I need to make two things clear:

1) I am going to do my best not to belabor all the points people have already made regarding things they personally didn’t like about Final Fantasy 13

2) I really liked this game

Listen, I know it’s mid-July.  This game has been out for four months.  Everyone has played it by now.  Everyone has beaten it by now.  I’m slow.  I know.  But I’ve just never been so frustrated with a Final Fantasy game, and I’ve played them all, save the online one, since seven.  Torturously (sometimes) making my way through to the end of each one.  And I just can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t a Final Fantasy game, but no one has really been able to explain why.  Lots of people don’t like it, so much more than any entity before, and it’s been chalked up to the overwhelming number of drastic changes, but I don’t think that’s it.  It’s that the core of the game changed.  To the point that it just isn’t even recognizable.  This just isn’t Final Fantasy.

Pandering (by me)

There are a lot of things to be annoyed about in this game.  Things like the linear storyline, the lack of a ship, having to restart a battle because the main character dies (even though both supporting characters are at full life).  But while those things are annoying, they certainly aren’t enough to make you hate the game, and aren’t even that new to the Final Fantasy series.  I mean, most of the games are pretty linear.  You’d be hard-pressed to find any game that isn’t linear.  It would actually be a pretty terrible idea (like those kids books where you have a choice between how you want the story to continue, and depending on which page you choose you meet another choice of two pages to turn to).  This one is just more streamlined, so instead of running around for three hours trying to figure out what to do you’re told exactly where to go and what to do.  While we’ll all miss finding a new town and being able to buy new weapons and armor there, a direct storyline isn’t exactly the worst thing.  The real problem is lack of control.

Autonomy

What I think people really didn’t like, even if they never quite realized it, was the lack of autonomy Final Fantasy 13 has.  Essentially, this is Uncharted with role-playing elements.  There is minimal exploring, the character you control is the only one who has any influence on the world around them, and even the fighting is far more action-based than it’s ever been.  Hell, the characters even move the same.  The thing here is you have almost no control over the other members of your battle team.  You can equip them and set what type of general actions you want them to take (attacker, healer, booster, etc.), but you don’t have the turn-by-turn control.  Granted, the AI for the most part is really, really good, but the whole basis of the fighting system that people fell in love with in RPGs (and Final Fantasy in particular) is having all the control.  In this game you will find yourself hitting the auto-attack button 90% of the time, if not more.  The strategy element is still there: which paradigm to use, timing the switches, or which enemy to focus your attack on, but you are just one character.  You don’t control the battle.  You don’t get to strategize individual attacks.  This game steals all the things that made every version before it great, and that’s being able to have complete control.

It’s like a sports game now.  You set up the starting lineup, you decide who will play what position and then you just simulate.  In-between games (battles) you re-adjust, maybe shift some tactics (and equipment) around and then you simulate again.  A lot of sports games have the option to play as an individual player.  That’s essentially what this Final Fantasy game is.  Like a baseball game where you control just the shortstop.  The entire game takes place around you but you only control one tiny element.  Some people will love it.  People like me will feel like they’d rather have all the control.  The difference is in that baseball game you can choose another mode where you do have the control.  In Final Fantasy 13 you have to take what the developers give you.  And for some reason they decided to take everything we’ve known about the series and throw it out the window.

All-Inclusive

On one hand, this is a double-edged sword, on the other it’s just stupid.  The double-edged sword is that everyone gains experience at the same time so that even characters not part of your battle trio will earn experience points after a fight.  At first I loved the idea.  I got to level up characters who were sitting on the bench.  But for one, it makes no sense.  And two, as I got farther in the game it just became annoying.  Basically, (especially after the point where all characters can become all paradigms, which I’ll get to soon) it makes every character the same.  Sure, people are still better at certain roles, but for the most part it doesn’t matter.  What made 8 (or any other) great was I could choose if I wanted Zell or Irvine to get most of the experience points.  With this one what’s it matter?  I could use the same three characters the whole time and for the last battle decide to switch it up and they’d be just as ready.  That just isn’t the Final Fantasy way.

The other hand, the stupid one, is why can every character be every role?  There’s always been a sense in these games, even though it might not be obvious, that certain characters are meant for certain roles.  I’ve always thought 9 defined them best, which is why it always has a place on the mantel for me.  In this game it starts out that way, which I thought was great, until it all opens up halfway through.  Sure, they make it hard to level a character in a role outside their original three, but the option is still there, and it kills the strategy and difficulty of the game.

Caveat

Now, of course there are parts of the game that I found amazingly difficult.  I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to whip my controller at my TV.  But 99% of the time it was because of in-game errors, like my character inexplicably pausing for 5 seconds before initiating the command I’d given, or the game deciding it needed show each of my characters change their paradigm role, preventing me from doing anything while the enemy continued to attack.  Or the pure insanity of suddenly dying after fighting for 20 minutes for reasons that really aren’t known, other than the AI just really wants to piss you off.  It seemed like this game just wasn’t balanced very well.  Enemies are either boringly easy or frustratingly difficult, and the battle system is set up so that grinding is less arduous, but bosses are a pain (especially since so many bosses seem to have some weakness or other that, once exploited, makes them cake, assuming you discover the weakness).

Conclusion

Again, this is a good game.  A great game, in fact.  It’s just not a Final Fantasy game.  Sure it has similar qualities, like the final boss coming in three stages and being amazingly easy compared to some of the other bosses you face, but it just isn’t Final Fantasy.  I’m loyal to the name.  I was always going to buy it, and I’ll buy the next one too.  I’ll probably like it, it just won’t be like the games we used to play.  I’m okay with change.  But we don’t call Democrats Whigs for a reason…they aren’t the same thing.  And if Zachary Taylor is the old school version of Final Fantasy, then just like him, Final Fantasy has been poisoned.