Final Fantasy 13, for anyone who didn't play it

[Mr. Wallet]

Just finished it. Here's the gist:

A group of five extremely Japanese people and one moderately Japanese black guy have a very slow-acting form of Doom cast on them and resolve to prove that they still have the freedom to choose their own destiny by running down an endless single-route corridor. In their path stands a story of completely incomprehensible bullstuff that was probably damaged in translation, a broken character progression system which offers no real choices but must still be tended to every 10-30 minutes, and a difficulty progression that can only be described as "serrated". Along the way, they will retread such tired Japanese story themes as the difficulty of being unique in a conformist culture, friends sticking together and helping each other and really for the fifth time stop hiding your problems from us because of a deep cultural abhorrence of imposing on others no really we're your friends, and never giving up no matter what (making sure to lose all hope every 3 hours so that they may again resolve to never give up). In overcoming their destiny they will discover not only how to stretch a 15-hour game to 40+ hours by adding excessive mandatory combat with foes that have long since become boring, but also the true meaning of plot holes.

But in all seriousness, 15 of those 40 hours were pretty good as long as you maintain the mindset, "interactive anime" and not, "video game".

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[Sulfate]

first I was like NOOOOO SAZH!!! Y U DIE

then he didn't die



the ending was kinda lame

they should just make movies, obviously they weren't interested in gameplay




that being said I'm buying FF13 - 2 because idgaf

[Mr. Wallet]

Sazh's big scene was definitely the most compelling part of the whole game, mostly because he was the only one un-Japanese enough to spend more time caring about real problems than imagined ones. I could actually understand what he's QQing about, unlike most of the characters. Even Hope managed to logically forget up "my mom died" which you think would be pretty open-and-shut as far as angst goes, but he was extremely Japanese about it. Ironically, Sazh was supposed to be the mildly tribal comic relief and yet came across as the most genuine character specifically because he spent more time being realistic comic relief than being yet another Japanese angstomatron.

The last 2 hours weren't lame so much as completely loving incoherent. I've never watched Neon Genesis Evangelion but from what I heard about the ending, I guess "completely loving incoherent endings" is another thing that's big in Japanese storytelling.

[Sulfate]

was deus ex machina allllll up in that bitch (did I misuse that? the ending didn't really make any sense to me ..)


and Sazh was the only one I gave a damn about through the whole storyline. sucked that he did the smallest amount of damage, maybe I just geared him wrong ..

[Mr. Wallet]

No, he's got weak stats to make up for the fact that he never has to run up to opponents to use physical attacks. He can burn through an ATB gauge and start charging again faster, so they made him weaker to balance it. He also has a ton of native HP, even surpassive Fang I think, who has Sentinel natively, so that's where a lot of his stats went. I dropped +250 strength on him with accessories and didn't even need to bother with defense because he's so tanky already.

It's not so much deus ex machina as non sequitur. A few times in the final sequences the characters just decided to charge in and beat the stuff out of everything that moved in a given area with absolutely no justification and even in some cases a lot of indicators that it would have an effect directly contrary to their goals.

It's a little like a nuclear reactor overloading, and the heroes charging in and punching the fuel rods deeper into the reactor until the reactor goes critical, then the problem disappears and everyone lives happily ever after. A deus ex machina is where something is so completely implausible and unhinted-at until this point that it comes off as a lazy way to end a story, but it technically makes sense if you are determined to just go with it. In our example, if there was an earthquake at the last second and the ractor fell into the ocean, cooling the reactor and preventing an explosion, that would be a deus ex machina. FF13's ending does not qualify as deus ex machina because it didn't make any sense at all on several levels simultaneously. It's deep how many contradictions in logic there were.