Final Fantasy XIII – Rant

I didn’t create this website to review games. I think, if I remember correctly, I made this blog to rant and whine in the cyberspace. So, allow me to express my disgust about some games! As you guys know from my previous blog entries, I just bought a Play Station 3 and I think this product is worth every penny. I bought a few games to try (Red Dead Redemption was the first and it kicks ass) but one of these games was Final Fantasy XIII suggested by many friends and reviews.

Final Fantasy 13 looks like it’s designed for a specific audience. Teenage Girls. Why’s that? it’s because of the design of the major characters. First of all, all the important characters are of age 12-19 and all of them look “perfect” with perfect EYE freaking BROWS. Even the “tough” guy has his eye brows fixed. That just gives me the creeps, seriously. Have you seen their movie cut scenes on youtube? everyone has this tooth-brush-commercial-like smile you will never see an ugly character with bad teeth and pimples. I don’t respect any world where everyone pays 50% of their savings on cosmetics.

Secondly, the character story and background. Why am I watching a teenage cliche love story? Serah (Sarah?) and Snow. Every time I get Snow’s flash backs of him dating the under aged kid with their “Hahaha.. life is beautiful, I will love you all my life.” kind of dialogue I feel I want to shove a fork in my eyes. Even to the standards of a dreamy 1930s teenager, that’s a little too much. The other characters don’t help either; you got a kid who wants to avenge his mother’s death and a very flat character (Valine?) who’s always optimistic and has this ANNOYING voice. To mention that her personality is more sensible than the others says MUCH. To my surprise, I found Sazh (the guy with the afro) to be “coolest” character of the bunch, still I think he’s annoying. What kind of character would keep a little bird tucked inside his afro?

World and Setting

The world doesn’t convince me and not because I’ve played a lot of RPGs. It’s always empty except for hostile creatures, the linearity of the game doesn’t help either (the game is really… REALLY linear). You are not free to go anywhere you want, there’s only one path to go to. There’s no maps (as far as I reached, there’s none and I played for at least 15 hours). I don’t feel I’m inside a world with its own lore and history I actually feel the history and lore of the world were just an afterthought. I don’t understand why I’m fighting “technological entities” I don’t know why they’re always hostile (no one explains that, not even in the datalog). I just know I must kill them. I fight against airplanes, Giant Red Peppers, Robo-Tigers, Bombs!, and Motorcycles!!!! I’m not a big fan of that, thank you. Why the hell am I fighting a motorcycle, why is the motorcycle angry.. I don’t understand!!! SOMEONE EXPLAIN!!

Character Progressing is an illusion because it’s super-linear. Every character gets a variety of “classes” for them so there’s no specific roles, everyone can do almost everything. You just set your Paradigms to quickly make each one of your party adapt a role. I don’t like that really, I’d rather have roles for each character. However, combat is fun in this game and that’s the only thing that kept me coping with the cut scene videos (the horrors.. god, but once I learned how to skip them I NEVER hesitated to skip any video with Serah and/or Snow in it).

In Combat you control one character only and the only way to control the others is by paradigms (changing their roles). It is fun I have to admit but still got old on me. The combat is not turn based (ATB?) rather you wait for an action gauge to get filled so you can execute your abilities (automatically most of the time). There’s a twist with the Edilons? (I stopped playing the game for a little while so I kind of forgot the terminology) I think it was Edilons which are some kind of spirits that you can tame/impress and they stay with you. I got Odin for Lightning (the main character of the dreamy story) and you can unleash these Edilons  in combat if you have enough Tactic Points? so that adds more depth to the combat… I guess.

Plot

Not ANOTHER political conspiracy… God I got sick of this, when are we going to play a game where the protagonist is trying to do something simple. Why this Politics, War, BIG conflicts, Destroying worlds.. Especially when you are in a fucking linear experience. It got old, am sick and tired of this. I’d rather play a character who wants to be a Mighty Pirate and that’s that. No big goals. God bless you Guybrush Threepwood.

Also, why this weird name choices? Game designers always want to make their game plot sound important so they must think of a weird name to call things. L’cie, Far’lcie, Cocoon (what a stupid name).. Why!? They kept repeating this word a LOT “L’cie”…. “L’cie this, l’cie that.. l’cie, l’cie, l’cie, l’cie” Shut up already. As if they’ve invented something NEW. I call them Zombies with voodoo magic. Fuck L’Cie, you’re Zombies with some Pewpew.

Score

I give this game a 3/5 for trying. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad game but it’s just not for me. It’s a shame how they spend millions of dollars on a project to end up with such a story, flat characters and shallow game experience. But I know some people swear by this game and like it and I also know some people are on crack so to each his own I guess.

Hurray, my first ranting post in awhile! More PS3 game bashing coming soon, so check the blog out later… and if you’re interested I have a used copy of Final Fantasy XIII for sale!