Still spoiler-free! Still flippantly disparaging!

“Can I use this couch?” ” Oh my goodness no!”Playing FFXIII is like visiting a beautiful Victorian castle where everything is covered in plastic and nobody will talk to you. Gaze all you like! It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen! But like the velvet-roped section of a museum, you’re not really allowed to interact with the majority of this fantastically shiny world. You press onward to the end of the area, at which point you save and then press onward to the end of another area. This has persisted for 16 hours.

I can’t (I won’t!) speak for JRPG fans, but it’s pretty damn difficult for me to get into this story. Despite the fact that every character and machine is 500% Nomurafied, I feel like I could ostensibly invest myself in the happenings of Pulse and Lightning and the L’Arc-en-Ciel or whatever if the game just gave me a chance to take things at my own pace. As it is, I can feel Kitase gently nudging me from behind every time I start to appreciate a pretty area. Even my teammates remark, “Shouldn’t we be moving?” if I stop just to rotate the camera and admire the pretty forest.

But being that there isn’t much of anything to explore, I guess I’m not really missing anything. I just want some sort of opportunity for me to go into “town mode;” strolling into people’s houses, gathering info, upgrading equipment, gently humming along with the somnolent town theme. This gauntlet of robots and tears is wearing thin.

Severe linearity notwithstanding, the dungeons are pretty neat. Everything is gorgeous (moreso now that the dungeons seem to be taking a more organic and outdoorsy turn) and the enemy design is fantastic. The battle system may be the thing that carries me through this. I can’t imagine it being anything else. It seemed daunting at first, but I noticed tonight that I was getting into a brisk “Optima rhythm,” carefully monitoring various gauges and tubes and switching up Optima accordingly. Sorry, I meant Shifting Paradigms!!

Man (with tattoo) sits atop bike (with tattoo)Valid comparisons have been drawn between this and FFX-2’s battle system. But unlike X-2, once the battle is finished I have to go back out into the dark, forbidding mountain, or the cold, lonely forest, or the dark, forbidding iron smelt. At least X-2 gave me a light-hearted world to explore without guilt-tripping me into taking care of a poor orphan. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to play an RPG that’s nothing but sunshine and puppy kisses (or maybe I do…!), but I need some kind of purpose to keep me invested in this thing. If you’re over 14, it’s going to be pretty difficult to pin down what exactly that purpose is.

While the story as a whole seems irrecoverable, the smaller interactions between characters are a cute and welcome break from this beautiful string of dungeons. I’m following three plot threads right now, and the smaller party sizes allow for a more intimate look at 2009’s misfits of fashion. It’s easier to take these characters seriously in personal interactions as opposed to lengthy, shaky-cam action sequences that have taken up most of the game so far. Combined with an excellent (Uematsu-free!) soundtrack, the little scenes are doing a lot more than I would’ve thought, and I’m finding myself almost disappointed when I get to the next CG backflip/shouting match/explosion.

And no, don’t put this on me. I know that the game contains hundreds of pages of backstory and information on the world, characters, and events, but that’s lazy. Going into the subscreen and selecting the handy-dandy primers and then reading this information on a still screen is not a substitute for storytelling. I’m willing to do some of this myself! But first, SE has to take this info and chop it up and throw it into some NPC word bubbles in the towns that don’t exist. I get my books from books.

Wait, I want to end oFigure prominently into the plotn something positive. When you load a file, the game will display a brief summary of the immediate events leading up to that dungeon. Being that the loading process demands a good few seconds, this is a great way to fill that time and get you back into the flow of events.

I’m trying to be optimistic. I’ve heard that the game opens up later on, and that I can take up missions. As long as these don’t consist of “run down this hallway and kill this dragon,” I’ll be fine.

Buy Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) at Play-Asia.com