No Escape

This project has been such a strange experience for me. I feel my relationships with these games and with the rest of the Final Fantasy franchise constantly shifting as I learn more, do more reading, finish more of the core games I’ve decided to take a look at. My reaction to the misogyny in Final Fantasy XV no longer feels like just some vague feeling of unease at the way certain characters were written; playing the Final Fantasy VII remakes now evokes within me a strange sense of recognition as hints of the Active Time Battle system from Final Fantasy XIII peek their way through the layers of modern remake paint. The heart of Fabula Nova Crystallis beats in games that theoretically shouldn’t even be in the conversation, like Final Fantasy XVI with its Type-0-style crystal-oriented warring societies and grimdark tone. And yet I’ve played nothing outside of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy that makes me more certain of my original hypothesis—that “for all the ways new series entries keep FFXIII‘s legacy alive, it sometimes feels like these titles are themselves participating in backlash against their predecessor”—than Final Fantasy XIII-2 itself.

In every sense, Final Fantasy XIII-2 feels like an apology for what came before. From the way mechanics were “streamlined” to the ways characters talked to each other, Final Fantasy XIII-2 felt basically purpose built to put a western audience’s mind at ease that, no, of course we’re not trying to do anything that would make you uncomfortable! Have some Red Dead Redemption! We won’t make it too girly for you! This sense that Square Enix was in some way embarrassed by Final Fantasy XIII even extends to this direct sequel’s base premise, which is that what happened in Final Fantasy XIII was a divine mistake.

The Apology Tour

I’m about to dive into a fairly late-game spoiler, but here’s what you need to know first: Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a time travel story that involves Serah Farron, XIII protagonist Lightning’s sister, and Noel Kreiss, a hunter from “the end of time,” traveling through a bunch of future-historical periods and solving so-called “paradoxes” that fix the timeline and allow the pair to get closer to Lightning, who is trapped in a place called Valhalla in the middle of a fight with the game’s antagonist, Caius Ballad. Eventually, Serah travels around 700 years into the gameworld’s future and finally meets with Lightning, who tells her what happened after the end of XIII. What follows is, in my opinion, so cowardly from a narrative perspective that when I fully realized what was going on, I simply walked out of my apartment and took a lap.

At the end of Final Fantasy XIII, Vanille and Fang merge into Ragnarok and use their powers to keep a collapsing Cocoon from hitting the ground. They turn into a stunningly beautiful crystal pillar in the process. Lightning, Snow, Hope and Sazh materialize in a field on Gran Pulse many miles away, looking on as their former home and everyone they ever loved is saved from total annihilation. They no longer have l’Cie brands on their bodies; their Focus has been completed. As the sun sets, Serah and Sazh’s son Dajh appear on the horizon. There’s a tearful and joyous reunion. Lightning gives Snow her blessing to marry Serah. Leona Lewis plays in the background, credits roll, game ends.

In Final Fantasy XIII-2, however, Lightning remembers it a little differently. All the stuff I just mentioned happened, but as the remainder of the party walks into the sunset, saved family members in tow, a storm surrounds Lightning and begins to tear at her. A giant chasm opens up in the ground underneath her feet, and the storm and the earth swallow her whole, erasing her from existence in the process. She wakes up in Valhalla, meets the goddess of death, Etro, and becomes her chosen protector, a Valkyrie with a gunblade. Cool, I guess. The outfit Lightning receives is fire. But… why did the world erase her in the first place?

I realize I’m belaboring this point but I do have to make another, smaller digression.

In the Beginning…

Retrospectively it’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that, for a project with so much supposed planning like Fabula Nova Crystallis, the details were agreed upon ahead of time (or that the vicissitudes of game development had little to no effect on those details). However, at least when it comes to what the developers were willing to share publicly, that might not have been the case. It wasn’t until after Final Fantasy XIII and Type-0 had come out, in late January 2011, that Square Enix decided to release supplemental lore content in the form of the gameworld’s creation myth.

In that myth, a creator goddess, Mwynn, created the mortal world and everything in it. She also created a son, Bhunivelze, with whom she would share in the miracle of creation. But Bhunivelze was greedy and wanted the mortal realm for himself, so he killed Mwynn. She returned to a place called the Unseen Realm. As Bhunivelze gazed over his new domain, he realized that things made in the mortal world have a finite beginning and end, which he thought was a curse that Mwynn had placed, just to spite him. He believed that a union between the mortal realm and the Unseen Realm was necessary to allow for eternal life to spring out in every direction, and so created the first two fal’Cie, or Demigods: Pulse and Etro.

Bhunivelze assigned Pulse a focus: expand the world in all directions, looking for the gate to the Unseen World. Pulse began this work dutifully. But when Bhunivelze gazed upon Etro, he recoiled, because she looked too much like Mwynn. He refused to give her a focus or any power whatsoever, fearing her allegiances were already corrupted, and created a third fal’Cie, Lindzei, to replace her and protect him from her. Bhunivelze left the world and fell somewhere into a deep crystal sleep. Etro, abandoned, without purpose and distraught, then killed herself, letting her blood spill on the ground Pulse had made.

Two surprising things came out of this: first, human beings emerged into the world from Etro’s blood. Second, Etro ended up in the Unseen Realm herself, where a dying Mwynn was waiting for her. The injuries Bhunivelze had left on Mwynn had allowed for Chaos, the primordial force that permeated the Unseen Realm, to seep in, and she was fading quickly. With her final few moments, Mwynn pled with Etro to stay in the Unseen Realm and protect the balance between it and the mortal world. Etro agreed, and became the lonely goddess of death, a stewardess of souls as they drifted from one life to the next. She imbued her “children,” humanity, with small amounts of chaos, which they would later come to call “hearts” or “souls.” Both Pulse and Lindzei discovered that, in addition to creating their own lesser fal’Cie, they could indenture humans into divine servitude, grant them a small taste of power, and set them upon their own Focus. These divine servants were called l’Cie.

Now I should note this is not how the myth was presented or written, merely my retelling of it. There’s a Famitsu article out there with the myth as Square Enix presented it that I think it’s particularly illustrative of the mindset the devs had about all this. This is also what the Wikipedia page for Fabula Nova Crystallis reflects, and I even have a third source from around 2011 that confirms it as well. What’s most interesting about the Famitsu piece, though, is that the writers don’t seem to think very highly of the entire pantheon in general—Mwynn was short-sighted, Bhunivelze was selfish and paranoid, Pulse was too obedient by degrees—but the one demigod they save most of their ire for is Etro, going so far as to call her stupid or foolish when she talks to Mwynn in the Unseen Realm.^[1]エトロは愚かだったので、ムインの言葉の意味がわかりませんでした。 “Etro was foolish, so she didn’t understand Mwynn’s words.” Shoutouts to … Continue reading

So let’s return to the point of digression: Lightning met Etro and became a Valkyrie, but why was she there at all?

According to Final Fantasy XIII-2, from Lightning’s lips to God’s ears I fuckin’ swear, the reason Lightning was eaten by reality was because Etro was apparently a dumb bitch.

Cosmic Oopsies and Omelas Children

The exact gist of it is, Etro took pity on the remainder of the party after they defeated Orphan, so rather than let them turn to crystal for fulfilling their Focus, she just erased their l’Cie brands with the intent of giving them back a normal life. This action tore the fabric of spacetime and allowed chaos to seep into the mortal realm, claiming Lightning for oblivion. It also backfired on Etro in the process, mortally wounding her.

And like… I fuckin hate this decision, man. I was already not enjoying Final Fantasy XIII-2 because of all the machismo and chivalrous misogyny on display between Snow, Noel Kreiss and Caius Ballad. To get to this point in the game, which I arrived at like 30-some-odd hours into my playthrough, only to be told that the reason I’m even here doing all this bullshit is because the last game should not have happened, I’m just kind of left deflated. Like, alright, bet. Why bother continuing? What are we really truly doing here?

This shit wasn’t the worst part, if you can believe it.

There’s also the reincarnating Omelas Child, Paddra Nsu-Yeul, or just Yeul for short. A teenage girl with the power of clairvoyance whose lifespan is cut short every time she sees a vision of the future, Yeul serves as the emotional core of both Noel and Caius’s characters, though each of them have different reasons why this is the case. For Noel, Yeul is the only other person roughly his age in existence, and he treats her somewhere between a budding love interest and his younger sister. For Caius, Yeul’s sworn guardian and an immortal being with the heart of Etro in his chest, he is tormented by the hundreds, possibly even thousands of times he’s watched Yeul succumb to her power’s cost. He is ready to destroy time and space itself and let the Unseen Realm come crashing into the mortal world if it means stopping the eternal cycle of death and rebirth that Yeul is seemingly trapped in.

I’ve seen folks say they really like Caius because his villainy would so clearly be the protagonist’s motivations in any other Final Fantasy. You know, fight god to save the girl. I get it. It’s also total hogwash. Caius is the only person who insists that Yeul, who has mostly accepted her fate and the terms of her powers, needs to be saved. He doesn’t care what her thoughts on the situation are, because all that matters is what he wants for her. He doesn’t see the broader perspective that even if she does die over and over again, as long as she is able to see a bright future for the world where everyone is happy, the world will not end. But Caius doesn’t give a shit. He is her protector, and her main threat is simply dying.

By the way, those powers of hers start to manifest in Serah from the beginning of the game. When we find out Serah fully has the power to see the future, we’ve already learned that it’s a fatal ability. And so naturally, the game has its “good” ending when, after Caius is defeated, Serah succumbs to her clairvoyance and dies in Noel’s arms—and the Unseen Realm comes crashing into the mortal world anyway.

Sorry about the last video game, the video game

There’s a lot more in Final Fantasy XIII-2 I just really could not stand. The theme song for New Bodhum sounds like some shit Jack Johnson would play in 1998 at a Coachella side party. The Crystarium is awful and confusing despite being “streamlined.” The monster-collecting and secret object hunting really did nothing to add to my experience. A couple of the side quests were interesting but side-questing writ large didn’t really do much for me. The movement was kind of crummy across the board, but nowhere was it worse than when I had to do a fucking platforming puzzle at the end of the game like I was in the fucking King’s Fall raid in Destiny (2014). The Live Triggers and cinematic actions I thought could have been interesting, but often didn’t really do much to add context or weight to encounters. And I really cannot stress enough: the misogyny in this game makes a lot of Atlus titles look progressive.

Ultimately though, I am glad I played Final Fantasy XIII-2 and got through it. It has helped me understand the Final Fantasy franchise of the 2010s a lot better. It’s given me important context for why we’re all still kind of at Fabula Nova Crystallis‘s mercy over a decade and a half later, and it’s given me a lot to chew on when it comes to this project. I’ve got to do a whole bunch of reading now, just to see if I can reckon with what critics were saying about this game—good and bad.

With any luck, though, it won’t take me another 14 months to get to the next milestone.