Final Fantasy XIII

... has sucked up a huge chunk of time recently, and it really shouldn't have. That time is completely wasted and I should have realized by now - after having played every Final Fantasy from 7 through 12 - that I would just have to start over and play it through once I got the Prima strategy guide. I know: I'm cheap. But I realize that's the kind of player I am and I want to get all the goodies along the way and not miss anything.

Plus, the sometimes intrusive Final Fantasy tutorial system neglected to mention that I shouldn't be crapping through all my Aegisol and Fortisol fighting random trash monsters because - surprise! - you won't be able to get any more of these incredibly valuable items later in the game... They were dropping like rain in the first couple chapters so I used them up assuming my time of plenty would never end. O, what a fool I.

Generally, Finaly Fantasy XIII is a mixed bag for me. I like the game enough to play it through again (the combat system is innovative and yet the game is familiar enough to let me play it as Final Fantasy). I can definitely say, though, that I'm not invested in most of the characters the way I was in XII, X, or VII, or even as much as in the comparatively weak characters in VIII (FFIX was a disaster so I don't really count that). Apart from Lightning and perhaps Vanille, the characters could all die in a train crash and I wouldn't miss them or care where their boring stories were going. I routinely skip any cutscene with Sazh, Fang, or Snow because Sazh and Snow are boring stock characters while Fang's personality fades into the background noise as "random ornery woman".

I generally expect there to be a character or two that is just garbage: I think there's a rule somewhere in Japan where you have to have a trash character in your anime-looking RPG, no matter what. It was true for FFVII (Cait Sith), Breath of Fire III (Momo), FFX (Waka), FFXII (Penelo)... For some reason there's always a character that is neither badass nor central nor useful in battle nor otherwise interesting. Yet the game forces you to use this character for a couple hours of time-sink for reasons beyond my ability to divine (I can only imagine that these trash characters have some other value in Japan that I don't grasp). XIII's problem lies in the fact that at least half of the cast is the "worthless trash character".

Finally, is there a rule at Square Enix that all your proper nouns have to be drawn from an internet word generator? For fully a third of the game I had no idea what was being referred to when someone said Pulse, l'cie, fal'cie, ci'eth, cocoon, and so forth. These are pretty important elements and the story lost my interest several times because there was zero explanation of how to decode the game's nomenclature. It didn't help that once I realized what these words meant I recognized how stupid the names were and they could have just as easily been replaced with something recognizable (for the record, the words above can roughly be translated Earth, demigod, god, demon, and space station).

...

Hmm, I guess I didn't like FFXIII as much as I imagined; at least not the story itself. It's a testament to how well the game is designed as a game, though, that I'm still planning on playing it through again, only skipping all the tedious cutscenes.