Hey KAIZEN Fans!!!

As those of you who follow my Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/ZookeyTK) have probably already found out, I traded in Final Fantasy 13 without beating it. I know, to many people, that’d be a shock–people are used to hearing me preach my love for certain Final Fantasies (including 7 and 10–as well as their sub-stories told via additional games and films). 13 was to be the grand return of Tetsuya Nomura and his crew to the FF series proper, and I was excited for it for many years. Before I dive into the reasons why I gave up on 13, let’s post 2 concurring opinions:

HarmonixSean (Sean over at Harmonix, he’s their community manager–and this was posted on his Twitter http://www.twitter.com/HarmonixSean):

I think if it weren’t called Final Fantasy but were called like Cabela’s On-Rail Fight Simulator no one would be arguing its merits.

Tycho from PennyArcade (www.penny-arcade.com):

Imagine my surprise when discovering that the dude with a chocobo literally roosting - roosting, sir - in his afro is the only character I have any affection for. I don’t understand the thinking behind giving me lead characters, which the narrative can slowly alchemize into gold. Why don’t you give me gold characters, and then refine them into platinum? I mean, if we’re absolutely dedicated to transmutation? God, I hate these fucking people. I don’t give a shit what happens to Sulky, Twat, Twit, Pip, and Marm. Sometimes, I kill them on purpose.

We have at times considered the plight of the games reviewer. Forced by the mechanism to consume games, because more games are coming, cresting the hill, and these games must be consumed also - but at least someone is compensating them for their time. I considered loading it up last night, just as I have every night since I got back, and I could make no cohesive argument for why I should do that and not something else. It’s horrifying to think that I had defeated Uncharted 2 by this point, traversed a full narrative arc, in the time it took me to hate Final Fantasy XIII.

Funny thing is, I like PennyArcade, but I **RARELY** agree fully with what Tycho says. Even if I agree with most of it, there’s usually some barb of a comment I take issue with (obviously, not enough of an issue to not love PA). This is one of those rare times. Outside of Sahz (the man with a Chocobo roosting in his afro), there isn’t any likable characters in FF13. And, like Tycho, I sunk in more time in FF13 than I did Uncharted 2’s first play through before realizing how crappy of a game it was. It was like I was reading my personal insights, but penned by someone else! Beyond that, here’s my laundry list of things to hate in FF13:

A) Linear as hell. When the reviewers said this, it sounded familiar to comments made about Final Fantasy X. When X came out, it was linear, but on purpose–there was a story to tell and the game designers put you on a track to see the sights and hear the sounds they meticulously created for you. Final Fantasy X got good reviews, as did Uncharted 2 (currently accepting it’s millionth Game of the Year practically) and God of War 3 (which is sure to rake in another million GotY’s)—all linear. I had no idea what they were saying with FF13 being linear and bad–now I understand. What they mean is that, instead of letting you explore in any fashion, you are put on a slot car track and just expected to run and get into pre-determined fights. You can’t stay in an area to try and level up your character—you just keep moving forward, and the set pieces are very bland. In games like Uncharted 2, NaughtyDog worked hard to create beautiful environments. In FF13, much of it feels cookie-cutter, not only on itself (you can run into many areas of a map and get confused–it looks practically copied-pasted upon itself) but also a lot of other sci-fi media. The treasure boxes, for instance, look like they’d be more at home in Star Wars than a Final Fantasy. The end result is the game trying to train you to hold up on the analog stick for an implied reward of a video showing more of the story.

B) No leveling up. Like I said in A, all the fights are pre-determined. Other Final Fantasies, you could stay in an area and keep getting into fights until your characters become stronger. In 13, not only are you limited to these pre-determined fights, but your characters don’t even have levels!! To become more powerful, you earn CP points. These points are spent on a board called the Crystarium–which is very similar to Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid. Not only are you limited in the fights, but if you happen to gain a surplus of CP points, there is story-driven blocks on the Crystarium!! This means that, until you hit a certain story segment, you can only power up so much–I have had times where I had reserves of several thousand CP points I couldn’t use–and to make things worse on this check out C:

C) Unbalanced as hell. I wouldn’t mind this if the Crystarium didn’t have those blocks in it. However, I will have my characters either fully maxed out (for the time) or extremely close–and most fights will be easy–but there is some fights that are uber tough and there is no way I can become more powerful for them. The final straw where I quit 13 was a normal enemy–this enemy had an attack where it unleashed a gattling gun on me. I had full health and a shield (not to mention an ally frantically healing me on the side) and, through several tries, I was successfully killed each time–with atleast 5 seconds left in the attack. If this was any other Final Fantasy, the fault would be my own because I didn’t level up enough. However, when I am only allowed to power up so much–and I did EVERY fight that came my way to make sure I wasn’t short-changing myself, this is complete crap.

D) Eidolons. Eidolons are the summons in the game. When you encounter one, they cast Doom on you (which roughly gives you 200 seconds to live) and you have to fight them. Most of them have alternate things you can do in battle (such as heal wounded people) that will impress them more and, once fully impressed, the battle ends and they join you. These fights are also unbalanced as hell–both of the ones I faced were required by the story and both required me to go grab Trevor’s guide to the game–the info given in the story (while somewhat helpful) wasn’t enough. I absolutely hate games that try and make you buy the guide!! As if their cheap tactics wasn’t enough, they seem to lose a lot of power once you get them. Even Trevor noticed that the Eidolon’s (in battle alongside you) are flashy, but not very helpful–it was far more convenient just to have the team out hacking away–so I know it wasn’t just me being mad about the fight I had to go through to get them. Odin’s (one of the Eidolon’s) fight is so out of balance the guide actually suggests you go into the game settings and slow down the battle speed!! Trevor is a veteran of Final Fantasy–he beat Emerald Weapon in Final Fantasy 7 (an insane optional boss fight) as well as the optional over-the-top fights in Final Fantasy X and XII–not to mention Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts II. He’s used to tough fights. He even had to change the game settings to have a chance against Odin!! That isn’t challenge, that’s unbalanced. It’s like breathing underwater–it isn’t challenging for someone who doesn’t have gills, it’s downright an unrealistic expectation!

E) You can only play as one character. In other FF’s, you play as a whole party, in 13 you’re forced to play as one character (for most of the game, you aren’t even allowed to pick which character!). If this character falls in battle, (EVEN if the other two are still standing!!) it’s game over. I can hear a chorus of you out there, “What about Phoenix Downs??”–I asked the same thing. Apparently, whatever character you play as develops an allergy to them or something–as they’ll only work on your team mates. If you fall, they won’t use one on you. (For those of you wondering, Phoenix Downs are an item in all Final Fantasies and they bring dead party members back to life). What is especially frustrating is that the last FF game Nomura’s crew worked on, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 for the PSP, had this problem solved. For the first time in FF, you could pre-equip a Phoenix Down, which would cause a glowing feather to be above the player. If the player died, then the character was immediately revived and the feather disappeared. Excellent fix–great gameplay mechanic! So, why in the name of all that’s good and just did they break a working idea? And, further more, why can’t you just cycle to a different team member if you die? Throughout the game you play as all of these individuals at one point or another, so it makes no sense!

F) Irritating characters. I said it before, and Tycho said it beautifully–but man these characters suck! I like Sahz–but I just wish he was in a different game! Lightning has severe anger problems–the more you learn about her the more you learn to completely dislike her. Vanille isn’t bad per se, but her perky character style has been repeatedly done in FF for who knows how long, so she has practically no weight in the story to me. I look at her and see, atleast partially, Rikku from FFX, Selphie from FF8 or Yuffie from FF7. Hope is so irritating I want to actually reach through the screen and kick him–and I’m a non-violent person!! Snow has an irritating hero complex that makes him seem very waxy and Ken-doll like–the opposite of what Nomura usually achieves.

E) No money from battles. You do shopping at the save points–or, rather, you WOULD if you could get some dough! Apparently, Cocoon and Pulse (the worlds of FF13) are experiencing a greater recession than we are! Every other Final Fantasy you get a small amount of change from battles–as you fight more, not only do you become more powerful but you bolster your wallet. Here, you randomly find money–and you find it so sparingly that the stores become completely worthless.

F) Very few towns. Towns are an RPG staple, you are going to save the world and the towns introduce you to the people you are standing up for! The makers of 13 said towns are too hard to do in hi-def. Hmm. White Knight Chronicles, Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean 4, Eternal Sonata, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Borderlands and even Demon’s Souls seem to disagree with that! (I know, Demon’s Souls doesn’t have vibrant towns–but it has more to it than 13 does!). No one said making a modern RPG is easy–but if you sit back and talk about how it’s impossible then your competitors will waltz right by you.

G) To upgrade or to buy? Technically, in response to E, you could get money from selling current equipment. A lot of Final Fantasies had that as another option–and it did help. However, 13 tries to combine this commerce approach with an upgrade system where you can find spare parts and use them to make current weapons stronger. Since I wasn’t finding money, I decided to do just that. Very soon, my weapons (which were all either the first or second weapon my characters found) were more powerful than the ones on sale in the stores a full 10 hours into the game!! At that point, why have more than 1 weapon? Why not just have the upgrade system and only have the stores for healing items? If I really wanted to buy the new (and, presumably, cooler) weapons I’d be shooting myself in the foot! This whole thing seemed rushed and under developed–which, again, is rare for a Nomura game. This man, and his team, usually hit it out of the park!

H) Some beauty with a lot of bland. The character models are beautiful, but a lot of the rest of the game is very bland and unremarkable. This is in stark contrast to Nomura’s last proper Final Fantasy, FFX. FFX launched on the PS2 and is still breath taking. In 13, there’s a part where you see ships on a lake–when I saw it, with the bland sky (that actually looked to be obviously made up of giant squares) and practically nothing vibrant happening, my thoughts traveled to FFX, in which you cross a similar lake. There was more life in the background and FFX felt more populated and vibrant–13’s lake scene felt like it was very early in Beta (pre-release).

I) The Paradigm System. This is a system you change mid-battle to tell your other team mates how to behave. Sounds cool at first–until you realize each behavior only has a limited range in what it can do. So, to be effective, you end up have to change many times throughout an even somewhat challenging battle.

J) Healing people can’t attack. If you change the Paradigm system so someone is a Medic, they can only heal. In previous Final Fantasies, Medics could attack badguys, even if only with weakened ability. In 13, they are helpless. What is even more irritating is when the game forces you to play as a character who practically can only be the medic (such as Hope)–at that point you are just repeatedly tapping X in battle whilst the AI characters have all the fun.

K) TP system. TP (can’t remember the actual name) replaces magic points in 13. In most Final Fantasies–people are given magic points and each spell costs a different amount. To regain magic points, people can be given Ethers, and the more they fight the higher the magic points cap is raised (and, thusly, the more magic can be used before an Ether is needed). In 13, only the lead character has TP and can only have a max of 5. It never gets higher and is only replenished through getting good combos in battle. Thankfully, most magic doesn’t use TP, only hard hitting ones like Quake (which attacks all enemies via Earth magic) do. However, a lot of 13 is based around the spell, Libra–which uses 1 TP and the idea is it reveals all the secrets of an enemy. Libra is required on Eidolon fights to even have a chance of knowing what to do. The fun part? Libra **NEVER** works the first time!! Every single time Trev and I had to use it, we had to cast it twice–giving up two full TP points when one should have sufficed. TP is just an attempt to fix a working system. There was nothing wrong with magic points and Ethers—but the team behind 13 felt they had to go add complexity where it wasn’t needed. On top of that, the whole Libra situation just punishes players for trying to follow the established rules of the game.

L) The bland riding sections. There is sections in 13 (I only ever played 1 section, but the tutorial hinted there’d be more) where you ride atop a giant robot and walk around. Sounds fun right? Wrong. Enemies can’t hurt you while you are riding it, and stepping on them is enough to kill them–so this devolves into the same as normal map-traversing in the game–holding up on the analog stick for an implied reward at the end. They tried to add a gameplay element by saying you could attack with your arms up to 3 times before needing to power up–but if enemies can’t hurt you and you can just walk on them, what’s the point? Also, to recharge the attacks, you just smash down fences–how’s that supposed to recharge a robot? The whole thing reeks of bland game design—there wasn’t even a split second of fun in it. It’s hard to describe how boring it actually is–because if you tell someone they’d be driving a big robot chasing bad guys they’d think it’d sound like a sure fire game plan–it sounds fun–but the execution is so horrid that the fun was drained out.

I’m sure, if I thought about it longer, I could write more about how I hate FF13. However, I think I successfully got the point across. This pains me a lot to say too–I love FF7–it’s the game that inspired me to be a writer! I also love FFX, and I still have a lot of respect for Tetsuya Nomura and his team. However, I do feel FF13 is a blemish on the good name of Final Fantasy and Nomura’s career–a blemish he’ll surely overcome–Nomura is the man!! (one of the many reasons I am learning Japanese is so I can someday thank him for making FF7). I do feel that going multi-platform probably hurt FF13 significantly, and a lot of the bland or under-developed elements probably have this to thank for it (most people don’t realize how much extra work it takes to make a good multi-plat game, which is why the Bioshock series is one of the few that does multi-plat right. Start a Bioshock game some time and count the studio logos that pop up and you’ll get an idea!). However, going multi-plat alone can’t explain all the faults of FF13–some of them (such as the odd battle design and inability to use Phoenix Downs on yourself) are more game design related and not, “We have to drastically cut this game up to fit on 2 very different systems” related–so it’s perfectly plausible that these tainted elements would have been in the game had it retained PS3 exclusivity. I do believe though that all these elements, both poor game design related and massive cut backs related, conspire together to make for a fact that pains me to say: I believe the Final Fantasy series has jumped the shark.