Final Fantasy 13 – First Impressions

So a while back I wrote about the most pretentious announcement in the universe. Now I actually have the game in question it’s time we all found out if it really is that good. Does it cure the sick and feed the hungry? Is it the new messiah of the gaming world that we have all been waiting for? Is it better than Final Fantasy 7?

The answers. No, no and no, unless the hungry can eat DVD’s, in which case yes they can eat all three disks of this monstrous turd. Admittedly I am only a few hours in and who knows, it may get better, but I seriously doubt it.

The setting is as weird and fantastic as you would expect from a game with the word Fantasy in the title. Cities are presided over by mechanical god creature things called Fal’Cie, and they sometimes turn people into L’Cie, which gives you magic powers but also gives you a mission or quest to perform, if you don’t do it you turn into a zombie, if you actually do your job you turn into crystal… damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What does this all mean? I have no idea, all it tells me is that they obviously fired everyone that can think up any good fantasy names.

Apparently the government doesn’t like L’Cie and anyone that lives near them; so they send out soldiers to kill them all. To begin with it’s your job as the player to try to end the genocide in a fight along a featureless linear walkway. Switching between several groups of people that include ‘Lightning,’ a stroppy bitch that Square Enix have mistaken for a strong woman, ‘Hope’ a whiny little boy who can only whinge about how his mum died and can’t muster the courage to complain to the guy she died next to, and a vaguely racist caricature of a black guy who keeps a baby chicken in his afro… Yeah.

I have no idea who this is, I don't think she even turns up in the game. But those are some damn pretty lights!

But you don’t come to Final Fantasy for the story… oh wait, no, you do. But even a god-awful story is tolerable if the fighting system is fun. I finished Eternal Sonata didn’t I? Square-Enix has had twenty two years to perfect it, and it can’t be that hard when everyone’s taking turns already.

In fact it turns out they seem to have both made the fighting stupidly over-simplified and over-complicated at the same time! Instead of controlling your main character and two teammates you now just control your protagonist and give vague commands to your friends to the effect of ‘Keep hitting the guy I’m swinging at’ or ‘oh shit he’s still not dead yet, better heal me up while I keep swinging at him.’ You frequently find yourself waiting for your turn when you should have been commanding the rest of your team.

Not only is it a sword, it's a sword that folds into a gun SHE NEVER USES!

And the real cherry on the cake is that unlike previous games where you had to get the whole party killed before you lost, if your main character gets knocked out it’s game over. It’s not so bad, you can just play as the gunslinging birdnest-headed black guy while stroppy bitch swings a sword at the enemies and takes all the damage… Oh wait, no, YOU CAN’T CHOOSE WHO YOU PLAY AS! More often than not you are stuck with someone stupid enough to attack gun-toting soldiers with a buggering sword. Seeing a game over screen even though your friends are still alive and you’re carting a bag of magic ‘dead-be-not’ Phoenix Downs in your inventory but haven’t used any yet because YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE THAT EVER DIES BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT USING A FUCKING GUN!

I can’t believe I’m saying this… but I enjoyed Eternal Sonata’s combat more, and the story was so bad it was funny… this game is just plain disappointing. Do not buy this, you are far better off with the likes of Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age or even Final Fantasy 7. If you can’t find a copy or console for that last one, just get it illegally. It’s their own fault for trying to foist this shite on you instead.

Tags: Final Fantasy, Square-Enix, video games

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