The Lost Odyssey of Final Fantasy XV

I just started playing Final Fantasy XV for the PS4 after holding off on it for so long. The game has been in production since 2006 and was planned as a spin-off title for Final Fantasy XIII. It shares the same mythos found in that game, but set in a completely different world. The game was retooled and became a main line title in 2012 and was finally released in 2016 after numerous delays.

The game starts with words from the developers saying this game is made for new and returning players. That's supposed to say "trust us, you guys," but I'll have to see it for myself.

You're thrown into the story of events already happening sometime in the future for a few minutes. Then it cuts back to the present with the main character and his friends heading out of the huge castle with barely anyone (non-playable characters) around, sent off by the king and his advisor with encouraging and hopeful words for their journey and the task at hand. Your car breaks down and your characters push it to the nearest shop. Cue in Florence Welch (Florence + the Machine) and her rendition of "Stand by Me" swells in the background as the camera pans and zooms out, showing the horizon of this big beautiful, yet somewhat empty world. Then the title, "Final Fantasy XV," is on screen. You reach the stop called Hammerhead and met with a plucky character with a Southern American drawl for some reason, named Cindy, who becomes the game's mechanic for your main characters. Her grandpa is a character named Cid. From here on out, you get to interact with the world and experience the game's battle system.

You control the main character, Noctis, prince of the kingdom of Insomnia, during onscreen battles while your friends, Gladiolus, Ignis, and Prompto help out. You can issue commands to your friends or execute linked attacks. You gain experience and on leveling up, gain AP which you can use to fill up your character's skill grids. These grids unlock more powers, skills, and abilities that help your character. Typical Final Fantasy flair for the most part. But that's basically it. This huge world is filled with side quests right from the start of the game. You can indefinitely hold off on main story and do as much of the side quests as you want, except for those locations that are blocked for game and story reasons.

When I did decide to continue with the main story, I was shown clips of negotiations going horribly bad for the King of Insomnia with no sound or context. The next thing, the main character wakes up in bed from where they were staying and hears the news from his friend that his kingdom has fallen. This is where you start to see the cracks and where the developers hodgepodge-ed material from FF Versus XIII to fit the story of FFXV, or whatever story they have cooked up to finish and justify the 10-year development of this project.

I'm 17 hours into the game and barely touched the main storyline. I've been doing most of the sidequests and developing my characters' levels and skills. This is why I miss the old Final Fantasy titles: Story.

I don't know if it's the limitations of the tech back then, but story/mythos was center stage on top of gameplay. The more recent FF games seem to have focused on gameplay while having trouble executing a coherent story. I saw the same thing with Kingdom Hearts 3, which underwent its own development hell. I just don't feel a connection with the characters right now. In previous games, you spent a lot of time learning about the story and the characters. You can play mini-games, but side quests were off-limits until further down the line. In FFXV, you're basically doing your own thing from the get go like Fallout 3 or Fallout 4. Maybe it's the whole "open world" strategy that has worked well with titles like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin's Creed, but it's not working out for this game when the story is incomplete to begin with. Assassin's Creed, especially, has a well-established mythology that sprinkles all that information throughout the game. Previous FF games pepper you with this information. FFXV lazily attempts to do that and right now, I just don't care about these characters.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy, left Square-Enix and formed his own company. He created Lost Odyssey for the Xbox 360. The game is praised for its story, but people were turned off by the outdated turn-based battle system. I think that's what's missing in these more recent Squeenix JRPGs. When you play a Final Fantasy game, you're supposed to feel like you're on this epic journey... an odyssey. I'm hoping at this point where I'm at in the game picks up the pace and the story. But based on numerous anecdotes and reviews from people who've played the game and its numerous DLCs over the past few years, I'm not hold my breath.

I'm done.

Also Finished Final Fantasy XIII-2, Too

Last month, I did my review of Final Fantasy XIII. I have mixed feelings about the game. It was much different from previous Final Fantasies and used the new Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology instead of the original crystal origins that the first games used. Linear maps, non-north facing maps (which was a pain), very short story, only one major side quest... the list goes on. Good thing the sequel improved on everything.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is set three years after the previous game. Without spoiling much of what happened, the 6 main characters saved the world. However, something is off. Lightning, one of the main characters is gone. Nobody knows where she is. Many of her friends believe she turned into crystal. Serah Farron, Lightning's sister, sees things differently. She remembers Lightning being with the group after they saved the world and then suddenly just disappears.

The game starts with Lightning in another dimension, Valhalla, in battle gear and different armor. She's fighting another person named Caius Ballad. During the fight, a portal appears out in the sky. A young man, named Noel Kreiss, falls through. Lightning saves him and tells Noel that she was expecting his arrival. She knows that Noel is from the distant future. She sends Noel on a task to help Serah on saving the world... again. The game pulled a Metal Gear Solid 2 and switched main characters. For the duration of the game, Serah and Noel are the main characters.

Noel arrives in Serah's time, 3 years after the 6 l'Cie heroes saved the world, and tells her that Lightning sent him. Noel explains that the sudden appearance of otherworldly monsters is caused by different timelines bleeding into each other at one point in history, causing a paradox. The only way to fix these is to travel through time and resolve all the paradoxes and find the TRUE timeline. Serah decides to go with Noel and jumped through time using the Historia Crux (it's the fancy name they call the wormhole to jump through time).

That's pretty much the whole premise of XIII-2. The two main characters have to go through history fixing paradoxes. Along the way, they meet familiar main and supporting characters from XIII. There's actually more content here than XIII on top of many improvements.

One of many complaints from XIII were the linear maps. That's gone. They expanded the borders on where you can run around, battling monsters and talking to NPC. The non-north facing map? They fixed that by adding an option to make the full map and mini-map always facing north or facing where your character looks. Chocobos are found in all timelines after you've completed the story missions in those areas. This makes traveling much easier than XIII. You're also able to fully explore the game menu unlike in XIII. You can also save anywhere.

In XIII, it was possible to completely ignore appearing monsters by running away from them and catching them completely off-guard with their backs turned and abuse staggers. Not anymore. When monsters appear, a color-coordinated timer appears counting down from green, to yellow then red. You have the chance to hit any of the monsters with your weapon before the timer runs out and get a preemptive strike. However, these preemptive strikes don't almost stagger the monsters. You can run away from the monsters and the timer disappears. if you don't hit them or them hitting you before the timer runs out to red, you won't be able to restart the battle.

In battle, you have a chance to obtain monster crystals from monsters you've defeated. You can use these monsters as pets and your third character during battle. Like your two main characters, they can be leveled up and obtain more powerful skills and more health. You can also infuse one monster to another monster. The other monster would gain any available ability from the consumed monster. Another game mechanic they changed is the ability to switch leaders during battle. This was not possible in XIII. When the leader dies, it's game over. Not in XIII-2. When the leader dies, it automatically switches to either Noel or Serah. They also added this feature for paradigm shifts: (1) Normal, Cross (X) or Wide (W) paradigms. Paradigms with X have the characters focus on one target. Wide paradigms focus on all targets. You can also save up to three paradigm shift setups. This makes setting up for specific boss battles easier and it's as easy as loading your go-to shifts.

XIII-2 played similarly to another numbered sequel (X-2)... in that you can choose the order you play each timeline or branching timeline. You don't even have to play all the timelines to beat the game. I know some people play the game like that, but they miss out on everything. When interacting with certain NPCs and various story points in the game, there is a trigger event that lets you choose an answer, which garner serious, honest or funny reactions from the characters. Any variations of these will net you decorations for your monster pets. There lots of these collectible items. They're unnecessary for completing the game, but it's fun to dress up your monsters. XIII had you collecting monster drops and pawning them off to shops as the main source of money. Not in XIII-2. This time, monsters actually drop gil, as well as monster items and equipment.

Can't get enough of side quests? XIII-2 has got you covered. Collecting monster decorations, fully exploring every map from all possible timelines, optional bosses, gambling and chocobo racing. These will keep you busy. These don't even include the downloadable content (DLC) you have to pay, which are a lot, and which Square Enix is guilty of abusing. There's a colliseum DLC, which have you fighting strong monsters and familiar characters from XIII. Beating these guys will net you their monster crystal. That's right. You can have Sazh, two version of Lightning and Snow as support characters. From a gameplay standpoint, these DLCs were fun to beat. They don't really add much to the story, but they sure help out with beating the game. Too bad I already beat the game before I attempted to fight them in the colliseum.

You can get Sazh early on by playing his own DLC. In this story, he was also affected by the paradox. He and his son, Dajh, wind up in the Serendipity dimension, where everyone can gamble. You can play poker and this other gambling game having to do with a clock or something. Beating the requirements for this DLC gets you Sazh's as a supporting character.

The last DLC is the important one, as it bridges the story at the end of XIII-2 and the third game, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. In this DLC, you play as Lightning wearing Etro's Goddess armors or whatever. You fight Caius Ballad one on one. It's probably one of the hardest DLCs I've had to play. Normally DLCs are freebies and much easier than the main game content. Square Enix didn't get the memo and is basically making you pay extra for a harder difficulty. Because Japan.

Square Enix did everything right in my book. From what I heard, this was supposed to be just one game, but it got too big to fit in one Blu-Ray disk that they have to split it into two games. Not sure if that's true or not, though. The only thing I didn't like is having to play another game to find out the story of the Lightning Saga. I already ordered it, but the seller is waiting on a back order delivery of another item before they can ship this. Gives me more time to play other games, I guess.

I'm done.

Finally Finished Final Fantasy XIII

I bought Final Fantasy XIII (FFXIII) back in late 2010. I even wrote a first impression on the game based on a few hours of gameplay. Then my fat PS3 broke. It couldn't handle all of FFXIII's awesomeness (The original 80GB PS3s could play PS2 games and DVDs, overworking the disk lens. FFXIII fried it). My initial review was heavily biased over a broke PS3 and I chimed in haterade bandwagon online. Three years later, a new slim PS3 and numerous games after, I decided to pick up where I left off on the game early December completed the game.

The cast in Final Fantasy XIII: Left to right: Sazh, Snow, Hope, Lightning, Fang and Vanille.

The Final Fantasy series is the poster boy for everything that the gamers of the world know about Japanese Role-Playing Games. Numerous iterations, different game mechanics and new stories later, we are now at the thirteenth of the series.

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Story (mostly from Wikipedia)

• Setting
• Characters
• Beginning Plot

Review

• The System
• The Good
• The Bad
• Overall

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Story

FFXIII is set on the gigantic world of Gran Pulse (simply called Pulse). Central to the story is Cocoon, a massive artificial sphere that floats above Pulse's surface and is ruled by the Sanctum, a theocratic government. The two worlds are controlled by godlike beings known as fal'Cie. The Cocoon fal'Cie are responsible for keeping Cocoon floating, as well as providing light and water to the people that live inside. Each fal'Cie handles a specific task. The fal'Cie have the capability of marking the humans that live in Pulse and Cocoon as their servants. These servants, called l'Cie, are branded with a symbol representing either Pulse or Cocoon and are given a "Focus" — a task to complete. If the 'Cie complete their task in time, they are transformed to crystal and according to legend gain eternal life; otherwise they become mindless monsters called Cie'th. The l'Cie are not explicitly told their Focus, but are instead given visions that they must interpret.

Lightning on the Archylte Steppe in Gran Pulse, looking at Cocoon.

Several hundred years before the events of the game, a battle known as the War of Transgression took place between Pulse and Cocoon. During the battle, l'Cie from Pulse attacked and ripped a large hole in Cocoon. Eventually, the l'Cie complete their focus and were turned to crystal. The hole was patched with material lifted from Pulse, and Cocoon's citizens have since lived in fear of another invasion; this fear is used by the Sanctum to remain in power. the Sanctum oversees two military branches; the Guardian Corps, responsible for keeping order on Cocoon, and PSICOM, the special forces in charge of dealing with any threat related to Pulse. The fal'Cie have given the humans advanced technology, including flying airships and mechanical creatures, and a form of magic also exists. The magic is normally only accessible to l'Cie, fal'Cie and various monsters in Cocoon and Pulse, though distilled chemical forms can be used by normal humans.

The six main playable characters of Final Fantasy XIII are Lightning, the main protagonist of the game, a former soldier and older sister to Serah. Snow Villiers, Serah's fiancé and leader of NORA, a paramilitary group. Oerba Dia Vanille, the game's narrator and an exile who is later revealed to be a l'Cie from Pulse. Sazh Katzroy, a civilian pilot and father to a young boy, Dajh; Hope Estheim, a young boy who is struggling within the relationships he shares with his parents; and Oerba Yun Fang, a l'Cie from Pulse who is working with the Sanctum's Cavalry branch. Other characters include Galenth Dysley, the ruler of the Sanctum and main antagonist; Cid Rains, a Sanctum Brigadier General in the Cavalry who does not trust the government; and Serah Farron, Lightning's younger sister.

Courtesy of IGN: Snow and Vanille looking at the Pulse Vestige after it crashed on the ground and crystalized the waters in the surrounding area.

FFXIII begins in Cocoon as the citizens of the town of Bodhum are being evicted, or Purged, from Cocoon after coming in contact with something from Pulse. Over the course of the game, the player is shown flashbacks of the events of the previous 13 days, which began when a fal'Cie from Pulse was discovered near Bodhum. Lightning's sister Serah had found the fal'Cie from Pulse and been changed into a l'Cie by it. Lightning and Sazh derail a Purge train bound for Pulse in an attempt to save Serah. In the subsequent battle, Snow leads his resistance group, NORA, to rescue the Purge exiles. Several of them, including Hope's mother, are killed. As Snow heads to the fal'Cie Anima to save Serah, he is joined by two of the exiles: Hope and Vanille. The two groups meet at the fal'Cie, and find Serah just as she turns to crystal. Anima then brands them all as l'Cie and they are cast out into a different part of Cocoon. During this transformation, the newly crested l'Cie all have the same vision: a monster called Ragnarok. The group, arguing over the ambiguous nature of the dreamed Focus, find Serah in her crystallized form; Snow remains with her as the others leave.

The System

The beginning plot covers three out of the thirteen chapters in FFXIII. The start of chapter three is when your characters start using magic, bestowed upon by the Pulse l'Cie who marked them. The rest of the game is the group rationalizing their decisions on whether to undertake the "focus" given to them, run away and give up, or option three, like most epic RPG plots, go against the status quo and start shit up.

Playing FFXIII over the last three weeks made me like the game. As far as JRPGs are concerned, FFXIII is still the same formula as previous games. The biggest difference is the change in overall game mechanics.

For starters, while you still have health points (HP) there are no mana points (MP). You still have magic abilities, but they are no longer dictated by how much MP you have left before you use an Ether to restore them. You still get HP in battle, but you can use cure to restore it or an item. After the battle ends, your HP is back to full. All of your attacks, special techniques and magic are simply abilities. the power of your abilities are determined by your Strength (STR) and Magic (MAG). You increase these attributes, along with HP using the Crystarium System (CS).

Each characters gets their own CS. Each battle awards you with Crystarium Points (CP). You can use these points to increase your character's attributes and gain new abilities. There are 5 levels in the CS. Each node holding an attribute or ability requires CP. You require more CP as the level progresses.

The team facing one of the toughest and largest monsters in the game: Adamantoise.

Initially, characters get to have three CS for any three roles: Commando (attacker), Ravager - magic user (RAV), Medic - healer (MED), Synergists - status booster (SYN), Sentinel - damage tank (SEN), and Saboteur - status ailments (SAB). You can only have three people in your batty party. You can mix and match your characters to have different roles for each paradigm and switch out of that during battle. For example, you start the battle with three characters as RAV and fight the enemies. If one character's HP is almost gone, you switch to another paradigm of two RAV and one MED, continuing the fight while one character restores health. You can mix and match your paradigm set up and tailor it for different enemies.

In essence, you don't level up your characters in FFXIII. You level up their roles to gain attributes and abilities. It is the same thing with weapons and accessories. Each character have their own weapons which they can level up and upgrade from Tier 1 to Tier 3. Each Tier 1 weapon have their own Tier 2 counterparts. All Tier 2 upgrade to the same Tier 3 weapon for a specific character, with different stats and special attributes. Upgrading weapons requires organic and industrial components. You get these from enemy drops or from buying through online shops inside save points. This brings us to another change in the Final Fantasy series. While you still have gil as currency, enemies don't drop them at all. Selling enemy drops and only a select few treasure orbs are your only monetary source. The good part about this is that certain enemies drop what are called premium items. These items are useless for upgrading your weapons and accessories, but they sell for a lot in the stores. This forces you to battle in the chance of acquiring premium items and get CP and enemy drop for upgrading in the process.

With these, FFXIII's battle mechanic is still a JRPG at it's core. They just stripped out the tedious parts and focused on making the battles look cool, flashy and fast-spaced. It's the best of both turn-based and active real time battles. You also have to be proactive with the battles and change your roles accordingly.

The Good

Final Fantasy VII (FFVII) will always hold a special place in my heart as the first Final Fantasy game I ever played and for introducing me into the world of RPGs. Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy X are close second place next to Final Fantasy V and VI. That said, FFXIII managed reinvent the RPG genre and streamline the storytelling process. The soundtrack is quite new and sort of a step up in the same direction as Final Fantasy XII (FFXII).

They got rid of random battles, which is also a step up from the same formula in FFXII. You see your enemies on screen as you plow through from start to finish. Enemies are alerted by your presence when you enter their radius. If they notice you, they give chase. You can fight them head on, try to dodge them or avoid them entirely. You also have the option of using shrouds (Aegisol, Fortisol and Deceptisol) to buff your party or hide from enemies before battle and cause a preemptive strike. When you need to farm for CP and enemy drop, you can exit out of the area and go back. This resets the area and have another go at the enemies you just passed or beat. This level of freedom is a nice addition Final Fantasy that won't be going anywhere.

The CGI cutscenes are one of the best in any RPG to date. It's signature Final Fantasy... always flashy and never disappoints. The environments, characters and enemy models had an upgrade. At some points in the game, you couldn't even tell whether you're watching a CGI cutscene or in-game graphics.

A still from one of the cut scenes riding Fang's Eidolon, Bahamut, flying over Gran Pulse.

The game can be as short or as long as you want it to be with fully developing your characters and their weapons and accessories. My total time in the game after getting 100% completion is close to 100 hours. Even if you just plow through the story, you can get back to completing missions, side quests and getting 5-star rating on those missions.

The Bad

Despite all the new additions to "wow" gamers, FFXIII is not as good as previous Final Fantasy games. For such a long-standing series, there are traditions and appeal to the series that fans have known for two decades now. FFXIII is a case of too much something new and disastrous omission of what Final Fantasy.

FFXIII sort of mimics how FFVII started out. You're thrust into this situation and only get snippets of the story as you progress. Everything is linear, going from point A to point B, battling enemies and unavoidable boss battles. After chapter three, you'd think  you see the world map. But you don't. You're going through ten more chapters in a linear direction. The closest this game to ever getting a world map is in Gran Pulse when you finally get out of Cocoon. Gran Pulse is one huge place. There are 6 main interconnected areas. They're all still point A to point B areas and longer. If it weren't for teleport spots, Gran Pulse would have been a tedious area.

The maps in the game show are different from the previous game. The point of a map is to show your location on a stationary fixed-point. in FFXIII, the fixed-point is the direction that your character is facing. The map rotates accordingly. This is useful when you're following arrows to the next location as a compass, but you're left scratching your head on side quests. It took a while to get used to it until I figured out landmarks to know my whereabouts.

At it's core, FFXIII is a very short game compared to previous adventures. there are no towns to go and visit to relax when the entire plot revolves around running away from enemies and going forward to the goal. They had two relaxing parts in the game: a flashback and a brief rest from all the chasing. The entire story for the first 12 chapters were supplanted by cutscenes and flashbacks on the first thirteen days before the events of the game took place (thirteen days, thirteen chapters, thirteen Analects in the game to read, etc). I accumulated almost 100 hours of gameplay because the distance between point A to point B is really long. I think they tried to make it so distances are as lifelike in the game. They succeeded in making the game longer. There aren't enough side quests like in previous games, though I can kind of get that because of the overall plot.

A personal "bad" for the series is the inclusion of staple names in history and mythology present in Enix games, but were not in Squaresoft. The marriage between both companies is a compromise. As an homage they would put staples from both companies in their games. It's not really a game breaker, but it's also not the Final Fantasy I knew. It's a change. Whether fans like it or not, I welcome them just as well.

Overall

Overall, FFXIII is an okay game. It's still Final Fantasy. It's got a great story. The characters and the world setting is something you can get used to and invest your time in. The battle mechanics are a welcome change. The story felt short, made longer by the massive environment. I think it set itself up for the sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the upcoming sequel, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. I'm going to take a short break before moving on to the sequel.

I'm done.