Craomias
2 reviews liked by Craomias
Final Fantasy XIII
2009
There is a truly perfect game in here, somewhere within the knots and tangles of its narrative presentation - but alas, it exists in its current state as simply a very good one.
Still, I'm not going to complain about playing a great game! I think a lot of the critiques of FFXIII are more-or-less misguided, as I ended up either having no problems at all with or actively loving the parts that everybody complains about - namely the codex and the combat system. The codex means you have to stop every few hours to stop and read about the world, which isn't a problem to me because the world is so interesting. The gameplay is probably the best in the mainline Final Fantasy series (having finally perfected the ATB system after nearly two decades!) and is refreshingly hard, a surprise in a series known for being pretty easy to breeze through.
With this being said: there aren't many problems with FFXIII, but one of them is big enough to seriously dilute the experience. You hear a lot of people complain about the linearity but that really isn't the problem - the problem is that in a game so linear it still manages to have really poor pacing that simultaneously feels too slow and too fast. FFXIII is nothing without its characters and their internal conflicts, which are very well written and mesh with one another in a way that is perfect for the kind of story FFXIII is trying to tell. Problem is that the characters are exposited and fleshed out in a really rapid-fire way with so little downtime that all character development feels very abrupt and lacking in weight - it's more or less one dramatic scene and huge character moment after another, and as characters progress through their varying states of being it feels like you never get to really know who they are before you meet who they're becoming. Couple that with all of the actual plot developments and crucial world information being saved for the last five-or-so hours of the game and you have a story that feels rushed and way too slow at the same time - all of this only weighed down more heavily by bizarre and inexplicable difficulty spikes that leave you lingering further on moments that already overstay their welcome.
Even so, FFXIII is just a marvelous game to sit and exist in. The dual settings of Coccoon and Pulse are every bit as lively as they are beautiful - this is by far the prettiest game I've ever played both in terms of art direction and graphical fidelity, which is impressive considering this game came out in 2009 - and the atmosphere is bolstered even further by the phenomenal soundtrack. As poorly paced as the characters' personal arcs are, they're still extremely well-written on the whole and are all charming, likeable and memorable, with some seriously gripping character dynamics and relationships. Even when the writing's own convolution fails it, the Big Moments are delivered with a palpable heart-and-soul that I've only been really able to find in Final Fantasy games developed with Yoshinori Kitase and his usual posse at the helm. There were several moments in FFXIII that made me stop and remember why Final Fantasy is my favorite series, having been immersed in an intangible feeling you can really only get from this series (and Kitase's games in particular).
With themes, ideas, and characters this tight - as well as a near-perfect combat system - I imagine that with time the mess of FFXIII's presentation will long be overshadowed by the finesse of its actual substance in my mind, and that I'll only grow more and more fond of it as the years pass by.
Still, I'm not going to complain about playing a great game! I think a lot of the critiques of FFXIII are more-or-less misguided, as I ended up either having no problems at all with or actively loving the parts that everybody complains about - namely the codex and the combat system. The codex means you have to stop every few hours to stop and read about the world, which isn't a problem to me because the world is so interesting. The gameplay is probably the best in the mainline Final Fantasy series (having finally perfected the ATB system after nearly two decades!) and is refreshingly hard, a surprise in a series known for being pretty easy to breeze through.
With this being said: there aren't many problems with FFXIII, but one of them is big enough to seriously dilute the experience. You hear a lot of people complain about the linearity but that really isn't the problem - the problem is that in a game so linear it still manages to have really poor pacing that simultaneously feels too slow and too fast. FFXIII is nothing without its characters and their internal conflicts, which are very well written and mesh with one another in a way that is perfect for the kind of story FFXIII is trying to tell. Problem is that the characters are exposited and fleshed out in a really rapid-fire way with so little downtime that all character development feels very abrupt and lacking in weight - it's more or less one dramatic scene and huge character moment after another, and as characters progress through their varying states of being it feels like you never get to really know who they are before you meet who they're becoming. Couple that with all of the actual plot developments and crucial world information being saved for the last five-or-so hours of the game and you have a story that feels rushed and way too slow at the same time - all of this only weighed down more heavily by bizarre and inexplicable difficulty spikes that leave you lingering further on moments that already overstay their welcome.
Even so, FFXIII is just a marvelous game to sit and exist in. The dual settings of Coccoon and Pulse are every bit as lively as they are beautiful - this is by far the prettiest game I've ever played both in terms of art direction and graphical fidelity, which is impressive considering this game came out in 2009 - and the atmosphere is bolstered even further by the phenomenal soundtrack. As poorly paced as the characters' personal arcs are, they're still extremely well-written on the whole and are all charming, likeable and memorable, with some seriously gripping character dynamics and relationships. Even when the writing's own convolution fails it, the Big Moments are delivered with a palpable heart-and-soul that I've only been really able to find in Final Fantasy games developed with Yoshinori Kitase and his usual posse at the helm. There were several moments in FFXIII that made me stop and remember why Final Fantasy is my favorite series, having been immersed in an intangible feeling you can really only get from this series (and Kitase's games in particular).
With themes, ideas, and characters this tight - as well as a near-perfect combat system - I imagine that with time the mess of FFXIII's presentation will long be overshadowed by the finesse of its actual substance in my mind, and that I'll only grow more and more fond of it as the years pass by.
Black Mesa
2020
What a joke! I cannot comprehend how the developers so clearly have a sincere passion for Half-Life while simultaneously not understanding in the slightest what makes Half-Life what it is.
My disillusionment with the game set in the instant that I got into my first encounter with the HECU, who are so unbelievably obnoxious and focused on trial-and-error that the game stops for 30 minutes at a time every time you encounter them. Of course, this wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't the overwhelming majority in terms of enemy placement; once you first encounter a Marine the (genuinely very good) alien-fighting gunplay is sidelined up until you reach the very depths of the Lambda complex.
The HECU (while also obnoxiously and artificially difficult) are representative of Black Mesa's biggest flaw, and the most dire manner in which it fails to recreate what Half-Life is all about: rather than encouraging exploration, innovation and improvisation like every Half-Life game does, you're regulated to kneeling behind cover and using some of the most boring weapons in the game (namely the MP5 and shotgun) as you attempt to pick them off from a distance. Even the flow of using these weapons is neutered when compared to the original game, due to the MP5's magazine capacity, ammunition reserves and grenade stock being reduced to mere fractions of what they were, meaning that you can't even truly indulge in bombast without having to stop and reload or scavenge for ammo every minute or so. This problem also impacts the revolver and crossbow, genuinely fun weapons that lend themselves well to the long-distance based combat of the HECU: you're reduced to a measly three-or-two magazines in reserve for both of them, meaning you can carry a maximum of twenty-four and fifteen rounds apiece for them. I don't know if they were going for realism here or what, but tell me, do you play Half-Life for realistic portrayals of combat?
The gunplay is not alone in being completely representative of Black Mesa's disdain for exploration and player creativity: there are invisible walls and cheap mapping practices everywhere, determined to stomp out Half-Life's signature feeling of "what's up there? I wonder if I can get up there" at every possible corner. Some of my favorite examples were long-jumping off a floating island in Xen to land on one situated below, only to find that the developers had registered all long falls in Xen as falling into a bottomless pit and would force a reload upon landing... and feeling quite clever when I used satchel charges to bypass an explosive maze only to find that the map was designed to blow you up if the explosives blew up regardless of where you were on the map, even if you were well behind cover.
Speaking of Xen...! I don't know, it's beautiful and impressive and perhaps a step up from the original's from a certain perspective, but it's also not really anything we haven't seen before in a million other alien worlds from a million other science fiction stories. The Xen of Half-Life felt genuinely strange, incomprehensible and uncanny in a manner that not only acted in favor of the game's horror elements but also reinforced the notion that you are not welcome here, that this world was never meant for and never intended to pay host to those of your kind. Sure, we're treated to beautiful forests, swamps and factories, but... they're just that, things that I recognize, things that I've seen before, things that are familiar. It takes the alien out of "alien invasion."
Another thing that bothered me was the music. None of it was bad, I'd say, but none of it really felt like Half-Life to me. Half-Life's OST was dominated more than anything by droning guitar feedback, dark ambient soundscapes and industrial rhythms, the prevalence of which makes the heavy synths and pounding drums that much more impactful when they do show up. Not only does the Black Mesa OST sound much more like something you'd hear in a standard fare sci-fi FPS of the 2010s, it was more or less one Epic Videogame Song With Heavy Drum And Guitar And Synth after another - sometimes it worked for the moment (such as We've Got Hostiles, whose almost desert rock-styled riffage fit perfectly for the adrenaline rush of seeing the surface for the first time only amid a massive firefight) but most of the time I mostly either found the loud music irritating when it played during something as innocuous as exploring a reactor facility, or when I had to listen to it again, and again, and again as I reloaded save after save after save in one of the game's million-and-a-half HECU skirmishes.
It's a shame, because as I said in my intro it's clear that these developers love Half-Life. There's a lot of thought put into capturing the idiosyncrasies of 1998's portrayal of Black Mesa while also making them feel more lively and lived-in from a modern point of view. The moment-to-moment combat and "gun feel" is excellent when you're just fighting aliens, and the flow of the levels themselves is quick, breezy and natural... but because it all goes to hell whenever you get to Xen (the only completely original section of Black Mesa) it's clear that we can give credit to the fact that these are painstaking bit-for-bit recreations of Valve's innovations as opposed to something that the team can truly take credit for. Xen literally milks the same puzzle over and over and over again for the entirety of its 8-10 hour playtime, and only really bothers to introduce its trump card (which in fairness is cool as hell) during the last quarter of Interloper.
The Nihilanth fight, though? That shit fuckin' rules. It's just a shame that the game only finally realizes its potential during the literal final moments of the game.
Played on "hard" (eventually got so fed up with the very first tank fight and the Gonarch fight that I set it to normal until I'd killed those), completed in about 28 hours.
My disillusionment with the game set in the instant that I got into my first encounter with the HECU, who are so unbelievably obnoxious and focused on trial-and-error that the game stops for 30 minutes at a time every time you encounter them. Of course, this wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't the overwhelming majority in terms of enemy placement; once you first encounter a Marine the (genuinely very good) alien-fighting gunplay is sidelined up until you reach the very depths of the Lambda complex.
The HECU (while also obnoxiously and artificially difficult) are representative of Black Mesa's biggest flaw, and the most dire manner in which it fails to recreate what Half-Life is all about: rather than encouraging exploration, innovation and improvisation like every Half-Life game does, you're regulated to kneeling behind cover and using some of the most boring weapons in the game (namely the MP5 and shotgun) as you attempt to pick them off from a distance. Even the flow of using these weapons is neutered when compared to the original game, due to the MP5's magazine capacity, ammunition reserves and grenade stock being reduced to mere fractions of what they were, meaning that you can't even truly indulge in bombast without having to stop and reload or scavenge for ammo every minute or so. This problem also impacts the revolver and crossbow, genuinely fun weapons that lend themselves well to the long-distance based combat of the HECU: you're reduced to a measly three-or-two magazines in reserve for both of them, meaning you can carry a maximum of twenty-four and fifteen rounds apiece for them. I don't know if they were going for realism here or what, but tell me, do you play Half-Life for realistic portrayals of combat?
The gunplay is not alone in being completely representative of Black Mesa's disdain for exploration and player creativity: there are invisible walls and cheap mapping practices everywhere, determined to stomp out Half-Life's signature feeling of "what's up there? I wonder if I can get up there" at every possible corner. Some of my favorite examples were long-jumping off a floating island in Xen to land on one situated below, only to find that the developers had registered all long falls in Xen as falling into a bottomless pit and would force a reload upon landing... and feeling quite clever when I used satchel charges to bypass an explosive maze only to find that the map was designed to blow you up if the explosives blew up regardless of where you were on the map, even if you were well behind cover.
Speaking of Xen...! I don't know, it's beautiful and impressive and perhaps a step up from the original's from a certain perspective, but it's also not really anything we haven't seen before in a million other alien worlds from a million other science fiction stories. The Xen of Half-Life felt genuinely strange, incomprehensible and uncanny in a manner that not only acted in favor of the game's horror elements but also reinforced the notion that you are not welcome here, that this world was never meant for and never intended to pay host to those of your kind. Sure, we're treated to beautiful forests, swamps and factories, but... they're just that, things that I recognize, things that I've seen before, things that are familiar. It takes the alien out of "alien invasion."
Another thing that bothered me was the music. None of it was bad, I'd say, but none of it really felt like Half-Life to me. Half-Life's OST was dominated more than anything by droning guitar feedback, dark ambient soundscapes and industrial rhythms, the prevalence of which makes the heavy synths and pounding drums that much more impactful when they do show up. Not only does the Black Mesa OST sound much more like something you'd hear in a standard fare sci-fi FPS of the 2010s, it was more or less one Epic Videogame Song With Heavy Drum And Guitar And Synth after another - sometimes it worked for the moment (such as We've Got Hostiles, whose almost desert rock-styled riffage fit perfectly for the adrenaline rush of seeing the surface for the first time only amid a massive firefight) but most of the time I mostly either found the loud music irritating when it played during something as innocuous as exploring a reactor facility, or when I had to listen to it again, and again, and again as I reloaded save after save after save in one of the game's million-and-a-half HECU skirmishes.
It's a shame, because as I said in my intro it's clear that these developers love Half-Life. There's a lot of thought put into capturing the idiosyncrasies of 1998's portrayal of Black Mesa while also making them feel more lively and lived-in from a modern point of view. The moment-to-moment combat and "gun feel" is excellent when you're just fighting aliens, and the flow of the levels themselves is quick, breezy and natural... but because it all goes to hell whenever you get to Xen (the only completely original section of Black Mesa) it's clear that we can give credit to the fact that these are painstaking bit-for-bit recreations of Valve's innovations as opposed to something that the team can truly take credit for. Xen literally milks the same puzzle over and over and over again for the entirety of its 8-10 hour playtime, and only really bothers to introduce its trump card (which in fairness is cool as hell) during the last quarter of Interloper.
The Nihilanth fight, though? That shit fuckin' rules. It's just a shame that the game only finally realizes its potential during the literal final moments of the game.
Played on "hard" (eventually got so fed up with the very first tank fight and the Gonarch fight that I set it to normal until I'd killed those), completed in about 28 hours.