On top of all that, Final Fantasy 13 tells a story that is surprisingly relevant to our own current experiences. Hell, the final boss of the game is literally called Orphan. Sazh is a literal father, doing his best for his son Dajh, whilst somewhat looking after Vanille, too. Snow is an orphan, and he, too, acts as a parent to Hope. Lightning has to mother her sister, Serah, and begrudgingly becomes a maternal figure for Hope, too. I was surprised to find it's a game about the role of the parent and child each of the main cast takes on one or the other as a role. People often get hung up over the nonsense fantasy language that some games use (as a Kingdom Hearts fan, I'm more than used to that), but lore isn't really what 13 is about, is it? The narrative takes some time to explain itself, and even when it all starts coming together it only kind-of digs into what a l'Cie, or a Fal'Cie, even is.
This leads to one of the biggest frustrations I have when it comes to historical criticisms of the game.Īt the beginning, you are just kind of thrown into the story. It is – after all – a Final Fantasy a game in a series known for its grand and ambitious storytelling and complicated, layered characters. Final Fantasy 13 keeps you on your toes.īut a fun game is not necessarily a good one. You can't just rely on the same rinse and repeat techniques. But the game forces you to switch your party members in its first half, so you're constantly needing to reevaluate how you approach fights. Some fights were a smidge too hard, and there was the odd occasion where things were repetitive from a lack of enemy variety. And that’s completely counter to what I’d heard about the game before jumping in. When you finally have the ability to choose your party members – and dictate what roles they have – you suddenly discover that there’s such a huge range of freedom to play how you want. Just from switching between the various roles, and paying attention to the various gauges at play, I was able to understand exactly how the game works. That didn't happen for me with the Paradigm system.
Turn-based RPGs have a habit of disguising some of the finer, somewhat important details of their battle systems, requiring you to put the time in to figuring out how they work. Over anything else, it introduced the Paradigm system, a gameplay mechanic that requires you to switch your characters between different roles. But my first point of frustration with the decade-plus of criticism I’ve been hearing is that the waves of negativity surrounding the game completely washed away any discussion that could dig into how good the gameplay is. The game definitely could have made a few cuts here and there, no doubt about it. Now, right off the bat I will say this: some of those aforementioned corridors are pretty long.
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