Well, here we are. *Final Fantasy XIII*. It's funny, because I thought going into this I'd be ending the game with a glowing rating, and standing apart from the majority of folks who can't stand this game. "Why would anyone hate this?" I thought, despite its minor flaws early on. Well, unfortunately I've now gotten about three-quarters of the way through the game a second time (my first attempt was *many* a year ago), and yeah, I see it now. The honeymoon period of the early game is over, and the flaws have gotten too big to ignore.
So let's start with the good -- I went into this wanting to play something flashy and cinematic, and by god, it delivered. The game delivers a strong start and everything feels super flashy and exciting, the cutscenes are frequent and gorgeous, you're thrown right into the action at a breakneck pace and the foot isn't coming off the pedal any time soon. The graphics are great, the music is stellar, everything is shaping up to be a fantastic experience!
I feel like people give many *Final Fantasy* games (generally the ones they *didn't* play first as a kid) undue hate for their tradition of *breaking* tradition -- every FF game tries something new, and the 'paradigm shift' combat system in XIII is definitely that. An interesting twist on the classic FF 'job' system, the paradigm system has party members shifting back and forth between different roles in combat, something you'll be expected to do frequently. So much so, in fact, that you only directly control the main character (and can even use an auto button to queue up the most situationally-appropriate abilties), while your other two companions follow their lead.
While I can see how this may be jarring to players of other FF games, I actually found it refreshing and intriguing; it's a system we haven't really seen the likes of before or since, and while it may be considered a little on the simplistic side, I thought it was thoroughly enjoyable.
On the inevitable elephant in the room of this game being a "corridor simulator", I similarly disagree -- yes, it tends to be *very* linear early on, though slowly adds a little more freedom later, finally going full-on open-world near the end of the game. This isn't your typical RPG where you venture freely between towns and dungeons, but again, I didn't really see this as a major downside -- I was in it for a cinematic experience, and the more tightly-controlled flow of progression lends itself well to this style.
Story and characters-wise -- again, I was honestly happy with this all along. I was quickly wrapped up in the story and intrigued by the machinations of the fal'Cie (god-machines that rule over and protect the two worlds the game is based around), and I especially related to the character Sazh, and his general "too old for this ♥♥♥♥" vibe. Me too, Sazh. *Me too.*
So where'd it all go wrong? Well, this is of course incredibly subjective, but *for me* things started to take a steep downhill curve somewhere around the last third or so of the game, 25-30 hours in. The combat becomes much more of a slog as the game clearly tries to pad itself out more than is strictly necessary -- while early on you'd meet some "spongey" enemies with massive health pools as sort of dramatic mini-boss encounters, now they're *everywhere*. Every corner you turn, oh look, there's another of those guys that takes an unneccessarily-long amount of time to beat, while simultaneously providing almost no actual challenge or difficulty beyond just soaking up damage, because that's super fun. Yes, you can also switch to using the Synergist and Saboteur roles to buff your team and debuff the enemy, respectively, but that also takes a bunch of *time*, especially when it's just battling trash in a corridor.
The boss fights in particular stood out to me as being something I truly detested. I'd describe most bosses in this game as: "I hope you bought the strategy guide". Aside from some early examples, pretty much every boss fight outright *requires* a very specific strategy, a very specific combination of paradigm shifting, none of which is expressed beyond the vaguest of hints, and your options are pretty much either trial and error (which can lead to being stuck in a boss fight for 20 minutes before failing and having to try again), or look up the solution on GameFAQs, and hope you remembered to have the foresight to level up your characters in just the right way beforehand. It's a stark contrast to the trash fights, which -- while sometimes spongey -- are almost always incredibly easy, to the point of often being boring.
The equipment upgrade system follows a similar style, where certain upgrade materials will add or remove multiplier buffs to adding future upgrades to weapons, but as for which ones do what... hope you enjoy trial and error, because even the game itself tells you that you just have to experiment and find out. Again, this feels like the sort of gameplay design that I'd expect from a game from the 80s, and I didn't like it back then either.
I've finally gotten to the point where I was sick of slogging through tedious trash fights, followed by repeated frustrating trial-and-error boss battles over and over, and decided that I'd rather just spend my time with a game I actually enjoy instead of forcing myself to finish one that I don't.
It's off to YouTube to watch the rest of the story, I guess.
