{"id":1899,"date":"2010-05-10T16:33:47","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T06:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1899"},"modified":"2014-05-13T13:04:11","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T03:04:11","slug":"final-fantasy-xiii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1899","title":{"rendered":"Final Fantasy XIII"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"finalfantasyxiii\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Playstation 3<\/em>
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong>Square Enix<\/em>
\nPublisher:\u00a0 <\/strong>Electronic Arts
\n<\/em><\/p>\nY<\/span>ou could make quite an interesting case study exploring how the role-playing genre has changed in this current generation of video game consoles.\u00a0 It has seen a cultural shift as the popularity and critical acclaim for Western RPGs have begun surpassing Japanese RPGs.\u00a0 Many RPG staples have started to appear in other unlikely genres such as first person shooters.\u00a0 And yet RPGs themselves, which have typically been adverse to change, suddenly find themselves rapidly adapting to capture a wider and more casual marketplace.\u00a0 With Final Fantasy XIII<\/em>, one of the most widely recognised and beloved RPG brands, SquareEnix has also has radically changed their traditional template.<\/p>\n

Some of the Final Fantasy trademarks are still there.\u00a0 Chocobos, Moogles, airships and summons are all here.\u00a0 Gone however are towns, NPCs, experience points, controlling multiple characters and world maps.\u00a0 That said, I’m reluctant to say that Final Fantasy<\/em> has ‘gone casual’.\u00a0 I completed the game with the internal clock registering 56 hours of play which is anything but a casual commitment to a game.\u00a0 I will say instead that Final Fantasy XIII<\/em> has been significantly streamlined and taken a highly unusual approach to its game design which I’ve not really seen before.<\/p>\n

As the game begins, the first ten (out of thirteen) chapters of the game are rigidly linear.\u00a0 Linear in almost every sense of the word.\u00a0 Not only is there just a single path for the player to travel along, this path is often bears down an absolute straight line.\u00a0 The player also has no choice in controlling which character they choose to play as.\u00a0 The combat system is initially so constrained that it is possible to progress through the first few hours of the game simply by mashing the ‘x’ button on everything.\u00a0 Final Fantasy XIII<\/em>‘s opening ten<\/span> hours may qualify as the world’s longest video game tutorial.<\/p>\n

Once the player reaches the eleventh chapter however, the game suddenly opens up and presents the player with control of all six characters and an open world with over sixty sidequests which can be accessed in almost any order.\u00a0 The game then encourages the player to upgrade their weapons and accessories using a combination of natural and mechanical items collected in the game world which require a mathematical formula and a detailed GameFAQs guide to work out the most effective way to level them up to their maximum.<\/p>\n

To use a culinary analogy, its like Square have served you an entree which they expect you to eat for an hour and then after that they’ve served you the mains, sidedishes, dessert, drinks and petit fours all at once on the same plate and said ‘enjoy’.<\/p>\n

I have no idea what sort of wider audience they think this game will capture and its alienating game design is reflected in the mixed critical reception its received upon release.\u00a0 The game is far too complicated from the eleventh chapter onwards for a newcomer to keep up with.\u00a0 Yet, by having such a simplistic approach to the game’s introduction and by scrapping so many staple RPG elements, they lose the support of traditional Final Fantasy<\/em> fans also.<\/p>\n

While I do think the game is likely to disappoint or confuse many players, I can also put my hand up and say that its the most enjoyable Final Fantasy that I’ve personally played in years and the first one since FF7 that I’ve bothered to play through to completion.<\/p>\n

It was a hard slog initially.\u00a0 Those first couple of hours in particular, are brutal.\u00a0 I found the characters to be almost insultingly simplistic and some of the clunky dialogue is difficult to sit through.\u00a0 Characters verbalise their emotions rather than express them.\u00a0 One of the characters, Vanille, who appears to be constructed out of the absolute worst of Japanese anime stereotypes, was particularly grating.\u00a0 Her character narrates the game with some wishy washy babbling about human nature and then as the story unfolds, there is a complete disconnect between her narrative voice and her behaviour during the game.\u00a0 In the narration, she is somewhat coherent.\u00a0 In-game, she appears to suffer from a severe social disorder that causes her to act like an overly cheerful mongoloid.\u00a0 Early in the game, a character’s mother dies to which she cheerfully spouts off some playground banter and then skips around in front of the bereaved.<\/p>\n

The opening chapters also struggle with jarring inconsistencies in the game world.\u00a0 The quality of the character models vary from cutscene to cutscene and there is a complete disconnect between the interactive parts of the game and the cinematics.\u00a0 In the cinematics, the leader of a rebellion Snow hides behind cover to avoid the gunfire of enemy troops.\u00a0 In-game, this same character will get hit with a faceful of gunfire for a measly couple of hit points.\u00a0 In the cinematics, Hope is a young boy who’s caught up in a conflict and is in way over his head.\u00a0 In-game, he’s probably one of the most useful fighters.<\/p>\n

However, over time, the game won me over.\u00a0 Once you get full unrestricted access to the combat system, it is the best I’ve played in any Final Fantasy<\/em> game bar none.\u00a0 The ‘Paradigm’ system, uses different combat styles focusing on traits such as attacking, defending and spell casting and then allows the player to assign these to their own player as well as the AI controlled partners.\u00a0 This means that rather than micromanaging each individual action, the player is more broadly controlling the behaviour of the character as they queue up multiple actions.\u00a0 The combat system then allows you to switch these different paradigms mid-battle, adapting to the conditions of the fight at hand.\u00a0 Its difficult to explain but is hugely satisfying to play.<\/p>\n

The game world also really comes into its own after chapter eleven.\u00a0 Gran Pulse is a fantastic environment which is populated with hundreds of interesting creatures and fauna.\u00a0 The sidequests are fantastic fun to play through.\u00a0 There is plenty of imagination shown in the creature design and the game delivers some of its most entertaining diversions during these sidequests.\u00a0 One mission starts with a cutscene showing off a vicious snarling creature full of tentacles and teeth.\u00a0 Out of nowhere, a pint-sized Yoda look-alike casually strolls onto the screen, knifes the creature and engages you in the fight instead.<\/p>\n

Final Fantasy XIII<\/em> is Square’s attempt at modernizing its most beloved franchise.\u00a0 Its certainly had a change in tone from when I first played Final Fantasy VI<\/em>, my first experience with the series.\u00a0 One of the closing lines of dialogue at the end of FF XIII<\/em> is a character telling their sister ‘congrats’ and then this leads into the closing theme song sung by a popstar from the British reality tv show The X-Factor.\u00a0 Its not a game I would recommend to everyone but personally I thoroughly enjoyed what Final Fantasy XIII<\/em> had to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not sure what kind of fantasy they had in mind when they made the character Vanille.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1787,500,713,525,1932],"class_list":["post-1899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-electronic-arts","tag-final-fantasy","tag-final-fantasy-xiii","tag-rpg","tag-square-enix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1899"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14888,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1899\/revisions\/14888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}