Final Fantasy XIII Early Impressions

So sue me, I am desperately seeking a topic and I love me my video games.

Okay. So I knew that people would be not liking this game. I can see why. Final Fantasy XIII is a departure, even more so than usual. Which is the first thing that sends a fanbase into a rabid frenzy. Change something, alter a good formula, hell - switch artistic styles (look at the folks who raved lun about Wind Waker), and some group of the fanbase will start screaming an waving signs.

So, in a series that always changes something big time every time, they apparently decided XIII would be a lucky number to alter as many things as they could. I kid not. Battle system? Entirely different - only a couple other games that I have ever played is anything like it. Game combat is fast paced, largely automated (until it isn't - SURPRISE!), tactical in the extreme, occasionally unforgiving (read the tutorial that sort of makes sense, then figure the rest out), and resembles nothing else in the series. Hell, so far it only vaguely resembles anything in any series I have seen. It is terribly rigid in places that I am used to flexibility, and fluid where I am used to order. It keeps me on my toes, true, but it is also nearly a system shock. It is the familiarity equivilent of juggling on a moving mopad. I am sure it is very easy if I get used to it, but until then I shall enjoy careening about with the occasional 'incident'. I am enjoying the flow of the encounters (I think. Probably) and I still twitch a little. I am an accepting person.

In a bit more detail, the combat is... active. Ever play Dragon Age: Origins? It is almost nothing like that. But chances are, Dragon Age is the closest battle system to FFXIII you've ever played, so keep it in mind. All damage is healed between battles. There are no magic points, technique points, etc, your characters just do what they can. You imput skills to use for your leader, or have the computer figure a set on the fly - and your companions are technically entirely out of your control and doing whatever the heck they like. You have only the most marginal, theoretical control over what two thirds of your party is doing at any given time. Which occasionally leads to screaming at the fricken' incompetents. Meanwhile you are trying to juggle what roles they are supposed to be doing, whatever the character you are controlling is doing (What is my leader doing? Staring at the bad guys? Again? FRACK), and keeping track of sixteen other little details wizzing past. Plus, it is in HD. My TV is not HD. My TV is BD - stands for blurred definition. Damned if I can read half of what pops up on the screen. Of course, all dialogue is now spoken - no message windows - so that isn't as bad, but it makes battle information interesting (little bar says I am dying, I just wish I knew what the hell the little numbers up there said, little bar tell me what you are saying!) I can only imagine this gets better. I mean, it isn't like any of this is new. Okay, the paradigm thing is - and those roles are going to drive me bugscrew - but even they have some precident if you squint. But it is like the Constitution back in the 1700s. Nothing really new there, but put it all together and step back and go, 'Well then. That's gonna be interesting.' So. Combat is jarring, but it usually goes by fast before it drives you madder than staring into the face of Chluthu-

Can I see the fanbase shatter into a thousand pieces arguing about this? You betcha.

Also, the story. It's good qualities I will get to later. Let's talk about the bad, first.

This game is a rail RPG so far. Its a very, very good rail RPG. I am liking it. But RPGs, you usually expect to explore, to see the side road. To find your own strength. FFXIII? Welcome to point A. Look at the line. It will take you to point B. Have fun with that. The game is linear as a novel in its early stages. Interactive to a degree (and novels, whatever else, rarely go 'in this battle the team were horribly eviserated because the reader is an inattentive moron - go back two pages and read better next time') but you will be walking more or less forward a lot in this game. Primarily to get away from what is behind you, but there is nothing to either side, and every time I have doubts about this game, its because my gamer's instinct wants to go sideways. Wants to explore.

I can't. For everything I am enjoying, there is a limit to how much I can embrace walking from point A to B. Thankfully it is getting better the further I go, like combat. The first two chapters combat was not only the odd, rigid but fluid system that caught me flatfooted and still does, it was also exceedingly simple. Then fighting, lacking a better term, went bugscrew on me and I am still plumbing its new, strange depths. Hopefully sooner or later, the linearity will go bugscrew on me. Heck, FFVI - originally FFIII in America - was fairly linear right up until its entire second half where you basically had to sail off an island, get a ship, and destroy a madman gone god. Everything else was optional - including making sure that two thirds of your party survived the apocalypse, and getting ready to have a chance in hell of surviving the last place. In other words, half the dang game was optional. It was the plotline equivilent of a tree - fairly straight at the bottom where everything is trunk, then a sudden, vast branching. Final Fantasy Sidequest - and often considered best in the series. So, I am crossing my fingers that bugscrew linearity will happen again, in FFXIII. Here is hoping.

But to the good parts of the story, it is compelling. This is a fairly well realized world we are talking about here. There is depth and complexity in what is happening, and the fact that the game starts on what is essentially the thirteenth day after some mysterious ball started moving, it more or less whispers to you, "we now begin your game on hour fifty. Catch up or die." You join the story in media res as a conspiracy to massacre a city starts to fall apart as resistance and defiance and desperate last stands derail a holocaust already in motion. You follow a soldier and a pilot, who quickly are revealed to be strangers to each other, and uncomfortable companions at best, as they make their way across elevated rails and floating switchbacks, watching a doomed citizenry try to save themselves - too late, it seems - from a world that has suddenly become murderously hostile to them. The soldier, a caucasian woman with the assumed name of 'Lightning', and the pilot, a jive, gangy black man with a big afro housing a bird named Sahz, are helpless to do much beyond keep themselves alive. This is painful to Sahz, as much as he tries to hide it behind good cheer. He has got a reason, not yet voiced, to stay alive and free regardless of the cost and so follows the vetern fighter as she carves her way through the smoke and gunfire. Lightning - not so much pained by the tragedy around her. She's got bigger concerns... someone to save, something to kill.

Elsewhere, a young rowdy with a hero complex named Snow and his band of militia / amateur monster hunters have also broken out of their trains and become the core of one of the largest knots of resistance. He arms former citizens and leads them against and army. It is very brave and incredibly badly thought out - like much of what Snow does. He wins some victories. He gets a lot of people killed doing so. One of them is a middle aged mother. She saves his life. He can't return the favor. Her last words, a plea for him to save someone important to her, visibly break open the bravado that gets Snow through most of his waking hours. The wounds mends, but not entirely. Occasionally it breathes enough that you can see big, brash, impetuous Snow convulse with the scar of maturity.

Not far away, a teenager named Hope (a boy. I don't think school was much fun for him with that name) is watching, and sees Snow get his mother killed. This does bad things to Hope's mental equilibrium. He wants to give Snow a piece of his mind. Or maybe kill him. It is hard to tell, and not because it isn't clear. It's because Hope is a teenager, and the the whole marked for death thing was already blowing his mind. He isn't coping, and when wracked with rage or indecision, the way his entire world has crumbled rings through. Perching on his shoulder, egging him on and further mindscrewing him about every ten minutes, is a teenage girl named Vanille. She's a ditz, a flirt. She's jailbait and sunny innocence. She's also calculating. How much of what she appears to be is real, I don't know. But despite her many goofy, fluff brained actions, occasionally there is a very serious, very solemn narrator who clarafies points across the fourth wall. We the players need only to watch carefully, and we know it is her. But if that is the real her, then she's faking with her every moment in the party. The game lets the player know they've never seen Vanille's real face. Then let that thought slide away. I'm waiting for the payoff. I wonder if she's the villain.

Or maybe the real hero.

Anyhow, across this battlefield the five characters make their way. Hunted, shot at. Heading to the thing that caused it all - a divine/demonic being with the power to bind mortals to its will. Just encountering this thing doomed a whole city to being 'Purged', being massacred quietly. It can take anyone who comes near it, marking them with a geas, a task they must perform. Those who fail it become monstrousities. Those who serve it well are made into immortal stone. A bad bargain at best. Lightning wants to kill it. Snow wants to save someone from it. But if you reverse the names, you'd still be in the right. Sahz, Hope, Vanille? Complete strangers to each other, to those two. But drawn along.

Then bound together in a fell contract that will force them to function as a group for a purpose they can't even make out. Their world wanted them dead before they became tools for a monster, just on the off chance they might have been what they now certainly are.

This a well told tale so far. Even better with the characterizations, since all five characters have their own motives, their own personalities. They don't always work together well (or at all). These people don't know each other, and the dynamics of their group show it, and do so with a superb skill that sells all the rest. Party interact is pitch perfect, and it makes everything else click.

Most games tell stories. It is a large chunk of the point. That FFXIII has a story good enough that I am, currently, completely and totally fine with the alien architecture of the system, says a lot for it.

Granted, I am not that far in. Plenty of time for it to get better or worse.