Final Fantasy XIII review

Today is a very awesome today. Today is the official Final Fantasy XIII release and since I’ve wanted to write a game review for a very long time I’m going to write one about Final Fantasy XIII and whether waiting 3+ years was worth it.

Final Fantasy XIII is the latest Final Fantasy title to be released by Square Enix. It is a Fantasy Japanese roleplay game with a fast paced action twist. It has both good and bad points so far and this is what I think so far of it.

STORY
It’s a sci-fi fantasy style story based in a world called Pulse, a beautiful utopia that looks like something out of James Cameron’s Avatar (which is quite funny since Square want to sue him for stealing their environment). On this world there is some really powerful beings called Fal’cie’s who can ‘curse’ humans into becoming L’Cie. The L’cie are given focuses by the Fal’cie which if they don’t complete something bad happens and if you do then the reward isn’t so great (basically a lose lose situation). You play a group of humans turned L’cie who have to save their world etc etc etc.

Basically like every Final Fantasy it’s all pretty much japans RPG dribble which includes curses, magic, monsters with fancy names and some form of emotional main character with hair issues. The story isn’t as amazing as previous ones. One thing which annoyed me mostly about it was after playing about 3 hours I suddenly started to realise that I was replaying Final Fantasy VII, the intro story and the characters are nearly enough identical. Square probably decided to do this after realising Final Fantasy VII was their most liked game out of the series.

All in all I found the story to be pretty poor (especially compared to previous attempts) but it was definitely not the worst aspect of the game.

CHARACTERS
As usually Square has created a crazy cast of characters with over-the-top hair and clothing but this time there is a bit of a difference.

When playing a Final Fantasy game I tend to end of becoming attached to at least one character, mostly the main character but this time no one has grabbed my attention. Sure they look great but personality is another issue all together. At the moment the characters are just socially inept morons with colourful back story. Maybe it’s because the opening few hours the game flitters from character to character meaning you don’t really get a main character. It could even be because of the voice actors.

In short awesome looking characters, pathetically thought out personalities.

BATTLING
One of the big things in Final Fantasy is the battle system. For roughly 10 games it was a action-battle-time-wait-for-bar-to-load-then-attack battle then suddenly it got to Final Fantasy XII and you only needed to control one character and you could set up all the other characters actions out of battle. Now in XIII the battle system is different again.

You control one character and they act as your main and you have two other characters in your group. Instead of setting the other two characters actions you set their style of fighting. Usually they go in as “Ravagers” which means they’ll just constantly attack but then within battle you can change their style via a funky shift-changing thing called a “Paradigm Shift”. Your characters can then be changed into Medics, Saboteurs, Synergist etc. This is less time consuming then setting them up outside of battle but there is a downside.

The styles have no middle ground, when you are in that style the character will stay doing what it is told to do until you’ve switched again, for example a medic constantly heals even when all characters health are full and in order for the medic to attack their style must be changed, changing all the other characters in the process. Now this would be perfectly fine but since Square seems to have wanted to speed up game play and make the battle scene look rather messy by having characters flip around none stop it’s very distracting and so shifting becomes a second thought until half your parties dead.

Basically very messy/distracting battle scene with a switch system which could probably do with being more refined to keep up with battle speed.

VISUALS
The one thing Square Enix is best at. The best thing about the game so far has been the nice high definition graphics. They are simply gorgeous.

Since the world is fantasy based the palette is very vibrant. At the moment it’s been mostly dominated by greens and blues and very harsh light tones. The environment is very much like James Cameron’s Avatar mixed with Tron in places.

The graphics are the best I’ve seen within a game. So crisp and detailed. The Skin textures are amazing, mottled slightly and filled with pours. The hair is probably not the best hair I’ve seen in a game but still amazing and the eyes seem somewhat lifelike.

Definitely a thumbs up from me though I do prefer my more Final Fantasy IX styled worlds to this one.

As much as I could continue babbling on about the game and the good and bad points I’m going to stop myself and give a general overview.

To me the game is a set of brilliant concepts that just don’t fit together. It seems as though Square don’t know if they’re making a roleplay game or a fast-paced action game (the two don’t really merge which is a shame). It’s one of the better games I’ve played this year though on the Playstation 3. Reviewing the game as a Final Fantasy I would say it’s probably one of the worst ones they’ve made to date even if the intro story was the exact same to Final Fantasy VII.

On the bright side this game is one of three and definitely not the one I’m pinning all my hopes on.