Final Fantasy XIII

For those of you who haven't talked to me recently (because if you have, I'm sure you already know), Final Fantasy XIII came out last week, and I've been playing it quite a bit.

If you follow Icarus's blog, you've already read a post about this game. However, I'm going to focus on something a little bit different.

Overall, I've been loving pretty much every aspect of the game. The new Paradigm battle system is absolutely beautiful to watch, making battles resemble what used to only be possible in pre-rendered cutscenes or movies like Advent Children. It may seem a little bit passive, but it's still a ton of fun to use and hasn't gotten old even after many hours of gameplay.

Also, it's fairly hard. To me, that's actually quite enjoyable. I like to play through video games on the hardest setting, as I prefer something that gives me a challenge and I tend to be fairly good at video games. The Paradigm battle system is set up in such a way so that if you die, you usually do so because you made the wrong move or forgot to pay attention to something, not because you were dogpiled by ten thousand unkillable enemies. Because of this, when I die, I usually shake me head and think "yep, I should have done that differently" instead of growling at the game for being unfair and unbeatable.

The battle system is not really what I want to focus on, though. The main thing is the characters/story and how the graphics contribute to them. The story is one of the best I've seen in a video game for a long time. You can tell the designers put some real effort into building a world and characters. Not only that, but the characters are developed in such a way that pulls you into their stories. I wrote a post not too long ago about characterization, and Final Fantasy XIII is succeeding as well if not better than Final Fantasy X did. I'm pretty sure, within the first hour or two of the game, I had already sighed, smiled, laughed, yelled, flinched, and brushed back tears along with the characters.

One reason that this game is succeeding so well at telling a powerful story is the graphics. Normally, graphics and story are not closely linked. There are plenty of games out their with crappy graphics and a beautiful story, or vice versa.

Final Fantasy XIII's graphics are different because of the amount of work that was spent on characters' faces. There are an incredible number of polygons in each character's face, which means that developers can make faces seem even more lifelike that ever before. More than just the number of polygons, though, is the way that the faces are animated. The developers had to have spent a fair amount of time observing and learning how to animate emotion and, as a result, were able to express an incredible range of emotions with a level of subtlety and grace that has never been approached until now.

This makes you identify with characters more and immerses you more deeply in the experience. Mouths sync with words, faces convey the appropriate emotions, and everything just seems to fit, giving you more time to empathize and less to critique.

Even the voice acting is superb, done by people with expressive voices that match their characters. Some games sound like they were voiced by the people who developed them. In XIII, though, I have yet to hear a voice actor who sounded anything but convincing.

So hats off to Square Enix for using their advancements in graphics to do more than make pretty explosions. Their superb work in incorporating emotional subtleties into the characters pays off big time.