Lightning lives up to her name in the all new battle system. The battle system was contrived the creators, and makes the game more like a movie – eliminating any dull and tedious fighting. Once again, the no random battle concept that was first introduced in the PS2 game Final Fantasy XII returns, but has now expanded to make it more life like. No longer will you find one character standing around doing nothing while your other characters are being annihilated by a fifteen foot mutant, but will be more active. This also brought in a lot of critics, many of which claiming that this will be too complicated. Once again, SquareENIX managed to silence them, by making a Matrix-like sequence occur as you decide your next move. What this means is that time will essentially slow down as you decide to change from an attack into using a vital potion which could literally save your ass.
A rollercoaster of emotions
The story is similar to that of Final Fantasy XII, in which your characters attempt to overthrown a powerful empire on the overworld which is plagued with monsters. However, there is more to this game than just that, and the whole background of the story is based around God-like Crystals, but saying anymore would ruin everybody’s fun, wouldn’t it? In actual fact, when you first pick up your game and put it in, you will consider it like a mixture of all the Final Fantasy’s put together, but soon the game will expand, and as you meet the mystery blond character, the story unfolds into a beautiful and tragic story, with an absolutely shocking ending! And we’re talking Tidus and Yuna shocking here!
Some simple shocks take the player’s breath away as the further your journey goes. Your main bad guy, who is not revealed until the climax of the game and remains hidden, is one badass son of a female dog. He employs a lot of Seymour’s characteristics from Final Fantasy X, in which you just have to hate him, despite him being one of the most amazing bad guys in the history of Final Fantasy. He does some pretty fiendish stuff to say the least, especially near the beginning of the game, and from there the mystery begins as you try desperately to decide who your enemy is.
One great aspect of the story is the subtle hints that the story leaves. While you’re walking along, someone will purposefully emphasise one word that keeps you guessing. The really intelligent thing that is employed by this year’s voice actors (which is also truly great), is that some of these hints are totally meaningless, but still keep your head spinning more than Crash Bandicoot on LSD.
This year’s cast of characters introduces some contrasting personalities which really keep the story moving brilliantly. However, as you shall hear about in the next section, there are some major flaws in some of the newer characters.
Visually, this game is stunning. The new and improved graphics make your characters leap out of your screen and make the gameplay more intense. Even outside of FMV’s, your characters move perfectly and cleanly, and don’t look like they’ve been chopped straight off of MS Paint, but look like actual people in an actual background. The game designers have gone so far that their characters actually sweat the more you’ve run around the battlefield, and now slight bruises and injuries are now visible, as your characters move slowly if they’ve been damaged, and you would require healing. Not only does it add realism, but it just makes sense, and how its taken the designers twenty years to figure it out is beyond me. But when you get into the FMV sequences, you seriously cannot fathom just how good the game looks – and that is something you have to experience. It’s really like sitting in a cinema, by yourself, watching some classic fantasy film such as Lord of the Rings, and really experiencing it all first hand.
With every silver lining comes a dark cloud
While Final Fantasy XIII will be hotly debated as one of the best games in the Final Fantasy series, it poses some serious questions about its longevity. Playing the game all the way through the first time is an absolutely amazing experience, and one that any RPG fan needs to embark on, yet when you put it in after seeing the ending and start up again, it doesn’t hold up. Having waited another week before playing again, it still didn’t hold a candle to the first time playing it. Critics who have already completed the game after just two weeks of non-stop action have all agreed that the story is far too long, with the game taking over 80 hours of playtime to complete – and that’s not including sidequests! Naturally, it feels tedious trying to do all that again.
The audio in this game leaves a lot to be desired also. While fighting an intense boss battle, you’re left listening to dance music. With nothing against dance music, it just screams that the fight is not to be taken seriously, thus taking away from the story. The voice acting is good, but it doesn’t compensate for the fact that battle music makes everything seem childish, especially when you’re about to fight the final fight against the unnameable evil that threatens your existence.
The final flaw is that this game will not attract any new Final Fantasy fans for the simple reason that the battle system is now so advanced you really do have to have played the previous Final Fantasy games first.
Closing Thoughts
This game is brilliantly witty and intelligent or needlessly complicated depending on what perspective you look at it from. For the fanatics out there, this game will be a brilliant addition to their 20+ year collection, but for newer fans they will be so perplexed at the beginning of the game they will put the game down and pop in a more easy-playing game. If you are a previous Final Fantasy fan, get this game immediately, sit down and get engulfed in a stunning story with unbelievable visualisation. If you are a newbie fan, I would suggest buying a previous game to start with.
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Final Fantasy XIII Review: Commentary
My coursework, a review of the computer game Final Fantasy XIII, was designed to follow the layout and style of another article. The source used was IGN, a well renowned internet review site, particularly for computer games. The objective was to emulate the main linguistic features, such as lexis, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.
The lexical field had to be almost identical to the model, since the target audiences are exactly the same, and the only aspect that was altered was the change in subject. The lexical field used in my piece is using extremely technical language, utilising such words as "HD TV" and "FMV’s", to suggest that the piece is more professional and reliable. This also is used to reference other games of its kind, such as Final Fantasy or Crash Bandicoot. The actual lexis used has to be quite advanced, due to the nature of the model’s language.
My model didn’t necessarily follow Standard English completely, as it used some obscene words. As a result, without wanting to sound too unprofessional, I used euphemisms to help soften the offensiveness, so instead of using “son of a bitch” I used the ironic and literal meaning of the word: “son of a female dog”. This denotation helps ensure that my text is not disrupted in terms of flow, and it limits the amount of people who could get upset by the language. On a similar subject, when I used end-focus to emphasise the phrase “save your ass”, while it may seem inappropriate to some, it helps bring connotations of a desperate struggle to heal your character.
As the coursework has progressed, it has steadily adapted to meet the standard form displayed by the original IGN article model. Originally, it did not use the technical language and the use of pragmatics was limited, as I emphasised into too many points as opposed to assuming that if the audience was reading this then they would have background knowledge of previous Final Fantasy games.
The majority of the important words in this piece uses polysyllabic words, since it complements my model. Most of these words are superlatives, such as “best” to emphasise the point, and somewhat exaggerate the point of the texts. However, since Final Fantasy was a part of a series, I felt it was necessary to include several comparatives, in order for the reader to relate to the past games and able to judge on their own personal opinions. For example, if a reader loved Final Fantasy XII’s graphics, and I stated that the graphics were improved in XIII, then the reader can relate and want to buy it more.
Connotations were one of the more important aspects of this piece, as I wanted the reader to relate to the article being posted, by using words that will entice them to read on, such as “vivid colours”, which people can understand now more than ever, as they play video games on better quality TV’s.
The discourse in this text emulates that of the original piece, as it is laid out in a similar manner to the model (this also refers to the graphology used). The article starts of the same as the model, beginning with an introduction and a part of background knowledge. Furthermore, the piece would then go on to describe the gameplay, and storyline – clearly underlying the positives of the game, before heading towards the negatives. Subsequently, my text came to a solid conclusion at the end, and it all relates clearly to the style that my model originally had.
The grammar used also had to replicate that of my model. Slowly, as the coursework has progressed, the grammatical features have expanded to include more advanced work such as semi-colons, to make the article seem more professional, and use more technical language. Similarly, the types of sentences used have also been chosen specifically. For example, declarative statements have been used throughout, since the article is informative but also to entertain. On the other hand, several interrogative sentences have been used in order to make the reader interact more with the article. The sentences also had to mostly be either compound, or contain an extra subordinate clause, because I wanted to make it more technical, and also emulate the model’s sentence structure.
Moreover, I had to make good use of pragmatics, as I had to assume that my reader was interested in the Final Fantasy series. This can be observed when mentions the previous characters who have created a legacy in Final Fantasy, such as “Aeris” and “Balthier”. These assumptions help my text flow, without heading into any unnecessary words used to describe exactly what my article is talking about.
Bibliography:
– for the model
– for the researched information for Final Fantasy XIII
