"How can there be any meaning in the memory of such a being? What I have shown you is reality. What you remember - that is the illusion". - Sephiroth, Final Fantasy VII
**Author's note - I have refrained from revealing anything in this post that could be construed as spoilers. The opinions here are based on the first fifteen hours of gameplay**
A while or so ago I posted a quasi-diatribe on how video games are too often tarred with the brush of distrust and disdain, with commentators preferring to focus on the putative links between the increasing realism of certain titles and the inevitable rise of violent crime. I offered as a counter-example the excellent Portal 2, a game that offered an intoxicating blend of exploration and puzzle-solving with a top-class script, beautifully realised world, and characters you genuinely cared about.
Since then, I have been slowly working my way through my (very small) library of existing games, given I made a solemn promise to my girlfriend, like a guilty ten-year old, that I would finish what I already owned before I bought any further titles. Whilst I'm afraid I've played nothing as absorbing and satisfying as Portal 2, I have singled out two I believe warrant further discussion - L.A. Noire, that I'll post about at a later date once I've finished it, and Final Fantasy XIII, a game that, in my opinion, almost single-handedly destroys the reputation the series has been trading on for over twenty years.
A quick word on the legacy of the sequence so far. For those who believe that Final Fantasy is just the pseudonym for Owen Pallett (whose Heartland record is excellent, by the way), the Final Fantasy series is a collection of Japanese role-playing games, characterised by incomprehensible plots, characters with angular hair-cuts and nonsensical names like "Cloud" and "Quistis", and battles that are conducted via selecting various exotic options from detailed menus rather than performing attacks in real-time. To the seasoned Call of Duty veteran such a protracted experience would seem ludicrous, but whilst on paper playing such a game sounds about as exciting as, say, grouting your bathroom, or re-alphabetising the DVDs, I haven't yet mentioned the rich worlds, the satisfying character development, the fantastic open exploration and the fact that for £40 or so you are buying a game that could easily last fifty hours or so, perhaps double if you are prepared to perform the side missions.
To place the series in context - thirteen years ago, the phenomenally successful Final Fantasy VII was released in Europe on the Playstation. It has since become revered to the point of idolatry by legions of fans who were bowled over by its incredible story, terrific (for its times) graphics, and focus on exploration and discovery in a dystopian world in which you could easily lose yourself. It is still one of the finest games I have ever played and reminds me of a golden era where graphics were still rudimentary enough to require some absorbing action behind them.
Fast forward to March 2010 - Final Fantasy XIII is released on the Playstation 3 and, surprisingly, the Xbox 360. With the extra processing power of the updated hardware, and thirteen years of building and refining, I expected an absolute tour de force, with film-quality graphics, a gigantic open world ripe for exploration, and an absorbing story with characters I wanted to understand and explore in great detail. Of that triumvirate of triple-AAA characteristics, I found one.
In his terrific Zero Punctuation series of review, which are so entertaining I would argue you don't need to be interested in games to enjoy them, Yahtzee Croshaw describes the game as "a painting of a firework display", and I have yet to hear of a better description. It looks beautiful, the lore is appealing, and it has explosions and SFX in all the right places, but look to either side and you realise that what's missing is depth. It's not extraordinary to find that you don't take to one or two characters in a game, but to hate them all? To really care not a single jot about their motivation or their background? To sigh every time another blasted cut-scene plays (fortunately they are skippable) where two characters will chat about nothing in particular for hours? That's quite something. One character, a "lovable rogue" called Snow, seems to have nothing in his dialogue beyond the word "Sarah"; the main character takes sullen animé angst to a new level, and the obligatory jailbait teenage girl, Vanille, seems to be on a completely different plane of reality to any of her companions, laughing and joking for no reason whatsoever.
As for the open world, I know for a fact that the final third of the game lives up to the expectation from previous series, where you can wander the world to your heart's content before tackling the main challenge. It's a shame then, that the first fifteen hours is a series of narrow walkways, punctuated by repetitive fights, boring cut scenes and the occasionally gigantic boss that completely floors you first time around before thinking better of it the second time and offering itself up for slaughter. Though the argument that such an arrangement adds forward momentum to the plot and ensures the player is suitably prepared for the more challenging second half, the opening act needs a complete rehaul before it can bear the Final Fantasy badge with pride.
I'm fully prepared to revisit my opinions once I have completed the game, which will probably take me another year given my upcoming schedule, but for the moment, I am extremely disappointed. Games are far more like films than any critic will credit - it's all very well throwing 3D and incredible big-budget effects at the viewer, but if ultimately you don't care about the what's going on, or the people involved, it just becomes a sequence of noises and colours. Maybe this betrays my English Literature roots, but for me the character and the story reign supreme, and perhaps the sudden explosion in high-definition remakes of classic games is in part propelled by the discovery that the mod-cons of current generation gaming are not always all that they are cracked up to be.
