Final Fantasy XIII: Culture clash

The Playstation era of the Final Fantasy series was a curious phenomenon. On the one hand, the huge sales of Final Fantasy VII forcefully vaulted RPGs into the mainstream. On the other, for every gamer who genuinely loved RPG stat progression and turn-based battles, there were another five who were really only along for the ride because of Square's spectacular technological displays and gorgeous FMVs. While series like Zelda and Mario awkwardly transitioned into muddy 3D, Final Fantasy VII opted for gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds. The series cashed in on the promise of next-generation visuals quicker than anyone else, and for a while its selling point was that it just looked better. True, some loved the genre for what it was, and went on to play Suikodens and Xenosagas and Chrono Crosses and Tales of Symphonias. Many others, however, ooh'd and aah'd at the opening cutscenes, played it for a couple of hours, wondered what the fuss was about, and then went back to GoldenEye.

Final Fantasy VII

The criticism is often levied upon JRPGs that they haven't evolved as a genre. While some of the genre's standard bearers (see: Dragon Quest) may be guilty of this claim, I don't think it can be said of the Final Fantasy series. True, Final Fantasy coasted on its ATB battle system and its superior visuals for pretty much the entirety of the 90s. But once the Playstation 2 rolled out, and full 3D became effectively mandatory, Square was forced to experiment with the series to ensure that it continued to stand out. Even the ardent fans were growing weary of same old, same old. Consequently, every Final Fantasy outing since X has taken a surprising new direction.

Final Fantasy X scrapped the pseudo-real-time ATB for a true turn-based system, eliminated character levels and XP, and introduced character swapping during battles. The product was still functionally the same – stat-based, menu-driven combat – but the tenth installment marked a definitive shift away from the cut-copy nature of the previous nine. XI dipped the series' feet – for better or worse – into the waters of massively multi-player online role-playing games. XII did away with compartmentalized enemy encounters, with every battle occurring in real-time on the world map, and was Square's first foray into party meta-management. That is to say, rather than controlling characters directly through specific commands, the bulk of the strategy was in setting up a tactical suite of Gambits – simple AI scripts – to manage characters indirectly.

Final Fantasy XII's real-time combat

And that brings us to XIII. What's very clear about the game, after playing it for only a few hours, is that the end result we get in Final Fantasy XIII is the result of Square Enix listening sensitively to player feedback for the past twenty years. All of the following has been said about Final Fantasy at one point or another, some of them rightly:

“The game is too easy. All you do is press attack over and over.”
“Status effects and secondary abilities aren't useful compared to attacking and curing.”
“It's too easy to get lost in dungeons and get interrupted by random encounters.”
“There are too many dumb mini-games cluttering up the experience.”
“The pacing is too slow; there are too many cutscenes.”
“The core gameplay isn't that fun. You'd really only play this game for the story.”

Lightning and Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII

The team behind Final Fantasy XIII clearly made earnest attempts to incorporate all of this feedback when designing the game. The desire to produce an RPG that could be appreciated on a wide scale as an RPG, and not just as a technical showcase or an interactive storybook, is transparently fervent, and perhaps best exhibited in the combat system. As a corpus of gameplay mechanics which demand tactical thinking, quick reflexes, and thoughtful responsiveness, it's easily one of the best in the series. Players are frequently required to make tactical switches between Paradigms - customizable party setups based on job combinations - to succeed. One might begin the fight with "Evened Odds" - which focuses on simultaneously debilitating the enemy and bolstering the party's status - and then switch to "Relentless Assault" for an all-out offensive. It's fast-paced, mentally demanding, makes good use of its mechanics, and most important of all, it's fun.

But in refining the genre's gameplay to its logical endpoint, Square Enix produced a game which could be accused of being stripped-down, grueling, and unfriendly. The game is certainly no longer easy; the question now is whether some of its encounters simply demand the player to think about too much too quickly. There's no risk of being lost in dungeons, but that's because most of them are just a straight line. There are certainly no mini-games to break up the pacing, but neither is there a proper town in sight, a world map to explore, or even many people to talk to. And the gameplay? If you like RPGs, it's definitely fun – but you had better like RPGs, because the game is more laboriously combat-focused than any other in the series.

The gameplay experience is refined, yes – perhaps over-refined, because it ends up feeling a little bit emaciated. This vague sensation of hollowness is the product of game designers diligently stripping the game of any chaff that might get in the way of a fun battle system; the result is a game which is pretty much just a battle system (albeit a very good one) and a handful of cutscenes. And the reviews, which were lukewarm as the venerable series goes, reflect this problem – Square Enix, for all their efforts, just can't seem to make an RPG that a Western audience wants to play for its own merits. They can't be accused of not trying. Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII are such polar opposites of each other that they almost feel like the results of a thought experiment. But, while their visuals continue to dazzle, their game mechanics both continue to elicit the same general apathy from North American gamers.

Why? What is it that makes an RPG accessible to a Western audience? If we were to look at recent hits like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Bioshock, the common denominator would seem to be guns. But the distinction lies a bit deeper than that. The JRPG is fundamentally about abstraction from reality. The fun is that it does not closely mimic the way actual battles work: Enemies line up on opposite sides of the battlefield and take turns. Characters learn abilities from items, sphere grids, or mythical beasts. Mechanics like Boosting (Xenosaga), Comboing (Shadow Hearts: Covenant), and Paradigms (Final Fantasy XIII) have only very loose analogs to real life, if any at all. Any semblance of realism is wholely in service of developing tactical depth and satisfying character progression.

Mass Effect 2

Modern RPGs produced by Western developers tend to take the opposite approach. RPG abstractions, like XP and levels, tend to supplement what is a fundamentally realistic experience. Recently, even highly realistic games which are decidedly not RPGs – like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – have decided to spice up the package with the succulent allure of grind-reward. Meanwhile, the “proper” RPGs, like Mass Effect 2, blur the genre's boundaries by putting a greater focus on twitch gunplay and cover mechanics. Experience points are only doled out upon mission completion; the ability system is vastly streamlined when compared to its predecessor. It's not that the statistical elements are just gravy – Mass Effect 2 is quite unambiguously an RPG, though some of the ambiguity is dissolved by the presence of actual role-playing – but the crucial distinction is that the game wants to make you feel like Commander Shepard, much moreso than it makes you feel like the sum of your stats.

I should conclude by noting that I am a huge fan of both Final Fantasy XIII and the series in general, and I don't think the sum of Square Enix's experiments over the past decade was a string of bad games. Japanese RPGs scratch a very particular itch; if you get the urge for Sphere Grids or Paradigm Shifts, Mass Effect or Bioshock just won't do. On the other hand, their inability to connect with the popular audience that the games were intended for certainly represents a failure of some sort. If there is a lesson to be learned from the languishing state of JRPGs, it is that many gamers resonate much more strongly with non-abstracted experiences. In a way, RPGs are going stronger than ever, but they must be wary of letting their own fetish for statistics consume them.