Editor's note: Final Fantasy 13 has drawn a number of critics for straying from accepted role-playing-game dogma. Michael, however, is happy with these changes to the RPG formula, and he offers this defense of the game. How do you feel about Final Fantasy 13? -Jason
We’ve started off with a pretty decent first quarter of 2010: Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta, God of War 3, Heavy Rain, and Final Fantasy 13. All of them received fairly positive reviews, but this isn't necessarily the case for Final Fantasy 13.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":654310,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"D"}']Taking a quick glance at Metacritic, you can see that so far this is the poorest rated game in the mainline Final Fantasy series. It’s not to say that I think Final Fantasy 13 received bad scores; it’s just getting lower scores than it usually does. If you read some of my other articles, you’ll see I don’t care about scores, but when you look at the text of these reviews it’s just difficult to understand where the respective writers are coming up with some of these complaints.
So why have people turned on Final Fantasy? Well, that’s up for debate.
Since this is considered a “triple A” title, did media outlets allow people who don't normally play RPGs review it? Maybe, but what about the writers who are RPG fans? Is the game too far off the normal Final Fantasy path, if such a thing even exists, that they didn’t like it? Again, that's up for debate, a few common complaints seem to exist among the reviews.
The No. 1 issue that writers have with the game seems to be its supposed linearity. When you read some of these reviews, you’d think that they were looking for a Grand Theft Auto game. If you go back through older Final Fantasy games, you’d see that they are all linear — they just give you a false sense of freedom, just like any modern sandbox game, even GTA.
Now I’m not opposed to this; my favorite genre of games are Metroidvania titles (such as Shadow Complex), but even those are essentially linear. You need to get certain items to progress forward in the game. Sure, you can "break" these games and skip items, but for the average game player, it’s essentially linear.
Where Final Fantasy 13 “messed up” is that their maps, in a lot of cases, are straight lines, but even still I backtracked when I wasn't instructed to do so. Without spoiling anything, essentially I did something in an area to progress forward and thought to myself, “Wait a minute, I wonder if that did anything in a previous area.” I went back, and sure enough, it had an effect; a few new areas opened up.
Another common complaint is the battle system. Reviewers are saying that you’re just blasting through combat, hitting the X button and not thinking at all. I've found the battles to be the complete opposite. Where I’ve caught myself just hitting X over and over in other RPGs, I’ve been thinking more in this game than in any RPG I’ve played in a long time. Sure, you're in direct control of only one character, but you’re still telling the other characters what to do. If you tell a character to use magic by shifting their Paradigm, it will use the magic from their roster of abilities that best takes advantage of the foe's weaknesses. Isn’t that what you’d do anyway? Again, maybe the developers made a bad decision by calling the command “autobattle.”
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The Stagger system is amazing and really changes the way you approach combat. Maybe the reviewers who are bothered by enemies with large amounts of health don’t understand the Stagger system. Battles were long for me until I grasped the concept of Staggering and using Paradigm shifts to keep boosting the Stagger meter. The enemy's health just drained after I grasped these concepts.
Speaking of health, the fact that the game replenishes your health after each battle really lets you focus on tactics rather than health preservation outside of the fight. I love Final Fantasy 10, but I can remember fighting battles and then running in a panic to the next save point so I could heal up and hopefully get there before entering another random encounter.
The Crystarium, which is reminiscent of FF10's Sphere Grid advancment system, is fantastic. Receiving gradual improvements rather than big chunky “levels” makes each battle feel much more rewarding. That you gradually unlock sections of the Crystarium makes me feel like I don’t have to grind much. So far I seem to be maxing out as much of the Crystarium that I have available by the end of each area, which makes me feel like I really completed that part of the game. I like the sphere grid, but with that the whole thing is visible right away. Gradually unlocking abilities in the Crystarium is a much better idea. It just makes me feel like I’m keeping the right pace in the game.
Finally, I must talk about the idea that the game “holds your hand” for the first 25 hours. This is just ridiculous. Instead of dumping all these new concepts on you right off the bat, the game eases you in by saying, “Here’s how this works. Now master this new ability for the next hour.” This is exactly how you learn to play a musical instrument — learn this guitar chord this week, learn another guitar chord next week, etc. I feel this method has helped me grasp concepts that I would’ve just blasted by in other RPGs. As soon as I realized that this is the teaching technique that the game uses, I immediately thought back to games like Final Fantasy 8 that just seem to dump everything on you at once. If games like FF8 offered a tutorial up front, I’m sure games would've had fewer complaints about its complex Junction battle system. You just can't please some people.
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One thing I can agree with in the reviews is the story, although good, can get a bit confusing if you don’t read the Datalog. Having to go to a menu to read backstory and term definitions is a bit archaic, but then again, reading some of these reviews, you’d think that’d be one thing the writers would like. I miss the traditional Final Fantasy victory tune.