March 9, 2010

• Looking forward to Final Fantasy XIII

  Today Final Fantasy XIII comes out for the XBox360 and the Playstation 3. Now I’m a huge fan of this series and have been playing Final Fantasy games since I was extremely young, probably under ten years old. So far I’ve completed every core game that can be completed with the exceptions of II, III, and V.  V I played half way through or so before the job system just annoyed me to death and I couldn’t make myself continue playing.  II, and III were originally not released in the United States at all. I recently played II on my iphone in a special re-release thing they are doing but I haven’t gotten very far. I’m not even sure if they’ve ever released III in the US, but I did play a little bit of it on an emulator back in college.

  By far my favorite Final Fantasy is VI (called Final Fantasy 3 in its first release in the United States).  That’s the one featuring Celes, Locke, Terra, Setzer, Cyan, Shadow and a whole host of other amazing characters. One of the most effective parts of that game was the primary villain, the absolutely crazy world destroying Kefka.

  My second favorite was the much beloved Final Fantasy VII. That’s the Cloud, Tifa, Aeris game with a tragic twist in the middle. Once again one of the most effective parts of that game was the dark and ruthless villain Sephiroth.

  My personal deepest worry about Final Fantasy XIII is that it will fail to see how important making credible villains and credible threats is in making a good role playing game. Also that it won’t create a heroic cast that is anywhere near as memorable as the crews of these pivotal games.

  A lot of the American and European initial reviews of XIII have focused on it being “too linear” especially in the first half. Now I haven’t played the game, but that strikes me as a really weird critique. Have these people ever PLAYED a Final Fantasy game??? They’re ALL linear during the first half. In VI you have strict places you have to go and you can’t deviate until after the breaking of the world. In VII the entire time you’re in the main city of Midgar you’re pretty much on a strict schedule. In X, the game is linear all the way until after you travel to Zanarkand. IV, VIII, IX, they’re ALL like that. Sometimes they’re tiny bits of freedom where you can like go to one place early only to have nothing happen there until you go to the other place first in order like you’re supposed to, but overall it’s extremely linear. That’s the style of these kinds of games. They’re trying to tell you a story and you’re largely along for the ride.

  Final Fantasy XI is of course not linear at all but that’s a MMORPG and doesn’t really count (it’s also IMO no WoW). XII was a little less linear in that you could, if you could survive, walk insanely long annoying distances to explore random areas where doing so changes nothing of significance in the game except perhaps allowing you to gain insanely powerful weapons way earlier than you should be able to, provided you didn’t accidentally open the random non-marked chests that if you opened earlier somehow magically makes your weapon vanish. I’m not sure that’s a selling point. XII is my least favorite final fantasy game, so if being too “linear” means it’s different from that, then I consider it a good thing.

  It seems in this day, RPG fans are looking for the kind of faux freedom provided by games like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.  Those are good games, but personally I found many aspects of them to be annoying. Their claim to being “nonlinear” is primarily that you can choose to go recruit different people from different areas. But those particular areas are themselves just as linear as any other game. You’re still basically going through pre-set scenarios. The overall game is still pretty linear too. Once you recruit all the people or go to the right area, the plot advances in a fairly linear deterministic manner. Your choices can create minor alterations in the story but the overall core of the story is the same.

  In my opinion, Dragon Age and Mass Effect never reached anywhere near the level of character development or story telling of the best Final Fantasy games. They had some interesting characters but they were largely cliche. Much more the games were about the social interaction you can do with your characters based on your own choices and of course the combat system.

  Linearity I’m not convinced is a negative in a game at all.  Consider, Halo 3. That campaign part of that game was entirely linear and I thought it was pretty good. So was Resident Evil 5. So was Bayonetta which I thought was an amazing game. I don’t recall people complaining about any of those games being “too linear”. There are lots of games like that. You go through scenario to scenario in specific order. You have fun playing the game mechanics while the plot is revealed to you as a cinematic experience. Why is that bad?

  There are other games that are not linear at all and I suppose that’s praise worthy but I tend to not like those games very much. There’s Grand Theft Auto games in which you have free reign over the world and Assassin’s Creed games which are similar. Fable II is a good RPG example where after the initial sequence you can prett much go anywhere within small limits. That can be good. Somestimes exploration of the world can be a lot of fun. But generally I find I can get bored looking around for the place to go to trigger the next important plot sequence in these kinds of games. Invariably when I want more of the story I find myself forced to explore the world and once I’m done exploring the world and doing everything I can with exploration I find myself quickly losing interest in actually playing through the story.

  Really I’m not buying the “too linear” critique. It’s possible what people are complaining and calling linearity is really a different more devastating problem. That is, it might be that the game is just too SIMPLISTIC. It might just plain be boring. But that’s not a problem because the game is too linear, that’s a problem because the writers and programmers didn’t put enough into the game to catch players attention. To me that would be a more devastating critique and I’m a bit worried it might be the case.

  The reasons I find myself fearing that is because of some of the rumours I’ve heard about the game including the following:

  1. towns are short and simple without much to explore
  2. there’s very little in the way of equipment to seek or bother with equipping
  3. there are no mini-games and very few side quests
  4. the game is very long even for a final fantasy
  5. the villains are unimpressive
  6. the heroes/heroines are cliche repeats of characters from other FF games

  Now I’m not sure if any of these critiques are true or if there aren’t other aspects that counteract them. Again that’s just what I’ve read in reviews I’ve skimmed and I have no idea if they’ll end up being a bad thing. But if a game has very little for players to actually do or care about it can be a really dangerous way to program a game. There’s only so much eye candy can really do for you in terms of your enjoyment of a game. Indeed one of the problems I had with Final Fantasy XII is that it became boring to me. Once I’d figured out a pretty decent configuration for my character behaviors my characters were able to kill everything without me even paying attention. And watching combat wasn’t any fun either since it was so chaotic and hard to follow. So basically all I did was walk around and let my characters kill everything until the end of the game. And there was a LOT of walking in that game. Way too much unnecessary walking without any cut scenes or anything breaking up the monotony of the constant walking and fighting.

  I’m hoping XIII isn’t at all like that. I suspect it won’t be. It actually sounds to me from what I’ve read that the game is going to be trying to be a little more like VII which if true can only be an entirely good thing. Heck the main character’s name is “Lightning”. How can that not remind you of a game where the main character’s name was “Cloud”? I don’t think that’s an accident.

  Even though I’m worried, I’m still extremely enthusiastic about playing this game. It’s been a really long time since I’ve played a real Final Fantasy so the game will have value even if it’s only for its nostalgia value. Also from what I’ve seen in trailers the cut scenes are beautiful and the music sounds amazing (though I still doubt anything can hold up to the classic Nobuo Uematsu scores).

  So here’s to a new game. Perhaps in the future I’ll write about how I feel about this game after I play it

  • 4:10 pm
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