Final Fantasy XIII: Character Development

Short post, this is in two parts. I'll compare FFXIII to VII a lot, since that is the closest game that Square emulated for XIII.

What was really impressive about VII's characters was, as I said, their complexities and depth. The multiple plot threads, mindsets and personalities that each character possessed evolved and found resolution as the game progressed, reaching their endings only when the game's end came into sight. What FFXIII does, and  wrongly, in this case, is quicker development. Having played a little farther into the game, I need to clarify a few things. The whiny little kid is no longer whiny, but now fills the role as secondary "friendship is everything" talker to Snow. The anime is showing something fierce both in his current mindset and the entire game's art style. That aside, the kid is a little better than he was a few hours ago, but he's slowly approaching Snow's one-sidedness. There is one thread of thought he still needs to tie up, but for now the only reason he's still around is because he likes these people. Sure, in VII there were a couple people like that, but they were temporary. Again, each character stuck with the party because some part of them was incomplete without the completion of the end goal and the happiness it brought. If they had a name and more than 10 lines of dialogue, they were deep, meaningful characters with motives beyond "save the world" or "I'm really curious" or "these people are nice and I'm kinda stuck with 'em." To XIII's credit, there is one overarching theme that ties the party together, but there needs to be more, as I've said again and again.

Another thing that bugs me is how quickly characters move from one emotional state to another. One minute they're laughing, the other their angry and confused, the next, laughing again. Emotions don't fade that quickly, at least not for anyone I've ever met. Ways of thinking change too quickly as well, and Lightning's monologue about herself was about as forced as I've ever seen. She, of everyone, needs to change slowest, evolving in small, delicate steps. At this point, I think Square dropped the ball on their "female Cloud." He remained cold and distant for essentially the first disc and half of the second. He moved with the group because he had too and, deep down, he knew he needed them more than they needed him. There was certainly that attention to the whole "FRIENDSHIP IS AWESOME" is VII, but it wasn't nearly as pronounced. Cloud's trust in the party came based on his own morals and how everyone seemed drawn to him, but he remained always unsure. In XIII, unlike its model VII, that uncertainty is voiced again and again, in no uncertain terms. Subtlety, Square, Subtlety. We don't need to hear that they don't know what to do. We can tell from their body language and the tone of their voice and the look in their eyes. What's irksome about the style in XIII is that the subliminal signals are all there, presented in high definition picture, and gamers who have at least three functioning brain cells can see what the character is really thinking and feeling. Yet apparently Square thinks much less of their players' intelligence than they used to, because, and I'll repeat, they give us everything verbally.

There are those brilliant Squaresoft moments though (Square Enix really lost something), and as you may expect, they come from Sahz. He remains the only character to evolve but remain damaged, complex and interesting. I won't say why because that's a big part of his story, but the scene I just finished really shows that some people at Square still value complex characters with pasts that affect the present and that the future is not always an easy thing to see. Maybe this is because Sahz is the oldest in the party, and has more on his plate then the others. That's really bullock though, since the only character less than 15 years old is Hope, and as one dimensional as he's becoming, 14 is plenty of time to garner plenty of stuff to hate about life but not be able to voice. It's disappointing but for XIII Square really made the game for themselves and not their fans. How much can we make ourselves look awesome, they may have thought. The characters, save Sahz, are over-thought and overdone, but with 40 hours of game left to play, anything could happen.

Xiant

Final Fantasy XIII: Initial Impression

So the game's been out for months. So it's more linear than any to come before. So it's been reviewed and played into the ground by people willing to pony up 60 hours of their life. None of that matters to me. I skipped FFXII because it looked absolutely not worth a moment of my time. I almost did the same to FFXIII. I'll be the first to admit that I probably would never have picked it up if I hadn't gotten a great deal on it in the UK. 47 bucks for a $60 game and I got the damn thing in England. I'm gonna play it until my hands fall off and write about it here.

That doesn't mean, though, that I won't rip the thing to shreds in an effort second only to Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw in Zero-Punctuation. I'm going to be as brutally honest as I can here and stray from my scoring review, since, for now, I haven't finished the bloody thing.

Here we go. First, let me say that, despite their best attempt at recreating the magic that was Final Fantasy VII, Square failed on all counts, at least in the first parts. To begin with, there's no world map. -10 awesome points. You spend about 2 hours in FFVII and then you get a full glimpse of the huge world you will tread all over. You walk in a straight line ad infinitum in FFXIII. Second, there is no clear villain from the start. The opening cutscene and subsequent early play define the setting, certainly, and show that there is something we should be fighting, but what, we really don't know. Again, within 2 hours of FFVII's beginning, I know there's a guy called Sephrioth and that he's really bad and he's going to be the final boss. You just know it. Within 2 hours of FFXIII beginning, there are at least five candidate final bosses, I have no idea how to fight effectively and there is almost no clear direction for the story.

Also, and this is the real big part, the characters are not nearly as complex as they need to be. In FFVII, within 15 minutes of starting the game, there is something very, very wrong with Cloud, and you sense confliction even as you feel put off by his blase attitude. Lightning, on the other hand, is just cold, hard and downright mean. I've spent five hours with her and all I know is she wants to kill something really big and really powerful with no other reason than that she's really mad at it (and that it's cursed her to "die" when it's done with her). We know that we want to beat Sephiroth because of a broken past, something buried deep in the lore and literature of the ages. Cloud is certainly cold and has his mean points, but there is a soft side of him, a side brought out by memories of a better time. He is more human than Lightning to begin with, filled with emotions of love and hate, sadness and joy that play out even despite the much inferior graphics.

The supporting characters too lack a depth seen in past FF games. Their goals are too simple, too defined by only what is on the surface to be effective. Snow, pushed by love for his fiance and nothing else. Hope, wanting revenge and whining constantly. Vanille, who everyone seems to universally loathe and who is somehow the narrator. If anyone has even a vestige of the character of FF's past it is Sahz. He, I think, carries more confliction and interesting depth than any of the others. Why does he have a chocobo? What is his past, his reason for joining and staying with the party? There is a tension within him that none of the other characters possess. Certainly there is tension, but it doesn't run as deep or as strong as it does in Sahz. If I'm interested in unfolding any character to see the underlying layers, I want to see his. Lightning I want to see evolve the most, since Square tried to model her after Cloud, a superior character, in my opinion. Vanille I want to shut up and see that the world is not a constant positive place. Hope I want to grow a pair (I know he's like 10) and man up to both his feelings and the responsibility he now holds. Snow I want to grow complexity. He is the most one sided character where I am in the game, about 8 hours in.

Also, I want to know who the ****ing final boss is. Who am I supposed to hate? Give me someone I know that'll be: "That's gonna be a fight for the ages."

Xiant