Final Fantasy 13 looks glorious...but it only looks that way.
It's boring.
And no, I don't hate JRPG's, or Final Fantasy games. Check my reviews...I glow about them.
But this game, is boring.
It does alot wrong that some people ignore, and others seem to pardon too easily, maybe from a sense of loyalty to a series that provided them so much joy, which is fair...but it doesn't change the fact that this game had significant issues that hindered the success many of us, myself included, hoped it would achieve.
The combat is repetitive and uninteresting, the story is convoluted, the characters are mostly uninteresting, and outside of the revamped graphics of the game, it does not one thing new that older Final Fantasies haven't done better.
There are some interesting developments, though. Watching certain characters pair up during moments in this game takes on a deeper context...things that seem accidental you come to find aren't, and you watch some characters grow in the presence of others. Namely, Lightning and Sazh.
Unfortunately, the other characters remain little more than cardboard cutouts there to simply fill old roles sequestered from the other series. The angsty teen, the happy go lucky girl, the mysterious dark haired woman, the brave and loyal handsome hero. You're likely to forget their names quickly.
The story takes forever to get going. Some of this, I feel, is just too much back and forthing in time through cutscenes that don't hold any context until about 2/3 through the game. But another part of this, is that the battle system is so repetitive and tedious, that laboring through enough battles won by simply pressing "A" over and over becomes so mind numbing, that when another cutscene comes up, you feel so drained that it hardly seems to matter.
Load screens aplenty, as well, popping up with surprising frequency and over very short distances, which does nothing to allieviate the sense of tediousness moving through this world.
And, while the story finally DOES start coming together at about the 2/3 point, when it does, there was a part of me that thought "isn't this kinda like FF10 a little?" And what followed was "but didn't FF10 do it better?"
The answer to those questions is "yes" and "yes"
There was a point playing this game, feeling like it took forever to get anywhere within it's own story, that I was reminded of Lost Odyssey, which suffered from alot of uneven pacing as well, for alot of similar reasons, but the difference with LO was that at least even when it was slow, I cared about the characters enough to pull me through it till it started to pick up. Sure, combat was a bit clunky, and load screens were a chore, but I cared. With FF13, by the time it started to pick up, I found myself indifferent enough that it didn't seem to matter to me anymore.
There isn't a whole lot of ground in this game that wasn't covered by older games better, and more poignantly. It's ok, but just ok. Not great, and really, not even good. Just ok.
The story could have been executed better, the combat could have been more engaging, and the characters could have been fleshed out alot better, but honestly, I get the sense that this game was like a "Final Fantasy's greatest hits", where they tried to take the best pieces of what made older games great, and mash them into a single game, while losing the context for what made those old games great.
You have Cloud without the world that makes him rage, Rikku without the racial context, Tidus without the deep backstory, Lulu without the deepened and understandable sense of protection, and Spira without the sense of wonder.
Sometimes without the context of an album, the songs lose their meaning.
Really, it's just a game that lacks a singular sense of focus. While it's certainly not terrible, and not bad, it's not the mind blowing and heart melting experience FF fans have waited for all these years. Better games have come out since, which perhaps colors my expectations too strongly.
Except, better games came out long before it as well, a number of them within this very series. I hoped for more.
Oh well, maybe next time.