Now, I’ll admit that the foundations of the narrative are actually pretty solid: an oppressive government led by the will of mysterious deities, a group of strangers forced to make difficult moral choices in order to save their own lives, and a mysterious underworld fueling the fears of an irrational society. While the combat in FFXIII has its ups and downs, one aspect of the game that is uniformly bad is the story. Lightning is like FFVII's Cloud Strife – minus the personality, interesting backstory or compelling character arc. Because of these disparities, the battles in FFXIII rarely hit that sweet spot where the challenge and mental engagement required feel just right – and for a game that is 90% fighting, this is not a good thing.
Of course, when the battles aren’t too easy, they are usually hard in the most frustrating ways – including the bizarre decision to make the battle a loss if your lead character dies, regardless of the condition of the other two. By the end of the game - when nearly every enemy has roughly a million times more HP than your characters - I literally started browsing Reddit and checking Twitter to stave off the boredom while mindlessly mashing ‘X’ and occasionally glancing over to make sure my characters weren’t dying. But, the opening up of the battle system has diminishing returns once you learn the ropes and have a few foolproof strategies under your belt, battles become more of an exercise in endurance than mental footwork. After twelve or so hours the game starts taking the training wheels off, and you’ll realize there is actually a fair amount of strategy to the system, and that not playing intelligently will result in a token game over screen. Of course, as any fan of this game will be happy to point out, it does get better. In an effort to seemingly make the introduction of this game accessible to even small children (and maybe some domesticated animals), winning any battle is simply a matter of pressing ‘X’ a few times. For starters, in the first few hours of the game, fighting enemies is abysmally dull. While Square Enix should be given some credit for taking a legitimately unique approach to RPG combat, their experiment offers its fair share of frustration and boredom. The combat itself offers a largely mixed experience. Just when you thought you've beaten the Behemoth King, he changes forms and regains all his health. The grind of constantly fighting really takes a toll, and the only reprieve you’ll get is the occasional cutscene.
Now, whether you like the new battle system or not, the fact that there is quite literally nothing else to do in this game is an issue. This system is sort of like a compromise between the Active Time Battles of FFVI-IX and the more MMORPG-style automated battles of FFXII. For this game, Square Enix decided to essentially bet everything on combat, and while there is a narrative (we’ll get to that later), the vast majority of your time in this game will be spent in the new “Combat Synergy Battle” system. The gameplay of past Final Fantasy’s could typically be broken up into four distinct categories: combat (random encounters, boss battles), exploration (towns, “puzzle” dungeons), narrative sequences (dialogue, cutscenes), and mini-games (FFVII). If variety is the spice of life, then Final Fantasy XIII is one flavourless pile of mush.
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