Final Fantasy XIII

With the lowest Metacritic score and highest first week sales of the series, the audience surrounding this much anticipated Japanese role-playing game is clearly divided. From the time I spent with the game, I feel it’s safe to say that if you love the series up to the unorthodox 12th entry you’ll enjoy the series first foray into HD.

It’s hard not to dedicate this entire paragraph to the game’s stunning graphical power, art direction, and soundtrack — it’s a tour de force and it’s a shame that Xbox360 players were cheated with a visually inferior version (badly compressed cutscenes, gameplay presented in 560p instead of the true HD of 720p.) As you might’ve read elsewhere, 13 chops the fat off the series’ formula. No towns, no world map, and no direct control over party members. Once you accept that there are 12 other entries in the series, each as diverse as the next, the sooner you’ll embrace 13’s inventive design that favors strategy and momentum rather than level grinding and exploration.

The story is convoluted to the point where the first ten hours will be incomprehensible if you don’t dedicate some time to reading the entries in your database and it’s becoming harder to accept the subpar dialog of the series, but the challenge and spectacle around every corner will remind any series veteran why a series that is so incongruous from title to title holds a place in our heart.

Problems arise as the game goes on and the combat becomes repetitive and easy to a fault, leaning on a rating system instead of actual challenge. The world that was so innovative reveals itself to be a mish-mash of concept art that has no flow or reason. Endless highways float in the sky and a gigantic zoo outside a town throw logic to the wind. Like the absurd abundance of zippers and accessories Tetsuya Nomura gives his characters, the world of FF13 favors style over substance and immersion.

It may not be worth sticking with to the end but the mindless aesthetic and fast combat is enjoyable in small bursts.

Final Fantasy is my favorite franchise of all-time, I've been playing them since the first one was released on the NES back in 1990. It feels weird that I have waited all this time to play this entry, but it just didn't have the best reputation and was a little scared that it wouldn't be Final Fantasy anymore. I was left disappointed by XII and XV, so I sort of expected to feel the same about this one since it's generally considered the poorest modern entry. Well I'm glad I dove in and gave it a chance, I really enjoyed the game and I would say it's actually my favorite since X.

Keep in mind that you do have to come in with an open mind and not expect "classic" Final Fantasy systems. They were trying new things here and I can see someone being disappointed if they wanted a classic style JRPG like Dragon Quest or Persona, it's definitely not that. Also if you want a big open world and towns to explore, this game also doesn't have that. The path is linear and the decision making on where to go is mostly simple, at least until the very late stages of the game. The combat system isn't quite either a Fight/Magic turn-based that you might expect, it's got a unique system with Paradigm that assign automatic combat styles. There's also a strong lack of itemization with just weapons and accessories, I did kinda miss gearing up into this one. But all in all, I think all of those things work in the games favor.

Perhaps fans wanted something different out of games back in 2010, but the fact that its linear is pretty good in my opinion. Not that I want every game to be like that, but I think everyone has now suffered the overload of Ubisoft open world games with huge maps and tons of pointless activities to do, so sometimes a game where you are just heading straight forward feels pretty refreshing. You are doing a little bit less of exploring, but this is compensated by doing a lot more fighting and tactics. The mechanics of the game are introduced at a steady slow pace, but once you've reached a certain point you get more freedom in choosing your own party members and their respective paradigms. That's also when the real challenge begins as the later half of the game is some of the hardest JRPG that I played, but it's a lot of fun.

The battle system is just excellent and will have you constantly changing between your preset paradigms every few seconds. Different enemies have different strategies on how to defeat them and you'll will need to adapt your strategy prior to many difficult bosses. And your ass is going to get handed by them and make them feel a little bit impossible, but it's almost like a puzzle where you really have to fit the puzzle pieces correctly... when looking up guides I noticed that no one really had the same strategy for particular bosses, so there's definitely a lot of possibilities to be successful. It's not only bosses that are hard, some of the common enemies too can totally wipe you and leave you wondering what the hell are you doing wrong. While the game might not appear to be too hard at first, the difficulty definitely ramps up and you'll have to use all your knowledge of the battle system to defeat enemies.

For a game released in 2009, the graphics are very impressive. It's one of the best looking games of the PS3 era, just really sharp character models and environments. Since there's not much "freedom", I guess the devs could focus more on getting those aspects perfectly. The story is wild and over the top, but that's what we like into these FF games anyway. The game was definitely ambitious with the use of technology, but also they went with a lot of risks by removing so many classic Final Fantasy elements. But it works, cause a lot of the other things not present would not feel too important in this particular experience. It's a little crazy to you expect for AAA games to be safe and all, but Square Enix kinda went the opposite way and I guess that's why many longtime fans were not pleased with it.

I still feel like FF X-2 is the "final" proper Final Fantasy game, the one where it still feels like you are playing the classic way. After that all the games are trying out weird things and trying to find their identity, this is definitely one of those games. But it's great and I loved my time with it, perhaps it was a little overlong but I think it paid off staying until the end. I am looking forward in playing the sequels now, but they will have a high bar to measure up to with this one. If you are still on the verge of trying out this one, I would recommend doing so (bearing in mind that this is a different experience) and I think it aged quite well and plays totally fine in 2022.