Now that I’ve finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth I want to take stock of where Children of Lightning is as a project.
The next game I have to play in the Fabula Nova Crystallis series is Final Fantasy XIII-2, and I’ve been putting it off because to be frank, I don’t like it. I’ve started it repeatedly and just do not like the taste it leaves in my mouth. It’s like drinking a Coke only to find out that someone has switched labels on the bottle and you’re actually drinking Coke Zero. You don’t necessarily have anything against the taste in a vacuum but it’s not what you expected and it’s definitely not the kidney-killer you’re craving in the moment.
I don’t think I was surprised by my reaction given how I felt about Final Fantasy XIII, but the fact that my initial impression of the sequel has thus far kept me from playing it and indeed has caused me to play everything but it, has me pausing to think about the purpose of this project to begin with. Is it to be a booster for the FFXIII series, a cheerleader? Or is it to critically examine the way the games and the critical and popular response to them impacted games that would come after them?
The least important part of my post, A Thousand Words on Final Fantasy XIII, is the part where I say that I think the game is “fine.” I could have thought the game was unvarnished horseshit and that wouldn’t have changed the historical fact that the backlash to it is at least in part what led to motherfuckers telling Japanese devs “your games suck” to their face at literally GDC. It’s what led Square Enix director and producer Naoki Yoshida, responsible for both Final Fantasy XIV and XVI, to tell the YouTube channel SkillUp “for some developers, the term [JRPG] can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past.” Kazuma Hashimoto wrote a really great piece of criticism at Polygon (RIP) unpacking this quote (and for real, this piece is I think one of the prime motivators to my trying to tackle this whole thing in the first place so read it if you haven’t already), and he writes:
While the “Japanese” aesthetic has come back en vogue — and JRPGs have become a favored genre — it can just as easily fall out of favor among Western audiences once again. Even as the term itself remains contentious, being both used as a negative and positive descriptor even among Japanese developers, we are once again watching the cycle continue. It is still a term that “others” Japanese RPGS — whether the term is a source of discrimination, or signals an aesthetic to be fetishized. […] And this diminishes the rich tapestry of games released under the “Japanese role-playing game” umbrella in order to fulfill a fantasy for non-Japanese consumers.
So in that vein, whether or not I like Final Fantasy XIII-2 is equally irrelevant. The point of this whole thing is not to put my stamp of approval on these games, as meaningless as that would be; it’s to figure out whether they’re at the root of a conservative turn in their successors. And for better or worse FFXIII-2 is where the effects of that backlash would begin to be seen.
So much of Final Fantasy XIII-2 really is different: there are towns (or at least population hubs) full of people to talk to and sidequests to obtain and clues on how to find artefacts and shopkeepers to buy items from; you can save directly in the menu basically any time you want; levels are more open to exploration, the paradigm and crystarium systems are based around ideal builds rather than simply drip-feeding Serah and Noel their powers, you can collect monsters like Pokémon… Even the soundtrack moved away from the jazzy, textured electropop of Masashi Hamauzu into a more rock-tinged OST by Naoshi Mizuta and Mitsuto Suzuki. To use a modern term of “art,” the game got “quality of life” improvements. And I think a lot of them were implemented based on the reaction to FFXIII. Or maybe they were simply looking for ways to iterate on FFXIII using some of the assets they had left over; I’ve heard it told both ways.
I know I have to play FFXIII-2, and even though I’m less than enthused about it I will get to it. I’ve run out of diversions. FFXV, FFXVI, FFVII Remake and Rebirth—they’re all done, finished, out of the way. It’s time to get back to work.
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