While some see the latest chapter of the long-running RPG franchise as a failure, perhaps it's actually the start of a better future.
Earlier this week, Gamasutra published a scathing criticism of Final Fantasy XIII-2 penned by our colleague (and occasional Retronauts podcast guest) Christian Nutt. Though contextualized through an extended comparison to Red Letter Media's popular video critiques of the Star Wars prequel films, his commentary touched upon many of the same points and concerns I addressed in my own review of the game. Where our opinions differ, I think, is in our ultimate conclusion of XIII-2's merits (or lack thereof); I found the game flawed but a welcome step in correcting the series' course after two widely lambasted entries, while Christian feels it represents a deep, systemic rot at Square Enix's internal development studio.
I'm not too surprised by this turn of events. Christian and I rarely see eye-to-eye on most matters. So while I agree with his assessment of the underlying issues affecting FFXIII and XIII-2, my outlook on the company's future isn't nearly as dire as his. (I also disagree with many of Christian's assertions about FFXIII, such as the claim that lead protagonist Lightning lacked a demonstrable character arc, but that's neither here nor there.) From having spoken to FFXIII-2 director Motomu Toriyama and producer Yoshinori Kitase several times over the past couple of years, I get the impression that they're sincerely concerned about the series' direction and want to keep Final Fantasy relevant. From what I know of Square Enix's corporate culture, I also suspect that they're hobbled by the conservative nature of Japanese business, which can be slow to change when processes and standards that worked for years suddenly become ineffectual.
Rather than simply rebut Gamasutra's editorial, I'd rather examine a few thoughts that Toriyama and scenario director Daisuke Watanabe provided in an email interview conducted after I completed the game. I was left with my own complaints about XIII-2, most of which were explicated in my review, and hoped that I could find a little more clarity through an interview. Their responses offer interesting insight into the game, both through what the creators said and what they didn't say.
FFXIII-2's biggest shortcoming is, without question, its narrative. Not just in terms of story, but the manner in which the entire tale is presented. FFXIII featured a fairly strong cast of protagonists that fit together well enough to drive the plot. From the start, the game made clear the fact that Lightning, Sazh, and Snow were propelled by a common drive to rescue their loved ones from a living death, and their mission became bound to that of the other party members by virtue of a curse placed upon them by their world's "gods." The bizarre cosmology of that world was presented clearly, and the tension between the dual realms of Pulse and Cocoon along with their amoral, suicidal gods provided an acceptable background for the story. Though the tale often stumbled, especially in its ham-handed presentation, it worked well enough.
XIII-2's story doesn't work. While time-travel provides the primary hook for the narrative, the wherefores of its rules for jumping through the timeline and how events in different eras affect one another never make much sense. In fact, when I specifically asked Watanabe what the rules for the game's time-travel mechanics were, the totality of his response was, "This is more like a characteristic rather than a 'rule,' but, 'If you change the future, you change the past.'" To me, this suggests that the lack of clarity of in the game itself comes from a poorly considered story -- one in which the complexities of time-travel were never properly thought through. Even seemingly obvious details, like the way Hope and his assistant Alyssa pop up across the centuries at various stages in their careers but always appear to be 21 years old, undermine the bedrock of the game's premise.
Toriyama even concedes the shadow other time-travel works cast over XIII-2's development. "The subject matter of time travel has a treasure vault of masterpieces not limited to RPGs," he writes. "We were bracing ourselves to be compared to every possible piece of work. When we were building a comfortable time travel system for a high-end console -- for example contemplating what method would be the most appropriate to express moving through time with fancy visuals -- we continuously kept Chrono Trigger in the back of our mind and aimed to better the quality of the game."
You'd be hard-pressed to claim that FFXIII-2 offers any real improvements on Chrono Trigger, though. In that game, the party's ability to leap through time was well-defined, and the rules of causality played heavily into the story. Most of Chrono Trigger's side quests revolved around setting future wrongs right by journeying into the past; you could always be certain that by teaching someone the value of kindness or sowing forests in years gone by, the world of the future would become a better place. The results of your actions in FFXIII-2, on the other hand, feel haphazard. Sometimes your actions change the timeline (even in reverse, a phenomenon whose nature is never properly explained), but more often than not they simply create a better alternate reality to which major characters are shunted while minor NPCs continue to wander around beneath a cloud of doom and unhappiness. It seems the only way to enjoy a happy future in XIII-2 is to have been lucky enough to have been born with a unique character model.
The flaws of FFXIII-2's time-travel rules become even more obvious when the game directly mimics Chrono Trigger. The gameplay constraints of the older game were explained in an arbitrary but acceptable fashion by the omniscient narrator in the End of Time (a place outside of the normal flow of time), and they made sense in that context. When the party's time-travel adventures went awry, the reason for those errors was always self-evident. Not so in FFXIII-2; although it obeys similar rules to Chrono Trigger (up to and including the existence of an isolated fragment of reality in which time-travelers gone astray wash up), those laws are explained as needed by the party members themselves rather than an outside observer -- yet how mundane protagonists Serah and Noel (whose journey through time we see in its entirety from the moment it's foisted upon them) suddenly know the intricacies of temporal mechanics is never touched upon. Perhaps this is a small detail, but it demonstrates a lack of the essential consideration required to elevate the best time-travel tales to classic status. The nebulous rules by which the story operates diminish any tension that could have been instilled by its cliché-spouting villain; without definite stakes, the plot lacks a clear sense of urgency.
At least the time-travel game mechanics are presented well; one area in which Final Fantasy continues to excel is interface and world design. Toriyama notes, "We looked to YouTube and used that interface as our reference point and brushed up the system to enable easy browsing so that it would be a simple menu for both core gamers and people who like a more casual gameplay." The final result is actually more akin to Apple's iTunes Coverflow than YouTube, but it works well -- though it also has the downside of rendering the confusing interrelations between eras and alternate realities in high relief.
The second weak link in FFXIII-2's narrative exists in its protagonists, Serah and Noel. While I applaud the developers for attempting something new here -- no "core" Final Fantasy has ever featured a party of fewer than three characters, and clearing the deck of secondary party members reduced a great deal of the extraneous narrative clutter that's bogged down the latter hours of previous games -- the characters themselves suffer from the same lack of focus as the time-travel elements of the tale. Surprisingly, Watanabe suggests that writing for the duo actually posed a greater difficulty than juggling a larger cast.
"[FFXIII] was a drama in which the desires of six people, each with different circumstances, undergo conflict and struggles, finally becoming one group pursuing a common goal," he writes. "We had an ensemble cast in the previous installment, and we wanted to change the flavor for this game [and] create new characters that have different personalities from the previous six. [...] In a large group, when everyone is an important character, we have trouble with balancing dialogue. If we just let them have conversations, the characters are perceived as either 'talking a lot, and asserting their opinions,' or 'always listening without contributing to the group'; the latter becomes something like a supporting role.
"In a large group, there are many different kinds of people: Brave people, calm people, people who think on their feet, people who are knowledgeable, that belong in the group; so there is an advantage in that it's easier to control the flow of the dialogue. On the other hand, when there are only two people, and let's say they were a combo of a 'calm person' and a 'cautious person,' then [...] a line like 'the probability of us surviving is only 10%, but let's take our chances and jump into that flame!' would need some tweaking to make it realistic. We don't want the conversation to repeat the same pattern of 'one is always being calm, and the other always shrinks back in fear' each time, so we control the conversation based on the emotions in each scene."
Gamasutra's editorial blasts FFXIII-2 for a lack of authorial vision. Not to play apologist for what has proven to be an uneven RPG, but I'm not sure that take is entirely fair. True, FFXIII-2 does feel at times like a story adrift, but looking at the bigger picture and the creators' musings on their creative obstacles, I think the real problem here is that classic conundrum involving the teaching of new tricks to old dogs. XIII-2's key personnel have been with the series since at least Final Fantasy VII, meaning they were involved in the development of its most popular and successful entries.
The rules and standards that worked in the PlayStation era are well past their sell-by date, but the entire Final Fantasy production cycle -- and, on many levels, Square Enix as a whole -- has been built around the techniques and processes that worked two hardware generation ago, when gamers held different expectations and the cost of making games was far more modest. Perhaps I'm reading too much into them, but my impression is that Watanabe's comments on the challenges of writing for a smaller cast than in previous entries speaks to the entire team's consternation at the resistance that Final Fantasy XIII faced in the marketplace and online. According to their process, they did everything "right," only to find that the end result was out of step with contemporary expectations. And now they have to figure out how to relearn the entire production process while struggling to figure out how to express the idea of "Final Fantasy" in a format that remains relevant to its target audience's current tastes.
Unfortunately, they're still struggling to get it, as seen in the way the game caters so desperately to the developers' perception of Western tastes in terms of mechanics yet still features incredibly Japanese dialogue and characters whose designs are sublime in their preposterousness. Perhaps the problem is an underlying cultural schism. When I asked about why Noel, the last man left alive on the planet in his apocalyptic future, seems to spend so much time on his appearance, Watanabe's response spoke of symbolism and stylization.
"Noel's appearance was in the vein of what happened with Fang from the previous title," he writes, "conceived from the image of 'a life in the wild, different from the civilized metropolis of Cocoon.' Caius was living in a similar manner, but since we wanted to emphasize the eeriness of the 'immortal man who has lived for centuries,' he ended up with a symbolic design like that. Not just in the outer appearance of the characters, but from the art direction to the slightest details in the worldview, we always ask ourselves, 'Where should we place more importance; In the middle of portraying reality and impressionism, or in the threshold of realism and symbolism?' It's not that we take being realistic and 'believable' for granted, but our purpose isn't the 'recreation' of a real world but the 'expression' of an exciting story."
I have trouble imagining a Western developer offering that answer -- or if they did, for the final expression of that desire for stylized visuals to express itself in the form of Noel and Caius. The visual design of the game's characters is very much Japanese -- though I don't pretend to know if the way that country's character designs gravitate toward the exotic and impractical is rooted in culture, in teen trends, or even in some off-kilter focus-tested misperception of what gamers want. Whatever the case, I have to wonder if the stewards of Final Fantasy (and many other series) realize how off-putting their creations can be to the foreign markets they're trying to eagerly to cater to. Not that they should adopt the aggressively bland American character design standard of an angry white guy with cropped brunette hair and a hoodie by any means... but surely, somehow, there's a way to achieve a happy medium.
Nevertheless, I see a silver lining in FFXIII-2 despite its issues, because its messy narrative is bound together by excellent gameplay. The battle system is elegant yet frenetic, and the skill trees and monster-capturing components offer genuine choice without feeling overly complex or fussy. The game's mechanical successes, I suspect, explain the different conclusions Christian and I have drawn from our experiences with the game: He's a highly story-oriented RPG fan, while I care mostly about mechanics and consider a good video game plot an unexpected bonus. FFXIII-2's story is not good, and its Halo 2-level unresolved ending is a slap to the face of anyone who makes the mistake of caring about it. But it plays incredibly well, and to me that speaks of a fundamental competence -- a promising base for building a future, for correcting its course.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 stands as a flawed but encouraging step in the right direction. Having been a fan of the series since it debuted in the U.S. more than 20 years ago, I'm not ready to write it off just yet; right now, it's suffering the growing pains that seem endemic to all its 1980s contemporaries. Consider the state of the Castlevania series, rebooted into something almost unrecognizable. OrMega Man, a stump of a brand cauterized by its own creators and rendered a laughingstock. OrZelda, still solid but increasingly bogged down by its desire to be everything to everyone. Phantasy Star barely exists. Sonic the Hedgehog is in such a dire state that fans are willing to cling to the merest glimmer of competence as a sign of hope. The next Metal Gear had to be outsourced to Platinum after its creators couldn't figure out what to do with it. Even reliable Dragon Quest has pissed off its most loyal fans by going massively multiplayer for its tenth installment. Of the industry's handful of long-running franchises, only Mario -- ever malleable, ever pure -- remains on-track these days.
Simply put, time isn't kind to video game legacies. The Final Fantasy brand is suffering from the same malaise of age that plagues all its NES-era contemporaries. XIII-2 is definitely not the game to save the series, but the radical changes and uneven design of the thing are the result of a desire to right a listing ship, not of apathetic captains. The creators need to rein it in a bit and cut back on the superficial nonsense -- the puzzles, the quick-time events -- but the fact that they're exploring solutions rather than simply digging an ever-deeper rut of irrelevance for themselves gives me hope that Final Fantasy will reinvent itself and survive another 20 years where so many of its contemporaries have fallen. And if not, at least it'll go down swinging.
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