Final Fantasy - The PS3/360 Era (XIII, XIV Online 2.0 A Realm Reborn) [Review]

Twice as many pixels. Twenty times as many problems.

Isn't it ironic that a franchise with “Final” in its name is that long?! Well… The anthology franchise tenure during the early HD Era was… Something.

One of the three games isn't playable anymore (the original XIV); The three of them had very bad to mixed receptions, and even the jump to a multiplatform strategy couldn't really help the disaster.

This post will be a bit different: while I had written in the past something for Final Fantasy XIII, that I'll add here shortly, the text for XIV 2.0 will be new and exclusive to the blog. I've replayed it recently and posted some captures of my journey through Eorzea here, but never really wrote anything about it. I will, here, on this post.

This is also a follow-up from my previous posts:

Final Fantasy I, II and III Reviews (NES Era, 1987-1990)
Final Fantasy IV, V and VI Reviews (SNES Era, 1991-1994)
Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX Reviews (PSX Era, 1997-2000)
Final Fantasy X, XI Online, XII Reviews (PS2 Era, 2001-2006)

Let's go!

Final Fantasy XIII

I don't want to yap about the game nonstop and there were places where FFXIII was great: its music, overall art style, character designs and the surprisingly fun but not great battle system. It is very cinematic, and most of the time, pretty.

The prettiest corridors in gaming history, maybe. FFXIII the biggest mistake is being so boring, filled with long, long corridors with absolutely nothing to do outside repeated battles, not that many monsters types, bad side content that appears after 25 hours of what it seems to be a stretched introduction and then a 100+ hour zone with lots of optional content to do before the end of the game. Similar to X and VIII in structure, but worse in almost every other way.

They hype this said “open” area the moment you press play on the game with the gorgeous opening cinematic, at a point of the game everyone insists that “Gran Pulse” is the nicest place ever and that we must go there… and then…

… There are no NPCs, villas, places, encampments whatsoever. Everything on the late arrived open area is void of life, you get quests with static crystals that order you to kill simple marks. Everything that returns to XIII is a downgrade from 12, and what is new is mediocre. Many systems were cut with no alternatives really, and while not the worst progression system, it is not the best either.

The designs are amazing, and the music is really great, and although I hated the cast at the beginning, I ended up being fond of the gang, they're all nice after all, but their dialogues are very stilted and most of the time… cringe. The story, although sometimes creative, is confusing, shrouded in menus and not always make a lot of sense… All the characters sometimes act like teenagers and can be tiresome. They grow on you, at least.

I was happy to finally finish FF13, even if I basically sped run through it, doing the minimum amount of side content necessary to finish the game. There was some that I had to do to toughen up a bit before the final boss, but every side content is often “kill this monster on the map” and you have to walk a lot back and forth in the same 5 connected areas that consists of “Gran Pulse”, fighting the same monsters over and over again, in this “endgame” zone after the 25 hours of corridors.

Unfortunately, on the matter of side content, I wasn't really having fun, and although I know that there are some interesting stuff to do, the game doesn't really show you what is nice and what isn't, and most of the time you'd only be killing the same monsters you did before, but now in a recolor or a tougher fight.

Unlike FF12 Zodiac Age (and some re-releases of older games), there's no way to “accelerate” the game to 3x or 4x. I've also needed to mod the game to uncap its frame rate and work more reliably on Linux, but the setup was fine. I wish there were a remastered version of the game like what they've done with 12.

I wasn't really expecting XIII to be the game that I felt the lowest on this FF marathon I'm doing. Part of me was hoping for this to actually be a hidden gem, but unfortunately it isn't. The characters may end up being nice, and their designs may be cool, with some good boss battles here and there, but does it really matter when almost everything else in the game is so mediocre and boring? Maybe 13-2 solves these feelings that I have with 13; and I will play in the future, who knows if a remastered version comes out. If not, I'm not too keen on returning to the world of Gran Pulse.

5/10

Final Fantasy XIV Online 1.0

While I just gave 13 a rough score of 5/10, the reception at the time was somewhat good with the game at an aggregated score of 83, mostly because of its visuals. The 1.0 iteration of Final Fantasy XIV Online, though, has a 49. The lowest of the series.

Long story short: it was gorgeous in cities but ran like ass on very expensive hardware (although it was announced for the PS3, the 1.0 wasn't released at launch on it), and it was very ugly on open fields. The animations were very well done, at the same time that the game couldn't keep up with its calculations, so everything was slow and stuttery. They say.

While 11 was a pre-WoW MMORPG (that still exists and is still playable), the world changed and expectations for an online game were different. While the original XIV tried to be its own thing, it was clunkier than its PS2 spiritual predecessor and way, way worse than anything else at the time. Again, they say. I never played it.

I've endlessly watched 1.0 cutscenes, the event of the finale live with Dalamud (a big Meteor, that “destroyed” the game while a new version of 14 was being worked on) must have been iconic. I wish I could play it in any way or form, even if it is a disaster. Experimental high budget online games often fail, but still, they try to be different, self-contained pieces of a vision, that while fail to deliver in the end, are unique and special in their own way. People played, paid and lived in this now dead world.

It is a mysterious, elusive and 100% not accessible part of the franchise. And it may stay like this forever.

So, yeah, after 1 bad game and 1 failed game, Square Enix did the only thing they could have done (sic): invested all the money on a new version of 14 to “clean the name” of the franchise 48 Metacritic.

At the same time that all this kerfuffle was happening on XIV, 13 had also its shares of dramas. The whole 13 iteration was going to be three new series actually, “Final Fantasy Agito XIII” for the PSP and “Final Fantasy Versus. XIII”, also for the PS3.

These two games were canceled. “Agito XIII” became separated from the entire 13's conundrums and became “Final Fantasy Type-0” and because of it, like, they could properly develop and release something that was in development hell, the team from “Type-0” was selected to also “solve” the development hell of “Versus. 13”. It eventually became “Final Fantasy XV” on the PS4/Xbox One. I will talk about XV on my next Era of Final Fantasy post, alongside 7 Remake – the only two mainline games on the PS4 generation.

Final Fantasy XIV Online 2.0: A Realm Reborn

It is pretty hard to make a concise text about a live service game. Final Fantasy XIV still exists and now is very, very successful. Arguably the most successful game on the franchise, with a myriad of very well reviewed expansions and a steady monthly fee.

I play Final Fantasy XIV. I've played a lot of it, actually, and while every time I've played it was for a different purpose, the story of Eorzea is what really makes me come back. Final Fantasy XIV gets so, so good with its expansions and story, while also getting better and better with its battle content and challenges overall.

Still, this is about the 2.0 part of the game. That is, the beginning of the game for new players, if you start today on the free trial or outright buy it. Unlike other MMORPGs, in Final Fantasy XIV new players actually need to progress through all the game story as they were released, with some tweaks here and there.

The “beginning” of the game is about 80 hours to complete. Honestly, it can go way, way beyond that, because the objective of Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 was not to “make an expansion” for XIV, but to remake the game entirely, being more theme parky and way more similar to World of Warcraft at the time (specifically, Mists of Pandaria).

A Realm Reborn (ARR, for short) is nice but… Undeniably slow. The jobs take their time to have more buttons to press, and because the player receives more experience than the pace of the Main Scenario Questline, the whole ARR experience feels easy and a bit boring, because my character is already at level 30 while the main questline itself is at 20.

The world is gorgeous and cohesive, even if the maps themselves are a bit small. There are lots of little rabbit holes to go through in A Realm Reborn, and they're often rewarding, oddly enough. It is an experience that takes its (and the players) time.

It sorely lacks voice acting, it feels like mute cinema most of the time, and there's a lot of reading so it would be nice to have more voices. This experience, while not fantastic, is far from being bad, it plays well on the controller and overall it sets the world up well for what's to come. The very end of A Realm Reborn is when everything gets more memorable, and finally the story starts to get good.

Basically, it is an “after 300 hours, it starts to get better!” type of game. Fortunately, Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn is never really a bad game. But it is a boring one. Sometimes.

Still, it is special. I replayed for a reason. The story of 14 gets really good after A Realm Reborn, the characters are among the best of the franchise. The slow progression, bad experience distribution and reliance on finishing some of 1.0 plots held A Realm Reborn a bit back, but it lays the foundation for something that becomes truly great... After 300 hours!

7.5/10

That's it!

I'll return for the PS4 Era (XV and VII Remake) someday in the future!

The images from both XIII and XIV 1.0 are from IGDB. The ones from XIV are from my current character "Kushala Maneiro" (although, now, I'm a Hyur and not a Viera).