Can't call it a comeback

Oh man, where do I even begin with this one. The short version is that this is not the knight in shining armor that will save the PS3 and Japan. This game is an embarrassment to the gamers, and its makers. This can't even be considered half-finished and rushed out the door to meet a deadline. With the amount of bare-bones technical content it's closer to a third finished. The graphics, audio and story may be competent, but after the five years of development, Square Enix forgot to make a game out of Final Fantasy XIII.

The final battle system has been watered down from the one found in the demo. The only interesting, though poorly implemented, "knock-up" mechanic has been replaced with a "Stagger" system. Similarly to the demo version, once an enemy receives enough damage they glow yellow, but now this condition only causes them to receive more damage from the players' subsequent attacks. This is done to compensate for the lack of a proper growth system and character levels. No more EXPerience points, VITality, LUCk, etc. The only stats left are Hit Points, STRength, and MAGic. This makes the core game extremely simple, so the developers decided to overpower the major enemies, forcing the player to utilize the Stagger mechanic as the only way to win. Keeping with 3D FF tradition, the battles are spastic and confusing, with sudden cuts and fast camera pans. The developers decided to add an "Auto Battle" command to make things more manageable. Instead of having to select commands from a list while robotic dogs chew on your face, you can now hit a single button and let the computer select Attack-Attack-Attack for you. Random enemy encounters have, therefore, been reduced to the player hitting the X button over and over again, eliminating the need to even hit Up or Down on the d-pad occasionally or navigating through sub-menus. Again, a band aid placed over a fundamental design flaw. The most complicated thing the player will be asked to do is hit L1 to open a menu, press up or down, to select a pre-programmed character behavior set, and hit the X button to accept. That's three or four consecutive button presses, provided the player was enterprising enough to set up their own set instead of relying on the ones that are automatically added by the system. All the while you'll find robotic dogs are chewing on your face. As someone currently playing through Final Fantasy V, I really have to ask, what happened to wait-time during sub-menu navigation? The PS3 isn't capable of halting the on-screen action like the Super Nintendo was or something? It's all quite bizarre to behold.

The music is still good. The graphics look unchanged from the demo. The maps are all straight corridors, and the whole thing is still an amusement park ride simulator. Square Enix finally succeeded in incorporating RPG elements into a movie. Also keeping with Final Fantasy tradition, no one will call out this game over any of these flaws in any meaningful way, until at least five years from now. (When Final Fantasy Versus XIII is released.) At this point I'll have to assume that the game was put together in the eight months between the demo's release and the final game. I find it hard to believe that the company that put a Final Fantasy logo on an artificial intelligence tool-kit made these backwards decisions on purpose, especially with a main series entry, their flagship product.

You may notice the $59.99 price tag in that picture. That is certainly not the price I paid for this. I missed my chance to pick this up for $30 at K-Mart, but I guess the kid I bought it off of on eBay didn't. I'd like to think that after shipping and/or gas, he didn't make any money off of my $35 winning bid. If $60 is the full asking price, and the product is only 1/3 complete, $20 is a fair price to pay. The US hasn't caught on to this yet, but Japan quickly realized it when the game could be had for ¥980 a few weeks after release. Currently, the market price seems to be ¥500. That's the score then, Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3 is ¥500 out of ¥9800.