XIII - The Games I've Played

Final Fantasy caries with it a whole crazy list of expectations. The thing is, to look at any of the games, you have to completly forget about anything else that has come out in the series up to that point because the game isn't going to match. Just like 7 is nothing like 8,

or 10 is nothing like 11

13 decided to go in it's own way, and it doesn't work to compare it to anything else that came before it, even if they share the same name.

Final Fantasy 13 is the first game that I put in my ps3 and really saw what everyone was talking about with HD quality graphics. This game is BEAUTIFUL. It is very easy to just start looking around where you're at and see the amazing surroundings that you're killing your way through. Then come the amazing cut scenes. Some of the cutscenes are just rediculous in how detailed and graphic heavy they are, but they never drop frames, and the game always manages to keep up with the detail that it's creating.

However beautiful the game might be, there's the problem of trying to keep up with the story. The names of everything start to blur together and you're not sure if you're a l'acie, fal'ice or anything else that shares a similar name.

Then there are the excessive use of cutscenes within the story line. Until you get into the end game, expect to run into cut scenes around every corner. I played about half of this game (and then ran into Borderlands and stopped playing it) when my playstation had a hard drive issue and I had to system reset the entire thing and wipe the memory. I had played a few dozen hours, and wasn't looking forward to playing through the same things all over again. The good news was that there was a movie skip button. In three hours I managed to do what it took me in almost 20 hours because I was able to skip past every single movie that I had watched. The movies are great, but to watch all of them, and to not get a bit tired of how often they interrupt the game is a bit obvious.

As a person who likes RPG's, this one starts to break the mold a bit. It's focused more on beauty and amazing graphics than it is on story and game play. It's still worth a play for the story line because it's still about 1,000 times better than the junk that gets thrown at you during a typical FPS game, but it just takes a bit of work to keep up with.

The one thing that I missed with this game was the freedom to move. Until the very end of the game, there is one direction that you can move. The line some time spirals, or waves, or draws other funny patterns, but until the end of the game there is a line that you need to follow and it's held together by a string of videos. If you break it down to the most basic elements, the majority of the game is hallway - video - hallway - video - hallway - video - hallway - video. The hallways might be different sizes, or may even be outside, but they always start at point A and only give the option to go to point B. Even the character skills follow this linear growth. They give the illusion that you're making decisions, but if you go down the sentinel path with your main character, you don't get any options, you just get to go down the path and do exactly what is expected of you. It makes you want to think of FFX's sphere grid, but the mobility and flexibility of the sphere grid isn't there.

FFXIII is a much more rigid and linear RPG than the typical final fantasy game. It's still better than other games out there, and you still have some freedom, but it's just less than what you're used to in a massive world covering story.