Final Fantasy Paradigm Shift

Now that we're a fair distance into the thirteenth game of the now comically inaccurately titled Final Fantasy series, I think it's time to start sharing my thoughts. We were put off for a while by the enemy that I referred to as Mecha-Pope, who is a man in a white robe who suddenly trans-forms into a titanic atrocity with upside-down distressed heads on its shoulders, which can split its entire face apart to reveal about eighteen cannons which blast you to oblivion very quickly indeed. It's like a fighting toy from the 80s... brought out of Silent Hill. But I finally got past him in a battle that lasted no more than twenty minutes, and can get back to whatever the plot dictated the party was supposed to be doing.

Except I don't really know what that is, because despite having been going for about thirty hours now, I still don't have a clue what's going on. I am not the best person to ask about penetrability of a storyline because I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't ever really say what's happening on Inspector Morse at all, for example, but I would go so far as to say that this one is unarguably badly told. I had to put the subtitles on very quickly because I had absolutely no idea what anybody was saying, or what the Sanctum, Psi-COM, fal'Cie, Cie'th, l'Cie, or various other fantasy words with unnecessary apostrophes were, and rather than dropping progressively greater hints as to what they're talking about like normal story narrative, you're just thrust into the middle with no explanation ever coming. Instead, the game throws a book at you - then dismantles the bookshelf and throws that at you as well, followed by the entire library, brick by brick. In the "Datalog" section of the menu, you're given a colossal amount of reading material that's never even pointed to by the game, describing the difference between Cocoon and Pulse and the arrival of the fal'Cie and other such vital information, and it just seems to assume that you've read all this before setting out. It's like the opposite of Hideo Kojima - you're given the same amount of information, but this is necessary and downplayed, rather than repetitive and expounded to death in cutscenes that last upwards of four hours.

Even in Japanese, this battle screen doesn't make any less sense

The gameplay is more infamous, and until very recently, I would have said that it seemed to be a very efficient but tragically unaware deconstruction of everything that JRPGs are about. All your progress throughout them is basically linear - through new towns to new dungeons and back again - so this game doesn't even try to disguise the fact that most of the dungeons are straight lines. And towns don't even really need to be there, if you could just put a "Shop" option on the save points (as indeed they have, in the form of electronic vendors - the whole presentation is oddly reminiscent of Ratchet and Clank). Money isn't that important, because what you're doing is taking the spoils from fights and eventually using them to improve yourself, so weapons can now be upgraded just by using arbitrary items on them like fangs, claws, oozes, ferroelectric film and bits of a toaster. Since they started getting each save point to completely heal you over the last couple of games, you would just return to a save point and heal yourself up after every battle anyway if striving to improve your levels, so this game doesn't keep a record of current HP at all and starts every fight with your health at maximum. And all you're really doing in those fights is getting characters to follow a strategy, so it has them do that automatically - you're only put in charge of the main character, with an "auto" button that you'll use 90% of the time. I was rather afraid that they'd forgotten that you were meant to bother having to actually play it on any sort of level.

But, even though I was eager to argue with this when I played through it, there's notoriously a very slow start to the game followed by a magic point where it all suddenly begins to make sense. For me, that point came about fifteen hours in, after the hopeless solo fight against a huge robot that you're meant to lose (and I can tell you, when faced with one character versus an airborne behemoth, that I've never hoped that a game was expecting me to lose a fight more than I have at that moment). Suddenly, after a long stretch of one and two person battles, you're given three characters, and the dynamics of the whole thing just fall into place easily. The whole thing just feels so much more... interesting, after wandering linearly from A to B to C and all the way through the rest of the alphabet during the last half-day of gameplay.

Just like the evolution of FFX to FFXII before it, the system this time around is a very difficult to describe evolution of some of the ideas from before while putting others back where they were - but in other ways, it's the largest departure yet for the series. It's a bit like a backwards ATB from the earlier games - instead of waiting for a time bar to fill up and then selecting a command for each character, you're telling all the characters what to do in general by selecting their roles from a previously set up bank of combinations - a Commando or Ravager will attack, a Synergist will cast advantageous magic, a Medic will heal party members. With the actual selection of commands out of your hands, the game is now focused on the efficiency of your strategy in defeating huge parties of enemies (up to ten at a time, the last time I counted) or defeating things with truly ludicrous amounts of health that would have taken hours in previous installations.

Speaking of which, after each battle, you're now humiliatingly graded on how you fight, like flashy monster-battling is this year's special theme on Cocoon's Got Talent. Now, instead of feeling triumphant that you've finally defeated that impossible boss, they have the Atlus-like opportunity to inform you that you've just triumphantly defeated an enemy the size of a building, but took twenty minutes to do it, which wasn't very good. And those impossible bosses make the difficulty curve look slightly like an electrocardiogram - most of the time you can absolutely breeze through fights and not really have to worry about role changes, only to suddenly run up against a brick wall in the form of a boss that will shrug off most of your attacks and will just cast Doom on you when it gets fed up.

I must, however, give it points for being the only thing that I have seen in recent memory to seriously use the term "paradigm shift" to refer to anything (in this case, the changing of tactics during a battle). Unless you're Thomas Kuhn, that's the kind of thing that you bet people you can slip into a university essay - you're not meant to use it in anything real.