I have been playing Final Fantasy since I was a small child. Now it seems that I have been asked by Nietzche’s Demon/ Angle to play every one of these games in endless cycles and not sure if I am happy about this or I am going to end up in a pick up truck yelling “don’t drive angry” to a rodent. Final Fantasy XIII has already been reviewed to death but I have some thoughts that were not in any of the reviews that I have read.
The production values are insanely good and by production values I do not exactly mean just the technical aspect of the graphics but a great deal more. I could call it mise en scène but that is an overused term in cinema that is to vague for my purposes. So I will explain the elements that I mean beyond the technical graphical detail.
The first paradoxical thing I would like to address is that the monsters in this game are less monstrous. In every previous game all your encounters with the monstrous are either random or you always got the impression that everything in world was just waiting to kill you or be killed by you. This is a convention that most video games have and can work in certain cases, like in Beyond Good and Evil but in Final Fantasy it has always been part of the suspension of disbelief. This time around, at least as soon as you get to Gran Pulse – for those that have not played the game it is the large openish world – the monsters or more like animals. Mind you they all seem to be stuck on an loop of a daily routine – possibly confronted by the same Demon/Angle that torments me – but you do get a sense of them fighting for territory, running around in state of play, worshipping treasure chests – okay that was a bit odd, or just searching for food. Even one of the hunt quests says that your quarry, which happens to a large dinosaur like creature – is probably just a lost child looking for its mother – I have yet to complete this quest. A lot of care went into making these creatures animals rather than just obligatory obstacles in your path. Every robot in the game, however, is exactly that. So you take a bit of good with the bad.
The art direction is also well done and for the first time in the series I got a sense of Amano’s art style inside the game rather than just between the covers of the manual. It is not omnipresent but around the Cie’th stones, some of the designs of creatures and building. This style was both beautiful and colourful, which to be perfectly honest, most games today look like the inside of the toilet from Trainspotting out of fear of being considered too childish. It is a nice break to see beautiful sights with the graphical competence of large company like Square-Enix.
The soundtrack is good and far more memorable than the work in Final Fantasy XII but at the same time I find the series has yet to top the work in Final Fantasy VI. In that game each leitmotif is associated with a character and each combination of these to make a song had some purpose to the plot. The soundtrack to Final Fantasy XIII is bit more like a Hollywood movie. Most of the songs are memorable and some are very beautiful but they do not mesh into a coherent whole and are there to act more tone for a part of a narrative rather than helping the narrative along. I feel this is important for video games as an art form because there will always be long stretches of the experience which the music is the primary auditory queue for the narrative. Still it is very well done despite the fact that I did not like the Leona Lewis song which the story seem to want to be hinged on.
And of course the technical aspects of the gameplay elements are fairly well done and do manage to cut down on some tedium and micromanagement which would have been great to allow us to enjoy the story without worrying which of the characters was missing their packed lunch. I will get to why I am using a subjunctive voice in a bit.
Everything isn’t roses and sunshine with the game and a lot of it has to do with the acting and the plot.
The voice acting in the game is variable. It is not fair to say that is is horrible. It is just some of the written lines are so weird that I am not sure any voice actor could have convinced me of sincerity. Also the choice of making the Gran Pulse accent Australian, Gran Puls being a world that is literally under the world which you start on, has led me to make far to many down under jokes.
The other problem with the acting is the motion capture kind of oscillates between Kabuki play, or really any type of play, and film acting. The larger gestures just seem odd when the camera is so close to the character. I thought Square-Enix used to do this because they used to keep the camera far back in non-prerendered scenes to hide problems with the textures which would make larger sweeping gesture more necessary. Now this isn’t a problem, which is an achievement in itself, but they still have this strange bad habit. It is also important to note this happens a great deal less in the prerendered cinematic.
And finally the plot… it’s silly. I’m sorry I don’t have much more to say. Group of young people although not as young as usual – Lighting is 21 and just about to take the officers exams before she is dragged into this mess whereas in earlier games she would have probably made the rank of general by then is famous on the field- save the world. Essentially it is just like every other JRPG in existence. Which annoys me becasue the plot has base components similar to Babylon 5 and with a little bit of work and care the plot could have been really good and may have even had some surprises. Alas, it is not meant to be.
The easiest way for me to put it is that it’s Dune except no one tries to play out their roles to absurdly. The entire game is done is somewhat a deadpan serious tone with comic relief sections which seems a little silly given that the plot is just so silly to start with. A for instance in this case is the charter of Dysely. To reference my Dune example, no body wants to play a subtle floating fat man so go for broke. Dysley should have been overplayed just for amusements sake and it is not like Final Fantasy has not done this before. Kefka, from Final Fantasy VI and Seymour from Final Fantasy X were both of this genre of villain.
That is all I can think of that has not been said ad nauseam by every other human on earth. I would still recommend this game if just to look at and considering how many of you have seen Avatar there is something to be said to experience something merely for an outstanding visual effects and other incidental achievements.
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