Final Fantasy 13

Final Fantasy 13 was a weird time for Square Enix. It was their first really HD effort but they were constantly trying to one-up themselves on production values. It was also a time when big cross-media franchises were getting launched. The result was Fabula Nova Crystallis which is a semi-shared mythology that links a bunch of side games with Final Fantasy 13 being the flagship game. It ran into development difficulties of both vision and technology (HD towns are hard), taking a long time to release and ultimately I don’t think it recovered from that.

My first impression having played it for the first time in over a decade was the graphics are really good, especially for the age in which it was developed. It brought the series back to the futuristic setting which I remember being quite exciting at the time since both Final Fantasy 11 and 12 both went for the classic steam-punkish fantasy. The PC version has some limited ability to set graphical settings, only 1080p max but the art direction is combined with a fantastic lighting model that still holds up well in 2025. The magic effects in battle are also really good, even most modern games don’t have that same level of detail. Although this is perhaps for clarity reasons everything has bright auras and bold effects but there’s something satisfying about the particles that almost dissolve into single pixels. The facial animation is also quite good. Lip syncing appears to be decent for English. I’m not sure if that was specifically done or if they just matched up the dialog but it’s better than expected. I don’t remember what else used this engine, or if it was really reused at all but I think it was a massive money sink and they abandoned it. It’s a shame really.

I don’t like the battle system. Basically each character has a few class roles they can take. You are only allowed to control the party leader and even then the pacing is such that you almost never set your own moves but let the auto battle take over. To change the flow of battle you use “paradigms” which are just sets of 3 roles. So maybe you have 2 attackers and a healer, or 3 magic attacks, or a tank and a healer etc. The battle strategy is basically attack until you’ve taken too much damage, heal and repeat. Occasionally you might buff or debuff as necessary. There’s a distinct lack of precision doing this. The “paradigm shift” has a bit of a lag to it and the battles are real time. So it mostly feels like waiting for bars to fill up and then changing high level tactics as the game sorta plays itself. In retrospect, it’s basically a mobile game battle system before modern mobile games. It also means that stats and equipment aren’t really important as much as capitalizing on what paradigm you should be in, for example if you take a full tank paradigm you generally can not die. To prevent tanking they add the combo meter which fills up as you continually attack a certain enemy but it can expire if you don’t attack. This adds a percentage damage boost and for large enemies and bosses it’s essential because their HP is enormous. This creates a secondary problem of if you get unlucky and the combo meter ends you probably just extended the battle by minutes. You are punished by wasting your time which feels tedious more than fun.

Musically, there are two main themes in Final Fantasy 13. The battle theme “Blinded by Light” gets a lot of play as it’s used by most battles, it’s not my favorite of the series as it’s a little too subdued but it’s still a good track. The other is the main theme “Fabula Nova Crystallis” which is heavily remixed including a couple vocal versions. This one is also really good. The rest of the soundtrack is kinda meh. It’s a lot of ambient background stuff. It really feels like it continues the transition from Final Fantasy 12 into that “modern” video game music where strong instrumentation and melody aren’t allowed and it has to sound more like a movie soundtrack.

The game is divided into chapters. The first chapter really shows off what Final Fantasy 13 is. The opening cutscene is pretty but cut very choppy and although they went for a cold open, they never actually give you your rest period where they explain what’s going on. Instead the game throws a complete salad of vocabulary terms at you: L’Cie, Fal’Cie, Pulse, Cocoon, Purge, PSICOM, Guardians etc. It make absolutely no effort to explain what these mean or contextualize them at all. Some of them sound like English so you can guess but I remember the first time playing I didn’t know what was going on for most of the game. Going through it a second time I remembered a few things but it’s still hard to keep up. We also don’t really know anyone’s motivation aside from some rebels fighting an evil empire of some sort.

Gameplaywise it’s also a very fitting introduction. You largely walk down hallways and fight enemies by repeated hitting auto-battle. At this stage there is no strategy, you just let it do it’s thing. Where Final Fantasy X also felt very linear compared to what came before, it at least has a strategic battle system forcing you to pick attacks in a rock-paper-scissors sort of way. Here it feels like they took X-2’s real time battle system while stripping out all of the good parts. HP is reset per battle, save points are also shops and potions heal everyone at the same time so simply everything has been compressed into one super optimized gameplay treadmill. At times it feels like a glorified cutscene.

Chapter 2 doesn’t fare much better. Here is seems we’re in some sort of mecha or something. Especially in these first few chapters the levels are drab yet visually busy. It’s kinda hard to tell what anything is supposed to be. Again it’s just walking forward and watching cut-scenes happen with a few auto battles to slow things down. There’s a little bit of exposition dumping in this chapter but it’s extremely terse and hard to follow plus the dialog sounds very forced. Snow and Lightening are both looking for someone named Serah who has been cursed by a Fal’Cie and turned in a L’Cie. All parties end up in the same room where she is and watch her turn into a crystal. Fal’Cie are apparently some spiritual-techno beings that curse people for “reasons” and this makes everyone else hate them. It’s confusing. The Fal’Cie then gets pissed turns everyone into L’Cie and the mecha structure thing get blown up by an angry military and falls into water turning it to crystal.

Chapter 3 is more of the same. We finally get access to the crystarium which is basically just a watered down sphere grid and the core way to expand characters. It’s watered down because you have very limited routes and basically you get capped at certain points so you can’t get ahead of where you are supposed to be. In addition paradigm shift unlocks so the battles get a little more variety than pure attacking (you can heal now too!). At least the setting of a crystalized lake is pretty cool and has lots of good lighting effects.

Since the party was cursed they get their “focus,” a sort of mysterious task they are supposed to fulfill for being cursed or be turned into a zombie-like creature called a “Cei’th.” They all have a shared dream but don’t know what the task is. They eventually happen upon crystalized Serah. I think the only character that isn’t annoying is Sazh who acts as the straight-man in the party. All the interaction just feels a bit stilted. It’s well acted but the writing just isn’t there.

Chapter 4 is running though a quarry or something. Boring to look at and goes on a long time. Lighting and Hope get really angsty. Feels like this was still a common video game trope at the time. The characters split into two groups because Lightening can’t just wait a second so her and Hope go one way and Sazh and Vanille the other.

Lightening and Hope wind up in a robotic forest of some sort. Real Mega Man X vibes. Much like chapter 4 it’s way too long and you really start to see the asset reuse here. Most of the conversations revolve around Lighting trying to toughen Hope up so he can face Snow and stop being a little baby but by the end Lightening herself realizes she has anger issues and decides that she actually cares a bit for Hope. Parallel to this Sahz and Vanille are going their own way but it’s through something that’s not a drab brown/grey technoscape. I actually enjoyed this chapter a lot more because it has pretty visuals of a forest waterscape that slowly changes to night time and the background vocal track is an upbeat remix of the main theme. The second area of this chapter has you touching orbs to change the weather. In a more competent game this would have some sort of puzzle mechanic but here it just changes the enemies on your forward walk. We get a glimpse of Sazh’s past with his son and how it appears Vanille had something to do with him becoming a L’Cie.

Chapter 7 cuts back to Lightening and Hope sneaking into Hope’s hometown of Palumpolem. Again, since a lot of this game feels rushed to completion there’s a sort-of stealth route and you can avoid enemies but there’s no point. In fact it’s to your detriment to skip the CP gained because it will put you behind. So you just move forward and fight things like always. There’s these really annoying enemies that constantly heal each other too. At the halfway mark the focus switches back to Snow who has been brought in by the army under Cid Raines with a woman called Fang but they want to help the Pulse L’Cie for whatever reason (I still don’t really understand what Pulse is, I know it’s a country/geographic region but where it sits in relation to Cocoon and why they hate each other is still not clear). This chapter goes on for quite a while switching back and forth between teams. The enemies started feeling pretty tedious since there’s some high HP ones frequently littered in, some even have instant death attacks if you aren’t fast enough or unlucky enough to not be able to guard with a sentinel. I don’t really like the sentinel role because it feels like it just extends the battle (the counter ability is not worth the effort) so I avoided using unless absolutely necessary.

The chapter here is used to build to the end of Hope’s ark with Snow and the whole thing feels rather stupid and makes Hope an angry unlikable whiner. He is convinced that Snow killed his mom so he intends to kill him while Snow plays the over enthusiastic hero. After Hope nearly throws him off a building Snow saves him from falling instead and they reconcile the whole thing. It feels forced. We also get a little bit of Fang’s motive. Her and Vanille were Pulse L’Cie who completed a focus and revived from crystal form somehow. They don’t have memories of their past life but they got split up and want to find each other again. Hope also reconciles with his dad whose dialog is weird and choppy and really ruins the emotional impact. They fight off the military and rejoin the army crew that’s been carrying Snow and Fang around.

Since chapter 7 is used at sort of the midway point to the game and is quite long, chapter 8 is a nice breather. Vanille and Sazh are at what is basically Final Fantasy 13’s version of the Gold Saucer except there’s no minigames, you just walk through 3 areas and watch cutscenes designed to show off Square’s FMV rendering abilities. Eventually they are attacked by PSICOM and there’s a length of battles mostly against really easy enemies as well as an easy boss. Sazh finds out Vanille had something to do with cursing Dahj while some villain lady tries to provoke Sazh into killing Vanille which of course he does not. He also gets his Eidolon at the end. This reminds me that Eidolons are a thing because there really doesn’t feel like a reason to use them in battle because TP takes forever to rebuild so you just save them for emergencies. Feels really disconnected because they aren’t really mentioned in terms of the L’Cie’/Fal’Cie stuff so I don’t know what their story purpose is.

Chapter 9 starts off with the team boarding an airship to rescue Sazh and Vanille although at some point they also break out of jail and you switch between parties. Perhaps the most interesting part of this chapter is the boss, Barthandelus. It’s really peak JRPG design. He’s this angelic robot with upside-down marble heads and a face that retracts to become a dozen laser guns. It’s also one of the harder battle up until this point but mostly because he has an attack “desturo” that can basically one-shot the party but it’s not really clear how you deal with it. It has a very long wind up and I thought the point was to heal and buff so you can take it. That only works the first couple of times as it seems to do more damage the closer he is to death. It’s actually a DPS check where you need to throw everything at him and while it doesn’t break the attack if you make him flinch it greatly reduces the damage taken. Plotwise, Barthandelus’ human form is the space pope of Cacoon but he actually wants to destroy it and has created this Rube Goldberg machine of “focuses” in order to push the party into making that happen.

In the end he tells you need to destroy Cacoon by destroying the orphan or something. More mystery vocabulary terms. He flies away and the party escapes on an airship and then teleports to some random landing spot after almost crashing into a building. Everything about the plot seems hurried and confusing and I’m starting to check out.

Chapter 10 remind me a bit of Final Fantasy 12. Not in a good way, in a walking down a drab mining shaft that repeats geometry and textures kind of way. You are in some sort of ancient storage building for Pulse weapons to be used on Cocoon. Now all party members can be any class which is cool but also seems a bit pointless, especially since you don’t have extra points to spend building them up. The boss here is Cid Raines who is also a l’Cie apparently and his focus was to help you destroy Cacoon. But now he wants to break his destiny. I guess that at least explains why he was being helpful but not why nobody asked questions about his motive in the first place. This boss is also annoying because his second phase has instant kill attacks.

Chapter 11 is where things get interesting. For starters it’s not a hallway (well the first half anyway). Instead you are given a lush field to run around in. You can even see Cocoon which is the first time I actually understand the geography that Cocoon is like a moon that got blasted by Ragnarok and Pulse is the actual wild planet it hovers over. Enemies here can be much higher level than your own so you do have to navigate around them but you finally have some freedom to do things at your own pace. To pace it, they setup Cie’th stones which give you quests to defeat certain enemies. The next Cie’th stone is always located close by the enemy you defeat so it still pushes you forward, just not as aggressively. This part was much more enjoyable. The chapter is also extremely long, roughly 4x other chapters or more if you get further into sidequests but at least there are side quests. I got at least to getting a Chocobo before moving on. The back half is drab cave and then a tower dungeon. The dungeon can be confusing since you need to talk to statues that rotate the floors but it’s not a real puzzle, there is a linear path forward. The final stretch is Oerba. It’s a dilapidated costal town where Vanille and Fang are from. Surprisingly there’s not even that much plot or backstory, you just move through it and fight Barthandelus again.

After beating Barthandelus the party gets on an airship he leaves for them and they fly to Cocoon and interrupt some sort of race. I guess this was done because it makes for a big prerendered spectacle but it feels really silly. Once the party lands rifts open up that let Pulse creates into Cocoon and start running amok. Then some other soldiers also swoop in. I didn’t really understand what was happening other than you again fight through linear corridors of new versions of enemies you’ve already fought before. This basically continues through chapter 13 which starts getting nasty. Lots of enemies that can one hit KO you if you aren’t careful or just get unlucky.

The final boss has really cool visual concept of Yoshitaka Amano styled art but in a semi-flat plane. Unfortunately gameplay-wise it’s absolutely cheap bullshit. To up the difficulty they give him an attack that does something like 95% of your party’s HP as fixed damage. He’s supposed to telegraph it a couple seconds before so you can get ready, except when he doesn’t when his HP gets down to 40%, you have to be expecting that one to survive and it’s not easy to gauge. He also has an attack that causes instant death 50% of the time and since it’s game over if the party leader dies you will just randomly die sometimes. There’s no way to defend against it either. There is an item that reduces the chance of instant death succeeding but it maxes out at 45% if you bother to upgrade it, which I did, and still died 3 more times to this attack from bad luck. I could understand it for Final Fantasy I and II but it’s amazing that a game costing tens of millions could be so broken. Eventually I tried a different lineup altogether and beat him in 1.5 staggers. Magic is apparently more powerful in this fight but there’s nothing to indicate that.

Upon replaying my opinion changed a little bit. I do have to give the battle system a little more credit. It can be a bit interesting late-game but you’ll only know how a battle flows and what you should have picked once you lose. Building your characters doesn’t really matter, you paradigm load out is always the most important thing. Choice is mostly an illusion, while it wears the skin of an RPG it’s really a type of slow indirect action game. It even artificially increases difficultly with instant death attacks and events (the eidolons especially) and requiring you main character to never die despite the party formation. The plot is hard to follow but you’re basically getting cutscene after cutscene after running down hallways. It just fails to be interesting most of the time. This is especially disappointing because chapter 11 did something better, and I’m sure they must have known. It would have been a much better model for the full game. The weapon system is borderline pointless and yet incredibly obtuse. They should have just dumped it.

This is really peak bad Final Fantasy, it feels like they got lazy about gameplay and wanted to make a movie or some technical showpiece. It has some redeeming values but it’s mostly shallow and boring. A true vanguard of the whole vapid generation of movie games that followed. It’s amazing really that the first Final Fantasy succeeds in so many ways this game fails, from being non-linear, to letting you build a party and explore your choices, to being somewhat coherent in plot. Hell it even feels less cheap. We laughed when they said “HD towns are hard!” but what happened with this game had little to do with HD growing pains and just complete directorial incompetence.