Gamersmint Review: Final Fantasy XIII
It was at Square-Enix’s E3 2006 press conference that Final Fantasy XIII was announced. Nearly four years and console hoppings later, it has finally arrived, albeit to mixed reactions from the Western media. For a long-time Final Fantasy fan like me, XIII didn’t live up to its hype or expectations, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great game – because it is exactly that. It was definitely worth the wait.
First things first, FFXIII is gorgeous. Each location, character, monster, enemy and boss is painstakingly detailed, and it shows. In-game FFXIII looks better than most games’ cutscenes, and the cutscenes and FMVs are even better. The FMVs particularly, run at a resolution of 1080i, and are quite simply breathtaking. There aren’t many drawbacks to this level of quality either, as the game runs at a smooth framerate throughout, and is almost completely pop-in free because of its stellar draw distance . And while the texture quality on some of the body parts, namely fingers and elbows, is a stark contrast to the uber-real character faces, the infrequency with which you encounter those on-screen means it doesn’t really matter all that much.
While we’re on the subject of the aesthetics, Square-Enix has done even the little things with panache. The menu screens are slick and very pretty. Many a time, I found myself flicking through the character status screens, and marveling at their prettiness. Even the subtitle font is styled perfectly. There is not much room to complain about the game visually, and make no mistake about it, if ever there was a game tailor-made to show off your console’s technical prowess, FFXIII is it.
While not as impressive as the visuals, the audio in FFXIII is pretty good, too. The lack of a Japanese audio track was a huge disappointment for me in the build up to release, but the English cast is surprisingly strong. They all play and sound their part convincingly, and if it weren’t for Vanille sounding… er.. stimulated all the time, they would’ve made for a damn fine ensemble. And of course, in time-honored Final Fantasy tradition, the music is excellent. The tracks for the various situations and locales are great, though a few tracks do get overplayed quite a bit.
The old “Group of adventurers taking on the world†theme returns, but surprisingly, the story takes a backseat in FFXIII. Instead, the focus is on the characters and their interactions and personal battles which, for the most part, are done well. A couple of the characters get really annoying at times, but improve to tolerable levels sometime around the middle of the game.
One thing that’s worth mentioning is the effective storyboarding. For a game that has a pre-existing setting and backstory by the time you start playing it, FFXIII does a great job of introducing you to the world, the events, and the characters without drowning you in cutscenes. It maintains a steady pace through the first half of the game, and the events, battles and flashbacks blend in well to create a proper flow.
Now for the downers – The writers found it prudent to break the characters up into two-member parties for much of the game. The idea here was to amplify the interactions between characters, and the duos do play off each other pretty well, all the while letting the player learn the ropes of the battle system. But the catch here is that the battle system is clearly optimized for parties with three members, which makes some of the sections with two-member parties extremely tedious, especially the ones featuring Sazh and Vanille, because Sazh has terrible attack stats. To make matters worse, most monsters have higher HP than they should have. When it takes a minute to kill a tomato, you know something’s gone terribly wrong.
Downer #2: As said before, the game does a good job of setting the table for the story. But when it all comes together, after an admittedly good plot-twist, the story grinds to a complete halt, and never picks up again. They established the characters, their backstories and their desires, but surely they could’ve done a better job in escalating things for the end-game. Instead, FFXIII staggers towards an ending that, while doing the job, manages to be rather random and unsatisfying.
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