Time Extend
Revisiting the most divisive edition of Square Enix’s world-beating RPG series
Revisiting Final Fantasy XIII, the most divisive instalment in Square Enix’s world-beating RPG series
How long does a getaway sequence need to last before it turns into a running joke? Final Fantasy XIII is very nearly the punchline, there. A misjudged bid to pump acid into the veins of a famously stately series, it starts with a boss fight on the roof of a train and keeps up that intensity for 20 hours straight.
There’s seldom a moment to breathe as your motley band of fugitives tumbles through the crevices of a mechanical world. The environments, ranging from airship hulls to the whipped-cream contours of a frozen lake, are grander than any previous Final Fantasy backdrop, but also far more disposable, quickly lost in the slipstream. There are hidden treasure orbs, some shortlived terrain puzzles and opportunities to flank enemies who are now visible in the field, but for the most part each area is a corridor, always shoving you onward. The interludes of previous FFs have been discarded. There’s no overworld exploration to drain off the adrenaline after a tough dungeon, no cosy inns with a Moogle out back, just save points that provide access to shopping menus. The game doesn’t even make you stop to level up – experience from battle can be spent at any time, and there never seems to be any time to spare.
Much like the setting, the cast are a blur to begin with. Final Fantasy XIII’s haste, which in fairness is a nice change from the sleepy premise of the undiscovered worldsaver doing chores in a backwater village, sees it dispensing with introductions and doing much of the crucial fleshing-out in flashbacks. It isn’t that hard to understand what’s happening – and there are chapter summaries in your datalog – but the script’s restlessness makes it difficult to care. You feel like you’re having the entire plot bellowed at you in a chaotic dressing room, five minutes before curtain-up.
This is a world split between two warring parties, you gather: the quasiAmerican wilds of Pulse and the jealously defended hollow planetoid of Cocoon. There are gods, the Fal’Cie, who are partial to branding mortals with sigils that confer magical powers while lumping the victim with a Focus quest. Fail to complete your Focus in time, and you’ll turn into a monster. Complete it, and you can look forward to a leisurely afterlife as a crystal statue. All the major cast members have these brands, and must tackle their Focus quests alongside personal issues and grievances. They must also stay ahead of Cocoon’s security forces, who regard anything Fal’Cie or Pulse-touched as an abomination.
The characters are abrasive at first glance, and certainly don’t belong in any halls of fame, but they grow on you as the plot settles into its stride. Handsome lunk Snow – Troy Baker in full cheesecake mode – begins the tale a self-declared hero but gradually learns humility. Vanille is another of the genre’s queasily sexualised infants, but her ditziness betrays a mountain of guilt. She’s at her most charismatic when paired with weary blaxploitation dad Sazh, the only cast member who is likeable from the get-go. Puny Hope is an absolute bore initially, seething with stifled resentment toward Snow, but once he obtains a degree of closure he’s surprisingly huggable.
Really, though, it’s all about the big sisters of the group – Fang, a staff-wielding Australian who exists to take everybody down a peg, and, of course, poster-girl Lightning, a gloomy warrior with the requisite over-designed sword. Lightning’s goal for much of the game is simply to rescue her sister, Serah, and if she experiences the occasional crisis of conscience, there’s nothing here on par with the legendary Tidus laughing scene in Final Fantasy X. She has the thousand-yard-stare and italicised hairdo of a Squall Leonhart but rather less of his sulkiness and indecision. Stand in her way, and she’ll cut you off with a look or a fist to the face (Snow generally gets the worst of it). The character’s coldness isn’t always engaging, but her steely demeanour more or less carries the plot through the early stages when Vanille and Hope, especially, are too much to bear.
There’s a somewhat entertaining fantasy melodrama somewhere in Final Fantasy XIII, then, but it’s poorly served for being fired at you out of a Gatling gun. The unrelenting pace frequently borders on farce: one critical story branch occurs because Sazh is too
exhausted to keep running. The curious thing about Final Fantasy XIII, however, is that in other respects it is desperately sluggish. Partly, that’s because when every area is a violently decorated corridor, every beat a question of fight-or-flight, it’s hard to feel like you’re really going anywhere. But mainly, it’s because the game takes its sweet time teaching you about its deceptively mindless-looking battle system.
Square Enix’s caution is easy to understand: this is one of the series’ riskiest departures, poised between the classic Active Time Battle formula, the if/then combat programming of Final Fantasy XII and the balletic pub brawls of Final Fantasy XV. But the trepidation hurts the game during the opening third, as you contend with a system that seems hell-bent on taking
WHEN EVERY AREA IS A VIOLENTLY
DECORATED CORRIDOR, IT’S HARD TO
FEEL LIKE YOU’RE GOING ANYWHERE
away everything you know. You only control one character at a time, with up to two allies attacking, casting spells and healing automatically. You can pick your character’s moves, stacking them like MMO commands before your ATB bar fills, but given the speed of encounters, it’s more effective to let the (almost too-capable) autobattle AI choose targets and actions for you.
The whole party’s abilities are, moreover, infuriatingly split between six ability suites, or Paradigms, which can be shuffled together to create various sets of roles. Where Final Fantasy XII saw you labouring to create Gambits equal to anything the game might throw at you, no single set of Paradigms will get you through every situation. If you want to heal, for example, you’ll need to switch mid-encounter to a set such as Double Dose which includes healing spells, which may mean that attack-oriented characters such as Sazh are left twiddling their thumbs. All this reflects battle system director Toshiro Tsuchida’s desire to strip out distracting minutiae and channel the flamboyance of infamous 2005 movie adaptation Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. The inevitable consequence is that you often feel more like a spectator than a participant.
That feeling eventually dissipates, however. The system opens up as you unlock the abilities each Paradigm contains, experiment with character combinations (by necessity – the campaign routinely splits people up, and doesn’t let you choose your line-up until pretty late in) and fetch up against more challenging enemy breeds. One incentive to be calculating is the enemy’s Stagger bar. Fill that bar and your foe will take huge damage for a moment or so, but you can only do this using abilities specific to the Ravager paradigm. Stacking Ravager attacks to unbalance enemies is accordingly the most efficient route to victory, and efficiency is Final Fantasy XIII’s cardinal virtue. Enemies range from wyverns to robots – the social impasse between the game’s worlds is pleasingly conveyed by the presence of tamed Pulse creatures on
Cocoon – but your greatest foe is always the encounter clock, with snappier resolutions equalling more points to spend on potent (or at least eye-catching) Eidolon summons. Is it worth putting off healing a near-dead character in order to speed a staggered enemy’s demise? Should you waste seconds shielding and empowering your party at the outset, or go for broke?
As the system’s depths reveal themselves, the preconceptions created by previous Final Fantasy games begin to shift. You realise, on the one hand, that many of the old ATB system’s best qualities are present and correct. Boss battles, for instance, still rest on knowing exactly when to oscillate from full assault to healing, buffing or debuffing, with last-ditch AOE attacks to worry about once the boss is on the ropes. On the other hand, you realise that much of what made previous FF games irritating has been elegantly minimised.
You can set up the same match-winning plays without worrying about many of the details. The absence of micro-management makes repeated battles against the same enemy types less boring. Character health is restored between scraps, which means you spend less of the game in menus keeping everybody upright. It’s a compromise, without doubt – Final Fantasy XIII’s best battles can’t match the finest moments of the PS1 games, where the universe may live or die on a single command. But it’s a pleasure to witness those venerable core concepts buckle and diverge according to a wholly different understanding of what an encounter should be.
Final Fantasy XIII attracted damning verdicts at release – Edge’s 5 was hardly the exception – but Square Enix evidently felt it was onto something. The game has spawned two sequels, one a Final Fantasy spin on The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and Lightning has guest-starred in other games. She has also broken into the fashion industry, doing ‘photoshoots’ for Louis Vuitton. All of which is cause for rueful laughter, but Final Fantasy XIII isn’t the joke it may seem when you realise you’re still reading tutorial windows 15 hours in. It’s fascinating to trace its eccentricities forward into Final Fantasy XV and, indeed, the forthcoming Final Fantasy VII remake, as this series continues its headlong flight from whoever and whatever it used to be.