It only has been one hot minute since I've finished
Final Fantasy XIII (well, mostly anyway since I didn't do the post-game content) so I figured I better write something down before the week is done.
When I started this game, I tried to recall my impressions from having played the PS3 version on release all those years ago. I remembered not being overly impressed by the corridor dungeon design for half the game, and having completed the game again on PC, that impression still stuck with me. This second time around, the game has a new coat of paint via mods, and despite its shortcomings, the game is now very nice to look at. And with the help of Cheat Engine's turbo mode, fighting trash mods weren't such a chore like it once were on PS3.
To address the state of the PC port: it's still not great. The advent of
FF13Fix has alleviated most of the issues apparent upon release, but not all. There are still frame pacing issues and audio noise related to multichannel audio, and the worst offender: it refuses to work with Steam Input. Steam Input must be disabled in order to have the controller working. An issue which also present in FF XIII-2, iirc. I remember reading Durante's article and reading about the performance issues. The same exact issues are still present today, and while an RTX GPU seem to mitigate this to some extent with the help of FF13Fix's frame rate unlocker, this is pretty much what we can expect out of this port.
While FF XIII's modding scene isn't exactly thriving these days, there are still people dedicated enough to make mods for it. The revamped difficulty mod is still getting updates, and there's a modder dedicated enough to make
4K-upscaled FMV mod. I'm not crazy enough to try it, though, the 1080p FMV mod alone has eaten 100 GB of space by itself. I didn't check how much space the 4K mod will consume in total, but the download size for Chapter 1 FMV alone is nearly 20 GB (against the 5 GB of its 1080p counterpart).
The ATB/Stagger system feels as fluid as it once did on PS3. The only problem is, once you have a proper paradigm setup, there's very little difficulty in defeating even the bosses with extremely deep HP pools. As an aside, I dislike that you have to remake the paradigm pallets all over again if you swap the active Battle Team members. The battle system feels like it has the trappings of SMT games, for better or worse: once you know the enemies' weaknesses, exploit it, don't neglect healing, and you're pretty much done. In FF XIII, it's pretty much the same: double/triple ravagers paradigm setup until it staggers, then shift to Relentless Assault paradigm until the enemies' stagger bar run out. Shift immediately to double medic paradigm to withstand special attacks for boss fights, and shift to the ravagers paradigm again to bring the stagger bar back. Rinse and Repeat. That's about it.
Now let's take a look at the story and how I feel about it now when compared with my first play through. While I don't feel the linearity isn't a problem, the sub-par expositions and the generally sloppy storytelling is. I tried to read the datalog as much as I can; as I once did on PS3. But for a game with a fast-paced mechanics like FF XIII, pausing for a few minutes to go through the datalog will certainly take you out of the pacing for a bit. Especially when the cutscene expositions are poor, and you feel like you need further context from the datalog.
While I felt that the characters has decent personal arcs, there's something about them that didn't speak to me at all. Even the antagonists feel like one-note and feel like they're just there to pad the game to a certain size. The lack of emotional investment apparent in earlier FF titles is also somewhat lacking in FF XIII. There are some moments of brilliance, like Sazh's
attempted suicide or Lightning trying her best to be a “big sister” figure to Hope. However, for some reason, it didn't quite have the same impact as the other FF titles did in the past.
The lack of notable side quests and mini-games in this game is also one of the reasons why I feel FF XIII is lacking. Sure, there is that 64 Cieth Stone
missions to go through, but I can't help feeling that it lack the same flair as the Hunting missions in FF XII. At least in FF XII, you need to talk to someone to “accept” the mission and reconfigure the gambits accordingly. In FF XIII, the strategy barely changes. Once the party completed Level 8/9 of the Crystarium, they are strong enough to mitigate any kind of status debuffs, with maybe some consideration to equip proper gears for marks with gimmick AI. Unfortunately, I don't feel like doing the entire 64 missions just to find out if alternate strategy is needed for high-level marks, especially when Soul Hackers 2 is just around the corner.
To sum up; while I enjoyed the battle system enough to go through the game once again, sadly, my opinion of the entire game barely changes since my first play through. It's clear that Squeenix was trying to recapture that “Ivalice Alliance” magic once again with “Fabula Nova Crystallis”. However, as the opening title, the narrative in FF XIII is somewhat lacking and not the strong start I had hopes for, and it's definitely a hard sell to recommend this title to anyone except for historical or nostalgia reason. As it stands, it is probably my least-liked Final Fantasy title so far.
Next up is FF XIII-2, but I'll probably switch this one up with Soul Hackers 2 and push Lightning Returns to the next blitz season.
