And yes, finished this, and not even a week behind schedule!
1. Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360, Square Enix, 2010)
Much has been already written about Final Fantasy XIII. Chances are most people reading this have a fairly strong opinion on the game, whether or not they have even played it. You may think it's the best JRPG of the current generation, or the worst, or anything in between. Regardless, I'll submit that it's probably one of the most worth talking about. Almost nothing is conservative about FF13's game design; for better or worse, it strikes out to re-invent its own genre.
Right off the bat, and one of its most key traits that makes me like the game, is its decision to streamline the RPG experience. The game will never, ever make you spend half an hour exploring a town for plot triggers, or collecting items for some lame fetchquest, or forcing you to play mini-games, or figuring out where the game wants you to go. If you want to get on with the game, you'll always know what you have to do (follow that orange arrow) and I for one greatly appreciate this. The game has been concentrated, shedding all but the aspects of the RPG I actually play games for: telling a story, and having fun, enjoyable battles. It means that I can turn the game on, play for an hour, and expect to be entertained rather than to put up with some sort of bullshit.
In another effort to speed up the game experience, dying in battle now takes you to right before the battle began. Other games have done similar things (such as recent entries in the Wild Arms and Suikoden series), but with FF13, you don't just get to refight the battle, but tinker with your setup as well so you can find something that works better. Even better, if you think a battle has gone south but don't want to wait to actually lose it, you can restart the battle with from a menu option. As a result, you'll never have to redo large amounts of game due to a death.
This, of course, frees up the game to make battles much more challenging. No longer having to worry about annoying players by killing them, many of the battles in Final Fantasy XIII, regular fights as well as bosses, can be deadly. A few are deadly enough that the game is actively encouraging you to avoid them (such as a few memorable nasties when you first arrive in Pulse), but for the most part, they're just relatively challenging fights that the game expects you to use the system against. Especially from later in the game I find most individual enemies memorable, something almost unheard of for me after a single playthrough of an RPG. I consider this a great thing.
As for the actual system itself? Again, it's pretty terrific. It succeeds at what I feel many action RPGs fall short at, mixing the analysing and decision-making found in RPG battles with a fast tempo. Choices are still made via menus, but the decisions need to come fast. The game's interface strives to make this possible; you can queue actions as your ATB gauge fills up instead of waiting for it to be full and then scrambling at the last second. It's pretty much the best version of ATB the series has produced, rewarding quick thinking without sacrificing too much of the strategy side of things. Also serving to help this is the paradigm shift system, which allows you to control the way your party fights, with more difficult battles expecting you to make use of it extensively to react to what the enemies are doing and manage your party's strategies. Like a good action RPG, it's a game where I can forgive the fact that only one PC is controlled directly because with the speed of the game it simply would not be possible to control all three.
Several more decisions surrounding battle are good and need to be noted. First of all, MP is gone, so you can focus on just managing and surviving each battle instead of trying to horde it away for an unforseen rainy day, which generally makes things more fun I find, putting the emphasis further on individual memorable fights. There are plenty of choices to be made when assembling a party, as each PC varies not only by stats but their available roles and skillsets... and the PCs furthermore get full CP (Exp, essentially) when out of the party so the player is free to try out different parties without screwing herself over in the long term. The game adopts a scoring system which provides the player with incentive to play well (instead of just slowly turtling through fights), which means you always have something to shoot for in battles, even the ones which are easier. And if you're bad at the game, it will start throwing shrouds at you, which have a very powerful effect on battles. I personally disliked them because they felt cheap, but I can see why they're there, to help ensure the game is ultimately completable regardless of one's skill level.
So the gameplay is new, fresh, and generally a smashing success. The writing is less so, certainly, but it still does some decidedly good things. In particular, it manages to deliver a very strong cast, in which each character has clearly fleshed out, unique motivations and comes from a unique background before the story begins. Very often this leads to the characters clashing, and combined with the generally horrid situation they find themselves in, leads to a lot of dramatic tension and quite a few good scenes. It's great to see a game put this much effort into all of its characters; they're not all likable people by any means (something I find refeshing), but they are quite interesting and play off each other well.
There's also some good setting elements in the game, those they bothered to flesh out anyway. Cocoon society bears a frightening resemblance to some of the more unpleasant aspects of our own, with a government which takes a page from Orwell and induces fear and paranoia in its own citizens to gain their compliance. It made for an enjoyable antagonist for our heroes to go up against, though sadly is really only a factor in the first half of the game.
Unfortunately, writing is also where the game makes its biggest errors. In general, the whole second half of the game feels incomplete, with far fewer cutscenes than are needed to flesh out the story the writers were trying to tell, and a considerable underutilisation of the game's second setting, Pulse. And while the PC cast is excellent, the NPC cast is virtually non-existant. One NPC has some decent romantic scenes via flashbacks, and the main villain deserves points for being a deviously effective troll who masterfully manipulates the PC cast to do what he wants, but past that there's little to like, with Rosch, a villain who the writers can't seem to decide if he's dead or not, being a particular black mark. The game, in its effort to create strong, dramatic scenes, sometimes goes too far and falls into weak melodrama merely toying senselessly with the player's emotions, with one particularly egregious example being a sequence involving one of the PCs considering (and ostensibly committing) suicide.
Though these are certainly the game's biggest faults, it's not flawless on other fronts, either. While the AI control ends up perfectly acceptable, there's still no real excuse to not allow the player to switch leaders, and to tie a leader's death to game over; it feels inelegant. And of course, the game could really afford to grant the player more choice of party and roles earlier in the game. This latter concern isn't a huge one to me (after all, plenty of RPGs never offer party choice, or offer very little, including a couple already on this year's list!) but it does lead to the feeling of a lengthy forced tutorial. If it is a tutorial, it's still a very fun one to play, and does ease one into the game's various roles and strategies before expecting you to put it all together against the nasty fights in the second half, but a little less restriction on this front would still have been nice.
The game has a few other signature decisions which I do not consider weaknesses, but I would do the game's reputation a disservice not to discuss them. First and undoubtedly foremost is the game's linearity. Without question, it is a rather linear experience. Outside of lategame FF5 and FF6 (and FF5 is a bit of a stretch), the series always has been quite linear, so this really isn't anything new, but certainly FF13 is moreso than most; the plot makes it impossible for you to backtrack until late and the dungeons don't offer much branching (though of course, neither did those of FF9 or FFX, for instance). "FF13 is linear" is a true statement, but it's a linear genre and anyway I can't see this as much of a weakness anyway. I generally prefer linear games for their ability to have tighter narratives, better balanced gameplay, and not waste my time figuring out where to go, so, of course, I'd be more inclined to view this as a positive attribute of the game anyway!
Another contraversial aspect of FF13 is its decision to do away with towns. Given the story FF13 set out to tell, towns (outside the one town-like environment it does have, Nautilus) would feel very out of place, given the PCs are on the run from the government. But even setting that aside, I don't really feel as if there's much of a loss. After recently watching the first disc of FF9 again, in which the game expects the player to waste loads of time activating plot trigger after plot trigger in the town of Lindblum (all to tell a not-exactly-intriuguing story), I can't say I miss most of them. Towns are at worst a huge timesink into things which are uninteresting, and at best a good opportunity to develop setting, but as you can see from my earlier comments I don't think FF13 failed to do so anyway.
Similarly, the game mostly did away with sidequests. While on the one hand, sidequests have the potential to add to a game inoffensively (optional content which you do or don't do at your leisure), they again would have felt out of place in the story FF13 was trying to tell (fugitives don't really have the time or the desire to do fetch quests), and again, they aren't something I especially miss, because I'd rather not have them at all than put up with bad, forced ones which waste my time. The game does eventually open up enough to have them, and they're pretty much the best type of optional content in a game (tougher bonus fights, not "find this hidden item" type garbage), when the story no longer has the PCs so pressed for time. While it's a legitimate complaint that they aren't available earlier (one I'm more sympathetic to than complaints about linearity or towns, certainly), in practice I didn't find it personally bothersome at all.
That leaves one last shout-out to the games graphics and music. It is of course fantastically pretty, which at this level is in fact definitely worth something to me, and the soundtrack, while not perfect throughout, certainly delivers some very solid tracks, and in an RPG it's always a big bonus when one of those is the most common battle theme.
Final Fantasy has, with only occasional exceptions, always been a series that has preferred to lead rather than follow. Certainly, FF13 represents a bold step in a new direction, one which chooses to emphasise certain aspects of the genre. Fortunately for me, they're the aspects I care about. It's the polar opposite of Dragon Quest IX, for me; rather than a boring retread of the genre's failings, it tries instead to step away from those and pull the genre in an interesting new direction. It's not a game without its kinks, but it was nevertheless a unique and thoroughly enjoyable experience, and only my exceptionally high opinion of Final Fantasy X prevents it from entering consideration to be my favourite game in a series that I hold in quite high esteem. And ultimately, that's enough to reign over all the other games I played this year.
The good: Some great battle design decisions, solid gameplay executed well in many memorable fights, very strong PC cast
The bad: Storytelling goes seriously downhill late, limited party/leader choice early
The ugly: The eternal internet shit-slinging over this game
That's it for this year. Hope everyone enjoyed reading.
