ファイナルファンタジーXIII

I thought long and hard about how best to approach this review. With over 500 hours and counting spent with this game, there is so much I can (and will) say about how phenomenal and inspiring it is. However, the sheer amount of critical baggage the game has makes it difficult to communicate these things without feeling like I'm speaking to deaf ears. FF13 is one of the most misunderstood games I've ever encountered. So much of the criticism I've read about it is founded upon narrow expectations of what a role-playing game should be like. This isn't surprising, as JRPG audiences have for decades proven to be a conservative bunch who react to experimental titles with apprehension at best and contempt at worst. While there's nothing wrong with having a preference for traditional JRPGs, I believe the scale of this conservatism is unhealthy, and has fostered an environment where developers are afraid to be creative. For this reason, I feel it's best to break down the biased preconceptions that have led to FF13's stained reputation, in order to create a clean slate upon which its merits can be displayed.

To begin, it's necessary to touch upon the uncertain definition of "role-playing game." It could be argued that its usage in describing "games in which you increase character statistics" is a bastardization of its original meaning in the context of traditional pen and paper role-playing games or western computer RPGs such as Ultima. Japanese RPGs commonly have players take on the role of pre-existing characters, and some will argue that this is a valid form of role-play. After all, most JRPGs allow the player a degree of interaction within the framework of their pre-existing characters. I'm not going to provide a take on what the correct usage of "RPG" should be; the aforementioned arguments are brought up only for the necessity of context. I call FF13 an RPG only due to the lack of a better term, but I'll be the first to admit that this requires stretching the term to its absolute limit. It's impossible to even use the argument that you're playing the role of a pre-existing character, because FF13 does not allow interaction with other characters or agency in the story. Players looking for a role-playing experience will be understandably disappointed in this game, but FF13 offers an alternative: it focuses all of its interaction on combat. It's not a game where you play as a character. It's a game where you use characters as tools. This distinction is important to make, because the entire experience is built to support an extreme emphasis on combat. Anything that distracts from this emphasis is cut without compromise, including towns, npc interaction, exploration, and the ability to role-play as a character. It's only with the bastardized definition of "game in which you increase character statistics" that FF13 could remotely be considered an RPG, but does that make it a bad game? Of course not. In fact, its removal of traditional RPG elements is a large part of what makes it so phenomenal. FF13's combat is easily the most unique and satisfying system in the series. Focusing the game entirely on combat was the best decision the dev team could possibly have made, as it cuts out downtime and provides a slick, fast-paced adventure with impeccable pacing.

In some ways the design philosophy is more akin to an arcade shmup than an RPG. You run through a linear stage fighting carefully designed enemy mobs, battle a boss at the end, and move on to the next stage. The arcade influence is made even more obvious with the inclusion of a score and rating system for battles. The faster you complete battles, the higher your score, and thus your rating. A higher rating provides better drop rates for rare items and refills more of your TP, but most importantly the timer shows exactly how well or poorly you're playing. The developers are clearly implying that the point of this game isn't to simply survive each fight and move on until you're done with the story. No, it's to be as fast and clean as possible, always trying to improve your times and your scores. This brings me to another common criticism of FF13: that the game "plays itself" or that it's "auto-battle to win." Admittedly, it's not that difficult to beat the game and see the ending. In most battles you can get away with safe, slow strategies to survive, but like I said, survival isn't the goal. You can credit-feed an arcade game to reach the ending, but no one with a brain criticizes arcade games as being "credit-feed to win," because it's understood that arcade games are meant to be played for score. No one criticizes shmups for being "hold down a button to shoot," because it's understood that there's much more involved to get a good score than simply shooting at things. Likewise, playing FF13 well requires much more than simply selecting auto-battle to attack, or letting your party AI handle the enemy. Aggressive chaining, interrupting enemy actions, stagger-cancelling dangerous attacks, and manipulating character positioning are just a few techniques that require careful, deliberate control of your team to execute, and will help improve your times. There are some really neat mechanics to exploit such as passive effects of roles, buffering actions into other roles, conditional chain modifiers, and ATB refreshes. I've only mentioned tactics used in battle, but there's a lot of strategy to exploit in your setup as well. Having only 6 paradigms really forces you to strategize in advance for each fight, planning out the flow of the battle to determine which paradigms will be most advantageous. Synthesized abilities add an additional layer of strategy to equipment, as it can be worth equipping certain weapons or accessories for their synthesis class rather than their stats or passive abilities.

What makes all this strategy feel truly rewarding is that target times for battles are not fixed - they scale based on your stats and those of the enemy. You can beef up a character's strength all you want, but since the target time will decrease accordingly it's not a free ride to a 5-star battle rating. The most important factor is always your strategy, not your stats. This means that you can strive for 5-star ratings even with low stats, and conveniently enough you're free to abstain from increasing your stats if you so desire. Challenge runs of FF13 are a lot of fun. Unlike most Final Fantasy games, there are no cheap broken strategies that you can use to cheese the game, so you need to make use of all your tools wisely, understanding their situational utility. A great challenge for a first or second playthrough is to get a 5-star rating on all the Cie'th stone missions with stage 8 Crystarium (the level you have access to when you first arrive on Gran Pulse). While Cie'th stone missions are commonly considered to be post-game content (when you have stage 10 Crystarium), all but two of these missions can be played even before unlocking stage 9, and you can simply abstain from making use of stage 9 before completing the last two. Doing this should give you a good taste of how much depth there is to the combat, since you'll need to rely more on strategy than stats to survive some of the more dangerous missions. Recently I've been doing a Secondary Roles Only challenge (only secondary roles may be developed in the Crystarium, and only secondary roles may be used in battle). This has also been a lot of fun as it forces you to take each character out of their element, survive with low stats, and work with some unusual paradigm combinations (there's only one Ravager available for example). Despite being a very linear game, the depth of the combat gives FF13 a high replay value. It unsurprisingly has a robust speedrun community thanks to the game's emphasis on speed and execution. It's perhaps a little unfortunate that it's possible to beat the game without seeing how deep you can get with the combat when going for the best times, because it may have prevented some players from exploring that depth enough to appreciate the system.

No debunking of FF13 criticism can be complete without mention of hallways and corridors. Yes, this game is a hallway simulator. It's extremely linear. I already touched upon this earlier when I compared FF13's stage design with that of an arcade shmup, but I'd like to expand upon that further now. I genuinely believe it's to the game's advantage that there is no exploration, and you're merely shuffling along from one fight to the next. Like everything else in the game, it places the focus on the combat, and to back it up the encounter design is absolutely fantastic. Enemy formations present dynamic challenges that players must recognize and adapt to. Daemons use debuffs and aggressively interrupt you with combos, Armadillons have high chain resistance and protective shells that can be removed by staggering, Behemoths can activate a second stronger phase at low hp and heal to full hp in the process, and so on. Different enemies require very different tactics to deal with efficiently, including exploiting their gimmicks. For example, aggressively raising chain percentage on behemoths without dealing much damage, then blasting through their remaining hp before they can activate their second form. As you get further in each stage, the combinations of enemies become more complex and expect efficient multi-tasking and prioritizing from the player. The restrictive access to abilities and characters up until chapter 10 gives the battle designers a clear framework to build off of. It's known exactly who your party leader is, who else is in the party, and what abilities you are able to learn, so encounters can be carefully balanced around that to be engaging. Some have interpreted the restrictive access to tools as a "30 hour tutorial," a criticism I've never understood as the game stops providing tutorials after the paradigm system is introduced in chapter 3. What the game does do is ensure that your entire toolkit is useful for almost every encounter in the game. Interesting, well balanced fights are not tutorials. Restrictions on party composition and character growth are not simply there to teach you how the game works; they serve to provide unique challenges in each chapter. With so many engaging fights, I don't need or want exploration. As a matter of fact, when I get to Gran Pulse I always end up dreading all the running around between Cie'th stone missions, as I just want to get to the battles. When a game does combat as well as FF13 does, it's a blessing to be able to focus purely on fighting, so the hallways are a godsend. To criticize this game for being linear and full of hallways is to ignore how it uses this design to its advantage.

At this point I think I've made it clear that the designers of FF13 were not trying to make a game that falls within RPG conventions. By their own admission, their goal was to create something new and different. It's disappointing to me that when JRPG developers get creative and make something unique, it's usually met with derision rather than open-mindedness.

Last but not least, we come to the story. People have many complaints, including unlikeable characters, confusing narrative, and an over-reliance on the datalog for information. The characters all have deep personal flaws. Namely, their unhealthy obsessions with particular goals lead them on morally questionable paths, or are used as coping mechanisms to block out painful thoughts. Hope becomes obsessed with taking revenge, and nearly murders Snow. Sazh is so desperate to save his son that when his son turns to crystal he has no will to live and tries to commit suicide. Vanille runs from all her problems and responsibilities, putting on a cheerful facade to hide her inner pain. The cast could hardly be described as admirable (aside from Sazh, arguably), but that's also what makes them feel genuine. They're human, just like us, and the way they come to terms with their flaws feels real and believable. Lightning doesn't come to terms with how unhealthy her mindset has been until her coaching of Hope turns him into a reflection of herself. When she realizes this, there is no immediate resolution, and she doesn't know how to proceed. A healing process needs to occur, and these things take time. Players may not agree with the actions of the characters, but their inner turmoils are honest and relatable.

FF13's dialogue contains a large amount of jargon. Cocoon, Pulse, PSICOM, Guardian Corps, Sanctum, fal'Cie, l'Cie, Cie'th, Focus; the list goes on. It's easy to be overwhelmed by these terms at the start of the game, but they are explained in cutscenes within the first few chapters. Cocoon society's fear of Pulse, the world below, is discussed at length within the context of justification of the Purge. The Purge was enacted by PSICOM, an army division controlled by the Sanctum which Lightning, a Guardian Corp member, is distrusting of. The concepts of fal'Cie, l'Cie, Cie'th, and Focus are discussed in chapter 2, where we see firsthand examples as the party are branded l'Cie themselves. At no point do any of these terms need to be referenced in the datalog, since they are explained in a natural manner in the story itself. It's true that terms are often initially used in dialogue before they are explained, but this is necessary to make dialogue feel natural and convincing in a society where these terms are common knowledge. For some players, that initial alienation may cause them to turn to the datalog seeking answers, but after a couple hours with the game it should become abundantly clear that explanations will be provided when the proper context appears in the story. The datalog serves as a reference guide for forgetful players, or those who spent time away from the game and need a refresher upon return. It does not replace explanations in cutscenes. The only aspects of the story which are not explained are some mythological lore which is only hinted at in vague terms in the Analects of the datalog, unlocked by completing certain Cie'th stone missions on Gran Pulse. This is intentionally left obscured, as the characters themselves do not know the mythology. Their lack of understanding the implications of their actions is what leads them to trigger the fall of Cocoon, and it's only by Etro's divine intervention that this is prevented. By keeping the mythology obscured, players are made to feel like a participant in this universe; a universe in which fal'Cie and humans alike have been orphaned by the gods. It also provides an opportunity for imagination in the interpretation of the Analects, as their vague wording leaves room for players to form their own theories (at least until they play the sequels, which spell everything out for better or worse). I really like FF13's story, and the way it was presented felt respectful of the player's intelligence.

I think that I've addressed most of the common complaints about FF13, but there are two more things I want to touch on: visuals and music. The art direction is stunning. Isamu Kamikokuryo has a wonderful mind for creating gorgeous alien landscapes and cities. The arrival at Eden comes to mind as one of the most inspiring moments visually, as the player looks down at the surreal architecture below. The Gapra Whitewood's synthetic biodome with its soft blue hues walks a fine balance between uncanny and beautiful. The environments never stop looking breathtaking. The music, courtesy of Masashi Hamauzu, features some of the most beautiful ambient tracks I've ever heard, including Sulyya Springs, The Vestige, and The Gapra Whitewood. Will to Fight and The Sunleth Waterscape are also standout tracks for me. Hamauzu is probably my favourite composer of video game music, and FF13 features some of his best work. I feel a little bad for him, because he has made some truly incredible music for games that are woefully misunderstood. Just look at Unlimited Saga as another example.

I admire the developers of FF13 for having the confidence to release a game like this. It's obvious that it was made with a vision of something new and different than traditional RPGs, and the final product reflects that vision without compromise. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the game's sequels, which explicitly tried to address player feedback and failed to expand upon the things that made this game special. It was as though the developers started putting their trust more in the audience's vision for the series instead of their own. That's not to say that they're bad games. I like 13-2 and Lightning Returns, but I consider them to be deeply flawed works which hurt 13's legacy more than they celebrate it. I won't go into more detail here since they each deserve reviews of their own, and I already wrote a review for 13-2 a while back which you can view on the 13-2 page. As for Lightning Returns, I'll write about it some day in the future. I hope a time will come when audiences become more receptive to experimentation within JRPGs. Developer creativity is alive and well, but the market just isn't ready for it yet.