Final Fantasy XIII has been a long time coming. It's was announced back in 2006 and just released in 2010. With it comes another visually impressive RPG. Could it possibly live up to the mountain of hype that people built up around it? Or will it be the Final Fantasy?
The story follows Lightning, a soldier girl that's on the run from the military with 4 others; Hope, Snow, Vanille and Sazh, in a world known as Cocoon. They have all been branded a l'Cie by a Pulse fal'Cie, a God-like being from the land below Cocoon and a place that the people of Cocoon fear and hate. A l'Cie is a servant of the fal'Cie and must do what it orders them to or they will become Cie'th; basically an undying monster with no mind of their own. With fear of becoming a Cie'th, the crew head off trying to find out just what their goal is.
The crew gets split up and all the personal demons they deal with are interesting. The overall story is interesting as well, it's not great and the neither is the writing but the world is very imaginative and well put together. It all starts a little simple and seems to start later than it was supposed to but it fills in the blanks and it keeps things interesting. Overall, it's a decent yarn that can stand with most of the other fantasies and it can get pretty emotional.
The gameplay in Final Fantasy XIII is mixed in a couple of ways. Outside of combat, it's a straight line and that makes the gameplay totally in service to it's story. These "hallways" you explore are bland from a gameplay point of view, but the game is no slouch in combat. In battle, you control your party leader, with the others controlled by the AI and using what they feel is best. This works in most ways, your partners are pretty intelligent and don't mess up very often, but while it's better to be able to focus on one character, you lose when the leader dies. This is really terrible in that, if a monster decides to target you, you have a high, high chance of losing due to the fact that they don't change targets often. That's where the paradigms come into play...
The paradigms are basically the classes in the game. Each character can set a role; such as a medic, and they behave differently depending on what the class focuses on. Most of the roles are for support, and you will need it, and you'll always have one person doing the attacking. This paradigm system adds some depth to the combat and it's absolutely needed during the boss battles, especially since you can change during combat. Battles earn you experience that's used on the Crystarium, basically Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, and this teaches your characters new abilities and affects their stats. At the beginning of the game, not everyone can use every role and you won't be able to change your leader until extremely late in the game. At a certain point in the game, you can do side-quests and there are a lot of them. These side-quests and the weapon crafting will keep you busy for a little while.
Despite this slow, slow, slow start, the flashy combat will keep you happy if you can stick with it. It's combat system is fast-paced, can be quite challenging and, while the Paradigm Shifts can slow things down a tiny bit, it never stops being fun despite being as linear as a ruler.
The audio is up the Final Fantasy standard, despite Nobuo Uematsu not returning for this game. Even though it is a good soundtrack, it's not THAT memorable, there are a few memorable tracks such as the main battle theme and the game's theme song (love it or hate it). The voice work is good, but some of the characters manage to be annoying. The sound effects are great as well. Overall, it's pleasing on the ears.
The visuals are simply stunning and they better be. The characters all look fantastic and the environments are beautiful and very well realized. The art style shines through quite often here and the monster designs are very good, despite being very mechanical in nature. Square-Enix continues to prove that they are one of the best in the business for visuals and continue to show off their CG cutscenes. Some are amazing looking but the good visuals come at a price; the linear environments. This game is as much as a straight line as Call of Duty is. In spite of this, the game looks amazing.
PROs
- Fun, fast-paced combat
- Paradigm Shift is a neat addition
- Visuals are stunning
- Music is Final Fantasy and the voice work is good
- Story is interesting
- World is creative and well realized
- Amazing CG cutscenes
CONs
- Corridor Fantasy XIII
- No freedom until way late in the game
- Story has some iffy writing
- Some characters are annoying
- No chance to explore most of the creative world
- Only a few music tracks are memorable
Overall, Final Fantasy XIII falls before it's hype, but it's still a good game. It has fun combat, great visuals and music and an interesting world and story. Sure the game is linear beyond belief and some of the characters can be pretty annoying but it's still a worthwhile adventure if you've got the time to put into it's long opening. It's not the JRPG revolution we were all waiting for and it's not a very good follow-up to the great Final Fantasy XII but it's still worth playing.
Story: 7.0/10
Gameplay: 8.0/10
Audio: 8.0/10
Presentation: 9.5/10
TOTAL: 8.0/10