Final Fantasy XIII: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

The Playstation 2 was part of what is considered the sixth console generation. During this period of time, there was no question about what console was on top of the podium in the console war. The Gamecube was for children, The Xbox was for fratboys and the PS2 was for everyone.

During this period of time, the primary Final Fantasy experience could be found on Playstation. Square Enix was repairing its relationship with Nintendo and would occasionally release side projects on their consoles, but for the big mainlines games that marked the next big step the franchise would take, Sony’s device would be considered home.

Final Fantasy XIII was announced, alongside Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Final Fantasy Agito-XIII, in 2006 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). These would all be coming to the Playstation 3, Sony’s newest device that was set for release later that year. Everybody expected the seventh generation of consoles to be a straight repeat of the last one. Why would anything change?

Unfortunately for Sony, the very same E3 that FFXIII debuted at is considered one of the most abysmal showings for a console manufacturer ever. At this show, Sony announced a ludicrous price for its latest device – $499 for a lower-tier model and five hundred and ninety-nine U.S. dollars for the premium version with backwards compatibility – and also didn’t reveal anything that was considered a ‘must-have’ for the game’s launch window.

Conversely, Sony’s chief competitor, Microsoft, had entered the seventh generation of consoles in 2005 with the XBox 360. This device started at $299 and its best version was $399. Graphically, it also didn’t look to be much different than the Playstation 3. For gamers entering a new generation of consoles, it was either jump in immediately and save a couple hundred bucks or wait until the end of 2006 and spend a little more.

Complicating matters was what the third console manufacturer was doing at the time. The PS3 would be competing with the Nintendo Wii during the holiday season of 2006. The Wii marked a massive shift from the Gamecube and aimed to make gaming more approachable for people who may not typically engage with them. It became an instant success and was near impossible to find on store shelves for even a year after its launch date.

This led the Playstation 3 to be sort of forgotten about. The hardcores and Sony loyal definitely knew it existed, but the casual fan was more likely to be lured in by the cheaper price tag of the readily available Xbox 360 or the wild appeal of Wii Sports.

While looking at numbers in 2026 will show that the PS3 eventually would sell more than the Xbox 360, things were not like that early in the generation. With its gigantic price tag, Sony found itself on the losing side of the console-wars for the first time since the original Playstation launched.

A big factor in Sony’s planning for this generation was around blu ray adaptation. The PS2 sold so well in part because of its inclusion of a DVD player. With the rise of HD entertainment, there needed to be a replacement for DVDs and Sony was banking on Blu Ray to be just that.

While this proved to be a winning strategy at the end of the console generation, at the beginning it was anything but. The average consumer hadn’t been effectively sold on the importance of high definition content yet, so there was not a gigantic rush to replace DVDs.

It may seem incomprehensible now, but lots of people would proudly claim to not be able to tell the difference between HD and SD content. Go ahead and pull up an NFL broadcast from 1996 and see if it’s not immediately obvious to you. But people would look you in the eye and say it all looked the same.

The changing times and the Playstation 3’s slow start led to one of the biggest surprise announcements of all time. At Microsoft’s 2008 E3 press conference, Final Fantasy XIII was unveiled again. This time, it was a multiplatform game. Final Fantasy traditionally launched as a platform exclusive – alongside the occasional PC port. From this point on, it would be entering the space of third-party AAA multiplatform titles like Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto.

The Wii was not an option for this move as it wasn’t designed with high definition graphics in mind. Nintendo being underpowered would continue until…well, it still is happening today actually. Hey, Nintenbros, we got the FFVII remake eventually!

Expectations were high for the first multiplatform mainline Final Fantasy release. The game was a graphical powerhouse and fans of the franchise who might have been alienated by XII’s radically different gameplay approach were hoping XIII marked something of a return to form.

Could Square dominate this new frontier with the trio of FFXIII games that were announced in 2006?

My history with XIII

In the leadup to Final Fantasy XIII, I was in a very different time of my life than the previous entries. I was a college student! I had found communities to discuss Final Fantasy and video games in general well before the game’s release. As a result, I was pretty tuned in with how the game was progressing.

As a more ‘traditional’ fan of the franchise, I was looking at XIII to be something of a ‘redemption’ for Final Fantasy XII. Square Enix was loud and proud about the game bringing back the ATB system and every bit of video coming out about the game made it look like the best thing ever. Remember, at this point in time, Square Enix was considered to be on the forefront of graphical technology. So a lot of the hype around XIII was built on what those wizards could do on HD hardware.

The trio of games mentioned above, the Fabula Nova Crystallis project, seemed interesting to me but at this point a bigger universe revolving around one of the mainline entries wasn’t exactly what I was looking for out of Final Fantasy. I did not love the sequel to Final Fantasy XII – Revenant Wings – that released on the DS. And I also did not love Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus or Advent Children. So my thoughts were mostly ‘focus on XIII, I don’t care about the rest just yet.’

And if you know anything at all about the history of Versus XIII, you probably know this was an oddly beneficial frame of mind to be in because fans of that game have been put through the ringer. But that’s a story for a different retrospective. The other game in the trio, Agito, was released in Japan and eventually came over to the States as Final Fantasy Type 0. It’s uh…not for me.

Back to the core game, I remember a bit of negativity around the announcement that this title would be on the Xbox 360. Even though most console ports looked better on Microsoft’s console, it was understood that games built from the ground up specifically for the PS3 were the best looking experiences. Titles like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Last of Us still look great today.

Also there was the fact that Sony games were printed on Blu Ray discs. Microsoft was still using dual-layered DVDs. They tried to make an add-on expansion specifically for High Definition DVDs (HD-DVDs) that failed miserably, so DVDs are where they had to stick for that generation.

So while Final Fantasy XIII was one disc on the PS3, it was three on the 360. A bit of a throwback to Final Fantasy VII, sure, but what compromises would need to be made? Would content need to be cut in order to make everything come together?

Then the game came out in Japan. At this point, there was nothing but negativity surrounding the 13th Final Fantasy. I would see screenshots of the official Japanese strategy guide posted online and maps were just one straight line. I saw copies of XIII literally ripped in half as people said this would kill the franchise. And this was before the game came out in North America.

For the first time, I was expecting to enter a Final Fantasy title that had serious problems.

Talking about Final Fantasy XIII without mentioning the negativity around it is impossible. Outside of II, this is the one title in the franchise most people will point to as being bad. To understand why so many people thought (or still think) this game is bad, I think it’s important to look at some trends in console gaming at the time. To talk about what makes Final Fantasy XIII tick, let’s compare it to what others in gaming were doing at around the same time.

Open world

It might seem weird to say in 2026 but twenty years ago, there was a pretty stark difference in what kinds of games were available on PC and consoles. In the 90s, most console games were pretty linear and straight forward. On PC, while shooters like DOOM were the most popular thing, in the background the hardcores latched onto games that had a more open structure.

In 2001, Grand Theft Auto 3 hit the Playstation 2 and changed the game essentially overnight. That title encouraged exploration and gave the player a sandbox to play in and create their own fun. This birthed a lot of clones, ranging from Saints Row to Mercenaries, but it also expanded what people were looking for out of gigantic releases.

In the following year, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind released on the Xbox. Elder Scrolls was a PC game that thrived on being a non-linear experience, so having a game with a world that open on consoles felt pretty overwhelming. I remember having friends at school talking about how long it took to walk across the world map – yes, that is quite literally something people cared about at some point.

The PS3 and 360 also got the next Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion. Oblivion became quite a success on consoles and combined with the success of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, mainstream console gamers seemed to prefer games with an open level design, where there was more than just one path to take in order to win the day. If a game released in the late 2000s and it was linear, reviewers and fans would point out the linearity like it was a flaw.

Final Fantasy XII was a step in that direction, possibly owed to being formatted sort of like an MMO. Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, is nothing like that. The story is told to the player by moving forward in a straight line – the player will then watch a cutscene – and then they proceed to move forward in a straight line again.

Sure, there are occasionally divergent paths that lead the way to some treasure, but generally speaking the player can get to where they need to go by following the set path laid in front of them.

Sound familiar? If you played Final Fantasy X, you might be thinking the structure is pretty similar. X is revered while XIII isn’t quite. From a narrative standpoint, X tells its story in a very similar way to how XIII tells its story, so why does XIII get the flack for it?

There’s a couple of different reasons for it. First, as I mentioned, XIII came out at a time when linearity was flatly uncool. It’s a wrong place, wrong time sort of thing. But I also think FFXIII is much more naked about how linear it is.

Looking at how X is structured, the player is able to travel over long stretches of the world at will. The player can’t run from Besaid to Mushroom Rock Road but they can go to Besaid, rent a boat to Kilika and then make that trek. Everything is connected in a way. In order to make progress, you still moved forward, but there was a feeling that everything was connected. You could still turn back! If you wanted to run from Zanarkand to Guadosalam you could. It wasn’t ideal, but you could.

In XIII, you control a party that is constantly on the run from authority. There are very rarely times for breaks and there is no reason to backtrack – both from a narrative and a practical standpoint. So the player still needs to move forward in order to progress the story but if they go ‘oh shit I forgot something at Lake Bresha’ there’s no way to go back. Lake Bresha might as well not exist anymore.

As a result, FFXIII’s world feels very cut off and level-based. As I’ve mentioned many times in this series, Final Fantasy has always been a linear series. Square typically gated off progression by requiring certain vehicles to move forward on the world map or by placing insanely hard enemies around where the player isn’t supposed to go. These are smoke and mirrors tricks. FFXIII simply doesn’t use any of those, and as a result, it feels more straight forward than a typical entry.

That isn’t to say the whole of FFXIII is linear. I will talk more about side quests later, but the big meme around XIII at launch was that it gets good 15 hours in. That time generally lines up with when the player gets access to Gran Pulse, a gigantic sprawling open world area that is nothing like the rest of the game. This is the only place in the title that has something to do that isn’t just ‘move the narrative forward’

This practice was common in more linear games at the time. In previews for 2011’s Uncharted 3, Naughty Dog was quick to say that there were open areas that players could explore at their own pace. This was sort of the concession that was made ‘well we want to tell a crafted story but we also know what the trends are, so we gotta pay some service to that.’

My take on linearity is probably not surprising. I’m fine with it. I actually prefer it. While having an open-ended game can be very immersive, I think there’s something to say about the artistic merits of a narrative constructed to be played in a particular way. This guarantees that things the player sees are probably the most important things for them to see in the developer’s mind.

Think of Eventide Island in Breath of the Wild, an open world game. This is an area that strips the player of all of their equipment and requires knowledge of the game’s mechanics in order to survive. It’s often praised as the single best area in Breath of the Wild, but there’s no guarantee the player will find it. My first time through that game, I completely missed it. I only knew to look for it because people kept talking it up.

But if such a meticulously designed area was in FFXIII, there’s no chance the player would miss it. They’d plant it front and center, it’d be the definitive ‘that part’ of the game. That’s what Gran Pulse essentially is. It’s the one part that is seen as the highlight by a lot of the playing audience and it’s impossible to miss.

Now, will the player engage with it in its entirety? Probably not. There are a ton of quests there and the tippy-top ones require a little bit of grinding, but the option is presented at least, nobody playing the game is gonna go “what the FUCK? There were sidequests in this game?”

It’s just a different philosophy. It’s not necessarily better or worse. It all comes down to an individual’s opinion. But at the time FFXIII came out, public opinion was that it was the inferior way to format your game and I believe the valuation of XIII suffered as a result.

Hand-holding is bad

This has been an off-again and on-again debate in the video game industry. Do games need to casualize themselves in order to make themselves more accessible to a broader audience? It depends. Sometimes a game can convey very complicated ideas that necessitate some hand-holding. Other times, it can feel slightly patronizing.

At this point, it felt like a lot of bigger AAA experiences were trying to figure out how to draw more people in. Final Fantasy XIII was attempting to enter that same sphere at this time – remember, this is the first multiplatform launch the franchise had ever experienced – so it makes sense that Square Enix may want to make things simpler in order to bring in new players.

Final Fantasy VII drew in audiences at its release thanks to beautiful cinematics that were unparalleled on consoles at the time. It was something your uncle would see and go ‘holy shit I need to get a Playstation.’ But a lot of those people, my uncle included, fell off of Final Fantasy VII immediately after playing it.

Final Fantasy XIII probably brought about similar feelings. This is a graphically impressive game that is going to bring people into the fold for the first time. They probably haven’t played an RPG before. So how can we keep them? It needs to be accessible. So every little element needs to be explained as if people who are playing this game have never played a game like this before.

Before getting into how FFXIII approached this problem, it’s important to talk about how the game plays. XIII returns the franchise to the ATB system – check the FFIV retospective for more information on that – but tweaks things in order to be more action oriented.

The player starts out with the ability to select two commands per turn in combat. Enemies do not stop attacking even if commands have stopped being input and as progress gets made, more actions can be completed per turn – up to 5. So to help with this, only one party member can be controlled while the rest of the crew operates on AI logic.

The reasoning for this is because of the brand new paradigm system. There are six combat roles in this game that each character has access to. These all fall into classic RPG/MMO archetypes. You have a tank, a healer, two DPSes, a buffer and a debuffer. Combat involves shifting between these roles as situations pop up. If you know a heavy hitting attack is coming, you may need someone to take on a tank role in order to deal with that.

Sounds a bit like the job system, right? Couple of differences here though. The job system is focused on making strategies for individual units with mid-battle job shifts typically being impossible.

The paradigm system is all about working as a team. It’s not possible to change an individual’s role – instead you shift the whole team at one time. The player can have six paradigms assigned at once, so effective use of this system requires knowledge of the individual roles and how they help each other out.

This is not the first time mid battle job changes have been tried – Final Fantasy X-2 allowed for it on an individual basis. In some of that game’s more complicated battles, this could require switching multiple members to multiple different jobs, which can be very overwhelming. The approach here in XIII is designed to make it easier to deploy mid-battle tactics.

Each character has three roles they specialize in, though all of them can learn abilities in all six of them. Since combat involves swapping roles for all party members frequently, the number of abilities each character has access to has been drastically reduced. The ATB meter fills relatively quickly, so that’s useful for the faster-paced combat. But even still, as your character levels up, there are enough abilities that manually selecting them can be time consuming and risky.

As a result, XIII has an auto-combat system. Since the main tactic in battle is switching paradigms – working as a team – there’s less of a need for individual precision based moves. With auto battle, your characters will naturally pick abilities based on enemy weaknesses or vulnerabilities – it aims to be very efficient and is probably the best way to play the game…for the most part.

The only time I found auto battle unhelpful was when it came to buffs and debuffs. The priorities the AI places on what buffs to use can be slightly baffling – I find they go with offense when I’m looking for defense and vice-versa.

I even saw party members stuck in a loop where the buffer (synergist) would just constantly cast a move that imbued electricity into my normal attack. So if the player is in a situation that demands specific buffs or debuffs be applied, they should probably manually do it.

The player’s goal in these battles isn’t just to beat down on the enemy until their HP is up. Instead, you have a separate meter to worry about called the stagger meter.

Essentially the more you beat on an enemy, the meter goes up along with a damage multiplier. When the meter fills completely, the damage multiplier increases by a large number and as long as the player is attacking, the enemy is unable to do anything about it because every attack knocks them out of whatever they’re doing – staggering them.

The different roles help achieve this. Physical DPS helps steady the meter and Magic DPS makes the meter rise quickly but it also drops just as quickly. The goal of combat is to find a good rhythm and to pick your spots about when to aggressively raise the stagger meter or when to sort of hold steady and keep your guard up. The main goal of most encounters is to get the opponent staggered in order to make them easier to finish off.

There are times when this system is a little annoying though. Namely, during parts of the game where you can’t switch out party members or change roles, you will get into a situation where you only have magic DPS (ravagers) without any physical DPS (commandos) which makes it maddeningly difficult to fill the stagger meter.

This section is not long but I remember it every single time I play FF XIII. And I dread it. So even if it’s like 30 minutes of gameplay, it’s left enough of a mark to annoy me.

The system as a whole is a fast-paced and intriguing one that plays a fair bit differently than past Final Fantasy titles. Making the player focus on in-battle team structure really breathes life into the ATB system – honestly, it’s one of the more enjoyable combat experiences in the franchise.

I generally prefer tactical gameplay and this allows for that while injecting speed into the equation. Square Enix clearly wanted to get away from slower paced turn-based combat and I think XIII represents something of a happy medium to that approach. XVI is the other extreme.

So all that’s well and good. I didn’t go over everything – like techniques that have their own separate meter – but that’s the jist of it. I don’t think that sounds so complicated, but I’ve also been playing games since I was like four. The problem comes in with how FFXIII conveys this to the player.

The first couple hours of the game are spent giving the party basically no abilities outside of attack. A major plot event happens – the characters become l’cie, which I’ll get into later when discussing the sotry – and suddenly the player gets introduced to combat roles and the paradigm system. There are very few combat options at this point, so fighting is spent either manually selecting between like three choices or jamming on auto attack. It’s not particularly engaging.

Paradigm shifts aren’t immediately available yet either. So it just feels a little bit like the player is using training wheels. And when paradigm shifts finally are introduced, the party is unable to be customized, so you just have to use whatever group the game gives you and work within those rules. There’s very little exploration of combat at this point, instead it feels like an extension of the game’s linearity.

Slowly, features become unlocked and they stop holding your hand. The first true test of the game comes at about five or six hours in when the party encounters its second summon battle. Summons work kinda like they did in X and XII where one person summons a creature and that creature replaces the party.

But in order to use summons, you need to beat them, and those battles function as a sort of test to how well the player understands the combat.

This fight, Odin, is often where new players might throw in the towel because it comes as a difficulty spike. It shows a lot of people might have been mindlessly playing the game without thinking about the mechanics. I like this sort of approach generally, but in XIII, I think the game never gives you the adequate tools to learn the system for yourself, so it sort of encourages lazy play early on.

Heck, it also isn’t possible to grind because the game locks out progression beyond a certain point based on where you are in the story. FF XIII’s level up system is called the Crystarium, which functions much like the sphere grid. But because each role has its own crystarium, the system comes off as even more linear than its predecessor. There really isn’t a lot of thought about which abilities to choose, instead it becomes about which roles need to be leveled up.

So you’re more or less locked into the ride the way the developers want you to be. You can’t even go insane with grinding to ignore the mechanics if you’re that kind of person. I’m okay with it from a narrative perspective but when it comes to gameplay, I think it’s very hard to both hand-hold a player and also encourage them to interact with the combat system on their own terms.

It’s not until about 15-or-so hours in that the player has access to the entire battle system. Before this point, it’s a long bit of tutorial screens. That’s just entirely too long for a game to get its gameplay going. If someone wants to dip out because a game isn’t sinking their hooks into them after 10 hours, I think that’s entirely reasonable.

This approach turned a lot of players off – it leads to people thinking XIII is either way too easy and brain dead or inconsistent from a difficulty standpoint.

It’s a shame too, because there’s a lot to love about how this game plays. But even as a guy who plays JRPGs to the extent I made a website basically dedicated to talking about them, I can’t deny that XIII starts out way too slowly.

The first two hours are a complete slog. I don’t think it really starts to feel fun at all until about five hours in. In an era where developers would tout stuff like “press X to awesome,” which is basically a way to tell people that they can have fun from the moment the game turns on, it’s no wonder this turned people off.

This time period was a bit of a turning point on hand-holding and player guidance. 2009 saw a game that was philosophically completely different from Final Fantasy XIII – Demon’s Souls. This title became something of a niche hit on the Playstation 3 and encouraged player experimentation while not explaining basically anything along the way.

If you look at the general public opinion of Souls and FFXIII, I think it’s clear which approach players prefer.

Is streamlining casual?

In 2009, the most popular console on the market was the Nintendo Wii. It was meant to be played and enjoyed by everyone, so this led to a lot of more mechanics heavy games being simplified in order to appeal to those people. Around this time is when you saw a lot of hardcore gamers complaining about how simple everything felt.

An example of this is from 2008’s Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The previous game was incredibly fast and mechanics heavy – as a result, newer players would fall off and be uninterested in getting good. If you see a Luigi wavedashing around nonstop, it can be demotivating! Brawl’s solution to this problem was to slow things way down and introduce an element of chance, tripping while moving, in order to even the playing field between hardcores and casuals.

Brawl is one of the more controversial entries into the Smash Brothers franchise as a result. That’s Nintendo though, those games always have wide player bases of all ages and skill sets. For as many people who bitched about casuals, there were just as many who wanted pure random chaos.

Final Fantasy, on the other hand, has been traditionally enjoyed by more hardcore gamers. So any attempt to simplify the experience is going to be met with resistance. This ties a little into linearity, but the makeup of XIII is all about refining elements of the game in order to make them more accesible.

A Final Fantasy staple to this point has been going into towns and talking to NPCs in order to find out where to go. Older games didn’t necessarily point the player in the right direction, instead it required exploring towns and talking to characters and learning about the world. By talking to NPCs, the player could also learn a little about the lore of the world.

XIII’s approach to this is to make it so there is essentially no NPC interaction at all. A player enters a town, it’s a straight line without a lot of questions about where to go. Instead of talking to NPCs directly, NPCs will just talk amongst themselves. It’s a slightly more realistic feeling because who goes and talks to everybody in town, but the purpose here is to feed the player information without them having to seek it out for themselves.

Going into a new town in a Final Fantasy also involves checking out the weapon shops. You need the newest and latest gear in order to fight monsters. In XIII, there’s never a fear of missing out on the latest items because every single save point has a shop too. If you’re running low on supplies – which don’t see that much usage outside of phoenix downs – you are simply a save point away from safety.

As a result of these changes, towns feel less engaging and unique. It makes navigating sections of the world smoother and helps spell out narrative elements more clearly, but in exchange a lot of the personality of areas is missing. Yes, Bodhum looks a lot different than Palumpolum, but functionally they feel the exact same. They feel like pretty faces with nothing underneath.

Towns function essentially the same but this streamlining effort just makes it lose something. Part of what makes these worlds feel alive is navigation. I’ll never forget Lindblum in Final Fantasy IX because of how unique the layout is, but I can’t tell you much unique about these cities outside of what the theming is. A bit of personality got sacrificed for accessibility.

Thankfully, this is not done without a lore reason. The characters in XIII are constantly on the run from (for lack of a better word) the law and staying in one place around large swaths of the population doesn’t make any sense. Having traditional Final Fantasy towns here wouldn’t work. The world is less interesting but at least there’s a reason for it.

Now let’s go back to Gran Pulse. As I mentioned before, this is the side quest zone. Here is one of the reasons why I think X gets away with linearity better than XIII does. In X, side quests take the player across the world. Yes, a lot of them just involve moving from point A to point B, but there are lots of changes in scenery. There are also side quests that don’t involve core gameplay – you can play blitzball, you can dodge lightning, you can learn a new language, there’s variety.

In XIII, every side quest is exactly the same. They all involve fighting a monster. Gran Pulse is quite large, so your backgrounds for these fights can feel pretty varied, but it doesn’t change that all of these fights are roughly in the same location. So you’re doing the same sort of kill monster quests in the same zone – it can just feel very repetitive.

The nature of side quests also pares into how the game doesn’t want you to miss anything important. These missions all have a format based on completing missions for l’cie (think soldiers) who couldn’t finish their missions in time. They’re meant to give these NPCs a bit of closure. All of them are like this.

But because the game doesn’t want you to miss anything important, no individual character has a unique side quest that develops their plot. Think of Final Fantasy IX how Princess Garnet’s true name is hidden on a wall in the Eidolon Village. Nothing like that would ever be in XIII because they want the player to know everything important.

This unfortunately makes most sidequests feel very filler-y. While you can occasionally unlock lore information through these in the form of datalogs, you’re mostly getting very minor NPC stories told over a paragraph or two. I would be surprised if many people actually have read the flavor text for these things. The optional content that hardcore players crave is still there, but the reasons to do them have been trimmed off so the majority of players don’t feel left out.

This just pares it down to the most naked the franchise has ever been. Do you want story? Play the main game. Do you want a challenge? Do the optional content. The most difficult challenges in Final Fantasy were always on the optional side of things. But it usually doesn’t feel so cut and dry.

Let’s look at FFVII again – the sunken sub gelnika. That is a high level and challenging area of that game and the lore reason for its existence is that its a submarine the player shot down earlier in the adventure. It’s natural to see it and follow up on it – you, the player, are the reason it’s there. So when you see it, you know why it’s there and you might have an actual reason to explore it. The area is light on story, but the exploration of it makes sense.

In XIII, there’s nothing quite like that. To me, it feels like you just do the hard content because it’s there to engage with. There’s no bigger reason as to why it’s there, there’s nothing to learn from it: it’s just there. Sure, some of the best bosses in the franchise are also ‘just hanging around,’ but those games have other side content to engage with too. You either like fighting in Gran Pulse or you don’t.

If you don’t? Just go beat the game, I guess.

This game functions much like older Final Fantasy games but it just feels different. Sometimes that set dressing is there for a reason and I think FF XIII shows why that is. When you strip it down, that bonus content just feels like something to be consumed.

If I wanted to watch a movie, I’d watch a movie

In June of 2008, the fourth Metal Gear Solid title came out on the Playstation 3. One of the things people ragged on it for at the time was the length of the cinematics. There are two moments that get a lot of flack: in the game’s third chapter, there are about 90 minutes of cutscenes tied to a very short gameplay sequence. The other is the game’s ending, which clocks in at about 70 minutes.

I’m not going to say this is what kickstarted the ‘big games just want to be movies’ era of Internet discourse, but it certainly aided it. Final Fantasy XIII, which came out about half-a-year after MGS4, also features a hefty chunk of cutscenes. As a result, it received flack for this. It is often called a movie game.

I don’t think that’s particularly fair. Since FFVII, in game cinematics have been a crucial part of Final Fantasy story telling. With the introduction of voice acting in X, this naturally expanded the scope of these scenes. If you remove all gameplay from XIII – a game that took around 50 hours for this retrospective – there are about eight hours and 38 minutes of cinematics.

You know what game didn’t get the same amount of flack for being a movie game? FFX. Maybe it’s because video games were more popular in 2009 than they were in 2001, but I don’t remember hardcore players complaining as much about it. FFX clocks in at 9 hours and 36 minutes. It has more cinematics in it than XIII. Perhaps first-time players of X in 2026 would pick this element apart, but I think this reputation has stuck with XIII over the years for some reason or another.

When looking at how XIII tells its story, it takes a completely polar opposite approach of what XII took. If you remember, XII was a game that focused on the state of the world over character work. They wanted you to know the motivations of the people in power moreso than your party members. XIII on the other hand is a game that wants to tell a story completely focused on characters.

It’s not to say that same lore content isn’t there. Instead, a lot of the background on what makes the world work is put in the game’s datalog section. This tells the player the history of the world and some background on the institutions of power within and it also consistently updates with summaries of the game’s plot. It’s pretty hard to get lost in this narrative.

A lot of people online say that the player needs to read all the datalogs in order to understand what’s going on in FFXIII. I don’t quite see things that way. This is a character-focused story, so it’s not crucial to understand every element of society in order to figure out why Lightning and company are fighting the establishment. It helps provide context and gives a deeper understanding of the world, but the player will not be lost without that information.

The datalog content also covers background events that might have been included in the game itself if there was more development time given. These can help fill in the world as a whole, and it has even given some people the impression that this game is literally unfinished, but it’s not critical to read this stuff to understand what’s happening with the characters.

Some of the mechanics of why things happen might be confusing, as we’ll get to when I talk about the ending, but it’s a story focused on character growth. The nitty gritty matters less here than it does in a game like a Dark Souls, where the entire narrative is based around those background details.

Character-based stories are hardly a new thing for Final Fantasy. VII’s main plot revolves around Cloud discovering himself and VIII’s main plot takes a backseat to relationship drama. You might notice how I only listed one character in VII and two characters in VIII. XIII’s approach to a character based story tries to shine a spotlight on everyone.

Your player characters all encounter each other relatively early on in the adventure. Not long after joining up, they part ways into groups of two. Long sections of the game focus on these groups of two – think of the raft scenario from Final Fantasy VI but expanded to about eight hours of game time. Since each group is divided in two for these segments, all main characters get a significant amount of focus.

As a result, this is probably the most fleshed out main party the franchise has seen to this point. These games do a very good job of fleshing out the primary protagonist but the other playable character are often left in the dust. Hell, in XII, it was difficult figuring out the primary motivations for the main character! But in XIII, that isn’t the case. You know your crew, for better or worse.

The downside of this amount of character work is that, if the player doesn’t like these characters, it doesn’t make the game shine. XIII’s cast is going through a whole lot over the course of the game, so their emotions are all over the place.

The character who gets the most flack is probably Hope. He is a teenage boy who loses his mother at the very start of the game. And he is written very much like a teenager. Here’s the thing – if you meet someone grieving but don’t have a prior attachment to them, they may come off as a little whiney. Like, you may understand where they are coming from because you’ve experienced loss too, but in the back of your head you may think ‘can you get on with it already.’

If the player is spending hours of game time watching a teenager go through these complex emotions, it might turn them off. So I think that’s where a lot of it comes from. But for me, this individual character portion of the game is the absolute height of FF XIII’s story telling. It made me interested in seeing where things go because I cared about the people the game was putting in front of me.

There is a downfall to this extreme focus, though. Whereas XII gave a lot of time with villains and minor characters to flesh out the world, XIII’s side characters are touched on pretty lightly. Only one major villain gets very fleshed out while the others are very expendable.

I look at the character Jihl, portrayed as a the main antagonist for one of the main playable characters, Sazh. She is shown as cunning and evil but what is it can I tell you about her? She wears glasses? She wears a weird leather undershirt thing? She hates happy families? Not sure, but she shows up and then the main villain discards her and that’s that.

The main Cid of this game, Cid Raines, is positioned as a person aligned with the main party. He wants to take down the villains who rule cocoon. He turns out to be something of a triple agent, he has to work for the main villain but really wants to undermine him, but there’s not much to him as a character.

I can tell you that he shows up as a late game boss fight in order to test the party and that he gets resurrected to be a puppet of the main villain, but I can’t tell you much about him. I’m sure I could read more about it, but from what they just present to me up front, I don’t get a lot.

Hope’s father gets way more characterization and his relevance to the plot basically begins and ends with his son. So it just feels like the main characters get more love but it comes at the cost of everyone else. I get it though. The player spends most of their time with these characters, so why not focus on them?

However, when everybody reconnects around chapter 9 or 10 – about 15 or 16 hours into the journey – is when the story becomes pretty dull and the main party stops developing too much. At this point the player knows all the vital characters to the story and understands what must be done, but none of it is particularly original or interesting. It’s moving from point A to point B, having an enemy taunt the party, beating that foe, and then moving on.

This is made worse by an ending that ignores a lot of the rules the world establishes to this point in order to provide a happy ending. I will explain some of the lore and more specific terms in the character section below, but the party turns into the in universe equivalent of zombies and then instantly get better. It feels like they should just lose.

The datalogs can help explain things a little bit. As the player does more sidequests, more information about the world comes out. And the ultimate answer to this is essentially that a god did it because they felt sorry for your party. Essentially, your party would have failed in their quest if it wasn’t for outside forces. Like I said in my Chrono Trigger retrospective, sometimes it’s best not to get hung up in the minutiae of things and to just take things at face value.

It just feels like they were told ‘this game needs to come out, wrap that shit up’ and just came up with a conclusion. And don’t look for the sequel games to make it any better. I guess just take it as ‘everything just worked out because it was supposed to’ and leave it at that. If you really want to know the deep dirt, check the datalogs. But if you just take things as they’re presented, you can get the whole picture well enough.

Regardless, bashing FF XIII for being story heavy is not fair. Not liking games using a lot of cinematics is valid, sure, but at that point it seems like more modern Final Fantasy might not be a franchise for whoever is doing the complaining. Hey, if you want nothing but gameplay, play V. That game rules!

Notable characters

Before I get too in depth, I want to define a couple of terms that may be useful to know.

Cocoon: A giant shell floating in the sky that houses most of humanity. The structure is kept afloat by Fal’cie.

Gran Pulse: The land that Cocoon floats above. It is full of wild creatures and is often referred to as hell on earth by the people of Cocoon. It should be noted that nobody actively living on Cocoon has ever been to Pulse…and lived to tell the tale.

Sanctum: The ruling party of Cocoon. They are presented like a church. In reality, they’re just an extension of the Fal’cie.

Fal’cie: These beings are something of the overseers of the world. Humanity depends on them for most of everything. As a result, they feel like they are supposed to be Gods, but they are very much not. Most notably there are Pulse Fal’cie and Sanctum (Cocoon) Fal’cie. The perception is that these are opposing forces.

L’Cie: Humans branded by Fal’cie. They are given special powers, namely magic. They are given a mission to complete – a focus. If they cannot complete that mission in time, they will turn into a soulless monster called a cie’th. Cie’th wander around aimlessly and have lost all humanity, think zombies. If they do complete their mission, they are turned into a crystal, where they never die. It is shown in game that crystalized l’cie can be awakened by the fal’cie in order to do more missions for them. You see, the Fal’cie know they’re capable, so why look for a new l’cie when you have a perfectly good one waiting for you already?

Brand: The marks on l’cie that show that they are, in fact, l’cie. These change over time based on how long they have left to complete their mission. The easiest explanation would be: If it’s mostly black, you’re good. If it’s mostly red, you’re running out of time.

Purge: Organized by Sanctum, this is what they refer to as sending Pulse L’Cie and anyone who has come into contact with them back to Pulse. In reality, Sanctum murders anyone in the purge well before they reach their destination. This is used as a measure to keep the population scared of Pulse and maintain control over them.

Paradigm roles: Here are the names of the six combat roles in FFXIII:
Sentinel: The tank
Ravager: Magic-focused DPS
Commando: Attack-focused DPS
Saboteur: Debuffer
Synergist: Buffer
Medic: What the fuck do you think?

Serah Farron

Normally I start these character sections off with the main character, but instead I chose the main character’s sister. Her involvement sets the game’s events into motion. However, she doesn’t actually have much of a personality in this game and functions solely as a plot device. The best I can say is that she seems like a pretty normal and maybe fashionable teenage girl. If you want her to develop much of a personality, you need to go play Final Fantasy XIII-2!

Starting off with a bit of a lore dump. Before the events of the game, Serah has an encounter with a Pulse Fal’cie. She becomes a l’cie, but keeps it hidden. Nobody in the world truly knows about it. This changes when she comes out to her boyfriend, Snow. She breaks the news by attempting to break up with him.

Snow is a rash teenager, so upon hearing this news, he does what comes naturally: proposes to Serah. Dump me will ya? That doesn’t work for me, brother. Serah of course accepts but she still keeps it to herself. At some point the guilt eats away at her and she decides to come clean to her sister, Lightning, the main character of the adventure. She decides to do so on Lightning’s birthday, which leads to one of the funniest lines of dialogue in the franchise.

Lightning brushes this off and thinks it’s just her dumb kid sister doing something for attention. However, Sanctum discovers the Pulse Fal’cie on their own, which initiates the purge. Basically an entire city is going to be wiped out as a precaution. I don’t believe it’s specifically stated in the game, but I think this triggers Serah to seek out Cocoon leadership and turn herself in.

This purge is what inspires most of our characters into joining the fight. Lightning feels a sense of guilt about not believing her sister and wants to both protect her and to prevent anyone innocent from being purged. Hope was on vacation in Bodhum, the city that was set to be purged. Sazh volunteered to be purged for reasons we’ll get into in his section. While it was more the Pulse Fal’cie who moved things along, this whole series of events started with Serah.

When Snow and Lightning get reunited with Serah during the purge, they catch her right in front of the Pulse fal’cie (Anima). She turns into crystal, which suggests that her focus has been fulfilled. A lot of time after this is spent wondering just what the hell her focus is supposed to be. Snow in particular is convinced it was to save Cocoon. Not so. Instead, Serah’s focus, which is never explicitly stated, is probably to bring together a group of people capable of bringing down cocoon as l’cie together. So when the main party shows up to get her, the focus is fulfilled.

Serah then spends the rest of the game encased in crystal. She only emerges during the game’s ending when the fal’cie threat is eradicated. The actual whys and hows of how her crystallization comes undone isn’t super important – instead just think of it as some symbolism. The crystal represents the fal’cie’s control over her and with the fal’cie gone, nobody controls her anymore. And poof! She’s back.

The decision to make a sequel starring Serah makes perfect sense to me. She is one of the more important characters in the game because she gets the plot going but the player doesn’t actually know much about her. We know she loves Snow and her sister. We also know she buys Lightning a knife for her birthday. That’s about it. So a perfect way to have a sequel is to have it star an important figure that hasn’t been developed. And Serah is that character.

There’s also Noel who is like a time traveling guy but uh…let’s not get into XIII-2.

Lightning (Claire Farron)

Lightning is the first billed female main character of the franchise. Terra from VI is often thought of as the first, but she was part of an ensemble cast. Yuna is the co-lead in X, but it’s a shared role at best. And then there’s Ashe – the most important character in XII who takes a backseat to one of the least important characters in that game. There’s none of that here. Lightning is the main character immediately and stays that way throughout the journey.

I believe the goal with her was twofold. On the surface-level, the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII resembles the beginning of Final Fantasy VII in a number of ways. You have a train sequence that goes wrong, you fight a giant scorpion mech beast and you have the word ‘soldier’ name dropped in reference to her right away. I believe this is done to communicate to the player that hey, this is still Final Fantasy. There might be new graphics but this is just like that adventure you loved back in the day.

The other goal with her is to have an attractive, strong and fashionable character in the lead spot to appeal to new players. If you look at the main characters of X and XII, they are clearly from some sort of fantasy world. Tidus’s weird single leg pants attire makes him look totally foreign. Vaan is similar – nobody is going to be surprised to learn that he’s from some far off Star Wars land.

But Lightning? She looks fashionable, like someone that could be on a runway. Her aesthetic, while futuristic, looks more modern.

Getting past her appearance, Lighting’s character arc in XIII is spent feeling regret about not being there for her sister. She starts the journey being very focused on lashing out against the world that took Serah from her and also to take out those responsible for it.

This leads to her being very cold and distant to her party members. She always marches forward. She truly resents the Fal’cie for manipulating the world and robbing her of Serah.

Lightning and Serah basically only had each other. The older Farron essentially raises the younger Farron, which leads to maybe some more motherly tendencies than you would typically expect out of a sibling. This also explains her complicated relationship with Snow. She judges everything he does harshly because she doesn’t view him as being good enough for her sister.

And then when it’s revealed he proposed to her, it makes her furious. This idiot thinks he’s good enough for Serah? Please! Essentially, this moron is taking her away. Whether it’s from the Fal’cie or from Snow, Lightning does not want to lose what she has with her sister.

The game pairs her up with the teenager Hope for a large chunk of time. The reasoning for this feels obvious – Hope is a teenager and is the closest in mentality to her sister. Lightning sees how Hope is reacting to his world being torn apart and naturally her big sister role takes over and slowly leads to her softening out.

At first she talks shit about basically everyone, especially her would-be brother-in-law Snow, but then she sees how Hope reacts to it. Her hatred is more steeped in deep sarcasm, she doesn’t really hate Snow. She just thinks he’s kind of an idiot.

But then when she sees how Hope talks about her guy, it shifts her perspective. She sees the young man going down a dark path. She lost her little sister already, she has no desire to lose her new little brother also.

This grounds Lightning and makes her more personable. She has a firey relationship with basically every protagonist, but her journeys with Hope calm her down and by the time the party comes together as one, she sort of becomes a natural leader for it.

She even tries to see things from Snow’s perspective and softens towards him. Yes, Lightning was annoyed that she was losing her sister. But she could now place herself in Snow’s shoes.

He was trying his best in order to do right by the person they both loved. He may not be perfect, but nobody is ever going to be good enough for your most treasured family member. She could see he was doing his best, just like Hope was doing his best, and she was able to move past it.

Lightning’s growth is also a reflection of Cloud Strife’s arc in VII. In that game, Cloud was stand-offish and cold due to some mental trauma he had suffered. Once he discovers who he actually is and gets over his hang-ups, he slots in as a leader of the party. He has his quips and he still has a personality, but his edges have been sanded off so he can focus on the mission at hand.

Lightning is still an interesting character after she softens, but her personality shifts from depressed to focused on getting her entire team out of this situation. She’s still sarcastic and biting, but it no longer comes across as her being detached from the people around her. It ends up feeling more authentic to her as a person.

Hey, VII was the game that made Squaresoft turn heads of uncles across the country. Why not try to hit similar feelings with XIII?

From a combat standpoint, Lightning’s main roles are commando, ravager and medic. These are the most basic roles in the game, suiting her position as main character. Damage dealing and healing, doesn’t get more simple than that! With her great stats, she was basically always in my party from the time I could set who my adventuring crew was. Even when you can remove the main character from your party, I typically didn’t!

Unfortunately, since she is pretty basic, this also made her the most replaceable member of my team. An efficient way of grinding in this game is to put Vanille in the lead role as a saboteur and have her cast death repeatedly. Any time I needed to do that, I would switch Lightning out because she just wasn’t the best at more ‘complimentary’ roles. But I liked her enough that I felt bad about doing it, so that has to mean something, right?

Lightning, at least in XIII, isn’t super complicated. Her development isn’t as complex as Cloud and her backstory isn’t as tragic as Tidus’s. She doesn’t get a love story to lure you in either. Instead, the player just has to get into her for who she is.

Some people might get turned off by how gruff and annoyed she can be at times. But I look at one scene that kind of shows how much I appreciate the character. At one point, Lightning asks Snow for forgiveness over how she’s treated him. He retorts with that she can pay him back by telling him her real name. Her response is that she’ll tell him when they save Serah.

Later in the game, a fake Serah comes around and just casually drops that Lightning’s name is Claire. In that moment, the revelation of the name didn’t mean much to me. What mattered was that I was robbed of the touching scene between Lightning and Snow where she let her guard down enough to reveal that to him.

I was bothered by a character revelation because it robbed me of a scene I wanted to see with the character in question!

And every time I play FFXIII, I can’t help but like her. They did something right. Which might help explain why they put her on the cover of XIII-2 when she only appeared in the game for like 15 minutes of game-time.

Sazh Katzroy

The second character the player meets in the game and oddly one the advertising campaign for XIII seemed to adore. You see, he keeps a Chocobo in his afro. Isn’t that quirky? Well…it is a cute little fella.

Sazh is a very light hearted and fun-loving character. A lot of his dialogue is very jokey and any time the characters jump out something way high up, he’s depicted as falling with his arms flailing. Lightning gets to look cool while plummeting to the earth, Sazh gets to be a goof ball.

Which is interesting, because his motivations for joining the party are a little sad. Before the events of the game, Sazh’s son Dajh is turned into a l’cie by the Sanctum Fal’cie. Unlike Pulse l’cie, Sanctum l’cie are viewed as heroes of Cocoon. So while Serah is a villain who must be destroyed, Dajh is a hero who must be protected. As a result, Sanctum spirit him away from his father.

Sazh, who had recently lost his wife, now had his son taken from him. So he sees the purge generated from the Pulse Fal’cie’s appearance as a chance to move around in the chaos in order to find Dajh. In doing this, he runs into Lightning and decides to follow along with her because she’s causing all sorts of chaos. He really just wants to reunite with his kid, but doesn’t know how.

When the characters split off, Sazh gets paired with Vanille. Vanille is a young girl who is peppy and full of energy, a bit of a contrast from the tired and goofy old man. Just like with how Lightning took on a big sister role for Hope, Sazh takes on something of a fatherly role for Vanille. He ultimately wants to be reunited with his son, but he also really doesn’t want to see any harm come to Vanille.

Sazh’s fatherly attributes have him come off as a very likable character. He is very selfless and just wants to see the people he cares for safe. He also constantly makes what I would best describe as dad jokes. It’s something like Balthier’s role in FFXII – his quipping works because he’s the only character that does it a lot. Sure, Lightning will occasionally have witty retorts or funny dialogue, but she is not a jokester like Sazh is. Really, he’s just a joy to have around!

The height of this comes right before his biggest character moment. Before everything goes south, he had wanted to take his son to Nautilus Park. Think Las Vegas but for the entire family so, uh, Branson. But obviously Dajh can’t go, so when Sazh and Vanille get there, he treats it as an opportunity to bring levity to the young woman’s life. He just wants to see someone he cares for smile, so if he can’t get that with his son, he can get that with his daughter-figure.

During this segment, Dajh is reunited with Sazh. And then immediately turns to crystal. It is then revealed that Vanille is the one who is essentially responsible for everything that’s happened to the party. This is definitely hinted at before that point, but this is when the game puts it in front of the player. And from this point, Sazh breaks a little bit.

He becomes depressed and despondent. But ultimately, he views Vanille as a kid. He doesn’t want to contribute to more sad parents in the world, so he elects to just let her go, which leads to one of the most insane fakeouts in the franchise. They show Sazh pointing a gun to his head and then play the sound of a gun shot going off and then the very next scene, you see Sanctum wheeling Sazh out in what looks like a casket.

He’s not dead though. He can’t do the deed. He feels he has nothing to live for but doesn’t have the courage to pull it off. He simply gets knocked out by sanctum forces and dragged away in a device designed to seal away magic that l’cie use.

But to me, when I first played the game, I bought this moment something fierce. It felt like a realistic reaction to the situation he was in. His son, for all he knows, will never wake up from the crystal prison. He had wanted to turn himself in to assist his son and now he couldn’t even do that! And his traveling companion is the person responsible for it to boot. Did I mention everyone in Cocoon hates l’cie? He had nothing to live for, so I completely bought that response – he lost hope.

On replay, I found this to be a little tasteless. I felt they suckered the player in with a heavy moment in order to make them feel invested only to rug pull it. This time it felt like cowardice, like they wanted to have a big emotional scene that would resonate with the player but didn’t really want to pull the trigger. Sazh is my favorite character in the game, so it feels a bit weird that I’m off-put by his not-death, but I can’t help it.

But hey, I have always remembered this scene all these years later. Every time I get to Nautilus Park, I am aware that it’s coming up. So it sticks with you, if nothing else.

In combat, Sazh’s main roles are commando, ravager and synergist. Having a synergist with the party to act as a buff-giver is mandatory in most difficult battles. However, early in the game, characters who share roles with other characters get access to slightly different abilities. Sazh shares the synergist role with Hope. So to differentiate the two, Hope gets access to defensive buffs while Sazh gets access to offensive buffs.

The problem here is that I find defensive buffs way more useful than offensive ones. Sure, causing more damage quickly is nice – crucially Sazh gets access to haste far before Hope does – but status effects like shell and protect are far more useful. Sometimes enemies will hit you hard and having that extra layer of protection can save you from a game over!

And because his other two roles are the two DPS classes, his stats end up very balanced. He doesn’t really excel at anything. A true jack of all trades and a master of none.

Even though he eventually gets access to defensive synergist abilities, his stats are just never enough to make him a main player. I typically prefer to use characters I like on my teams, but in this game, party composition is crucial. No individual character can just be along for the ride, carried by superior teammates. I just can’t have a guy running around who is just okay at everything. So as a result, he ended up riding the bench a lot in favor of Hope.

While he’s probably the least important character in the main cast, you could probably erase him and Dajh from the narrative and not lose much of anything, I still love the guy. FF XIII would just be a lesser game without him.

Snow Villiers

Snow is probably the second most divisive character in this entire game. Honestly, he would probably be the most contentious character in most Final Fantasy titles. But most of those don’t feature Hope Estheim, so what can ya do.

Snow starts out as a character who constantly spouts off about how he’s a hero and how he’ll protect everyone. This is most frequently depicted with him going up to the younger members of the squad – Hope and Vanille – and declaring that they need to get behind him. It is extremely boastful and brash, a mentality that infuriates just as many people as it inspires.

And that’s the point. Snow is overcompensating for what he feels like are personal failures. His girlfriend Serah becomes a l’cie without him knowing anything about it and he comes at her in an over-the-top way (immediate proposal) to help her cope with it. He’s trying to make up for not being there for her at the time by making a promise that he will always be there for her going forward.

Similarly, as the purge swept over Cocoon, Snow and his buddies formed something of a resistance group called No Obligations, Rules or Authority or NORA. Not to be confused with Not in Employment, Education or Training, NORA aims to protect normal citizens of Cocoon from being purged. They essentially arm and assist normal people to fight tyranny.

Idealistic, absolutely. But by taking ordinary civilians under their wing, they also take some responsibility for what happens after they take up arms. This is most notable in the case of Hope’s mother, also named Nora, who takes up a gun and dies shortly after doing so. It is implied that this is neither the first nor last time this has happened, but it’s a notable occurrence because it sticks with Snow for the remainder of the game.

Nora’s parting words to Snow were a plea to look after her son and to get him home. Snow did not know the woman personally, so he spends a good chunk of game time unaware that her son was right there, which means his approach to doing this is to be overly protective of every young person he sees. This involves proclaiming, repeatedly, that he is a top tier hero and that the kids don’t even need to worry about anything because he will take care of everything.

This attitude is extremely patronizing and suggests that those children have no agency of their own. Especially to Hope, who literally watches his own mother die. He knows there’s danger. He knows that one person, no matter how strong they are, cannot overwhelm the governing forces of Cocoon. This creates a constant bit of tension between the two. In scenes where Snow thinks he is being comforting and cool, he comes off as an arrogant blowhard.

And once again, that’s the point. The player is not supposed to see Snow’s attitude and think ‘damn that guy IS a hero.’ Snow’s arc through the game involves coming to terms with his personal failings and also relying on other characters. He learns that he doesn’t need to shoulder so much responsibility or overcompensate for his failings. This is best seen in his interactions with Hope later in the game. He stops trying to hard to be a superman-esque hero and treats the kid with a little more respect.

Snow’s arc is very effective and I think it ends with him being a likable character, but we spend a lot of time with the arrogant version of the man. During the bits where everyone splits into teams of two, he goes off solo – only to eventually pair up with Pulse’s own Oerba Yun Fang – and doesn’t get a lot of up-close-and-personal time with the person he has the most conflict with. So the player probably spends a little too much time dealing with the overcompensating version of Snow.

I also think a lot of people drop off of this game due to the long build up, so a fair chunk of players never get to see his character evolve. Perceptually, he gets stuck as being the same dumb asshole he is at the start of the game for the entire duration. As mentioned many times, this game has a notoriously slow startup and Snow might be one of the many victims of it.

Combat-wise, Snow is the first playable character to get access to the Sentinel role. If you didn’t read the explainer above, Sentinels are tanks, so this fits in with his personality. “Get behind me and I’ll shield you from danger!” Unfortunately for our would-be hero, he is not as effective at this as Fang is, so he never got much time to shine for me.

His other two roles are Commando and Ravager. His physical attack is great, so he makes an alright Commando. But there are many other characters who make better Ravagers. This makes him come off as fusion of Lightning and Fang to me, but he just feels less useful than those two. As a result, once I got free control of who got in my party, I very rarely used Snow unless a situation demanded two sentinels. There just aren’t many of those.

For people who hate Snow and have not played through all of FFXIII, I would say pay more attention to him if you ever attempt a replay. I’m not gonna tell you that he’s going to make you replace Cloud Strife in your favorite character hierarchy, but you might hate him a little less upon replay.

Hope Estheim

Let’s keep that universally disliked character train going! Hope Estheim, at least in the West, is definitely the most hated character this game has to offer. If you have ever seen or read a review of FFXIII, it’s likely that you’ve heard how annoying this kid can get.

I’m not going to tell you ‘well actually, he isn’t’ because that’s not true. Much like Snow, his character is like that on purpose. He’s an annoying little shit because most people in his situation would be annoying little shits. Final Fantasy does not get enough credit for how it writes characters that are supposed to be teenagers and I feel like Hope acts exactly as most teens would if they were put in his situation.

Before the main events of the game, Hope is on vacation with his mother Nora in the resort town of Bodhum. They seem to be a relatively well off family with very few cares in the world. Then, suddenly, the pulse fal’cie shows up and the purge is initiated. Hope and his mother are swept up in it.

Here is what happens to him over the course of a few hours: He is rounded up to be essentially murdered. A weird blonde dude who proclaims himself a hero promises to save the day but fails and gets his mother killed. He becomes a l’cie – a being he knows is hated and villified throughout Cocoon – and immediately feels isolation as a result. The person he blames for his mother’s death ALSO becomes a l’cie, so they have to hang around each other for a while.

That’s a lot! So he acts like most teenagers would and is very mopey and emotional about the whole thing. This includes making illogical thoughts about his situation – he stops caring about his father because he assumes his family would stop caring about him now that he’s one of those monstrous l’cies – and constantly pining for vengeance. He’s not thinking straight and it comes across in how he acts.

While I love how much time this game spends on developing its main cast, Hope is an example of why that can be too much. The narrative dwells on him being emotional and vengeful and it makes him come across as extremely unlikable.

The writing for why he acts like this makes perfect sense. But when you encounter someone in the real world who you aren’t intimately familiar with and all you hear them talk about is how miserable they are, I dunno about you, but to me sometimes in my head I’m like ‘okay, get on with it, it’s not that bad.’ And I think Hope gets that treatment a lot.

When everybody splits ways, Hope pairs with Lightning and you see a lot of Hope’s character growth through her eyes. She watches over him and sees what he’s going through and wants to help guide him to something better. It’s a pretty interesting dynamic. But to make it visible to the player, they have to play up Hope’s emotional state. They have to make Lightning’s attitude towards him make sense.

The game does this by having Hope set up a plan for vengeance called Operation Nora. The main goal of this plan is to get revenge on Cocoon society as a whole but especially Snow. At some point, Lightning gives him a knife that Serah gave her for his birthday as a form of protection.

While he’s talking about his plans and his feelings, he constantly opens and closes this knife. This happens frequently when he’s paired with Snow later on, in an attempt to make the player think that maybe he will get revenge. This happens so frequently that it feels almost annoying. You constantly see Hope twiddle his stupid knife and talk about how he’ll make operation Nora succeed. It happens so much that I grew annoyed at the prop, simply seeing it would make my eyes roll.

This long, long bit of angst all comes to a head when Hope meets his father. His dad is a very minor character who only shows up in one segment, but it is one of the best segments in the entirety of your adventure. His dad expresses sorrow that his wife is gone but he doesn’t blame Snow or Hope for what happened. He doesn’t turn or his son for being a l’cie. Instead he loudly declares that this is his son’s home too and that he has every right to stay there to hide from the authorities.

It’s very simple. But it’s so direct that I have to think all of Hope’s character to this point was building to this scene. After Hope and his father reconnect, his stance towards the world as a whole and his lot in life softens dramatically. He even returns his stupid knife to Lightning, saying that he’s given up on his plan of vengeance. He sees that his initial perceptions about his situation aren’t 100% correct and it changes him drastically.

After that moment, Hope is pretty drama free. I’ve used how ‘straight-forward’ Cloud is after his mental breakdown as an example a couple of times now, but Hope fits into that mold as well. Once he overcomes his mental anguish, he becomes focused on the goal. When you see him laughing jovially with Snow, their relationship evolves from antagonistic to almost brotherly. The encounter with his father flipped the character on his head – hey, sometimes parents are important. Looking at you, Sazh!

It just takes so much running in circles to get there that I completely understand the backlash. This is a character whose arc I really like but even in my screenshots for this game, I titled images things like ‘Hope and his stupid knife.jpg.’ It just becomes grating and too much. Like with Snow above, I think the overly harsh reactions to his character come from a lot of people who dropped the game. And hey, I think if a game doesn’t grab you in the first five hours, why torture yourself to experience more?

You’ll never truly appreciate the PS1 version of Dragon Quest VII. But that’s your problem, not mine!

Unfortunately for the haters out there, Hope is one of the best characters in the game. His primary roles are Ravager, Medic and Synergist. He has awesome magic stats and he gets immediate access to defensive spells that Sazh doesn’t get until much later. With how I usually play these games, he wouldn’t normally make it in my party because there are three characters I prefer over him, but he’s such a great magic user that he basically never left my squad once I could choose it for myself.

I want to harp on Syngergists a little bit. Buffing your crew is essential to victory over some of the game’s harder foes. The game offers items that let you provide buffs to your characters before fights and this just lets you steamroll most enemies.

The Synergist slowly doles out these same abilities. Obviously not as impactful as getting access to all of them at once, but they hit just as hard once the player builds them all up. Debuffs are important too, but I just don’t think most players will find success without a synergist. And Hope is the best Synergist in the game!

Hope gets aged up as a character in XIII-2 and a lot of people assumed it was because of his reception in XIII. His appearance there is also notably less hated. But I don’t think it’s because of his age up or anything like that, I think that game lets the player see more of Hope’s actual personality. In this one, you’re just seeing a teenager deal with a shitty situation…and that’s not always an enjoyable ride.

Oerba Dia Vanille

Before I talk about Vanille’s character, let me explain a couple of details I love about her that have nothing to do with her actual personality.

First, when going through combat at the start of the game, characters have two bars of ATB meter. This basically just lets them attack twice per time the bar fills. Vanille has three bars of meter. At first, one might think this is just a quirk of her character, maybe she’s the one character that gets extra moves. But when the other characters become l’cie, they all gain a third ATB bar. Essentially, this gameplay mechanic is a hint about the true nature of her character.

Additionally, if you position the camera to where her brand is, you can make it out very clearly, even at the beginning of the game. Now granted, this involves embracing your inner pervert because the brand is on her upper thigh right under her already short skirt. But hey. The hints about her nature are right there from the beginning if you’re watching for them.

Secondly, I want to talk about her character design. If you look at the five characters I’ve talked about above, they all have what I would call relatively modern clothing. Some of it is pretty fashionable, but it’s all stuff you would expect a citizen of this world to wear. They also all have pretty non-distinct accents in the English version.

Vanille on the other hand looks nothing like that. She has an outfit that has lots of fur and ‘naturalistic’ looking elements implemented. She also speaks in a very pronounced Australian accent. It’s so severe that lots of people thought it was an obviously fake accent – but the voice actress is actually Australian.

From the minute you lays eyes on her, the player can tell there is something different about this character. Even if they don’t fully realize it, something in the back of their head will piece it together.

I love that stuff. It’s a very uniquely video game way to deliver plot to the player. It reminds me of Tellah from Final Fantasy IV. He has access to the spell meteor but notably does not have enough MP to pull it off. Eventually the player gets to a story segment where he needs to cast that spell and he’s able to, but it costs him his life. The MP was a way to tell the player that the spell was beyond his normal limits. By casting it, he surpassed those limits, which ultimately kills him. This is the same sort of thing and it rules.

Anyway, Vanille is your narrator. A lot of the game’s story is told through her perspective. So she is presented as a very optimistic and bright character because they don’t want you to hate the narrator. But just like Snow, her disposition is a front to cover for her feelings of guilt. She just comes across as less fake about it.

The player is first introduced to her at the beginning of the game where she’s around Hope and the purge. She is portrayed as a victim of this circumstance and she witnesses all the bad things that come as a result. But in reality, she played a large part in why things are going on. She is responsible for a lot of the events of Final Fantasy XIII.

Vanille, despite her young appearance, is one of the older members of the cast. Long ago, she lived life as a Pulse l’cie. She completed her focus – that’ll be covered more in the next character bio – and turned into a crystal.

Much later, she was revived from her crystal, and went to Cocoon with her partner, Fang. The pair were targeting the fal’cie in charge of providing power to the people of cocoon. It sensed danger and turned the nearest human to it into a l’cie for protection. That human was Sazh’s youngest son, Dajh.

Vanille is very kind hearted and averse to making anyone suffer. Invariably, the focus of a Pulse Fal’cie revolves around destroying Cocoon in someway, but Vanille is very against that. She is more than okay with the consequences of not completing the focus. Her partner is more hardened and deals less with that, but her natural aversion to causing harm inadvertently leads to Dajh getting his life turned upside down.

She basically lives in guilt with this for most of the game. As a result, most of what you see from her character is her trying to act like she thinks she should. But it’s all a put-on. In the narration she is somber and honest but in cutscenes she’s very cheery. I think this makes her character interesting but I will also say that this game might have too many characters acting a certain way to overcompensate for their personal failings. Lightning, Snow and Vanille all have these aspects to their character – so I feel like for most players, at least one of these will get lost in the shuffle.

For me, I like Vanille a lot. Her genuinely sweet and caring personality is welcome in a generally more gruff cast. Sticking her with Sazh, the person she impacted the most, is also a good call. The poor father treats her exceptionally well, so it just increases her feelings of guilt for causing all sorts of pain.

I even like the over-the-top Aussie accent. I think it was a great call to make Vanille and Fang fake Australians in order to play up how different they are from the rest of the cast. What’s more naturey than 30 foot spiders?

In combat, Vanille is another excellent magic user. Her primary roles are Medic, Ravager and Saboteur – which provides some separation from Hope who excels in supportive magic. Unfortunately for her, I didn’t have much use for a second dedicated mage in my party, so she was left on the bench most of the time.

The exception would be for specific grinding scenarios. Late in Vanille’s Crystarium, she learns the Death spell. She will basically never use it if she’s not in the lead, but if she is, you can spam it over and over again until it works on some of the beefiest baddies in the game in order to earn quick EXP. If you need a lot of items or money later on to get stronger weapons, this is probably your best path to doing so.

This led to me swapping out Lightning if I needed to take on some of these enemies. She wasn’t completely benched like Sazh or Snow were so at least she had some versatility! The giant turtles of Pulse lived in fear of the sweet little Australian girl.

I think the entire cast of Final Fantasy XIII is controversial in some way. From what I’ve seen online, Vanille seems to be the one who gets the least amount of pushback. Even Lightning gets some shit for being the face of the XIII-trilogy! Good for the little lady from Pulse.

Oerba Yun Fang

The clothing and accent stuff I mentioned above in Vanille’s section also applies to Fang. However, Fang joins the party as a mysterious figure after the initial run-in with the Pulse Fal’cie at the beginning of the game, so her having a ‘shady’ origin story isn’t as surprising here. Still, it should be said, I love her design and voice for the same reasons!

Vanille and Fang are something of a package deal – they even became l’cie together. While Vanille is a gentle soul who doesn’t want to directly harm anyone, Fang is willing to take on whatever in order to guarantee the people important to her survive. She’s the yin to Vanille’s yang.

I glossed over Vanille’s focus above, but the pair were tasked with becoming an entity known as Ragnarok. The goal of Ragnarok is to take out the Sanctum Fal’cie and send Cocoon plummeting to the earth below, killing almost every human in the process. Vanille resisted this while Fang took on the task for the pair of them. She was willing to shed the blood that Vanille was not.

Now you might be asking, if this happened long ago, why the hell is Cocoon still around at the start of XIII? The answer is pretty unsatisfying – the same god that saved the party at the very end of the game also took pity on humanity here and crystallized the duo to prevent harm. Later on, when the two awoke, Fang had no memories of her past as Ragnarok. But Vanille did and she hid it, hoping to protect her partner.

You might have picked up on my usage of the word ‘partner’ when talking about these two characters. The game repeatedly tells the player how important they are to each other but they sort of leave their actual relationship ambiguous.

There is no official word on if the two women are a couple or not, so it’s left up to the player to decide for themselves. They’re always presented as a team, so I refer to them as partners, but I have no actual proof beyond that. There isn’t like a 10-minute makeout scene like with Tidus and Yuna. But, in my opinion, it’s pretty obvious that there’s something going on between the two of them.

Fang’s journey throughout XIII is spent mostly regaining her memories and doing whatever she can to protect Vanille. She repeatedly states that her main objective in this adventure is to ensure her safety. She never wavers from this point – even though she can’t remember her original focus, she tries to get Vanille to focus on her survivability.

This extends to the bit where Dajh becomes a l’cie, she reassures Vanille that they were only doing what they needed to do to survive.

Unfortunately, I don’t really enjoy Fang too much as a character. I feel like she never grows. In her original time, she was more than happy to bring down Cocoon in order to prevent Vanille from turning into a cie’th. When she learns the truth at the very end of this game, what does she do? She turns into Ragnarok and wants to bring about the exact same result. Vanille even tries to stop her and she refuses.

So she didn’t learn anything about friendship or gain any sort of love for humanity. Her ‘focus’ at the start of the game is to ensure survivability for Vanille and that remained true at the end. When confronting the final boss, the entire party turn into cie’th as Fang slowly loses her mind. Luckily for Fang, the god I mentioned earlier intervened again, and everybody gets saved. From here, they talk her down and the game proceeds from there.

This brings us to the ending of Fang’s character. The party successfully defeats the fal’cie holding Cocoon up and it’s going to plummet to the earth. At this moment, she decides to embrace Vanille’s sweet side and the two become Ragnarok together. They hold Cocoon up and then crystalize, preventing millions of deaths at the cost of their own life.

It is a sweet moment, but it is not one that I feel Fang arrived to naturally. If left to her own devices, if there was no literal divine intervention, she would have gone through with everything as is.

Unfortunately for my traditional play style, Fang is probably the best character in this game. She gets Commando, Sentinel and Saboteur as her primary roles and she gets excellent attack stats to boot. She’s a great tank, can cause damage and unlike the other tank in Snow, she has a different role in her arsenal that can give her utility in all-out attack situations.

Because of her varied skillset, she is invaluable to the team. I like having a tank, healer and a buffer/debuffer at all times and the combo of Fang and Hope is the only group that can provide those adequately.

Yes, you can learn all the roles with all of your party members, but the exp to learn those abilities is far steeper than the main path and the stat-ups are lesser. It’s a way for the game to kind of go: “Okay, you can technically do it any way you want, but it’s a lot easier if you just use their primary roles”

My least favorite character is also the best character overall? Harumph. Can’t you at least be overpowered and super boring like T.G. Cid?

Galenth Dysley (The Fal’cie Barthandelus)

We conclude our character section with the game’s big bad, Galenth Dysley. He’s the leading figure of Sanctum and sort of the figure-head for all of the Fal’cie’s machinations. He presents as a human but in reality he is the Fal’cie Barthandelus. Fair warning, this is also a section on the Fal’cie in general.

There is a strict black and white mentality in Cocoon. Pulse bad, Cocoon good. Really, bad is an understatement. Pulse is hell on earth! This is done in order to constantly keep the population on edge and subservient. They do not mind the occasional purge of a city because it keeps the population in check. The Cocoon Fal’cie Eden is God while the Pulse Fal’cie Anima is the devil.

However, Pulse and Cocoon aren’t so black and white. In reality, the Fal’cie all have the same goal. They all want Cocoon to fall from the sky in order to resurrect their maker. They are essentially a death cult. While Fal’cie were created at the same time as humans, they function on a much more robotic level. They are unable to cause harm to themselves, so they can’t just make Cocoon fall on their own.

If the Fal’cie had the ability to harm themselves or go out of their way to personally end humanity, their plan would be a lot easier. Every aspect of society relies on these beings – there’s a Fal’cie dedicated to food and water for humanity and there’s a Fal’cie dedicated to providing energy to Cocoon. These things are an integral part of society and due to some programming, for lack of a better word because they are not actually robots, they just can’t advance things as they want to.

They need to have someone do it for them. This brings about the need for l’cie. L’cie can be just about anyone – the literal child Dajh is one after all – so they need to have some shit put in front of them to harden them up. The whole Pulse/Cocoon hatred is a means in order to constantly put adversity in front of them. If the party is constantly on the run, they constantly grow stronger.

Much like in XII with the Occuria, XIII’s Fal’cie constantly manipulates the party into doing what they want. While the group thinks they have agency, in reality, they are moving in the exact way that Dysley wants them to in order to ensure the collapse of society.

This includes the reason for the party going down to Pulse in the first place. They want to go there in order to get stronger and maybe find a way to remove their brands. This is exactly what the Fal’cie want though, they view Pulse as a massive training ground for the l’cie. Like a boot camp, almost. The party essentially goes there to sharpen their skills so they actually have the ability to take down some god-like figures.

Yes, this means every focus works towards the goal of bringing down Cocoon. These are just assumptions, but Serah’s was to gather beings capable of bringing down society all together and Dajh’s was something similar along those lines.

It’s also the reason for why l’cie turn into cie’th if they don’t get shit done in time. If you’re not useful enough to complete your goal, you’re useless to the Fal’cie and should be disposed of. Useful tools get to stay around as crystals, useless ones get trashed.

The goal of the Fal’cie with this group of heroes is to get Fang, who has already shown that she is willing to turn into Ragnarok, to finish the job this time. They get her in a position to kill the Fal’cie Orphan – Eden’s power source – while all of her allies are Cie’th. Instead, the god of death Etro, once again takes pity on humanity and undoes the cie’thening.

But at this point, the party all kind of agrees that living under Fal’cie rule is bad. They feel that the god-like beings view them as pets and they want to go along with Dysley’s plans and end it. But, you know, without humanity’s extinction.

If Etro doesn’t intervene, Cocoon falls and the maker gets resurrected. But instead, through the power of love and friendship, Vanille and Fang jointly become Ragnarok and save Cocoon while also freeing humanity from the rule of Fal’cie. Everyone wins! Well, except the Fal’cie who don’t get to witness the resurrection of the maker.

I have bitched about the ending a few times, so forgive me for going back to old ground here, but it’s very disheartening to go on a large adventure to just find out every choice the protagonists make on the journey have been calculated. They’ve been so calculated, in fact, that the main party decides to play along at the very end of the game anyway. A literal miracle has to interfere in order for this plan to fail. It just sucks.

And knowing ‘why’ it happens doesn’t make it suck any less. A lot of players don’t know why the end shakes out like it does because they don’t read the datalogs, so it feels very much like it came out of nowhere. But is ‘A god did it’ really any more satisfactory than ‘It just worked out?’

It also hurts that Dysley, being an almost otherworldly Fal’cie, doesn’t have much of a personality. He’s just straight forward kill humanity man. This would be like if the main villain of XII was Venat. This leads to XIII having something of the reverse problem that XII has in the narrative. The villains in XII are super well developed while the main party is, to be very mean about it, set dressing. The party in XIII is super well developed while the main villains are, to be very mean about it, set dressing.

When it finally comes time to throw hands with Dysley, the final boss battle is three-phases long and even brings in Orphan to help assure players this is the end. Fittingly, this is the most difficult ‘normal’ battle in the game. If you are lacking in EXP and you don’t have a good paradigm set making use of all six roles, you’re going to struggle. I remember the first time I played feeling like the final boss went on forever – I’d even read online about how people cheesed it using poison. Poison useful in a boss fight, can you imagine?

In this go around, I had done a ton of side questing before reaching the end of the game. Every member of my party was pretty prepared for the postgame activities at that point, so this fight didn’t really cause any problems. It was still long, this guy has a ton of health, but it’s pretty straightforward as long as the player doesn’t bee-line to the end.

Hey man, you spent 30-something hours walking in a straight line. Might not hurt you to explore Pulse a little bit, right?

As much as I do not think that the overarching story in XIII is super interesting, I still prefer the character-focused approach to what XII did. I actually care about the main party – these characters in particular – being the ones to end Fal’cie rule.

I care about their motivations and I care about their arcs. Even if the villains are flat, seeing these characters succeed brings me joy. I don’t really give a shit who kills Vayne in XII as long as someone does. I need Lightning and crew to be the ones to end Dysley and the Fal’cie.

In conclusion

Final Fantasy XIII is an exceptionally divisive game. It came out at a time when linearity was considered a bad word in the gaming world. It has complicated characters and a battle system that is both familiar and vastly different to what came before.

Some people throw around the word unfinished when talking about XIII because of events being cut from the game and being thrown into the datalog. Curse you Xbox 360! While I understand why people may think that way, anybody playing XIII isn’t going to play the game and think to themselves ‘hey, this is missing some stuff!’

If you want an incomplete game, check out the next retrospective.

They shipped a complete, yet flawed, package. And that’s what I’m judging the game on, not the potential that never saw the light of day. The heights of the game – the combat and storytelling – make up for a lot of the shortcomings. But there are rough spots. It’s not the easiest playthrough if the player isn’t braced to deal with some of those things, most notably the pacing.

But anybody who claims it’s a disaster of a game or the death of Final Fantasy is over-exaggerating things. XII was the pivot into a more actiony direction, XIII was the next step in the process. The games to come next take the franchise even further from its roots, this just marks the middle years of the transitionary period.

It’s neither the worst nor the best game in the franchise. It’s a game many people brush off because of its reputation, which I think is a shame. Play with an open mind, you might find something to love. I’ve finished this game four times now, so even if it’s not my favorite thing ever, there’s still something about it that keeps me coming back.

Score: 3/5

Game rankings to this point

1: Tactics
2: X
3: VII
4: V
5: VI
6: VIII
7: IV
8: IX
9: XIII
10: XII
11: III
12: I
13: II
14: Mystic Quest

Yes, I scored XII a 3.5 instead of just a 3. Despite having more flaws, I just think I prefer XIII. Illogical but I can’t lie to you.

Up Next

The problems with modernity

Previous: Final Fantasy XII: JRPG Manager