Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Not So Final Fantasy!

My relationship with Final Fantasy has gone through a lot of changes over time. As a young man I fell into the fictional worlds earlier final Fantasy games with a passion and rapacity that many more recent games have had difficulty matching. All of that seemed to change with Final Fantasy X. Suddenly the stories and worlds I’d been so devoted to became overly dense and overwrought. The exploration and character progression that the series had offered in previous iterations was gone, replaced with the tedious, repetitious combat system and a cast of character I desperately wanted to see die in a fire XII did little to improve the situation. Even though it finally built a coherent world into the game again and offered up characters I actually enjoyed being around there was still something missing, the openness or epic-ness of the previous stories.

From the first battle of Final Fantasy VII the game is afoot. Even though the stakes still grow over the course of the game they start out high and readily recognizable – the world is at war and I’m a part of that war, an underdog fighting impossible odds with mysterious motivations. Final Fantasy VII sold me on its world, its characters and its stakes without ever really trying to. By the time X rolled around it was difficult to care. Why should I give a shit about a water polo player from an alternate universe which is actually kind of a dream, sort of, but not completely? Why was Yuna’s struggle important? Things I remember clearly a decade after playing Final Fantasy VII into the ground, the names of minor characters, places I visited in passing, cutscenes I saw to introduce bosses and cool touches of art, are completely absent from Final Fantasy X. I can’t even remember if Auron lives or dies off the top of my head right now, or what the name of the mystical water polo game Tidus is so fond of is. I want to call it Spheda, but I think that’s just the Italian word for ball.

Even XII’s turn towards wacky romance, with a particularly non-Final Fantasy relationship between Cid and Frieda highlighting the experience for me, was a welcome bit of character development after X’s bland and plodding execution, and that still left a bad taste in my mouth in a way no former Final Fantasy game ever had. So it’s fair to say that I began Final Fantasy XIII with a bit of trepidation. But at least it tried to lose its heritage, opening with a well executed action sequence and doling out bits of world and backstory with plenty of care. But after twenty hours and plenty of world and character development it still doesn’t feel like a Final Fantasy game. There’s no exploration, no civilization. I get the distinct feeling that I will never be in a place that isn’t beset by war, never wander through a city like Midgar or Treno. At this rate I’d be shocked if I was given a chance to engage in a series of drawn out late game sidequests that allow me to find extra special gear and summons.

But I’m still playing Final Fantasy XIII, and not just because I have obsessive compulsive disorder and nothing better to do. Despite gameplay that I started off hating, gameplay with can literally be boiled down to “press the a button occasionally,” I’m still enjoying myself, sort of. But why? It’s not the exploration. Of the areas I’ve visited only Palumpolum has evoked any feeling from me at all. Most of the places I’ve seen are retreads of landscapes I saw in X and XII, and even then they’ve had any personality stripped out of them. In fact it feels like the entire development cycle was spent removing personality from various areas, smoothing out rough edges and designing various variations of the “wolf” design from Final Fantasy VI which has stayed so iconic throughout the series.

And it certainly isn’t the art design. Sazh’s character design makes me want to punch a Japanese man in the face and tell him to stop with the racism, Snow looks like an asshole and I thank christ that Hope isn’t the main character so I don’t have to see his dumb fucking face all the time. I smile when supporting characters die in combat because it’s the only vengeance I can take against the developers. If there’s a chance to emotionally scar these douches I am so going after it. The enemies are, as I said, rote derivations of the enemies of previous Final Fantasies, dolled up with a new pallet and a few new themes, and the few that do evoke any sort of response seem to only generate laughter (Although I’ll admit, the Flanitors are hilarious. I hope to see a Flanitation Engineer later in the game). I’ll offer up the caveat that the female characters all look good, although I’m not sure if Panelo II (I’m sorry, Vanille) is supposed to make me feel like a pedophile or if she’s supposed to portray a developed young woman of legal age. That’s sort of just how Japanese culture weighs in sometimes, though.

Another major issue plaguing Final Fantasy XIII is that the dialogue isn’t particularly well translated or, from what I can tell, well written in the first place. I laughed out loud at the repetition of “moms are tough,” and I’ve actually spoken character’s mistranslated lines in turn with them as they grow upset over the same issue for the umpteenth time in the last fifteen minutes, I feel like I can predict where each character’s arc will lead them from the moment of setup to conclusion, and when surprises do come (anyone with an Australian accent is really from Pulse?) they seem arbitrary. Sazh having a son, Hope’s mother being the only casualty on the bridge, despite Snow falling down immediately after her, from the same spot? Snow being taken by an agency that helps l’Cie after a series of unwinnable battles? It’s the worst parts of soap opera story wrapped in overly expressive dialogue and set in the uncanny valley.

The only elements of the story I find fascinating come from, again, the three female characters. Jokes about her parallels of Penelo aside I’m very interested in how Vanille will develop. Underneath the bumbling sex appeal and lesbian implications there seems to be something developing that I can’t put my finger on. Her relationship with Fang, Lightning and the relationship the three of them have with the government of Cocoon is something I’m excited to see more of. If I didn’t have to sit through segments with Snow and Hope I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Final Fantasy XIII to veteran fans. As it stands I’d say that fans of the later games are the least likely to be upset over the various transgressions XIII makes against both form and story.

But what’s really keeping me play is the subtle honesty of its gameplay. It was frustrating to not be able to acquire experience points for the first eight hours of the game. In fact it was infuriating. I’d go so far as to call it downright retarded. Role playing games are fundamentally about presenting players with character arcs, and freezing those arcs for any reason is simply going to frustrate players. Doing so during the game’s infancy can snuff out all interest.

But as the game continued the systems began to develop and I began to see that the automation it aspired to was less an act of aggression against what I had seen as making the series great and more a streamlining of the fundamental concepts it used to operate under. Choosing larger strategic roles for characters and then automating those functions really just reduces the time I spend wading through menus and increases the time I watch characters do the cool shit that animators made up for them to do. And it’s telling that I rarely step outside of the automated system’s suggestions. Occasionally I’ll force a character’s hand to insure that they attack weak spots or properly capitalize on strengths, but the AI is surprisingly competent compared to previous iterations of the game. I sort of like the generalized strategic gameplay method FFXIII offers up, if only as a counterpoint to FFXII’s incredibly finicky system of slippery MMO style maneuvers.

In a way Final Fantasy XIII is like comfort food with fewer calories, a video game equivalent to Smartfood. It’s a more interactive and flashier version of ProgressQuest, an experience I can sit back and absorb or fine tune for greater results. Even if I find myself watching copious amounts of Buffy while I wade through artificial wilderness I don’t see myself stopping before the game ends, nor am I fast growing tired. While I don’t see this iteration as a return to the greatness Final Fantasy lost in its tenth game (eleventh if we count Tactics, which we should) I do find it satisfying. It’s not a great game, but I don’t think it has to be in this case. One day Final Fantasy might make a game that wows me, but it’s unlikely that it will happen before 2020. So one day, as we hear the news that Osama Bin Laden has been captured and peace has erupted in Iraq like some sort of awesome geyser, maybe there will be an announcement about a Final Fantasy game that hits all the notes the series used to, back when there were technical and budgetary limitations to force creativity. But until then I’ve got games like FFXIII to play, games that fundamentally get what the series purpose without trying to innovate it or challenge what its best entries offered. And sometimes, after a three year lull, that’s enough.