Final Fantasy XIII: First Impressions

Disclaimer: This is NOT a review. Rather, it’s an attempt to place Final Fantasy XIII within the context of the rest of the series and to address some of the most common criticisms levelled at the game by reviewers.  At the time of writing, the author had just started Chapter 5, around nine hours from the start. The following text contains spoilers up to that point.

Lose Your Illusion

Paradigm shifts. They’ve been at the core of every new Final Fantasy release from the late Eighties onwards. With each iteration comes a new game world, a fresh cast of characters, a revamped battle system and a bewildering array of new concepts, factions and jargon to grapple with. There’s a sense of incremental improvement – if only on a technical level – as each new title pushes its host platform to the limit and redefines accepted benchmarks for graphics and sound. As with any other Final Fantasy, paradigm shifts lie at the core of the thirteenth incarnation, not only as the lynch-pin on which the game’s new combat system hangs, but as a byword for the drastic overhaul brought on by another generational leap.

Final Fantasy XIII has not quite received the unanimous critical praise lavished upon many of its predecessors. That’s hardly surprising;  in the era of Fallout 3, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, the stubborn linearity of Square Enix’s latest effort seems almost anachronistic. Even set against its recent JRPG peers – Lost Odyssey, Persona 4 and Eternal Sonata – there’s something painfully austere about FFXIII’s approach to player-pathing.

Not that this is a break with series convention. With the exception of the open-word aspirations of 2006′s FFXII, each major Final Fantasy release since the iconic seventh installment has interspersed blatantly linear gameplay with sections of apocryphal non-linearity.  Even within the comparative freedom of the overworld, players are usually confronted with the illusion of choice rather than true agency. While five destinations may be available to visit at a given time, only one will actually advance the story. Now, in Final Fantasy XIII, even that thin façade of non-linearity has been torn away in favour of a streamlined, stripped-down experience. But to what end?

Eye-Candy

Lightning and Sahz take in the sights

To showcase the jaw-dropping visual feast, for one. Final Fantasy XIII sets a new high water mark for console graphics, particularly the PS3 version. The game’s conservative approach is likely as much a product of the astronomical production costs of the HD Era as it is of any design decision. With current hardware limitations, it’s difficult to imagine FFXIII’s visual fidelity and artistic achievement recreated in a true open-world environment. Whether this amounts to a trade-off of gameplay for graphics is largely irrelevant; the proof of Final Fantasy’s gaming pudding has always been in the meat of the battle system and story rather than wandering aimlessly between towns.

Which is just as well really, since towns too have been entirely excised from the early part of the game. Though urban environments abound, they appear mainly in cutscenes or as combat zones in their own right. It’s part of a wider philosophical shift in which NPC conversations too are largely conspicuous by their absence. Much of the story is conveyed through the cut-scenes, while shopping and upgrades are handled entirely through menus available at every save point. But similar to Square dropping the pretence of non-linearity elsewhere, not as much has actually changed as first impressions would suggest. With very rare exceptions, dialogue in Final Fantasy games has been strictly limited and more often than not simply a matter of jabbing the X button enough times to persuade an NPC to divulge plot details. Once again, FFXIII simply strips away the thin veneer of free choice.

Combative

Final Fantasy XIII's battle system in full swing

Whether narration through cut-scenes is ideal in the first place is a separate debate but it’s certainly in-keeping with Square Enix’s reductionist vision for FFXIII. Indeed, reducing the game’s core elements to first principles is a design choice carried over to the battle system. For the first two and a half hours of Final Fantasy XIII, many of the more complex combat mechanics are hidden from the player, only to be slowly introduced one by one over the next 7-8 hours of gameplay. While this hand-holding can feel obnoxious at times, the slow start is somewhat excused, if not entirely forgiven, once the full flower of the battle system begins to bloom.

Once again, there’s another jarring change to the status quo. Unlike previous titles where all members of the party could be given hands-on direction, in Final Fantasy XIII only one character is directly under the player’s control. The reasons behind this decision become more clear in light of the frantic pace of combat and once more complex battle concepts are rolled out but having two out of three party members controlled by the AI at any given time is certainly disconcerting.

Final Fantasy XIII’s combat mechanics hang on the notion of Paradigms – Jobs or Classes in other FF titles – and Paradigm Shifts. At the core of this system is the ability to change between different class assignments for all party members on the fly – the aforementioned Paradigm Shift. Once Paradigm Shifts are introduced about three hours in, the true tactical depth of the revamped battle system begins to emerge.

Alongside Paradigm Shifts are the related concepts of Chains and Stagger. Chains – simply a  series of attacks – fill a Chain Gauge which, when topped up, forces enemies into Stagger mode, allowing party members to inflict obscene amounts of damage in a short space of time. Chains decay quickly and must be topped up lest the Chain Gauge empty completely. However, certain Paradigms – most noticeably the Commando, decrease the rate of decay, allowing characters with pure damage-dealing roles – Ravagers – to quickly drive enemies into Stagger.

Paradigmatic

It’s difficult to convey the full potential of this system in play but the following is a fairly common example. The party engages a tough enemy and Paradigms Shits to a Commando, Synergist  (buff class) and Medic (healer) combination. Once the Synergist has applied protective shields to the party and the Medic has topped up everyone’s health bar, we switch to a Commando, Ravager, Ravager setup to quickly fill the Chain Gauge and Stagger the foe. While in Stagger, we change again to Ravager/Ravager/Ravager for maximum damage-dealing potential. As Stagger ends, the enemy swipes out at all party members, dealing serious damage and casting a damage-absorbing shield on itself. We switch to Medic/Medic/Saboteur (debuff class) to quickly heal up the damage and strip away the shield and then return to Commando/Ravager/Ravager to begin the cycle again.

Between the six available Paradigms (there’s also a tank-like Sentinel), the combat system actually gravitates more towards the feel of World of Warcraft party combat than preceding Final Fantasy titles, with the presence of a given Paradigm at the right moment being crucial to success. Learning to identify what Paradigm combinations – and the correct sequence of Paradigm Shifts – is best-suited to a given enemy is one of the game’s many tactical pleasures.

(Un)Conventional

The enigmatic Fal'Cie

For all that though, it’s hard to deny that Final Fantasy XIII’s stripped-down design aesthetic is jarring. It’s not helped by the excruciatingly slow pace of the game’s opening and haphazard storytelling. Early on, key concepts – Fal’Cie, L’Cie, Focus, Pulse – are bandied about with reckless abandon but remain as little more than obscure jargon until the game finally deigns to explain what they are and, crucially, why the player should care. It’s a good eight and a half hours before a character that might be considered a main villain is introduced. Even compared to recent slow-burners like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Dragon Age, the pacing of Final Fantasy XIII’s opening hours is rarely any faster than glacial.

It takes a while but these early misgivings do gradually begin to subside once the game opens up and starts to let players actually play it. For many, this will come around the three hour mark, when character levelling and the Paradigm Shift concept are introduced and the setting mercifully changes from the endless walkways of FFXIII’s opening sections. Others will have to wait a little longer, until the story begins to get its hooks in and starts to reveal more about the game world and character backgrounds in an intelligible fashion.

Though it sticks closely to many long-established conventions, Final Fantasy XIII is a paradigm shift in a very real sense, especially with FFXII suggesting a more progressive future for the series back when it was released in 2006. Four years on and Square Enix have abandoned any pretence of non-linearity, adapting a strictly reductionist approach which strips the latest title to the twin cores of the Final Fantasy experience – story and combat. It’s a brave move and one that won’t be received well by all of the fanbase but whatever else it might be, it certainly makes for a spectacular experience.