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auronluThis is a repost of a comment I made buried waaaay down in an LJ discussion. I thought I'd throw it out here. I don't think there are significant spoilers.
Preface this by the fact that I find I like games for the following reasons, in the following order: Characters (including their interactions, backstories, psychology, memorable lines, voices); myths and archetypes; setting (I am a graphics junkie, but also care deeply about worldbuilding); story; game mechanics; plot. (You can sell me on a childishly simple storyline, plot holes, or a story that's been done a million zillion times, if you do other things well.)
Oh, FFXIII. There's another game where everyone spent so much time running it down that by the time I played it, my first reaction was, "Wow! This is better than I expected!" followed by, "Okay, well, the plot and world are strangely empty; I see why people are disappointed," followed by, "Oh, but I like these characters, I just wish I cared more about their stupid-ass world." (in fact, for good and ill, FFXIII had a throwback feel to the MYST series, where eerily-deserted habitations were turned into a plot point because MYST/RIVEN just didn't have the computer power to fold character interactions in a photo-surrealistic 3D environment).
I have to admit, I'm swayed by FFXIII's rich and vivid MYST-like landscapes, although it also suffered painfully from a lack of metaphorical depth— no meaningful interactions with NPCs or town-exploration. The worldbuilding was physically elaborate and poetically poor. The storybuilding is labored and the storyline too simple (especially compared to XII, which was gloriously Byzantine). The bad habit of shoving backstory into "the manual" instead of dramatizing it is almost unforgiveable.
Yet XIII at its core comes down to really well-defined characters, which as I noted above, takes priority over lush landscapes (which it has, godalmighty), worldbuilding (which it fails), and plot (which is patchy and not well-paced).
Mainly, I liked the characters. It took me a little while to warm up to them, like XII, but I like the party members (even Vanille, once I had her Japanese dub to drive the English one out of my head a little bit).
Most of all, Fang. It's the first time there's been a canon lesbian relationship, and that one scene when Fang's giving Vanille a "don't you worry, honey" look as the door closes between them won my heart as much as "I had a terrible nightmare -- I dreamed I was a moron" made me howl and fall instantly in love with VIII for a totally different reason. Both are character-defining moments for very, very different characters! Fang's whole arc (and, let's face it, the great honking Angst and TORTURE scene) pleased me very much.
Also, I have a real sweet tooth for voices, as you know. There's no one with quite the cachet of Balthier's unforgettable sardonic tones, but both Fang and Lightning have voices I sink into and roll around with like catnip.
Even Snow in his PIE IN FACE bozohood amuses me. How many video games have there been with a self-appointed hero, the all-American Dude, who's supposed to be nice and decent and heroic and badass and you want to PIE IN FACE?!!! Well, XIII has him, but the game designers realized he is a PIE IN FACE and made it a running gag throughout the game, giving you the great satisfaction of watching Lightning give him PIE IN FACE physically or verbally. Until, finally, you figure out that honestly he's human, and he's flawed, and he's got a few nuances under the PIE.
Every single character starts with a stereotypical mold and then breaks it.
And it also helps that Lightning has the whole guardian/mentor trope I love so much (Lulu) even while upping the Badassitude about ten jillion notches. I also appreciate a female character who isn't always nice, and is sometimes downright rude and insensitive -- why do the guys get a free pass on that? But she is good, at her core. Most of all, I go all wibbly at "I will do anything to save my sister [literal or non-literal, hello Yuna]" as a driving character motivation for a female character, secondary only to "I will rip the sky apart to save my girlfriend." I know it's too much knight/princess in disguise (Utena/Anthy), but it beats the "heterosexual romance" plot we usually get for strong female characters.
____
ETA: I also like the managerial-tactics-plus-Hong-Kong-Cinema game mechanics of FFXIII fairly well, although XII's gambits system was my favorite, as it allowed both "baseball manager" style tactics and manual hands-on override. Mechanics may be a bigger factor than I realize, as the games I can't get through are often due to game mechanics issues. The sparkly choreography and -strike magic in FFXIII combat also suited my lizard brain very nicely; I loved watching Fang and Lightning thwack monsters into the sky and then fly up there on HKCinema wires to beat the stuffing out of their victims. In fact, I occasionally got my party wiped out, or at least lost numerous chances to get 5-stars, watching them fight. This was somewhat offset by my great glee in staggering robots, which are extremely amusing-looking when staggered. Yes, I have a bloodthirsty streak.
Preface this by the fact that I find I like games for the following reasons, in the following order: Characters (including their interactions, backstories, psychology, memorable lines, voices); myths and archetypes; setting (I am a graphics junkie, but also care deeply about worldbuilding); story; game mechanics; plot. (You can sell me on a childishly simple storyline, plot holes, or a story that's been done a million zillion times, if you do other things well.)
Oh, FFXIII. There's another game where everyone spent so much time running it down that by the time I played it, my first reaction was, "Wow! This is better than I expected!" followed by, "Okay, well, the plot and world are strangely empty; I see why people are disappointed," followed by, "Oh, but I like these characters, I just wish I cared more about their stupid-ass world." (in fact, for good and ill, FFXIII had a throwback feel to the MYST series, where eerily-deserted habitations were turned into a plot point because MYST/RIVEN just didn't have the computer power to fold character interactions in a photo-surrealistic 3D environment).
I have to admit, I'm swayed by FFXIII's rich and vivid MYST-like landscapes, although it also suffered painfully from a lack of metaphorical depth— no meaningful interactions with NPCs or town-exploration. The worldbuilding was physically elaborate and poetically poor. The storybuilding is labored and the storyline too simple (especially compared to XII, which was gloriously Byzantine). The bad habit of shoving backstory into "the manual" instead of dramatizing it is almost unforgiveable.
Yet XIII at its core comes down to really well-defined characters, which as I noted above, takes priority over lush landscapes (which it has, godalmighty), worldbuilding (which it fails), and plot (which is patchy and not well-paced).
Mainly, I liked the characters. It took me a little while to warm up to them, like XII, but I like the party members (even Vanille, once I had her Japanese dub to drive the English one out of my head a little bit).
Most of all, Fang. It's the first time there's been a canon lesbian relationship, and that one scene when Fang's giving Vanille a "don't you worry, honey" look as the door closes between them won my heart as much as "I had a terrible nightmare -- I dreamed I was a moron" made me howl and fall instantly in love with VIII for a totally different reason. Both are character-defining moments for very, very different characters! Fang's whole arc (and, let's face it, the great honking Angst and TORTURE scene) pleased me very much.
Also, I have a real sweet tooth for voices, as you know. There's no one with quite the cachet of Balthier's unforgettable sardonic tones, but both Fang and Lightning have voices I sink into and roll around with like catnip.
Even Snow in his PIE IN FACE bozohood amuses me. How many video games have there been with a self-appointed hero, the all-American Dude, who's supposed to be nice and decent and heroic and badass and you want to PIE IN FACE?!!! Well, XIII has him, but the game designers realized he is a PIE IN FACE and made it a running gag throughout the game, giving you the great satisfaction of watching Lightning give him PIE IN FACE physically or verbally. Until, finally, you figure out that honestly he's human, and he's flawed, and he's got a few nuances under the PIE.
Every single character starts with a stereotypical mold and then breaks it.
And it also helps that Lightning has the whole guardian/mentor trope I love so much (Lulu) even while upping the Badassitude about ten jillion notches. I also appreciate a female character who isn't always nice, and is sometimes downright rude and insensitive -- why do the guys get a free pass on that? But she is good, at her core. Most of all, I go all wibbly at "I will do anything to save my sister [literal or non-literal, hello Yuna]" as a driving character motivation for a female character, secondary only to "I will rip the sky apart to save my girlfriend." I know it's too much knight/princess in disguise (Utena/Anthy), but it beats the "heterosexual romance" plot we usually get for strong female characters.
____
ETA: I also like the managerial-tactics-plus-Hong-Kong-Cinema game mechanics of FFXIII fairly well, although XII's gambits system was my favorite, as it allowed both "baseball manager" style tactics and manual hands-on override. Mechanics may be a bigger factor than I realize, as the games I can't get through are often due to game mechanics issues. The sparkly choreography and -strike magic in FFXIII combat also suited my lizard brain very nicely; I loved watching Fang and Lightning thwack monsters into the sky and then fly up there on HKCinema wires to beat the stuffing out of their victims. In fact, I occasionally got my party wiped out, or at least lost numerous chances to get 5-stars, watching them fight. This was somewhat offset by my great glee in staggering robots, which are extremely amusing-looking when staggered. Yes, I have a bloodthirsty streak.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-30 10:45 pm (UTC)I thought FFXIII had the greatest story ever, until I realized I was in the penultimate chapter and that all the stuff I figured had been left out to develop later was actually just left out. I was very sad upon that realization.
(I also enjoyed tossing my enemies up in the air far too much.)
You may have seen this before, but this (English) voice actors sketch always makes me laugh.
Stealguard!
Date: 2011-11-30 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 02:05 am (UTC)ETA:
STEELGUARD!
(Also: PIE IN FACE!)
As for "greatest story ever," I wonder if the sequel will help at all. I gather that FFXIII's development was about the most fragmented, fractious Squeenix title to date, with lots of different teams working on different parts (a lot of effort and energy diverted into a titanic struggle with new technology) that they did not have one unified vision or storyline until quite late. And then they wound up having to leave out a lot of things that didn't fit. Will some go in XIII-2?
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Date: 2011-12-04 11:04 pm (UTC)I'm hoping the sequel will help, but most of the things missing for me were pretty specific to the original story. Fang and Vanille's complete lack of reaction to the wasteland their home had become was one of those things... :(
One of the other items has a better probability of being addressed, and that was the complete lack of human presence on Pulse. I'm hoping either we'll find out where they're hiding, or if not, what happened to them. It was implied that in the end, everyone became Cie'th or died from rampaging monsters/Cie'th, but there could be another angle...
"STEELGUARD!"
Date: 2011-12-01 04:06 am (UTC)Best sketch ever!
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Date: 2011-11-30 11:04 pm (UTC)Your comparison to Myst feels spot on, in a good way.
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Date: 2011-12-01 12:43 am (UTC)(And Lightning and Fang's voices are by far my favorites, although Sazh ranks pretty high up there, too. :D :D)
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Date: 2011-12-01 03:10 am (UTC)I love the girls. I love Snow for being an idiot and being called on it. I love Sazh. I love this game more than is reasonable.
WOW.
Date: 2011-12-01 03:37 am (UTC)I feel apologetic for liking this game. I mean, I KNOW its problems (Jihl, so horribly wasted, and what a lame-ass set of villains in general).
I'm surprised and pleased that so many folks on my DW list were able to enjoy the edible parts of this curate's egg of a game.
Meanwhile, I've got samuraiter over on LJ who can't even play Duodecim because he can't stand Lightning.
Whereas I'm all, WHY DIDN'T WE GET A CHARACTER LIKE LIGHTNING SOONER?!!!
Re: WOW.
Date: 2011-12-02 05:21 pm (UTC)Whereas I'm all, WHY DIDN'T WE GET A CHARACTER LIKE LIGHTNING SOONER?!!!
I can understand the early dislike, at least! I liked Lightning after finishing the game, but it took me a while to warm up to her. Part of that, though, is the fact that I felt like one of the very few people among my circles who didn't stand up and cheer when Lightning punched Snow in the face. All I ever read about that bit was how AWESOME it was, and all I could think was... no. It isn't awesome. It doesn't matter what genders the people involved were. She's punching the guy who was freaking out over losing the woman he loved; she's taking her own anger and frustration out on him. That's still a bad thing!
She came to realize that after a while, though, after she punched Fang and admitted that the violence never really changed anything. I think that's the moment when the emotional turnaround was complete; it had been coming during Lightning and Hope's Bogus Journey, but that was the moment I actually forgave the previous behavior, if you can really say that about a fictional character, and started appreciating her strength and her drive.
Which is part of what I ended up liking about the game. They're all very dynamic characters, and that goes a long way towards making up for the game's flaws.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 05:36 am (UTC)I think.. I don't love the game.
I like the game. And hate parts of the game with great hate.
I love the characters. Specifically, the PCs. Not much NPC-love.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 02:11 pm (UTC)For some reason it never occurred to me that Datalog storytelling was a problem - I like having cool things to read in the middle of a game, and I guess the text-heaviness of other RPGs I'd played fairly recently (FFXII, DA:O) meant that FFXIII didn't seem out of line. And I loved the nonlinearity of the Thirteen Days - that's not something most videogames would have tried.
FFXII's battle system is my favourite too! But XIII's is fun enough to keep me grinding, unlike many RPG battle systems. I do like a bit of mechanical complexity - I got bored of DA:O long before it was done mostly because of the clickclickclick combat. At least FFXIII allowed for some tactical experimentation.
I guess mostly I love FFXIII for the character melodrama and the vicious deconstruction (of character types, of what an RPG party is, of what a gameworld is, and it is probably noncoincidental that it all eventually devolved into a Metal Gear plotline in which whatever they do the Patriots will always win.) And the lesbians, obv. It's shockingly underrated imo.
-also, I hate to say it, but I am always a wee bit suspicious when non-American female VAs doing non-American voices get h8ed by American fandom. I think there is some inherent auditary bias at work.
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Date: 2011-12-01 06:15 pm (UTC)Vicious deconstruction, also good, although I confess it almost lost me in the early going as I have trouble with Everybody Being Nasty to Everybody social friction pieces. But I hung on gamely. Character melodrama yay.
I think the lesbians thing is underrated because, let's face it, it's left ambiguous, especially in translation. Fang's calling Vanille "Missy" is possible (I would've used "honey"), but "poor kid" -- conspicuously absent in the Japanese -- undercuts a scene where their relationship is most strongly implied.
I'm going to beg to differ with you on the VA thing, if you mean Vanille. Many Americans respond favorably to Australian accents; in fact, this has become a shameless U.S. advertising tool. Most FF fans love Fang's voice and Fran's (although the latter is playing around with French and who knows what to disguise hers). Vanille is actually remarkable to me for being the first time any kind of Australian accent didn't predispose me to like the character (I include my last girlfriend in that assessment of my own auditory shallowness).
My problem with Vanille was not her non-Americanness, but her pitch and nasality -- the same problems I have with certain California and New Jersey accents -- and the whininess. Her Japanese VA managed to convey all of Vanille's troubles and worries with a sort of breathlessness that expressed the character's contradiction (innocence, and its exact opposite) better. Her Japanese VA sounds to me like a Miyazaki heroine. With Vanille being a narrator and keystone to the story, the Miyazaki-heroine (and yet SO NOT -- again with the archetype subversion) adds a layer to the character that gave me the key to liking her.
Honestly, it wasn't that much of a distraction, though; it was mostly the battlequotes, which are always an issue because they're oft-repeated sound effects rather than real dialog.
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Date: 2011-12-01 03:09 pm (UTC)I spend a lot of time wanting to give Snow all of the hugs. All of them. Because a)I love it when the Big Muscle Guy is also emotional and nurturing, and b) YES THANK YOU CHEERFUL PEOPLE ARE NOT ALWAYS SHALLOW WE DO IN FACT FEEL THINGS CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF. I like me some occasional uncomplicated hero types. {Especially when they can bounce off of complicated hero types without the interaction turning into either Everything Is Perfectly Simple And Would Work Perfectly If People Just ~*Believed*~ And Stopped Harshing My Squee or else into God You Sure Are Dumb Optimism Is For Kids Grow Up How Dare You Squee My Harsh.}
And then there's Fang, who is absolutely 100% the sexiest character made of sexy sex ever to grace my screen. And pretty much everyone else, also being awesome in their own diverse and character-sheet-subverting ways. I want to take them all home with me.
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Date: 2011-12-01 06:22 pm (UTC)Which is no better, but I knew perfectly well they were building him up to be an ass in that way to elicit that response -- and then mirror-magnifying that response with Hope until we were embarrassed to feel that way. That was an impressive psychological sleight-of-hand.
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Date: 2011-12-02 05:30 pm (UTC)Also, Lightning punching him once an hour keeps the frustration down. {I am in my heart of hearts convinced that she has a little watch alarm.}
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Date: 2011-12-03 02:42 am (UTC)Having not paid much attention to American comics, I am blissfully ignorant of the trope. And you're right, that can get old.
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Date: 2011-12-02 06:01 pm (UTC)This. Well, most of what you just said, but especially this. I had a hard time getting through the first few chapters simply because of the stereotypical molds; I was basically watching them be really nasty to each other for what felt like a long time, and argh, I could get that in real life if I really wanted to see it. The whole argument over what to do about Serah's crystal, before the group left Snow behind, nearly made me give up on it; just about everyone was making me angry in that scene, except Sazh, 'cuz I'm biased towards the One Sane Man in a given group. (He was the only one I liked from the beginning.) But I kept going anyway, and I was very glad when the molds started to break and the characters started to actually become a group and play off of each other like people and have actual meaningful relationships. ^^
But yes. FFXIII will never be my favorite game, and I'll probably never go back for the rest of the Crystarium or the missions (I'd have to buy another copy anyway, the copy I played is gone.) But I'm glad I played it anyway!
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Date: 2011-12-03 02:44 am (UTC)THIS. There are so many games, books, and movies I have nearly or have given up on because of that there problem.
Heck, I can't get through Season 5 of Babylon 5 because of that problem, and I adore that show.
(And on the other hand, that problem meant it took me years to read some of Ellnyx's best fanfic -- North Star -- and I am so sorry i wasn't able to overcome my innate dislike of "everyone's being really crappy to each other!" sooner.)