FF13 is the game FF10 wanted to be, but couldn’t.

I’m still only about seven hours in, but my first impression of pretty much every aspect of FF13 is “I remember this from FF10… only it sucked.”

First: the high energy intro. FF10’s intro involved Tidus playing blitzball to this weird heavy metal, which was fine, but didn’t really get me into the game, per se. The blitzball cinematic was fun to watch, but then came to an abrupt stop so Tidus could sign some kids ball (read: input his name). The first scene in FF13 is: Lightning stands up on a trian and kicks everyone’s ass. Why? Don’t worry about it, player — just get to work. It’ll make sense eventually.

As I recounted to a buddy of mine later: if you recall how FF7’s intro was pretty much spot-on, and every FF game since has been lacking something, then you’ll be delighted to know that FF13 does it like FF7. That was my first impression.

The prologue is designed to throw five characters at you and force you to use each in turn. The idea is you get to know a little bit about your entire party in the first couple hours of game, while at the same time hiding the contrivance of getting them all together. It does drag in places, and it takes a little too long to get to any of the game’s systems, but at least it’s a string of action scenes. FF10 tried to pull this same trick by introducing a party member, then taking him away, then introducing another party member, then taking her away, then a few hours of boring welcome-to-our-town nonsense, then dropping the lady lead and three nobodies in your party so you could walk to the beach.

Which is another anomaly of FF10: the party set-up. Typically in an FF game you start with Heroguy and maybe Heroguy’s best friend. Other characters come and go as part of the plot up until about the 50% mark, where you’ve got everyone. FF10 tried to structure things so that your party was a cohesive group right from the outset — the summoner and her guardians on a pilgrimage — but didn’t really give you any real context to work with. Each of the five characters you start the “real game” with have different strengths and weaknesses, and you have to learn them all at once if you want to succeed in the game. Maybe 10-20 hours later you’d get some backstory on one of them… maybe.

FF13 walks the same path, but more deftly. You still begin the “real game” with five characters, but the events leading up to their convergence are explained in detail. Their goals and motivations are not identical, which creates some interesting in-party strife that isn’t present in FF10. Rather than being on a journey together these characters are “stuck in the same boat” as it were.

Unlike FF10, FF13 isn’t really a game where individual characters have strengths and weaknesses to exploit (or maybe it is, and I just wont’ know until the game starts letting me select my own party), but it does its part to not drop the entire battle system in your lap all at once. You learn a few concepts, then play half a dungeon, then learn a few more, gradually building up your bag of tricks until suddenly things start making sense.

This is all small potatoes compared to the Big Two, though.

Cutscenes. FF10 came out at a weird time in video game history where your game would be considered “cinematic” simply for having voice acting. FF10 did have voice acting, that’s true, but it was terrible more often than not, and most of the cutscenes involved the camera just cutting back and forth between whatever anime faces happened to be standing around. Awkward silences punctured any sense of flow the story might have otherwise had. Nobody really moved, unless it was Yuna’s goofy head nod or Tidus nervously scratching the back of his head.

FF12 did things a little better by virtue of being more reserved in its characters and dialogue. This paragraph is about FF12. What the hell is this paragraph doing in this post. Get out of here, paragraph!

FF13 really nails this, though, in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in a JRPG. Characters have actual conversations — they interrupt and interject, they talk over each other, they use their jargon with confidence. I remember playing Metal Gear Solid a few years later than everyone else, and being pretty much amazed with how fluid the story scenes were. It was a far cry from folks just standing around blue-dialogue-boxing at each other, that’s for sure. Problem is, MGS was doing it right and pretty much nobody else was; they just replaced the blue dialogue boxes with stilted voice acting. Then a few games started to get it right, then a few more, then the current gen of consoles came out and lots of genres were getting it right except, for some reason, JRPGs.

Well, now a JRPG has gotten it right and everyone else can stop slacking off.

Also! The cutscenes are skippable. Yes, even on your first playthrough. Thank you thank you thank you, Squenix.

Finally, we have the Sphere Grid 2.0: the Crystalium. It works for all the reasons the Sphere Grid didn’t, at least, not for me. To describe what was wrong with the Sphere Grid though I guess I need to describe the Sphere Grid.

First, imagine a typical oldschool no-frills JRPG. Say, oh, FF4. Imagine a black mage from that game, like Rydia. When Rydia wins fights she earns EXP, and when she has enough EXP she gains levels. Those levels come with stat boosts and, sometimes, new abilities. You can envision this as Rydia traveling forward on a line, with a level-up spot every few miles.

Now imagine, instead of level-up spots every few miles, Rydia’s individual stat boosts and ability gains were more evenly spread across the line. Instead of “spending” her EXP in big bursts she could “spend” it in small chunks, gaining lesser but more frequent boosts. A +1 Int here, a new Fire spell there… it’s the same line she was walking before, only now she gets a boost every couple steps rather than every few miles.

Now imagine that, instead of the game applying these boosts and gains automatically, you had to go into the goddamn menu and activate them yourself. Every single +1 Int and new Fire spell, every step of the way, for the entire game. You spend as much manually leveling Rydia up as you do in combat, uh, leveling her up — only menu manipulation isn’t fun. Congratulations! Now you’re envisioning the Sphere Grid from FF10!

To be fair, the Sphere Grid does open up eventually. You can, if you were so inclined, get every stat boost and every ability for every character. But for most of the game, and “most” in this context means 80%+, Lulu is your black mage and Yuna is your white mage, and them’s just the breaks. What’s missing is an element of choice. For much of the game your only options on the Sphere Grid are “move forward” or “don’t move forward”.

FF13 revisits this system, except each character has several smaller grids. Each grid corresponds to a role they can play during combat. They can switch roles on the fly as often as you like, so there is some benefit to developing each role evenly… but at the same time each character has strengths and weaknesses of their own that need to be harnessed. You get to make choices — real choices — and the choices you make have immediate and noticable effects in combat.

I’m sure the endpoint is still the same: every character will learn every ability from every role. But rather than waiting until just-before-the-endgame to start making decisions you get to make them through the entire course of the game.

Let’s see… what else? Well, both games have a cumbersome and not-adequately-explained equipment upgrade system that isn’t appreciably better than the standard buy-and-replace system. I guess they didn’t feel right totally knocking it out of the park.

The end question, really, is: why couldn’t FF10 get this right ten years ago? Is it just a matter of the gaming landscape being so different now? FF10 really was kind of one-foot-in, one-foot-out when it game to employing new ideas, whereas FF13 (like FF12 before it) really attempts to go full-hog with redefining the genre it’s in. It’s not trying to pretend to be something new while also remaining something old. Does it succeed? I’m not sure — I haven’t hit the ten hour mark yet. But the comparisons to its closest sibling are encouraging.

And I’m still in love with Lightning. I’ll let you know if that changes anytime soon.