Kicking this shit off with some Hot Takes.
Or maybe not, as the case may be.
Chances are, your perception of FF13 if you hadn't played it or any of the other games in the series was that it "was a bit naff". Heavily criticised by a lot of respected parties and treated like the black sheep of the series by fans, it definitely wasn't the game a lot of people would go to as an entry point into the series. Unless you're me, and you had it turn up in your house one day when you were a kid and you didn't really keep track of games media beyond your subscription to Official Nintendo Magazine. I never finished it then, unsurprisingly, I don't even think I got very far in the story at all, but I remember it looked pretty and I enjoyed what I played of it, which was enough for me to eventually pick it up on PC many years down the line for about 7 quid in a Steam sale.
Took me about another year or so of stopping and starting for me to finally finish it a few weeks ago, and now thanks to yet another Steam sale I'm now nearing the end of XIII-2 and eagerly anticipating installing Lightning Returns. So I thought I'd have a chat with Me, Myself and I about it.
Turns out I'm not along in actually liking the game, like I thought I was for so long. The Metacritic use scores for the 360 and PS3 versions of the game are split, but still mostly on the positive end. PC is a different story, with a near perfect split down the middle, thanks to the apparent inability to change the resolution and FPS drops in high end systems, which I thought was odd, considering that it does have resolution options and I never dropped below 60 during the entire game. Though the former was probably a patch and the latter will have been nullified by better tech, so make of that what you will.
So as for why I like it, I'd bet it's down to me not being bothered by expectations. As I said, I'd never played any other Final Fantasy game beforehand. I love Chrono Trigger, and I think they're probably a bit like that with more Crystals and shit. But I went into FF13 expecting whatever FF13 was, rather than expecting FF7 or FF10 or whatever Final Fantasy game was the favourite of the people who went into FF13 expecting a Final Fantasy game. If you went into it expecting that, I can definitely see why the game's long corridors would be off-putting.
But get this: I like the corridors. They're gorgeous corridors. Corridors in spirit only. There's nothing wrong with a linear JRPG, I mean Undertale was exactly that and it's pretty excellent. There's nothing wrong with an RPG that trades freedom for linearity, it's clear that the people complaining about the linearity are really complaining about the story, which is crucial for any RPG which wants to go linear, and where Undertale succeeded tremendously.
And frankly, I can't begrudge anyone for complaining about the story. It's a mess. A gorgeous, surprisingly enjoyable mess that is only made funnier when you actually know your stuff when it comes to storytelling. It's hilarious the ways the story manages to fuck up. I only found out about the alignment of several main characters, and what was actually going on in certain story events, from reading supplementary stuff in FF13-2. That's how bad this game is at conveying information. And every time I had a story point clarified, or sometimes completely contradicted, in the "story so far" loading screen text I burst out laughing. There's probably an actually good story going on during this game, I can almost taste it at times it gets so close, but the execution is just hilarious in so many ways. The script is meandering, and overly reliant on made-up words the audience doesn't understand, and while the voice actors do their absolute hardest to make it work it so often falls flat on it's face. And that's brilliant. It's a spectacular unintentional comedy, with gorgeous art design. It also boasts to genuinely brilliant action sequences involving the Eidolons. Seriously, look up a few of them even if you never play the game, they're pretty great.
I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet, so I guess I should do that.
It's pretty great, so long as you don't get lazy. You won't hear me say this about pretty much anything else, but I can bet Diversity kind of caused a lot of problems for people's enjoyment of the game. The Diversity Paradigm (Commando, Ravager, Medic) is pretty much the standard setup that you'll gravitate towards. Ravager increases chain gauge, Commando stops it decreasing, Medic heals, sorted. If you're like me, you'll have had that Paradigm set as our standard for about 20 hours without any problems beyond having to google how to defeat the Eidolons(which I'd recommend doing anyway, not worth the time trying to figure out some of that shit). You'll pretty much just defeat anything slowly, but without problems, until suddenly it doesn't work, and your life becomes hard, and it's not fun. Because at that point you're supposed to have become a master of the Paradigm system, juggling debuffs for the enemy, buffs for you, pure damage Paradigms, defensive Paradigms to switch to when big attacks are coming and healing Paradigms. But in stead, you spent all this time in Diversity just casually pressing the auto-battle button until things died. The game doesn't really do a good enough job of putting up a fight against that standard setup or conveying the importance of other paradigms. But hey, I just told you not to do that. So if you play it, you won't do that. Will you now. Thank me later.
And when you are dancing between Paradigms, buffing and debuffing, attacking and defending and everything in between, it's a lot of fun. The game ends up playing more like an action game than you'd think the battle system would allow it to. And the late game really won't settle for anything less, even with pretty much max level the final boss and a lot of the optional stuff on Gran Pulse will require pretty precision timing on your Paradigm switches to squeeze out the most damage possible and to keep problem enemies locked away in the air where they can't hurt you. And speaking of the optional stuff, you've probably heard the old "it gets good around 4 hours in!" nonsense that people often cite as both a defence and damnation of the game. In reality it isn't really either of those things, or at least not to me. I didn't really bother with the side quests and the open world when it finally reared it's head. I just farmed up to max level and powered on through the main story. The optional stuff is there, but only if you really feel like you need it. I'd personally just recommend doing what I did so you can experience the thrilling/hilarious conclusion to the story, which includes furries, a poor attempt at End of Evangelion level fucked-up-ness and magical sex balls. It's pretty great.
And then you can move on to 13-2, which I'll probably talk about too, but needless to say it's a much better presented story with gameplay which might be more up your alley if you wanted a Final Fantasy game.
Or maybe not, as the case may be.
Chances are, your perception of FF13 if you hadn't played it or any of the other games in the series was that it "was a bit naff". Heavily criticised by a lot of respected parties and treated like the black sheep of the series by fans, it definitely wasn't the game a lot of people would go to as an entry point into the series. Unless you're me, and you had it turn up in your house one day when you were a kid and you didn't really keep track of games media beyond your subscription to Official Nintendo Magazine. I never finished it then, unsurprisingly, I don't even think I got very far in the story at all, but I remember it looked pretty and I enjoyed what I played of it, which was enough for me to eventually pick it up on PC many years down the line for about 7 quid in a Steam sale.
Took me about another year or so of stopping and starting for me to finally finish it a few weeks ago, and now thanks to yet another Steam sale I'm now nearing the end of XIII-2 and eagerly anticipating installing Lightning Returns. So I thought I'd have a chat with Me, Myself and I about it.
Turns out I'm not along in actually liking the game, like I thought I was for so long. The Metacritic use scores for the 360 and PS3 versions of the game are split, but still mostly on the positive end. PC is a different story, with a near perfect split down the middle, thanks to the apparent inability to change the resolution and FPS drops in high end systems, which I thought was odd, considering that it does have resolution options and I never dropped below 60 during the entire game. Though the former was probably a patch and the latter will have been nullified by better tech, so make of that what you will.
So as for why I like it, I'd bet it's down to me not being bothered by expectations. As I said, I'd never played any other Final Fantasy game beforehand. I love Chrono Trigger, and I think they're probably a bit like that with more Crystals and shit. But I went into FF13 expecting whatever FF13 was, rather than expecting FF7 or FF10 or whatever Final Fantasy game was the favourite of the people who went into FF13 expecting a Final Fantasy game. If you went into it expecting that, I can definitely see why the game's long corridors would be off-putting.
But get this: I like the corridors. They're gorgeous corridors. Corridors in spirit only. There's nothing wrong with a linear JRPG, I mean Undertale was exactly that and it's pretty excellent. There's nothing wrong with an RPG that trades freedom for linearity, it's clear that the people complaining about the linearity are really complaining about the story, which is crucial for any RPG which wants to go linear, and where Undertale succeeded tremendously.
And frankly, I can't begrudge anyone for complaining about the story. It's a mess. A gorgeous, surprisingly enjoyable mess that is only made funnier when you actually know your stuff when it comes to storytelling. It's hilarious the ways the story manages to fuck up. I only found out about the alignment of several main characters, and what was actually going on in certain story events, from reading supplementary stuff in FF13-2. That's how bad this game is at conveying information. And every time I had a story point clarified, or sometimes completely contradicted, in the "story so far" loading screen text I burst out laughing. There's probably an actually good story going on during this game, I can almost taste it at times it gets so close, but the execution is just hilarious in so many ways. The script is meandering, and overly reliant on made-up words the audience doesn't understand, and while the voice actors do their absolute hardest to make it work it so often falls flat on it's face. And that's brilliant. It's a spectacular unintentional comedy, with gorgeous art design. It also boasts to genuinely brilliant action sequences involving the Eidolons. Seriously, look up a few of them even if you never play the game, they're pretty great.
I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet, so I guess I should do that.
It's pretty great, so long as you don't get lazy. You won't hear me say this about pretty much anything else, but I can bet Diversity kind of caused a lot of problems for people's enjoyment of the game. The Diversity Paradigm (Commando, Ravager, Medic) is pretty much the standard setup that you'll gravitate towards. Ravager increases chain gauge, Commando stops it decreasing, Medic heals, sorted. If you're like me, you'll have had that Paradigm set as our standard for about 20 hours without any problems beyond having to google how to defeat the Eidolons(which I'd recommend doing anyway, not worth the time trying to figure out some of that shit). You'll pretty much just defeat anything slowly, but without problems, until suddenly it doesn't work, and your life becomes hard, and it's not fun. Because at that point you're supposed to have become a master of the Paradigm system, juggling debuffs for the enemy, buffs for you, pure damage Paradigms, defensive Paradigms to switch to when big attacks are coming and healing Paradigms. But in stead, you spent all this time in Diversity just casually pressing the auto-battle button until things died. The game doesn't really do a good enough job of putting up a fight against that standard setup or conveying the importance of other paradigms. But hey, I just told you not to do that. So if you play it, you won't do that. Will you now. Thank me later.
And when you are dancing between Paradigms, buffing and debuffing, attacking and defending and everything in between, it's a lot of fun. The game ends up playing more like an action game than you'd think the battle system would allow it to. And the late game really won't settle for anything less, even with pretty much max level the final boss and a lot of the optional stuff on Gran Pulse will require pretty precision timing on your Paradigm switches to squeeze out the most damage possible and to keep problem enemies locked away in the air where they can't hurt you. And speaking of the optional stuff, you've probably heard the old "it gets good around 4 hours in!" nonsense that people often cite as both a defence and damnation of the game. In reality it isn't really either of those things, or at least not to me. I didn't really bother with the side quests and the open world when it finally reared it's head. I just farmed up to max level and powered on through the main story. The optional stuff is there, but only if you really feel like you need it. I'd personally just recommend doing what I did so you can experience the thrilling/hilarious conclusion to the story, which includes furries, a poor attempt at End of Evangelion level fucked-up-ness and magical sex balls. It's pretty great.
And then you can move on to 13-2, which I'll probably talk about too, but needless to say it's a much better presented story with gameplay which might be more up your alley if you wanted a Final Fantasy game.
Comments
Post a Comment