Well, here’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, sort of anyway. I’ve been meaning to do a review of Final Fantasy XIII for a while now to get my feelings on the game out there but I’ve also wanted to do a TNI on some games in the Final Fantasy series. This entry gets both of those out of the way and is on the perfect games to do a comparison on. XII and XIII are like polar opposites. One has a medieval fantasy setting and the other a futuristic sci-fi world. One is very open with huge areas to explore and the other is very linear –save for one area. One features a carefree, pretty boy antagonist and the other a serious woman ex-soldier on a mission to save her sister. One was the last Final Fantasy on its console and the other its first. Alright, enough of that, let’s have a look at Final Fantasies XII and XIII.
Presentation
Both of these games are simply beautiful. FFXII really shows how great PS2 games can look and it can look even better when you use an emulator on the PC to bump up the native resolution to HD levels. The textures are surprisingly good and have many details you just don’t get to see due to the game being rendered in SD. There’s also a very nice effect with the save crystals you don’t get to see well enough unless you play on an emulator, it reflects and distorts things and just looks really good. Sadly though no matter the resolution you display FFXII at it will always get beaten by XIII.
Square Enix once again outputs some of the best graphics seen on the console up to now with FXIII. It is seriously one of the most beautiful looking games I’ve seen. The colours and the locations and the designs and all so highly defined. It has also got some of the best looking FMVs I’ve seen with so much detail packed into every scene.
The sound design in both games is also great with both having some brilliant musical pieces like FFXII’s rendition of the Final Fantasy Theme (FFXII’s was my favourite until I heard FFXIVs) and FFXIII’s battle theme Blinded By Light. Overall though I think FFXIII has the better music as more of its tunes have stuck with me. The main ones I remember from FFXII was the Final Fantasy and Chocobo themes but with FFXIII there’s the regular battle music, the two Chocobo themes (Pulse and Cocoon de Chocobo), Snow’s Theme, Serah’s Theme (and all the tracks that incorporate it in some way) and more.
Regarding voice acting, both games have very good voice acting with no characters voices feeling out of place. The game with the best voice acting though would have to be FFXII. The voices fit so well and the performances are so good, particularly from Balthier.
The best presented game would have to be FFXIII though for its amazing graphics and music. If nothing else FFXIII is a very well presented game and just great to look at and listen to.
Gameplay
Regarding the gameplay, I don’t think the two games could be further apart unless they were two different genres. FFXII gets rid of the turn based combat used in Final Fantasies I-X and instead adopts for a style more similar to FFXI, the first online Final Fantasy. The battles plays out in real time on the field but can be paused at any time to select abilities or magic. There’s also the Gambit system, a serious of actions and commands that will execute when certain conditions are met. You could assign your healer to cast Cure when a party member’s health is below a certain percentage. These allow you to develop deep strategies or if you set it up right, have the game practically play itself.
FFXIII on the other hand goes back to an instanced battle field for combat. It keeps the real time style of XI and XII but you have the ATB (active time battle) meter that constantly fills throughout the battle. Each action takes a certain amount of the bar to perform and you can chain actions up. Unlike FFXII though you have next to no impact on how the AI behaves beyond what class they are and you have to pick your actions in real time, no pausing, slow pickings could mean a game over.
Speaking of game overs with FFXII, like all FFs, you’ll have to continue from a save point if you get a game over but in FFXIII if the character you are controlling dies you get a game over but you can restart from just before the battle began. This makes the game much easier and you don’t have to worry about experimenting in battle. You can also restart the fight whenever you want. It’s a very brilliant move on Square-Enix’s part and I really hope it stays in all future Final Fantasy games. One thing (the only thing) I dislike about FFXIII’s battle system is the Auto-Battle option. While other Final Fantasy games had an auto-attack option that was all it did, automatically use the attack command. XIII’s Auto-Battle chooses the best commands from your abilities list and uses them, taking away all the strategy from battles. You don’t have to use it but when there’s the option of having the best selected quickly or the probable best selected slowly you’re going to go with the best quickly every time, unless you like forcing artificial difficulty onto yourself. The most strategy in the battles comes from the Paradigm Shift feature that lets you change jobs in battle. It pretty much boils down to using a healer, a buffer and a debuffer on bosses, then switching to two magic users and a melee to build up the stagger meter, then when the enemy is staggered switch to the most powerful offensive roles and hammer away at the boss until the stagger ends then just repeat, switching to healing roles when needed.
That’s it with the battle system so how has the growth system changed between games? FFXII used the licence board where you had to spend license points to unlock stat increases, spells, techniques and the ability to wear different armours and weapons. Everyone shared a license board and every character was pretty much identical to each other, all that differed was the equipment they had and the squares on the license board they had unlocked. This system was quite nice though as it allowed you to craft the characters how you wanted. Want Balthier to be a master gun man with some deadly black magic? You can. Want Vaan to be a master mage able to wear the toughest armour? You can.
FFXIII’s Crystarium System is a lot less open. It resembles a linear version of FFX’s Sphere Grid system. You spend Crystarium Points to progress through the different class trees. Each character gets 3 starting classes but can later expand to the other 3 classes at a much higher CP cost. The stat increases such as HP and strength stay no matter what class you currently are but you can only use the abilities of the class when you are playing as that class. It’s a decent enough system but doesn’t offer the customisability of the License Board.
One last thing about the gameplay. I should say something about the summons. FFXII’s really aren’t all the impressive, you unlock them on the License Board after you beat them and when you summon them they stick around and fight a bit then pull off their special move. In FFXIII each character has one Eidolon they can summon after beating it in fight where you ahev to boost the combo meter then ‘Gestalt’ them. When you summon one they fight with you like in FFXII until you enter Gestalt mode where they transform into a vehicular form and you ride them whilst directly controlling their actions. It’s a nice feature and mixes up the gameplay a bit. It’s also really fun watching them transform from a big warrior into a sporty race car.
Story/Characters
Perhaps the most important thing to some Final Fantasy fans or RPG fans in general is the story. I won’t give away too much of the plot details here so as not to spoil anything in either game but will give a quick overview of the basic premise.
Let’s start with XIII. Basically near the beginning of the game shit is going down on a train due to stuff that will be explained in flash backs throughout the game. All the main characters except one are on this train and end up meeting eventually in the room of this evil machine/god thing that turns the characters into L’cie and tasks them with a focus, a task they must carry out before they turn into Ceith. Cieth are zombie monster things by the way. When they complete their focus they will turn to crystal and live forever according to stories they’ve heard. The main problem with XIII’s story isn’t the content or premise but the presentation. They just come out with all these words that you either need to read the in game encyclopaedia or wait until a good chunk of the story is explained for you later on. So basically, they aren’t told what their focus is but shown a weird shared dream of it and left to work out what it means. They eventually do and then its typical Final Fantasy save the world stuff. There are twists along the way but I don’t want to spoil anything. I wasn’t a huge fan of the story but the ‘big reveal’ was pretty cool I must say.
The characters on the other hand are great. At first I didn’t like any of them except for Vanille and Snow, two characters that everyone else seems to hate. Vanille is for the most part a cheery girl always trying to make the others feel better and brighten the mood and Snow just wants to be the hero and save everyone. He’s strong, courageous, stands up for what he thinks is right and tries to help even those who don’t want his help. There rest of the cast consists of Lightening, Fang, Hope and Sazh. Lightening is a serious and strong woman and perhaps the one who thinks most rationally about their situation. Hope is just a kid who has to go through a big loss early in the game which he blames on Snow and spends a lot of the game hating him for it, he’s a good kid though and forms a bond with Lightening wanting to be strong like her. Sazh is the oldest of the group and a father separated from his son Dajh, he’s kind and caring and looks after group. Fang is like a more fun, Australian version of Lightening and he last character to be introduced to the crew.
FFXII’s story is on a smaller scale than FFXIII’s, dealing with two warring nations rather than a world in danger. The story starts off with you playing as Reks, older brother to ‘main’ character Vaan, as you and your team try to stave off an invasion of Dalmasca by the evil Archadian empire (the baddies). When Reks makes it to the king he finds that the king has been killed by his captain whole then proceeds to stab Reks. With his dying breath he reveals the betrayal of his captain Basch fon Ronsenburg (of Dalmasca!). This sets the scene and sets up the Archadian empire as the bad guys and Basch as a person for Vaan to hate.
We then jump to Vaan’s ‘exciting’ life of being a street rat and doing odd jobs for people and getting quests off an old wise man who lives in the slums. Vaan plans to break into the palace during a royal event to steal some fancy treasure after learning about a secret entrance from the old wise man. Coincidently while in the treasure room bumps into Balthier (the leading man) and his lovely bunny assistant, who are both sky pirates and planed on stealing the treasure too. Stuff happens causing them to flee through the sewer and setting the rest of the game in motion with the main character meeting another party member, getting sent to jail and meeting another, traveling to a floating island to save Vaan’s pointless friend and learning a secret about the empire and starting a quest to return the rightful ruler to the throne and defeat Vayne Solidor, the evil son of the emperor of Archadia.
The story is pretty good, I’m just not explaining it right. It has its low points like the start but when it picks up it gets good and has plenty of good plot twists. The characters however aren’t as good as XIII’s over all. By that I mean XIII had six good main characters where as XII only has 3. Vaan is just tacked on and not really important, he’s there so that the story can be experienced from the point of the common man who rises up to do great things (which are really the doings of the other party members), Penelo is a waste of space and only good for getting kidnapped which leads the party to the mines on Bhujerba and Fran is mostly there to talk with a weird accent and wear revealing clothes for the furrys. On the other hand the other three really are great, you’ve got Balthier who just oozes cool. He’s suave, charming and smart and thinks of life as a play with him playing the leading roll –just like how I chose to play this game-. He’s also got some interesting back story. There’s also princess Asche who is a good female lead and pained by seeing her country under the rule of the Empire and Basch, the disgraced knight who claims to have been framed for the kings murder and wants to do right for Dalmasca.
Area Design
I’m going to get it out of the way right now. For most of FFXIII you will be walking in a straight line, from A to B, with next to no branches and the branches you do find will just lead to a dead end with perhaps a treasure chest. The only place with real exploration is Gran Pulse in chapter 11. It’s a breath of fresh air and such a huge area with places that you can explore that aren’t just the next point in the story. That pretty much covers the layout of the areas in the game, mostly linear with a huge open area for a chapter (which you can revisit later on) but it’s the design of the areas that is fantastic. There’s quite a bit of variety with futuristic cities, a giant crystallised lake, robotic forests, sprawling junk yards and lush fields. Every area of the game looks fantastic.
FFXII’s areas on the other hand are mostly wide open landscapes with loads of entrances and exits and branches through the area. FFXII also has towns and cities, something that FFXIII lacks for whatever reasons. Like XIII there’s a lot of variety in the areas in XII. There are deserts, forests, plains, caves, snowy fields, ancient temples, ruined dungeons, high-tech magic airship interiors and they all look great and are designed in a way that allows multiple ways of traversing the areas. You can also return to (mostly) any previously visited area, unlike XIII where you are constantly moving forwards.
Conclusion
All in all they are both beautiful games, great graphics for their system with some great character, enemy and location designs but FFXIII wins on looks and sound. The game play of FFXII was pretty fun and I liked how dynamic you could make your party. The combat wasn’t as flashy as in FFXIII but it was more satisfying setting up my gambits and choosing the actions myself rather than letting the Auto-Battle do it for me. I found the story of FFXII to be better as it’s a nice change from ‘save the world’ style Final Fantasy stories (for the most part) and is much better told. I didn’t have to look at an in game encyclopaedia to know what the characters were talking about. I also preferred the areas of XII. While Pulse was very nice and a great place it was a shame the rest of the game wasn’t as open as that. I can understand caves or a dungeon style area being linear but for pretty much the whole game to be practically a straight line and offer no exploration? That’s just absurd for an RPG.
In the end I prefer XII. XIII is still a fun game and I’m glad I bought it (albeit on sale) I felt more involved with the FFXII characters and setting and enjoyed actually playing the game. XII is also the one with Balthier which means it’s automatically better than any game without him.
