Let's talk about FF13

I finally got around to playing Final Fantasy XIII on my friend's Xbox 360. I know a lot of people have made cries of Ruined Forever with this game, but I honestly can't seem to figure out why.

Basically, every complaint I come across boils down to one of these:

• "It's too linear!"
  • Oh, grow up. Back in the NES and SNES era, linearity in games was to be expected, and games that weren't linear were the exception. Most the NES and SNES Final Fantasy games were somewhat linear; the explorable world map didn't make the game more of an open-world game, you still went where the plot told you to go, any freedom to explore you had was a distraction from the actual game. The only exception to this is Final Fantasy VI, which had a fairly nonlinear second half. Many critics even see the open-ended second half as a flaw to an otherwise amazing game, it made it much harder to complete the game without using a guide to figure out where to go next.
• "Cutscenes suck!"
  • Squaresoft has used cutscenes in the Final Fantasy series since Final Fantasy II, which was released on the Famicom. People tend to overlook NES-SNES era cutscenes because they came before the invention of FMV and had to use the same graphics as the rest of the game. Nevertheless, cutscenes still existed back then in the form of scripted events. Hell, the famous opera scene from Final Fantasy VI was mainly a cutscene with one or two playable segments, and you don't see people complaining about that bit.
• "The character designs suck!"
  • I think this is actually the only legitimate complaint. The character designs look rather silly, but they've been doing the same kind of designs since Final Fantasy VII, the most popular entry in the franchise. They've cemented the ridiculous hair and stupid-looking costumes in the franchise, and they sure as hell aren't going to change them in the near future. Besides, is character design alone really enough reason to hate a game? You could hate the game for the character designs if you also hated it for other reasons, but most often those reasons are the two listed above, which I've shown are really stupid.

Anyway, that's my long video-game-related rant for now.

edited 2nd Nov '11 8:51:29 PM by Zennistrad

This site has a reviews section, you may want to poke around there.

Ah, I keep forgetting about that part of the site. Now that I've remembered, though, I'm kind of reluctant to post it there, I don't like using comment sections for discussion.

"Games in the past were worse at it, so we shouldn't be annoyed at games that do it to a slightly less linear extent than those old games did!"

The game is comprised of many, many cutscenes. Hell, Final Fantasy 10 was terrible for the number of cutscenes in it, and 13 has managed to get so many more.

The reason so many people rag on the game is that there is next to no actual gameplay in it. I can literally list the interactive elements in the game in five points.

• The fights, of course.
• The Crystarium, customizing character growth. (Except it's possible to max out everything. So even that's only true to a certain extent.)
• Moving from screen to screen.
• Talking to people in about 20% of the game's areas. (I can't even remember if this one is true.)
• Going to the shops in the save points.

The game is pretty much comprised of "Start in Screen X, move on to next screen while fighting whatever monsters are there, move on to Cutscene 156, continue from Screen Y."

It's more like a movie than it is like a game. It lacks pretty much anything actually gamey. Fuck, look at 9- pretty much any time you're not in a dungeon, you can jump on the world map and head to ~40% of the places in the game. 7 does that. You talk to people, you visit shops and customize your character's weapons and armours, you choose what armours you have. You don't lean back and press Autobattle over again, which again removes a significant part of the interaction of the game and is actually a viable option- and in many cases, is actually better than choosing the options yourself, due to both speed and the annoying mess that is the menu.

There's next to no interactivity in the game.

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:00:02 PM by CyganAngel

I don't think everyone hates FF 13 — there's a great deal about it I like. I don't mind the designs, or the linear sequences, but I do think the linear world design hurts the game just as much as it hurt FFX. There's something to be said for wide open plains.

My main problems with 13 was the hideous amount of grind I was doing (and I don't even mind grind), and the storytelling, which at about the point Barthandalus turns up devolves into a lot of running around in circles and reacting to things. The first half of the game has a pro-active party who are engaging in fairly interesting concepts and issues, with some nice inter-party tension. It builds to a strong climax in Palompollum, of whatever that city's called, and there's a great, epic feeling boss fight at the end. Sure there's wonky dialogue and a lot of faux-philosophising going on, but that's as much a part of the FF universe as Chocobos. It's kitschy and silly, but not offensively so.

The second half has a lot of the characters become less vibrant due to all that "character development" which somehow causes them to become less dimensional, rather than more. They lose a lot of what made them interesting in the first place, and become dead narrative weight. The new set of villain introduced have far less focus, and suffer from a lot of ambiguous and incomprehensible motivation, and a lot of the thematic work about opposing the set role of a dystopic, fascist society gets thrown out of the window.

There's also a problem with the slow pacing of battle mechanics, and a wonky battle system which turns the final boss into a huge luck-based mission due to the way that the death status works. I mean, yeah, I get that the final boss is meant to be hard, and I can kind of give it a pass on that account, but it's a problem that raises its head throughout the entire game. Just never as prodigiously. The former issue, is more problematic, as the battle system's probably one of the more simple ones that's graced FF. You have six different classes, and you can change between whenever you want. Easy. It doesn't take 12 hours to explain that.

And, for a game that has two great female characters (Lightning and Fang — Fang particularly was one of the better female characters to turn up in video games in the last few years) Vanille was a huuuuge problem for me. All the sexualised groaning and squealing was something I just couldn't deal with, at all. Shame, because the character showed some degree of depth.

Also, you might want to change the thread's name, or it could quickly degenerate into a hate thread. Something like, FF 13, Pro's and Cons. Or FF 13 Bizarre Hatedom. Or something.

So linear = bad, now? Geez, some of the best games ever made were totally linear. If you're going to complain about FF13 being linear, then complain about all the other games that are linear, too, and see how people gang up on you for insulting some of the best games ever.

You have a point, but the post-MSX Metal Gear games are also well-known for their heavy cutscene elements, but you don't see nearly as many people attack that series for it.

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:08:58 PM by Zennistrad

Lack of interactive elements/lack of gameplay = bad. The game isn't just linear in the metaphorical sense- the entire game is linear. You are literally progressing through the game in a straight line.

This needs context... Mostly because games like Halo progress in a literal straight line as well...

It's bad because Final Fantasy is an RPG, whereas Halo is an FPS. It's expected that an FPS be played in a linear fashion. But a RPG is expected to not be completely linear... Because the theory is RPGs offer "choice." And making it linear takes away that choice...

That said, I liked the fact the game was linear. Just explaining why it's looked down upon...

Changed thread title as requested.

Actually the like/dislike ratio seems to be more even in places I've been.

As for the actual complaints:

• "It's too linear!" The complaints aren't just about the linearity of specific levels, but about how interactively sterile they were. For better or worse(the Cloisters in FFX, ugh) JRP Gs tend to start employing some sort of interactive elements into areas to keep them feeling fresh. Whether that involves increased levels of exploration, puzzles, or some sort of dungeon gimmick. XIII rarely had anything of the sort, and the few times it even tried amounted to little(the rain gimmick in Sunleth, or the light gimmick in Gapra).

There's also the way areas flowed. There were no secrets to find inside of areas outside of (very easy to find)token treasure, and no way to backtrack outside of Pulse or Eden(but those areas are so late in the game that you're pretty much guaranteed to not find anything new upon return, save for that one instance with Vanille's robot pet).

• "Cutscenes suck!" That's not even the complaint. It's more specific and accurate to say people complained about the pacing and content of those scenes. Lengthy scenes occur pretty often in the middle of areas, but many of them here either hamfisted or redundant.

When you've got a story this bad with dialogue this awkward, it's kinda hard to make people want to sit down and pay attention to it without rolling their eyes or riffing.

Squeenix made a whole lot of experimental changes in 13 compared to 12, but since many of those weren't well accepted I'm predicting a return to 10's formula when 15 inevitably rolls around. They'll really need to clone that success if they want 15 to be a PS 4 Killer App.

Every main FF after 9 has been pretty experimental in terms of switching things up between games.

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:41:07 PM by JotunofBoredom

Sounds like Final Fantasy is going the way of Command And Conquer, then: Lots of experiments while sticking to a different formula that doesn't quite please the fans.

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:42:36 PM by RocketDude

I felt that 13 was a lot closer to 10 in design than it was to 12. Linear environments with minimal backtracking. Multiple swappable party members who all start out with individual specialities but can be developed to be fairly similar, eventually. The ability to swap classes mid-battle.

12 has no unique character classes, larger environment with open world elements — including battles on the world map, and a less tightly constructed plot. It's closer to X-2 in that way.

Feels like they're searching for some kind of synthesis of the two styles, with the way they're bouncing between them.

FF 13 was a very good game, it was held to such ungodly standards that the shortcomings of it were VAINGLORIOUSLY exaggerated.

I played it after finishing FF 12, and I loved it. After everyone told me all of the things I payed no mind too were the INEVITABLE UNDOING of the game, I realized they were getting mad for no fucking reason.

It was exactly what I expected, pink haired girl being badass, fun weapons, likeable characters, new gameplay.

Bleh. I hate to say it, but subjectivity. What one person doesn't mind, ten other people find pretty bad.

I liked the game, but I can see where people are coming from.

Bleh. I hate to say it, but subjectivity.

Solipsism. The only opinion of the game that is important to me is mine.

That's because, in lots of stories, you usually got one or more major characters whose character arc(s) last most of the story, and a few other secondary characters with shorter arcs that can remain interesting by interacting with the more major characters during their development.

With XIII, every character has a short arc. Lightning, despite being the protagonist, actually has the shortest arc next to Fang(who has the excuse of appearing much later).

By the middle of the story, each character has gone through their development to get over their vices and become more well-adjusted people. Unfortunately, we still got 20 hours of game left afterward and "well-adjusted people hit things" is a total snooze-fest.

The end result is that, once you hit Pulse, every character's dialogue devolves into "dialogue hat" + "motivational speeches".

By the way, half the party's hat is sarcasm(not the good kind). Lightning has two hats(sarcasm, AND one-liners), but Fang balances it out by not having many(if any) real motivational speeches.

The only real exceptions to this ended in characters actually backstepping their development for five minutes so people could attack them with more speeches.

Wait, FF 2 had cutscenes?

Oh yeah...