A Thousand Words on Final Fantasy XIII

I don’t play video games in 2010. I’m too busy being 18 years old, playing bass poorly in two rock-adjacent bands, and taking moody night pictures of my town. I think if you would have asked me about video games I would have scoffed in the way 18 year olds scoff at unserious endeavors. So I don’t play Final Fantasy XIII when it comes out.

My best friend has Final Fantasy XIII on their PlayStation 3. It’s like, five or six years later. I’m over at their apartment after work, and it’s getting late, and they’re shuffling through a tarot deck. They ask if I want a reading, I shrug and say “sure.” Halfway through we get bored and they tell me about how rad Final Fantasy XIII is. They hand the controller to me and go into the kitchen; I play a little bit but it’s near the end of the game and I have no idea how any of it works. They ask me what I think; I say “oh uh, it looks cool.”

I buy an Xbox One in 2017 along with a copy of Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy Type-0.

I don’t think about Final Fantasy XIII again until 2020. Final Fantasy VII Remake is fully in the zeitgeist. Final Fantasy XVI gets officially announced. Some folks take the opportunity to revisit Team Lightning. I read Harper Jay’s Kotaku piece, In Defense of Final Fantasy XIII, followed by Natalie Flores’s article at Fanbyte later in the year, An Ode to Oerba Dia Vanille. A little worm drills into my skull, penetrating my brain. I buy the game and its sequels on Xbox.

It’s 2022. I buy a Steam Deck and almost wreck myself financially. I buy Final Fantasy VII Remake as it comes out on PC. I see friends in various Discord chats talk about FFVIIR‘s stagger meter and how it reminds them of FFXIII. The worm digs deeper.

It’s last year; 2023. I’m back in Final Fantasy XV, and I’m deep in the weeds on the game’s portrayal of masculinity. I see an image of the Jimmy John’s CEO hunting big game and this juxtaposes with an image from the game of Noctis and his retinue doing the same. Final Fantasy XVI comes out; the discourse solidifies around how dour the game is, how horribly it treats women, how far removed it is from, say, Final Fantasy XIII. The worm reaches the part of my brain that can’t stop thinking about shit. It whispers. I’m done for. I start playing Final Fantasy XIII, finally, in earnest, and the obsession begins.

I find myself captivated by the game. Paying no mind to the 2010-era graphics or the overwhelming linearity (I’m sick of open world games), I’m investing in the characters’ struggles. I love how they come together at first, then separate, then coalesce again as they all figure their individual shit out. I love the eidolon battles for their narrative significance even as they frustrate me. Learning the stagger system and the paradigm system and the crystarium from scratch is challenging but I think I can do it. Playing it with other people at the same time helps give me perspective. I love learning how they’re engaging with the game, what they like and don’t like. It feels like a revelation when the discussion turns to the puzzle-like nature of the battles. Suddenly it makes perfect sense that we have to be at least somewhat intentional with our party/role configurations as we move through the game’s many organic and manmade hallways.

It feels like a foregone conclusion that Final Fantasy XIII is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest, but we have the benefit of hindsight and the self-awareness to recognize that the game was initially caught up in an onslaught of general anti-Japanese game sentiment among western critics and developers. Think Justin McElroy and Nier, Adam Sessler and Baten Kaitos, Yahtzee Croshaw and Yakuza 4. Final Fantasy XIII wasn’t completely trashed at launch by everyone, but there were prominent reviewers who expressed a genuinely outsized disdain for the game. Tim Rogers wrote two separate reviews for Action Button panning FFXIII for being a game made by “artists” instead of level designers (whatever this means), among a litany of other issues; Stephanie Sterling derided the lack of character depth and tedious battle system at Destructoid; Wired’s Chris Kohler lamented the absence of certain familiar JRPG elements and even said, incredibly: “[Final Fantasy] XIII‘s story is good… but it’s no Heavy Rain.” When Phil Fish told a Japanese game developer that Japanese games sucked at GDC 2012, it turns out that that developer worked on Final Fantasy XIII. And as we found out last year (though it should’ve been no surprise), the anti-Japanese games sentiment had a negative impact on Japanese devs writ large.

It isn’t like FFXIII is secretly perfect. It’s not. There are some legitimate issues – issues that pop up in both the more fair-minded reviews and the harsher ones – that the game can’t get away from. I think a kinder assessment would attribute many of the game’s stranger peccadilloes to the generally awkward transition from the lower-resolution PS2 era to the HD age happening at the time. Getting away from the review cycle, the critical discourse around FFXIII was always – has always been – more thoughtful, and does not shy away from the game’s flaws.

For me, finally playing and finishing Final Fantasy XIII revealed a hidden truth: the game is… fine! It’s a good game, with great characters and an interesting story, a bunch of systems that don’t all play well together all the time and individually are trying cool things but collectively kind of get in each other’s way at times, and awkward level designs. For all the ways in which it’s an aggressively okay game, it didn’t deserve the legacy it’s been given: a shadow over the Final Fantasy franchise that everyone is seemingly trying to flee.