Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII was a wonderful experience for me. It got me out of my depressive funk and helped me relax between thesis work. Sadly, because of thesis work it took me maybe 3 months to finish. I don't remember when I started it. But I loved it soooo much.

Addressing the elephant in the room, the exploration is not there in the slightest. It really is a hallway simulator or whatever people described it as. Even when it opens up, there's barely anything to explore. It's not good at that. But it's not inherently a bad thing, I think it works for the story it's trying to tell. However, having NPCs to talk to would've been a good addition, since it adds a lot to the world. Sure, you can overhear conversations, but it's not the same.

The combat isn't bad at all, and it's definitely not a spam attack game. The game's basic combat relies on stagger, paradigms, and roles. Each character has 3 main roles that you can switch around mid-battle. The roles determine your stat bonuses and what skills you have access to. For example, for buffs you need to switch to a buffing role. The paradigms are pre-set team role configuration that you can switch around mid-battle, to change the roles your party members are currently at. You pre-set them in the menu before battles, and your paradigms are the only way to switch roles mid-battle, so properly spreading them out for different scenarios is required. This type of strategizing is really good in my opinion. The stagger mechanic is really important too, each enemy has a stagger bar that goes up as you deal damage. The stagger bar has a multiplier on how much damage you're doing, and when you increase the bar you do even more damage. Once the bar reaches the end, the enemy becomes staggered for a period of time which makes it easy to stun (or even launch in the air!) and increases the damage multiplier by a large amount. Usually, an enemy can be defeated by staggering it once and using the damage multiplier to finish it off. Enemies have different stagger thresholds and resistance, so some enemies can be easily staggered while others can't. Different roles have different stagger effects, so switching between them to keep the stagger bar active, and increase the stagger bar, is the primary battle strategy.

Instead of manually going through menus to select actions you have to switch roles actively, especially to finish fights as fast as possible. You want to finish fights as fast as possible because a higher rating means more TP regeneration. Buffs and debuffs are key, without them you can't get a five star rating consistently. Using libra is also important, as the AI will effectively target weaknesses and use debuffs the enemy is susceptible to. The active time battle approach is pretty fun, and makes selecting actions quickly much more important.

Level locking isn't a bad thing either, it just means you can't brute force your way through the game by overleveling. It forces you to learn strategies and adjust your paradigms accordingly.

My only big critique with the gameplay is near the end in late chapter 11 onwards, the HP bloat becomes ridiculous. The areas are small but have many enemies, and each enemy's target time (the time expected to finish a fight with an average rating) ranges from 4 to even 9 minutes. Even finishing with five stars can take 5 minutes for some of these. I understand each encounter is a puzzle, but regular encounters should never take this long. At the very end it makes you fight two bosses you just fought again as regular encounters, which are super bulky for no reason. The fights at this point aren't hard, just tedious. I had to change the difficulty to easy to keep myself sane as I was just starting to find the game unfun.

Now as for the writing, this game for sure has my favorite cast in all of Final Fantasy. I have a soft spot for all the character depth in VI despite it's large cast, as well as IX's main four, but XIII's characters are all super interesting and it's exploration of loss is amazing to me. My favorites were Vanille and Sazh, I think they make a wonderful team. My least favorite was actually Hope, because I found his struggles to be the least relatable, but I still think he's really good. The character-focused nature of the first third of the game is also really good and had me hooked. So much so that when it opened up and focused on the story itself I got a little sad. The story is still really good though! I find the anti-capitalist pro-commune approach very nice, and that Lightning and gang said the people fallen trap to the capitalist regime are still worth saving. It brings me hope in the world we live in.

On a smaller note, the graphics are amazing, beautiful and colorful. Shiny and pleasing to the eyes. I don't really care much for realism in videogames, but the expressive faces and exaggerated facial features still make it look fantastical. The environments are beautiful even if empty, the enemy designs are really cool, visually it's just super pretty. Finally, the music is insane, Masashi Hamauzu is an amazing composer, every track is beautiful. The game is beautiful in every way.

I hope to play XIII-2 soon!