Correct RPG vs. Incorrect RPG
It’s time for something completely different. Today, I will be reviewing two games at once: long-running, best-selling series entry Final Fantasy XIII, and new, under-selling original Xenoblade Chronicles. I will do this by focusing on five aspects of RPGs (that’s role-playing games) and how they were handled in each game. Specifically, how they were handled wrong in FFXIII and right in XC. They are listed in rough order of importance for their contributions to the overall gaming experience.
5. Content
RPGs are famous for the sheer number of gameplay hours they usually offer. My Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion file is on about 100 hours. My Final Fantasy XII file is on about 140. My Final Fantasy X file is over 200. And those are just my main files. Generally, no more than half of these hours is spent playing through the game’s main story, but rather on the plethora of sidequests and side-content on offer. RPGs differ in how much weight they put on sidequests and how much on story: Oblivion was almost entirely sidequests of varying degrees of story relevance, while FFX was about 60% story, 10% sidequests, and 30% levelling up to defeat the toughest foes at the Monster Arena. FFXII was probably close to an even split, with the majority of sidequest focus on the enjoyable monster bounty hunts.
Of course, there’s extra content that can be considered even less “compulsory” than already-optional sidequests: characters to talk to, locations to explore, and relationships to develop. FFX and FFXII were full of little hidden variables that would affect all these things: a vendor’s late-game prices would be affected by how much money you lent him when he was struggling to start out; female characters will like you more if talk to them first when your party is separated; powerful rare monsters you weren’t expecting may suddenly appear. I’m even willing to forgive FFXII’s notorious “Zodiac Spear quest”, in which the most powerful weapon in the game can be lost forever if you open seemingly arbitrary treasure chests in the game’s first few hours, leaving your only hope of obtaining it in a chest that has only a 0.1% chance of holding it. These things all stimulate online discussion of the game, where players can share and discover things about the game that they hadn’t even been aware of.
My point: FFXIII has NONE of these things in the first 20 hours of the game, and few after that. As we’ll see, Square Enix made a number of extremely baffling decisions in an attempt to hit a “mainstream” gaming audience — apparently, the game’s best-selling predecessors didn’t do this. The first such decision I’m cricising is the removal of all this extra content — the closest thing we get is coming to a fork in the road, then choosing one path at random and finding a dead end with a treasure chest (which are marked on the map at all times) containing an item we don’t care about. Gone are the bustling villages where you might meet a desperate man in need of phoenix tail feathers, or a girl looking for her pet chocobo. Gone are the unexpected arrivals of characters who urgently need your assistance, or the thrills of sneaking on board a pirate ship in the dead of night for some extra loot. It’s all gone.
“Ah,” you say, “but after the 20-hour tutorial, the game really opens up as you explore Pulse.” I’ll discuss the game’s setting more in a bit, but let me say that increasing the area of the map does not introduce extra content, aside from a few more hours of (pointless) exploration. I reached Pulse, but my dreams of being miraculously transported into a quality RPG were dashed. Instead, I was presented with a handful of scattered monster hunt quests ripped straight out of FFXII, except now given by a lifeless statue instead of living, breathing, named characters with whom I could empathise.
Two hours into Xenoblade Chronicles, and you’re already establishing relationships with dozens of people around your home town, you’ve been given optional quests to carry out, you have gems to craft, items to collect, rare monsters to hunt, party affinities to develop, arts and skills to learn, and giant areas to explore. I’m 20 hours in, and this all gets even better — I’ve just been tasked with the optional megaquest of rebuilding a city. And none of it ever gets dull.
4. Setting
Easily my favourite thing about FFXIII is the basic setting, and it’s a shame it was wasted on such a disappointing game. The idea of a society of humans being contained in a literal ‘cocoon’ by a collection of bizarre, omnipotent gods resonated extremely well, and in fact, the most fun I ever had with the game was reading the additional information on each of these beings in the pause menu’s encyclopaedia. I liked the concept of these gods installing ‘purposes’ in the mortal humans — fail your mission and you become a zombie; succeed and you turn to crystal — and thought having the main characters exiled from Cocoon this way was a great catalyst for a story. The monster designs are all entertaining and sometimes awe-inspiring, particularly the aforementioned gods (called Fal’cie). All this, FFXIII gets right.
Sadly, this setting is limited to cutscenes and supplementary reading in the pause menu, because the game’s maps are utterly one-dimensional. Remember how I mentioned the closest thing to extra content being a fork in the road with treasure down one path? You’ll treasure those rare forks, like the few minutes of freedom you get when your babysitter Square Enix is on the phone, because otherwise, you’re stuck running down five-metre-wide corridors forever and ever. I wish I was exaggerating. Then, after your 20-hour tutorial, you’re dropped in the middle of a desolate plain with no idea which way to go. I was fine with that, but I guess “mainstream” players were supposed to have figured it out by then. Of course, when I did eventually find the right way, it turned out that the giant plain was tragically unique, because it was back to the corridors.
Xenoblade Chronicles crafts a unique setting of its own: the characters live on the body of the Bionis, one of two colossal titans that died fighting each other and now grow life on their skin like mould. The other titan, the Mechonis, is home to the robotic race of Mechon, who have invaded the Bionis by overwhelming the humans’ defences along the swords where the two giants are in contact. Your hometown is Colony 9, at the foot of the Bionis, and the story takes you all over its body (and, I’m expecting, the Mechonis). Right now, I’m in a gigantic forest encompassing the Bionis’ back.
The scope of the maps in XC matches the scope of its setting: they’re all suitably enormous, with plenty of areas to explore, yet you still have an idea where you want to end up. I’ve made my way down a ten-level mine, climbed a statue the size of a mountain, and crossed a mile-long bridge. The time of day proceeds normally, and special weather events like thunderstorms will appear and disappear depending on the weather — I was amazed by the marsh that lights up at night, completely transforming it.
In fact, there’s an area very similar to the giant Pulse plain with the enormous meandering beasts. Except it’s four hours into the game, on the Bionis’ leg, right after you leave your hometown. Also, it’s comparatively small — wait until you see Makna Forest. I’m sure I’ll be equally impressed by the Mechonis.
3. Role-playing
Okay: so our maps are constricting and there’s not much extra content. But surely all is not lost for FFXIII: how does it play?
It turns out that yes, pretty much all is lost. The character customisation is dull beyond a fault. There are only three ways to role-play in this game: choosing your three party members and which of the six “roles” they will perform; equipping and upgrading their weapons (all of which are unique to one character); and spending XP to move around the Crystarium, which upgrades stats and abilities.
Okay, so again, we’re pretty limited, but surely some of this stuff is decent. Sadly not. The Crystarium is just boring, playing out like a linear (something of a theme) version of FFX’s incredible Sphere Grid, in which all semblance of a “choice” is embodied in which of the six roles you want to upgrade (the game halves these options by giving each character three primary roles that you’ll always want to upgrade). But at least it’s functional — the weapon system is even worse. To upgrade a weapon, you “spend” pick-ups from chests and enemies to level it up. When it’s levelled enough, you “transform” it into a new weapon using specific objects (you’ll be lucky to find one that’s actually able to do this for the specific weapon you may have chosen to upgrade). These pick-ups are arbitrarily named and can also be bought from different stores accessible from save points, though I never figured out what the difference between them was. Does a Wolf Fang upgrade my weapon in a different way to an Energy Cylinder? How would I know? I said I liked having things to discover online, but this is a basic part of gameplay. To make matters worse, there’s a second type of item that will increase the uprading power of the next few items you use on that weapon. This is so pointless, it’s mind-boggling. I ended up picking a weapon at random for each character and focusing entirely on that weapon. Gone are the days when I’d hastily equip my characters with Lightningproof armour while crossing the Thunder Plains in FFX, or equip Auron’s Firestrike weapon to hurt an ice beast, or save up licence points to finally unlock Balthier’s ability to wield the most powerful gun in FFXII.
XC shows FFXIII how it’s done: whenever you defeat an enemy, or complete a quest, or unlock an achievement (I forgot to mention the 100+ in-game achievements when discussing extra content), etc., you get XP for levelling up, AP for upgrading the Arts of your choosing for each character, and SP that automatically goes into unlocking the next skill in whichever skill tree you’ve selected for that character. Your characters can buy tomes to increase the maximum level of each Art, link skills with each other if they like each other enough, and, of course, customise all components of their outfits, which actually changes their physical appearance. The best weapons and armour have slots where gems be equipped, to add extra bonuses. You can find these gems or craft them yourself in an ingenious mini-game, and they’re completely re-usable. There’s not a single RPG element out of place, or underdeveloped.
2. Story
The strength of an RPG’s story goes a long way toward its value in my eyes. Story-wise, Final Fantasy X is my favourite game of all time. Final Fantasy XII took a bit longer to get into, and lacked a strong main character like Tidus to really get me invested, but still delivered in terms of pure dramatic power and the sheer scale of what was at risk in the war against Archadia.
Like its setting, the story of FFXIII is no doubt one of the better aspects of the game, and yet another reason why the game really wanted to be a film. That said, its good qualities are mostly in the setting, and the backstories and motivations (but not necessarily personalities and certainly not voices) of the main characters. I found myself admiring the locations, but I wouldn’t say there was a whole lot of purpose behind most of them. I can’t comment on anything in the last third of the game, but from what I hear, it’s not overly bad.
In any case, the story’s execution was problematic: namely, the necessity of going into the pause menu and reading ridiculously non-chalant descriptions of everything that’s just happened. These text entries read like a “Previously on…” segment and strip the story’s realism away so fast that I quickly felt like I was reading the game’s Wikipedia article. This was worsened by the fact that these entries, and the corresponding entries for the main characters, would feature details that were sometimes impossible to glean from the cutscenes.
How does Xenoblade Chronicles compare? It’s much better — the story is told by the events and cutscenes, not by text entries in the pause menu, and it’s a great story so far. The main character, Shulk, wields an extraordinary blade called the Monado, which grants him visions of the future. At the start of the game, a tragic vision comes true despite his best efforts, and Shulk sets out to seek revenge against the cruel Mechon — but soon realises there’s more than his vendetta at stake. Read any review of the game to hear another opinion of how good the story is.
1. Combat
Any game can have limited extra content, an unoriginal setting, and a lackluster story, and still be a worthwhile 10-20 hours if the central gameplay is fun. Alas, gameplay is the final nail in FFXIII’s coffin, and the game’s biggest misstep.
The combat system is a combination between FFX, in which battles are completely turn-based and discontinuous from exploration, and FFXII, in which battles are real-time and enemies visibly roam around. When a battle begins, you’re transported into a miniature version of your current area (i.e. an empty clearing) to fight. Magic and MP exists no more — instead, your primary resource is time, and stronger attacks take longer to execute. In a given “round” of combat, you organise a line-up of attacks which are all carried out in a row. The six combat roles I mentioned earlier are the fairly traditional roles (damage-dealer, mage, tank, healer, buffer, debuffer), and you can change between six preset party role combinations during battle.
Again, this sounds good in theory — except for the fact that it takes the game 10 hours to slowly leak you the freedom to fight as you want — but three fatal flaws ensure an abysmal execution. The first flaw is your inability to control your characters’ placement when placement matters. Plenty of enemies have area attacks, and you’ll groan as your party members group as close together as possible. The second flaw is the lack of any reason not to use the game’s auto-attack, which is very good at lining up the best moves for the situation (e.g. fire techniques against ice enemies). The game literally fights for you, better and faster than you can, and you’ll realise this when you continually get five-star battle ratings just using auto-attack.
The third flaw is relatively small, but it frustrates me the most because it is so unbelievably unnecessary: when you switch role presets, you might be subject to one of a few different mini-cutscenes showing the transformation. The problem? The battle does not pause during these cutscenes, and they have different lengths. That’s right — you have to cross your fingers and hope you get the cutscene where all three characters change at once, instead of the slow cutscene in which they change one by one. The latter almost guarantees you’ll take an extra hit from an enemy — something I’d be fine with, if it happened all of the time instead of randomly. It reminds me of the abhorred random “falling over” mechanic introduced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Where FFXIII gets it wrong, Xenoblade Chronicles gets it unbelievably right, playing like a fusion between FFXII and World of Warcraft. Like FFXII, combat is integrated into exploration — all you have to do is target a wandering enemy and attack. Each character has a wide variety of special abilities (Arts) and will also auto-attack when haven’t selected an Art to use. Arts encompass the whole spectrum of RPG abilities, and a lot of offensive Arts are granted bonuses when you attack your enemy at a particular time or from a particular angle. Like WoW, each Art has a cooldown before it can be used again, but there’s no MP or any other resource except your character’s unique Talent Gauge which unlocks their powerful Talent Art when full. Each character feels different to play, and can also encourage their teammates and congratulate their critical hits or nimble dodges, building up the party affinity I mentioned before. It’s ironic how FFXIII forces you to fight enemies by placing them in the middle of your narrow corridow, yet you’d rather not, while XC makes it easy to avoid battles in its wide open spaces, yet you’d rather not. Combat is an absolute thrill in XC, and a boring single-button chore in FFXIII.
And that’s a 3000-word double-review. The moral of the story? Please trade in your copy of FFXIII and put the credit toward buying Xenoblade Chronicles, or a whole Wii if you don’t yet have one. Have fun.
