended through the years and different people will look for different things in a RPG, but still...