Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase brazenly declared that Square Enix’s latest high-profile, role-playing release shouldn’t actually be classified as an RPG.
You know what’s sad? He was right.
Good role-playing games offer choices, engrossing worlds and the opportunity to figure out the best way to trounce your opponents on the battlefield. Final Fantasy XIII offers none of those things. It treats players like students taking a college exam—there’s only one right answer. And if you even dare to question authority…well, get used to academic probation in the form of the “Game Over” screen.
Here’s what it boils down to for longtime fans: Final Fantasy XIII is the antithesis of the original Final Fantasy. Twenty years ago, that game asked players to create a team of warriors in order to take down the nefarious Chaos, and you could attempt to complete the game with four White Mages, four Black Mages, four Fighters or a more balanced team. The series has gradually taken away some of that freedom of choice with each entry—some more than others—but none as strictly as Final Fantasy XIII. This game tells you where to fight, when to fight and how to fight. And, sure, you can try coming up with your own answers, but you’d be wrong.
Combat revolves around “Paradigm Shifts”—an appropriate name, given the “outside-the-box” focus-group corporate thinking that likely inspired this feature. In most RPGs, you have a selection of commands: Fight, Heal, Defend and so on. But with Paradigm Shifts, each character has a respective specialty: melee attacks, healing and attack magic, among others. But if you want your melee attacker to start healing, you’ll have to switch to a different Paradigm. In other words, Paradigm Shifts take the typical RPG convention of figuring out when to fight and heal, and then complicate the process for no good reason.
Make no mistake—you’ll be fighting a lot. Kitase described Final Fantasy XIII‘s combat as more akin to a first-person shooter than an RPG. You won’t be facing random battles as you traverse through fields and forests. Instead, you’re running down narrow hallways waiting for monsters to jump you. And, for the most part, you can’t avoid enemy encounters, except when the game goes out of its way to tell you that you can: “Hey, check out that lumbering brute over there! It might be a good idea to run past him!” In those cases, yes, you can magically make your way past foes. But unless you use items that specifically enable you to avoid enemies, you’re constantly getting jumped by the next mob of monsters around the corner. Unfortunately, without the conventional RPG downtime of towns and other assorted free exploration, that means that you’re constantly on edge. There’s no reward for getting through a dungeon; your reward is…well, another dungeon.
Yes, I realize that choice is always a bit of an illusion, even in the best games. But the key to good design is to mask that illusion. It’s the oldest trick in entertainment. Whether it’s a book, a play or a movie, you want to feel immersed in the world. Hell, the practice probably goes all the way back to shadow-puppet shows on cave walls. To borrow a silly ad cliché: It’s so easy, a caveman can do it—but apparently, the Final Fantasy XIII team can’t do it. The game is so obviously one straight line that it’s incredibly difficult to take its world seriously.
Now, I know the Final Fantasy series has seen linearity before. After all, Final Fantasy X was pretty much a straight march across the vast world of Spira. But here’s the difference: While that game was far from my favorite entry in the series, its linear design worked, because it had a clear protagonist and a world that you gradually traversed as you slowly got to know its varied heroes and villains. Tidus said it all in the first line of the game: “Listen to my story.” From Zanarkand to Mt. Gagazet, you got to know the world of Spira and Tidus—and it was clear that Final Fantasy X was his tale. After 30 hours of Final Fantasy XIII, however, I still couldn’t figure out whose story it actually was. The narrative jumps quickly from scene to scene and character to character, never stopping on any one person long enough for me to actually care. As far as I can tell, there’s no palpable world in Final Fantasy XIII—just a list of character names and locations.
The thing is, I can usually put up with subpar RPG gameplay elements, if the story offers me a reason to press forward. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I’m kind of a cheap date: Even fluff, such as Wild Arms and the Tales of series, usually holds my interest. But Final Fantasy XIII‘s narrative is so disjointed that I simply couldn’t be bothered to follow along. Kitase, apparently taking inspiration from TV’s “Lost,” decided to pepper the already convoluted narrative (a Final Fantasy prerequisite) with a series of flashbacks. I haven’t watched enough of “Lost” to see the direct comparisons, but my understanding is that the story-telling style works in that series, because viewers are emotionally invested in the characters. Final Fantasy XIII shoves a handful of protagonists in your face that look like they were designed at a cosplay convention and asks you to care about them simply because they’re wearing a beanie, have a cool nickname or speak with a mysterious Australian accent.
Still, even though Final Fantasy XIII asks its players to show the patience of Job, that endurance doesn’t go completely unrewarded in the end. Approximately 30 hours in—for me, it was 35—the game suddenly and unexpectedly places the player in the middle of an open field and at long last grants some well-deserved freedom. And the sprawling valley of Gran Pulse is definitely a nice reward at the end of a harrowing tunnel: Its vistas span the length of several normal dungeons, as lumbering giants and towering behemoths waddle menacingly in the distance. After 35 hours, I could finally tackle a series of monster-hunting quests, explore on my own terms and my own time, and take a break from combat if I wanted. In short, I could finally do many of the things I want to do when I play a Final Fantasy game. It’s just that in most Final Fantasy games, I don’t have to wait 35 hours to do them! But just as quickly as Final Fantasy XIII hands control over to the player in Gran Pulse, the game takes it away again the moment you leave that sweeping valley.
I realize that it might be difficult to properly define the overt control Final Fantasy XIII holds over the player, so let me put it in terms that many RPG fans will be able to understand directly. I’ll take Persona 3, since it revolves around a generally linear sequence of dungeons—not unlike Final Fantasy XIII. Imagine if Persona 3 featured the same plot and characters, and still focused on the epic journey into the 250-floor tower of Tartarus, but instead of being able to explore at your own pace and taking much-needed breaks when you wanted to focus on social aspects, the game forced you into a straight 35-hour grind, followed by a brief interlude where you could accept missions from various townsfolk. After that segment, you’d head back to Tartarus for one last linear trek until you completed the game. Sure, Persona 3 has an excellent battle system, an incredible style and charming characters, but would you still enjoy it if it were presented in such a linear, restricting fashion? It’s not necessarily that Final Fantasy XIII isn’t potentially enjoyable at its core—it’s that it’s presented in an incredibly unpalatable way.
While I appreciate the fact that Final Fantasy XIII’s developers took many bold risks—as Square Enix does with each iteration in the series—I think they got a tad too cute and felt a little too proud of themselves for coming up with what they clearly saw as a “novel” combat system. They seemed to think that even veteran RPG players would have a hard time adjusting to the intricacies of Paradigm Shifts; in reality, it’s as simple as attacking when enemies are staggered and healing when your party’s low on hit points—same as any RPG. No battle system needs an extended 35-hour tutorial—least of all this one. Why spend 30-plus hours explaining a battle system when it could’ve easily been clarified in 10? Why shoehorn the player into one long hallway in order to “figure out” Paradigm Shifts when combat already clicks 20 hours earlier? I’m a very patient person, and I appreciate a slow burn as much as any RPG fan. But unless I’m playing Silent Hill, I don’t want to spend 30-plus hours trapped in a narrow hallway—literally or figuratively.
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