Leveling Down

For every positive Final Fantasy XIII implements, there seems to be a corresponding negative.

I beat Final Fantasy XIII this past weekend. I can’t go so far as to say I’ve completed it, but I at least got to see the game’s ending! The core campaign was about a 50 hour game, but the game is actually split right down the middle in terms of the first 50 hours being the very linear main storyline, and the second 50 hours being all of the optional sidequests that are the more traditional Final Fantasy aspects that you would expect. The verdict is still out on whether or not I will end up going back to trying to do all of the optional stuff after beating the game, but I have an idea of what they are about so I believe I have enough to share my final thoughts on the game in this review.

Primary Campaign
Now that I’ve gone through the primary campaign, what are my thoughts? It was a decent experience. The entire campaign honestly feels like you were playing a shooter, but every enemy you came across you had to spend time on the combat screen fighting. The campaign is extremely linear, but fortunately, the combat system is interesting and different enough from traditional JRPG games that you won’t be falling asleep every time you play it. Probably the worst part of the campaign is that more time is spent in the primary campaign with just two characters for battles than three, so things go too slowly. I don’t know why Square Enix didn’t allow us to just get into 3 character parties from the start rather than forcing the characters to stay separated for so long. From a gameplay aspect, combat = good when you can finally control three characters for battles, but linearity = bad. So slow and boring.

In order to help out with the linearity and dullness of the path you follow from the beginning of the game to its end, Final Fantasy XIII also has some character development and storyline. Unlike Final Fantasy XII before it, Final Fantasy XIII does a pretty good job of defining its characters, giving them backgrounds, and allowing the player to get attached to the characters. But like the gameplay, Final Fantasy XIII has a negative element that detracts from giving the game a good cinematic experience. Final Fantasy XIII’s storyline is just plain confusing and underdeveloped. I would even go so far to call it a mess, as there are so many terms being thrown out and supposedly one type of people don’t get along with another type of people and these two other types of people are fighting and one type of people controls another type of people, etc. It’s just confusing and while the game provides a written summary of what has transpired for each of the 13 chapters you’ve played, long gone are the pure and less confusing storylines of older Final Fantasy games. The storyline in XIII is mildly better than XII, but even X’s was probably better (more so maybe because X had really good character design).

I will say this though – I enjoyed the ending. Obviously I don’t want to give it away or anything, but I liked the ending of the game and I thought to myself when watching it that the game was almost worth going through for the ending. Of course, maybe with Leona Lewis singing in the background, I was biased. But yeah – it was one of the bright spots in a campaign that seemed evenly balanced in things that were designed well versus things that were designed poorly.

The “Post Game”
After you beat the game, you may wonder what’s next. Final Fantasy XIII definitely has a “post game”, and what I found most jarring about it is that the game goes from being super linear in its campaign to super hardcore in the post-game. After I beat the game, I sat down and broke out spreadsheets and guides trying to piece together what I was expected to do in the 50+ hour post game. I didn’t like what I saw. The postgame is all about item constuction, grinding enemies, treasure hunting, etc. In a way, this would have been perfect for me when I was younger, as I enjoyed all that optional stuff for JRPG games. Today is a bit different. Reading that I would have to grind the same difficult enemies for 40 hours hoping for an item with a 1% drop rate is not something I want to do today (and I’d much rather play a game that I enjoy in those 40 hours). Because of that, I’ve decided to hold off on the “Post Game” content for now.

But if you are interested in the post-game stuff, what are the main tasks you will be working on?

1. Marks
I think there are something like 64 different enemies for you to hunt as optional secondary missions. You get rated based on how quickly and efficient you can kill the mark, and are rewarded with special items for doing so.

2. Weapon & Accessory Upgrades
I’m guessing that many people that played through the Final Fantasy XIII campaign did not do much upgrading along the way. In fact, I basically used the default weapons that each character started with and played through the entire 50 hour campaign with them. However, there’s a very complicated weapon & accessory upgrade system in place for the game, and the post-game does lend itself well to maximizing your weapons.

Throughout your encounters with enemies in Final Fantasy XIII, you are graded based on how quickly you can kill them. If you kill them fast enough to be awarded the perfect 5 stars, the enemy has a higher probability of dropping off a rare resource item for you. These resource items are used to provide experience points to level up your weapons and accessories. Every resource item provides a certain number of experience points for every weapon/accessory, and on top of that some resources include bonus modifiers for your leveling.

By leveling up weapons and accessories, they become stronger, and can eventually move up to Tier 2 and Tier 3. The Tier 3 weapon is considered a character’s ultimate weapon, and it is necessary for taking on some of the more extremely difficult optional bosses in the game. All in all, it sounds easy to grasp right now, but the hard part is trying to determine which resources are the best to use for upgrades, who to farm them from, and the upgrade path you should take with your items.

3. Farming
Farming is a huge chunk of the post game, and the primary reason the post-game is as long (or even longer) than the primary campaign. You’ll need experience points, money, and resources in order to level up your characters and gear so that you can take on more difficult monsters for better drops and so on. I had to really sit down and think if I wanted to spend another 40-50 hours at this point in my life farming mobs for low percentage item drops, and I decided that maybe now is not the time for me.

While I feel like I’m too old at this point to spend so much time grinding to max out my characters, all of these post-game “time sinks” are often what JRPG fans love. I still remember back to my Final Fantasy VI days where I had my party members equipped with Experience Eggs and grinding dinosaurs in the Dino Forest. By the end of the game, I think everyone was just mass casting Ultima. Anyway, that was a different time then but for those that still love it, stick around after you’ve beaten Final Fantasy XIII’s campaign for the hardcore JRPG gameplay that you crave.

Where Final Fantasy XIII Falls into my Final Fantasy Rankings
For those of you that read my initial impressions of the game, I ranked all of the Final Fantasy games I’ve played to date, and I am ready to insert XIII onto the list:

1. Final Fantasy IV (the story, characters, and gameplay made this game Final Fantasy perfection)
2. Final Fantasy VI (amazing game, but too many characters and the game was a bit overambitious in scope)
3. Final Fantasy VII (definite showpiece for the PS1)
4. Final Fantasy IX (odd character design, but a welcome return to classic Final Fantasy gameplay roots after the weird FFVIII)
5. Final Fantasy X (several changes to gameplay, but great characters and storyline for the PS2 system)
6. Final Fantasy I (the classic and original was quite enjoyable for its time)
8. Final Fantasy XIII (interesting characters, but storyline too confusing and game too linear)
9. Final Fantasy VIII (When I think about it again, I’d rather go through Final Fantasy VIII than XII if I had to)
10. Final Fantasy XII (interesting single player style MMORPG gameplay, but boring storyline and characters)

Unfortunately, as you can see, it’s among the lesser enjoyed ones I’ve played, but the gap between it and Final Fantasy VIII is somewhat large since I couldn’t even play through enough of VIII or XII to actually beat them.

Final Thoughts
In some ways, Final Fantasy XIII did a lot of new things that worked well, but in other ways, it also had things I wasn’t too crazy about. As an overall package, I think it is a successful game. Unfortunately, it’s not traditional enough as a JRPG where it counts, and it has this weird split between super linear and super hardcore. I would still go so far as to say that Lost Odyssey is the better and more traditional JRPG this console generation, and I enjoyed my time with that more.

That’s not to say that Final Fantasy XIII is a bad game. It’s just that it’s sort of an awkward game because its strict linearity is supposed to make the game easier to get into, but at the same time, the battle system is not exactly newbie-friendly. On top of that, you have to keep waiting: 30 hours in until you can finally control 3 characters and manage your party, and 50 hours in until you can finally beat the game and actually do all sorts of optional sidequests that JRPG games are known for.

The way the game is structured will not bring in new JRPG fans. Final Fantasy is in its 13th iteration – isn’t it quite recognized at this point that it’s basically the pinnacle of JRPG games? So why must JRPG fans suffer so much through all that waiting in order to get to play the parts of the game that they bought Final Fantasy XIII for? Isn’t the entire game supposed to be for them? For those jumping into Final Fantasy for the first time, please don’t do it with XIII. Play Final Fantasy IV on the PS1, Super NES, GBA, or DS. That game is what I would still consider the Final Fantasy game that will stand the test of time.

Final Score: B

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