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Posted By Austin Yorski about 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Missed Opportunity: The Real Problem with Final Fantasy XIII, 
I usually use this column as a place to highlight the best storytelling video games have to offer. I’ve talked about the clever ways the medium has leveraged Jewish mythology, Saussurean semiotics, and even Freudian psychology. However, to get the fullest understanding of the literary conventions and ludonarrative techniques of interactive electronics, Pixelated Pretension must also take the occasional moment to reflect on how and why things go wrong. This brings us to Final Fantasy XIII.
To clarify, I don’t think that XIII is necessarily a bad game. I would say it’s about a 6 out of 10 on BT’s unforgiving scale, which is above average. However, I do think the flaws in Square Enix’s overambitious RPG are telling. I’m not even referring to its “supposed” detriments–namely, linearity and unlikable characters–as both of those issues are rather subjective, if they can even considered to be problems at all. No, I am here to discuss all of the missed opportunities in the world of Cocoon and Gran Pulse.
Although spoilers follow, an intensive knowledge of the plot is not required for this assessment. The elements dissected in this essay are given enough context to be understood by those who have not played the game. For those interested, a basic plot synopsis can be found here.
Let's start with the pogroms and work our way to deicide.
Final Fantasy XIII starts in media res, or “in the middle of things.” It’s a time-honored narrative device by which the audience can quickly become engrossed in the most exciting parts of a tale, circumventing tedious exposition. In the case of Motomu Toriyama’s sci-fi/fantasy epic, this technique quickly becomes alienating. It doesn’t help that the player is immediately assaulted with jargon–Pulse, Focus, Cocoon, fal’Cie, l’Cie, and more are all hurled at someone coming into a strange world for the first time. Plenty of other Final Fantasy games have esoteric terminology, but at least VII had the decency to ease you into the universe before introducing Jenova Cells, the Lifestream, and the Cetra.
I’ve heard it said that FF13‘s failure is evidenced by its in-game index. How can a game expect its audience to study a whole encyclopedia of lore just to understand what is going on? I won’t go so far as to agree with this sentiment (Mass Effect has a similar compendium, but few problems with pacing or exposition), but I do think it is indicative of the game’s mishandling of its setting. There is no establishing shot of life on Cocoon. You don’t know any of the people being “Purged” (exiled to certain death). There are no stakes in the first act, because you have no idea what is going on. A certain sense of coherence and enjoyment can be found in repeat play-throughs, but that is a tall order for a title on which many gamers gave up halfway through.
The biggest missed opportunity isn’t in the central premise itself, but in the implications of such a world. Take the above clip for example. In it, Lightning and Hope come across Carbuncle, the fal’Cie in charge of Cocoon’s food supply. The scene contains a supposedly stunning revelation that the giant mechanical creatures of the world see humans as pets, which is a huge deal to both the characters involved. Unfortunately, the player has no frame of reference for this discovery, never having got the chance to live as a normal citizen on Cocoon. Compare this to a similar plot twist in Final Fantasy X, in which Auron is revealed to have been dead all along. This is truly surprising to the audience because we had journeyed, talked with, and fought alongside the character for hours. Conversely, Carbuncle’s first and only appearance is one that answers questions we didn’t know we were even supposed to have.
This is the ultimate price of those rough introductory hours: a distance from everything that comes afterward. It’s actually a pretty big shame, since the idea of people living in a world controlled by benignly neglectful machines is a pretty compelling one, and their personal agendas and eventual betrayals sound like decent starting point for a science fiction story. Instead, we are left to catch up with a bunch of neologisms and blurry character motivations. In fact, the only narrative thrust left with any promise is unceremoniously discarded.
The trolling of this game 2 years later is really unbelievable
People still shit on ET for the Atari almost 30 years later.. some games are just that terrible. I know in the 20-ish years I’ve been gaming, I’ve never regretted a purchase or hated a game as much as FF13.
13′s issues stem from unfamiliarity with HD systems, the added effort and resources required, and to a degree changing it over from a single to a multiplatform title. Square’s inability to admit such as well.
Yeah I didn’t hate this game, but I got bored of it by the time I got to grand pulse, which is the point most people say it gets better, but I felt so overwhelmed with little motivation to continue or explore as every battle was a chore.
I can see why most people like Sazh the most, but I Like Snow more, he was the only character I could really get behind.
The game could have been a whole lot more in so many ways, but this article details its biggest failing: Not having an interesting or well-explained world, which really seemed like their goal at some point.
I consistently disagree with the “It gets better on Pulse” claims. To me, this is like saying “Pokemon sucks till you get to the Safari Zone,” since that’s really all Grand Pulse is.
I got to this game about a year after it came out, and to be honest I enjoyed it at the time. My opinion of it did sour a bit the more I thought about it after finishing it–not a lot, though. The lack of context in this world seriously hampered my ability to engage the game past it’s mechanics, which I found engrossing on their own. I read every encyclopedia entry, which further reinforced that there was a whole world Square Enix created that I had no way to experience.
As for narrative themes, I will cede the floor to Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer (http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/06/deep-fantasy.html) and Simon Ferrari’s article referenced therein (http://simonferrari.com/2010/03/31/hills-and-lines-final-fantasy-xiii/).
These two pieces got me to see past some of my disappointments (although in some cases it further added to the unrealized potential, e.g. the Purge as a commentary on the American War on Terror) and shed light on a narrative game design elements that have largely gone unseen.
“wasted potential” is basically 13 in a nutshell. They could have done so much with what they had, instead, the writing turned it into an absolute mess.
Could you please cover 13-2 in an article like this? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on it, especially now that all the DLC is out for it.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/09/05/details-about-the-world-driven-lightning-returns-final-fantas/
^ Apparently the devs learned little from their William S. Burrows-like mess of a story.
I dont know if this could be considered spam but there are people trying to bring awareness to Type-0 and Vs 13, the movement wants to imitate Operation Rainfall but only wants to ask for clear information and it started on gamefaqs, now we have a facebook, twitter and youtube but i don’t know if i could post the links here since in this site forums those topics get ignored
The spam filter sometimes eats comment links. If you tweet or email me the info I’d like to take a look at it.
Where do i contact you?
Or do i send you the link on Twitter?
You can send me the link on Twitter @austinyorski or email me at Austin@blisteredthumbs.net
Never mind i send the tweet, i misread your reply
Reading the in-game encyclopedia was not necessary for me. Context is scarce but it’s enough to realize what is going on, and people who complain that there’s a billion alien-sounding words thrown in your direction make me laugh – how hard is it to remember “l’Cie” and “fal’Cie” and the difference between the two? Because as far as strange terms go, that’s pretty much it. But hating FF XIII is the popular thing, so of course they’ll have to repeat the same untrue criticism over and over.
That being said, I agree with your article’s main point. The ending is 100% bullshit. It is a literal Deus Ex Machina, and all efforts the protagonists put into finding a third option, one less disasterous than the two given to them – all that effort goes to waste. They play into exactly what the villains wanted, but a happy ending forces its way into the game anyway. Disgusting.
It’s less a question of the Jargon being hard to understand, and more an issue with helping flesh out the world. Imagine for instance in Star Wars that we never got an explanation as to what a Jedi or Sith are & all mentions of the force are removed, just watching the film you’d be able to gather that they’re psychics/wizards or something that use laser swords, and that Jedi = Good, Sith = Bad, but we’d have no idea where their power comes from or what makes them so special aside from an arbitrary title and cool powers/weapons, not the pseudo-mystical knightly order that make use of the magic inherent in all things.
Unto itself, the database isn’t an issue. The first Xenosaga uses it correctly; the dialogue is written so as to make sense in universe, and the glossary is there should the player want a more thorough explanation. For example, anyone on the bridge of a starship would have a basic understanding of what weapons they have, various properties of their primary opponents, etc. So in shouting out dialogue, they refer to things in a natural way that doesn’t necessarily make sense to the player. Except we can see what these things are and how they work on screen. Do we know what a Hilbert Effect is or what pseudo-science makes it work? Hell no, but we do know it makes it so bullets actually kill Gnosis. This is one of the main areas where FFXIII falls short, it makes sense that all the characters know about things in Cocoon, fal’cie, etc and refer to them casually, but we get no sense of these things in the presentation. Some 8 or 10 hours into the game we finally get a glimpse of Cocoon’s inner workings, but by then it’s been referred to enough to make a basic guess anyway, but that doesn’t make up for the hours spent wondering what is going on.
The other big issue I have with FFXIII, and you don’t really touch on this, is that it has no sense of place. This is in some ways because of the linearity, but only some. FFX basically had hallways too, but I can still tell you where different places are in relation to each other, have a sense of how people in Spira live, tell you some history about each place. None of that’s true in FFXIII. It was a long meandering nothing until finally the plot came back and sometimes Sahz or Snow did something I cared about. And then that went away, but at least the excellent enemy design finally showed up to make up the gap.
Great article! I’d love to ignore FF 13′s flaws in favor for its pluses (I don’t think it has so many unlikeable characters), but in the end the flaws demand attention in any playthrough. Indeed, it’s weird that Orphan wanted to die because that would destroy Cocoon, and our heroes wanted to kill Orphan and not destroy Cocoon … but by that point it had been established that once Orphan died, Cocoon would be done for. Our heroes can’t have their cake and eat it too, SO WHY ARE THEY STILL FIGHTING HIM!? (Perhaps they should try reasoning with the rebels outside of the temple who also want Orphan dead?)
Another big problem with the story is with the motivation of the fal’Cie. So they REALLY want to sacrifice Cocoon, but they can’t do it because it’s not in their nature to destroy something of their own creation? And that’s why they made our heroes into their servants, to do the deed that they don’t have the cajones to do? That doesn’t seem real to me. It simply reeks of plot convenience. Now here’s a thought: Instead of having someone kill Orphan, the fal’Cie could simply remove Orphan from the temple and take him off-world. Without his power Cocoon would fall and turn into a crater for sure, and Ragnarok wouldn’t be needed (as Sylveria pointed out).
Spoony’s going to cover this game soon enough, and I bet he’ll repeat some of the key points of this article, only in his hilarious trademarked manner.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your description here. The pacing and way the story was unraveled made it confusing and hard to get connected to, and the ultimate showdown and ending just felt like a cop out to what little had been established as far as theming is concerned.
I suspect XIII is so hated because it had an air of great potential…and has very spotty execution. XIII tried to be the most intellectually complicated Final Fantasy to date–just comparing the ideas make VII and VIII look weak–and it tried to do it under some rather harsh corporate conditions.
It’s no surprise it didn’t quite work out. You can sense how the game *ought* to be, and because that idealization is so great, the game you actually wind up playing looks horrible.
I never felt like XIII had a problem with jargon or pacing. True, we get dumped into discussions of l’Cie and Fal’Cie right off the bat, but Sazh explains what they are in the first fifteen minutes. And personally I don’t even think that was needed because it was out of character.
No, the problem is that ideas are introduced and only partially explored. Running out of time before becoming Cieth? Completely irrelevant to gameplay. Fighting the fate of the Fal’Cie? Mentioned, but not explained. The ideas are never quite dropped, but they’re not explained, either.
And then the antagonist was really, REALLY weak by Final Fantasy standards.
Many Final Fantasies feel like the script needed a redraft, but XIII needed some additional brainstorming, too. On the whole, I liked it, but I understand why people couldn’t stand it, either.
I agree with your observation on how the game gives you little frame of reference of people’s lives in this world. You’re just thrown into this shiny distopia and expected to care. That’s why I think Sazh is one of the better characters because you don’t need to understand the world to understand a father looking for his son.
I agree with some of your points. XIII doesn’t do a great job with supporting characters, villain or hero. The opening can also be a bit rough.
It is your take on the ending that I don’t agree with. Fang & Vanille’s fate hardly comes out nowhere. And Orphan’s goals are not really the same as the parties. Yes it wants to die, but only as a means to an end. What it really wants, is for Fang to become Ragnarok, lay waste to all of humanity and thus force the creator to return and restart society. Simply getting defeated by the party is not going to cut it for Orphan. It can seem like a matter of degrees but then isn’t that in some ways where the difference between free will and fate really lies?
Regardless, good piece. However I stand by positive opinion of XIII. For me, it was game that really worked. And I guess nothing can really change that.
Isn’t the desire for Fang to become Ragnarok utterly pointless though? If Orphan falls, so does Cocoon. Death for the populous in inevitable. Fang becoming Ragnarok or not has absolutely no bearing on the ultimate result.
Also, let us not forget… FF13-2 totally nullifies the whole The Maker subplot anyway. Cocoon does fall, nearly everyone does die and at the very end we see a whopping 3 people inhabiting the planet. Where’s The Maker then? Does the population need to hit absolute zero for it to appear? Does the Goddess that Lightning serves have any bearing on The Maker? Where are Caius, his predecessors and Yule during the events of 13… did the process of death and rebirth for the seer and her guardian even exist then?
There’s a certain irony that by creating FF13-2, FF13′s story becomes even more nonsensical. But, 9/10 right? Almost perfect….
I was under the impression that Barthandelus was after destroying all of humanity in an instant. That that somehow was different.
Plot hole or not, I really don’t care. XIII starts with a Pulse fal’Cie going on a suicide mission to turn a few random humans into l’Cie. This supernatural immortal archangel-like being turned itself into a Kamikazi…to turn HOPE into a l’Cie.
That fal’Cie deserves a Darwin Award.