Final Fantasy 13 I outlined just how horrifically bad the battle system was and that became the most popular post on this blog. 13-2 I went into great detail the many glaring plot holes I saw as I went. I picked apart what each game did the worst essentially and what stood out to me as really questionable. With 13-3 though...I honestly can't point to one thing, and that's not a good thing. Literally everything about this game leaves me scratching my head asking, why? Why did they choose to do this? Ultimately, I ask myself, why does this game even exist?
I think I will focus this blog on the main character Lightning. I've discussed in the past how terribly vexed I am about this character. How she can have 3 entire games about her and yet I know next to nothing about her at the same time. How is it that Cait Sith from FF7 has a deeper and more meaningful character arc than someone who's had 3 games devoted to her? She has no arc what-so-ever. Hilariously, the opening cinema of FF13-3 explains how God has taken her emotions away for her to complete her current quest. To which...if I had been drinking water, immediately spewed it at my TV in shock and dismay. Lightning, for the uninitiated has NEVER had any emotions to speak of to begin with. God took nothing away at all. Her entire character amounts to protect her sister....the end. She has no personal goals or needs. She has no sense of humor, no personality, she is completely a blank slate.
What vexes me so about her though isn't so much that she has literally no character to speak of, or that they had 3 games to develop her and didn't, no what vexes me is the creators of the games have all spoken out about how much they are going to miss working on games with Lightning. Interviews with them they go into great detail how attached they became to her, developing her, and going into her life and struggles etc, etc. Here I sit with my mouth agape reading this and wondering...what am I missing here? What is there about this character that has them nearly in tears having to part with her after this game? I am at a complete loss for words on this. Here are some quotes:
"We would never feel sick of these characters or these worlds," Kitase-san says. "Don't worry, we love them and we have an attachment to this whole story and characters. But in terms of this story, the whole Lightning saga story, this is going to be the end, and we're going to be moving on and not continuing in any sort of way. But the characters, since we do love them and do have an attachment to them, we're hoping there might be ways where they can make like a cameo, or something like that. For example, in Final Fantasy XIV, we're going to be doing like a collaboration with that game, and Lightning will make an appearance within the game. So we're hoping that there will be an opportunity to showcase them in some other form."
And this little ditty:
"What sets Lightning apart from the other [Final Fantasy hero] characters is that you don't see very many female heroines being the main character," says Kitase-san, "of course apart from maybe Terra from Final Fantasy VI. So that's definitely something that sets Lightning apart. She's not only a woman, but she's also very strong and also very cool, and she can put up a good fight. That's definitely one of her positive features. Even outside of the series, I got to go see the show floor at E3 and at Gamescom, and looking at other publishers I noticed that Lightning is probably one of the only female characters that pushed out in the forefront for their game titles. Of course, we had Lara Croft when Tomb Raider was about to be released, but now that that has launched, Lightning is one of the only female characters that is out there being the face of a title."
This one is my favorite:
“When I was making the game, I wasn’t really thinking about it, that I was going to have to say goodbye to her at the end of the process,” Abe told IGN through a translator. “But when I was playing the game during testing, when I reached the very end of the story, for the first time I felt a kind of weight. All the time that we’ve spent to create her from scratch and develop and progress her, it dawned on me there that this was the end, and that was an emotional moment.”
See what I mean? This is all from the creators of the game. Is anyone who played the games THIS emotionally attached to Lightning? I can't imagine how. I couldn't find the interview I wanted, one that I read around the time this game came out, but I recall reading how much time they said they spent developing her character, her background, her likes and dislikes, how she ticks, etc. Of which, NONE of that actually made it into any of the games and it floors me how that can happen. It's almost like how people describe their favorite color and why. No one ever really gives a great reason for it, you can't express it all that well, you just say that you like it, the look of it pleases you in some way. I swear that is the extent to which we have Lightning. They made something pretty to look at, and that was it. Then they try to go into how much depth she has, and that she's the female "Cloud" and us gamers scratch our heads and try to figure out what the hell they are talking about.
Let me please destroy the comparison to Cloud if I may as well. Now to be perfectly fair the creators made the comparison in terms of "popularity" not to literally put boobs on Cloud and call it a day. The internet however has maintained that she's just like Cloud! Yet, offer zero reasons as to how this comparison makes sense. Cloud begins his journey as a mercenary who is only out for money. He makes jokes, snide comments, dresses in drag, he's full of personality. Then he grows attached to the quest of his comrades and eventually befriends them. So much so, that he'll risk his life for them. But then tragedy strikes one of his closest friends and he couldn't save her. This causes him to go into severe depression and he doesn't want to take on the responsibilities of leading his group anymore as he feels he is unfit to save anyone. His friends convince him otherwise as the quest progresses and Cloud gains a renewed sense of hope in himself. THIS is a clear character arc. This is also a very cursory glance at the depth to which Cloud was written and presented. There is so much more nuance into how he developed, how he thinks of himself, and how he views others thinking of him and I could go on all day about it. We were told all of this about him though in the game, he was very well developed. We know his mom, we know his friends as a kid, we know his hopes and dreams, we know how he reacts to tragic events and how he deals with stress. He is very well fleshed out.
Lightning though? Uh...we know she wants to protect her sister and she doesn't really give a damn about the other people in her group either. She's very cold, she's all about the mission, whatever that may be and that's really it, that's all we can say about her. She's also exceptionally gullible as we see in the first game the villain outright tells her what he needs her and her group to do, and she DOES it essentially helping him succeed at destroying Cocoon. Only slightly after that does she attempt to save it, but she was helpless to do so and her friends had to be sacrificed to stop it from being destroyed. GREAT job Lightning...In this third game she's also unquestionably following the orders of God to round up souls for a new world. Now I haven't beaten the game yet...but I did discover that God is the final boss...so clearly it was being evil in some way or another and once again our gullible heroine was helping evil apparently.
I'm not sure I've ever played a game where they wrote so much and said so very little about the main character except for those games where you create a character and it has literally no character at all. It's dumbfounding that a company like Square can make characters as profoundly deep as those seen in earlier FF games or Xenogears and then have an entire trilogy devoted to what amounts to nothing more than eye candy. That's Lightning's character, eye candy, and this game pushes that notion to the forefront. The battle system is designed around changing her outfits for fucks sake.
Even characters that didn't have any depth to them in previous efforts like Squall in FF8 still had some notion of character in how they reacted to problems. Squall's character arc went from not caring what happened to Rinoa to risking his life for her. The game doesn't do a great job expressing WHY they become close as Squall's dialogue amounts to "...." and Rinoa incoherently goes from wanting to jump Seifer's bones to immediately wanting Squall's wang after they presume Seifer to be dead...but the point is Squall does go through a character change in that he is no longer self centered. What change can we say about Lightning? That she went from emotionless to God stole my emotions so now I'm even MORE emotionless? That about sums it up right there honestly and really this is not only the most glaring flaw about this third entry, but definitely the overriding flaw of the entire 13 series of games.
*If it looks like plastic, smells like plastic, and tastes like plastic, then you just ate plastic...wtf is wrong with you?*
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