Review: Final Fantasy XIII – A Bustle in Your Hedgerow

You know how “Stairway to Heaven” builds slowly and then finally ruptures at around 4:20? It’s a great moment and you get swept away with in the ascending momentum of the song. Final Fantasy XIII, like the Zeppelin song, makes you earn your nut. For instance, the game starts you out in the fine tradition of a simple and new battle system. As you progress hour by hour this battle system gets amended and deepens. It’s a great way to make you master each layer of the complex system before you move on. I’ve also heard complaints that the game starts out too linear and doesn’t open up a vast overworld for you to explore right away. Rest assured it does, just not immediately. Final Fantasy XIII builds momentum steadily as long as you can get into the initial groove. Its about earning your quest, not receiving it from the onset.

The Final Fantasy series is the royal family of console role-playing games. It brings with it a long tradition. Each game is made uniquely with little to no reference or return to previous installments. By doing this, the game’s developer Square-Enix makes the series more approachable to new players. Don’t worry, if you are a FF veteran there are always some non-intrusive cameos. Even in the opening minutes of FFXIII we catch a glimpse of a Chocobo living inside the afro of the character of Sazh. It’s a way to welcome back old players while not making new ones feel like they missed the party. It is true FFXIII was created with thoughtful direction.  I’d make the argument that Square-Enix is like the Pixar of RPG developers.

For that matter, FFXIII is a very considerate game. One of my biggest gripes about RPG’s lately is that there is so much to keep track of and they are so friggin’ long. Being a smoker, an alcoholic, a sex-addict and having a day job, I live in constant fear that should I not play the game for a week or so, that I will forget all my progress and not know where to pick up from. Thanks to Square-Enix, FFXIII fills you in with a little textual update each time you load a game that tells you exactly what happened and what you accomplished in the previous session. It’s these little things that make an older veteran sigh in relief that I can still play an RPG like this and have a life.

Final Fantasy XIII delivers with unparalleled sound and visual sass. Facial expressions, although heavily stylized, are stunning and nearing perfection in sharp contrast to RPG’s like Mass Effect where some expressions look like the characters are masked. FFXIII has an elegant musical score as well. Composer Masashi Hamauzu delivers a beautiful and mature course of Japanese classical piano, jazz guitar and orchestral loops that keep you in the game but do not distract from the quest. Speaking of the quest, like all Final Fantasies it balances on the border of Celtic lore and neo-spiritualism. It’s a rush of timeless devices based around the traditional Hero’s Journey. Some elements are as literal as the home world being called “Cocoon” and others are a little more subversive like the relationships between the different inhabitants and the notion of fate. The characters, while mostly clichéd western archetypes are purposefully made this way. It’s a Japanese tradition. Like medieval temperaments these are all classical characters basically reskinned.

All of it comes together very well in the end. Final Fantasy XIII is a game that probably won’t woo many non-RPG players but it should. If you haven’t played a Final Fantasy the piper is calling you to join him. Its a slow burn but a deep and rich game that will have your head humming from beginning to end.