In 2010, as a delighted Final Fantasy fan with an Xbox 360, I played Final Fantasy XIII. I played some way in and got distracted by other things. A few months later I returned and got as far as the bit where the game becomes less linear. Or, in a less generous way I’ve often seen it described, I reached the end of its 25 hour long tutorial. I carried on trying to progress, hit a fight I couldn’t win and couldn’t get back from, and gave up on it for good with a little bit of a shrug. Thirteen years later, with a lot more things going on in my life and a lot of other 2010 games to play, I started over on PS3 and went right through and completed it. It was a much better experience than the one I’d had the first time. The mindset I took to it was a lot to do with that, and approaching it with limited time for any play session was actually a big help.
Final Fantasy XIII tells an epic story with a range of stylish characters battling monsters and soldiers in a mixed sci-fi and fantasy setting (with crystals). They go on a long journey to unimagined destinations, learn secrets about each other and the world, and eventually attack and dethrone god and god’s space-pope representative. So far, so Final Fantasy. It’s also a series which has long been defined by overturning its mechanical approach with each new entry. My introduction to it was Final Fantasy VIII, with its collectible magic spells and scalable enemy levels and general disregard for established convention.
What still came as a bit of a shock for Final Fantasy XIII is how much Square Enix don’t just change but remove entirely. Lots of the ordinary moment-to-moment of RPGs, talking to people and visiting shops and doing sidequests, isn’t present, is ruthlessly streamlined, or is only present late in the game. Previous Final Fantasy games weren’t exactly realistic immersive sims, but Final Fantasy XIII makes its artificiality clear in more obvious ways.
All your upgrading and shopping is done at save points, theoretically via some virtual network. The game separates the characters into pairs and trios in far off places and unaware of each other’s progress, but they get access to the same pool of items. It completely reverses the emphasis in Final Fantasy XII’s combat on managing groups of enemies and the cumulative effects of fighting your way across a region, by making each battle an isolated event, after which you are automatically healed. You walk forward along linear pathways towards clearly marked goals, cutscenes triggered at points set out on the map. Final Fantasy VII had that one bit at the start where it compares life to a train that can’t run anywhere except where its rails take it. Final Fantasy XIII hammers that message home for an entire game.
For all its glorious scenery (and some of the backdrops, especially the icy ones, are magnificent), it’s not hard for the place to feel disconnected from anything you’re doing. In their straightforwardness, many levels feel built for random encounters which aren’t there. The structure of the game less resembles previous Final Fantasy games than the story mode from a fighting game, a sequence of combat encounters with glorified menu screens between them. Sometimes those modes are really good, of course.
Final Fantasy XIII’s diverse range of characters, thrown together by fate, has a fair bit in common with what can make those modes work, and it helps that they’re so likeable, both solo and in their interactions. Sazh is charming as a straightforward and grown-up everyman. Lightning shows again the value in letting female characters take on the full range of established lead roles (in this case taciturn soldier). Vanille and Fang’s star-crossed lovers story is compelling even as it is largely implied. Snow the pumped-up action hero type could be annoying but the story is built around awareness of that very fact; it knows just how much joy it’s going to provide when Lightning says of him to her sister “you got made a L’cie and now you want to marry this idiot?”. That leaves precocious Hope, whose initial story is the worst bit of the game (seeing his mum doing the “moms are tough” bit without the game even giving her a name is not improved by later discovering the name is withheld for contrived plot twist reasons), but once that’s worked out even he is good company.
Enjoying time with these characters in the story is important, but not as important as enjoying time in battles, which Final Fantasy XIII elevates to a new centrality. The combat system runs a lot of stuff on automatic but in a quite different way to Final Fantasy XII. In that you set out the complex detail of instructions for your party to follow in advance. This time you don’t get access to that detail, but can do much more broad switching up of instructions in battle. You take three characters into battle and they each get specialisms in three out of six roles, giving a lot of potential team formations, of which you have to pick six in advance.
The game works hard to give each of these roles its own distinct strengths, particularly through its stagger system where you build up a stagger gauge for each enemy to put them into a dazed state where they are much more vulnerable. The physical attacks of the Commando role do more damage but don’t move the gauge so far; the magical ones of the Ravager the reverse. Also, though, progress on the gauge disappears back down really fast from magical attacks, so if you’re trying to get there from Ravager alone you probably need three of them. Casting status effect debuffs on enemies with the Saboteur role also gives a boost to the stagger gauge. Balancing all those different ways to build it and the need to defend is an interesting strategic challenge.
The stagger mechanic and the strength of Synergist buffs and Saboteur debuffs, coupled with enemies actually being vulnerable to the latter often enough to be worth bothering with, makes for battles where the momentum can switch very fast. When it does, reacting just as fast is important. Switching strategies just takes a press of L1 and a selection from the list, and it is enormously satisfying to do it at the right moment to press home an advantage or save a situation from slipping away. Doing things fast is absolutely prized by the game, too.
There is one thing that carries over between Final Fantasy XIII’s isolated single battles. Technique Points let you do more powerful moves like summons (generally a bit too fiddly to bother with) or healing everyone at once (always worthwhile) and how much those points get replenished at the end of each battle is determined by your ranking for that battle. Which is largely based on speed. At the end of each fight you are shown how long it took you to beat it, in minutes and seconds, against a target time. Finish a battle fast enough and you get five stars, there in shiny gold.
In long RPGs, there is always a particular motivation to get battles done quickly to move onto the next thing, but by building it right into its mechanics Final Fantasy XIII makes this need for speed a central driving force. After years of Final Fantasy games with variations on the Active Time Battle system, here is one logical culmination of that. When you make the right characters Saboteurs and Synergists, the spells they prioritise first are the ones which affect your enemies and your party’s speed, Slow and Haste. In this game, bending time in your favour is the biggest possible advantage, and realising that was much of what helped me get through it much better this go round.
In fact, as I whittled away seconds, tried out unintuitive routes through battles, picked the right moments to turn things up a gear, and made sudden handbrake turns in strategy, the enjoyment I got out of Final Fantasy XIII felt more like another different type of game. In my post on Forza Motorsport 3, I talked about the experience grind approach of that series and Gran Turismo making them CarPGs. Final Fantasy XIII is the flipside of the same convergence: epic fantasy as a series of time trials. Getting into that on its own terms, I really enjoyed the ride.
Top of the charts for week ending 13 March 2010:
