Does anybody else get exhausted of our cultural tendency to immediately lump any given piece of media into concrete categories like "good" or "bad", the latter often attributing a sort of spiritual disposability to said piece of media? Like, in a vacuum, I guess it's not the worst thing we can do, and it's something you shouldn't be ashamed of doing or something you have to stop doing outright if you just really love or really hate something, but it does tend to have this knock on effect where we don't have to engage with media once we've categorized something as either "peak" or "dogshit".

Because of that sort of black-and-white mindset, Gamer Discourse just ended up eviscerating all discussion of Final Fantasy XIII when it came out, and in all honesty probably bled into the potential enjoyment other people may have otherwise received from the game. I'm not a psychologist I can't prove that, but like, it happened to me for a long time until I broke out of that mindset! Not saying people have to suddenly like FF13, or that we have to completely flip the discourse around towards largely positive, but it's pretty cool that Final Fantasy XIII even exists imho!! Like, how many AAA sci-fi fantasy RPG epics were we even getting during that era of gaming? I won't say it's as overall satisfying or as complete feeling of a work when up against most other Final Fantasy titles, and maybe even other RPGs of similar budget and scope, but I enjoyed my time with it despite it kind of having a Wind Waker-ian malaise to it (I mean that in both a good and bad way, but mostly a good way!! btw while we're hanging out in the parentheses dimension misusing basic conventions of punctuation and general formatting, does anybody else want to eat the little spheres in the Crystarium? They look like tasty little candies to me, probably even tastier than materia).

The basic combat system is contentious for a reason, but it's kinda sick as hell in a way I both love and despise. It's like, attempting to replicate the feeling of turn-based combat -- which is a style of gameplay that typically abstracts interactions between entities for the sake of compartmentalizing actions to allow strategy to be coherent for the player -- while ostensibly (and correct me if I'm wrong about how this game actually functions) being an action game that the player only tangentially controls. Even in the event that the player has chosen to manually select abilities, the other two thirds of your party still remain uncontrollable, but they function within the specific physical minutiae of an action game that Square Enix has created but that we are not allowed to play directly. In opposition to similar systems like maybe Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest IX, characters and enemies move in realtime, collide with other models, and can get hurt by splash damage (a particularly frustrating aspect of the combat system when afaik you cannot change the position of a character without making them perform an action that would require them to move); it's not always an immediately pertinent aspect of the game's combat, but it's something that remained on my mind consistently after I noticed it.

The result, along with its almost proto-Yokai Watch-esque approach to RPG strategy, is combat that can often make you feel like you just coached somebody else into getting a SSS rank in a Devil May Cry game, but equally ends up being probably the closest a video game has ever gotten to replicate the feeling of what it's like to drive a car in a dream? Idk if anybody else has dreams like that where you're in a dream, and you're trying to drive a car, and it is NOT working AT ALL, and you kind of just swerve all the over place and kinda noclip through dream terrain until it gets too scary and you wake up. Maybe that's just me?

Dream logic is also a pretty fuckin' apt way to describe Final Fantasy XIII's plotting and narrative delivery. Final Fantasy XIII is like an obscure OVA of itself that's been spread out across 40 hours? It's feeling abridged in this bizarre but kinda charming way like, damn I shoulda read the manga of this one before buying the VHS, I guess. So much of what happens on screen is just not explained diegetically at all, which I wasn't a huge fan of in Final Fantasy VIII either, but I heard you could go to Selphie's custom GeoCities site in-game to see what the fuck everything is and means. Never did it myself, but I love that there it's at least seemingly diegetic. To be clear, I think in-game encyclopedias are cool as hell and I'm glad it exists in Final Fantasy XIII, every game needs a Piklopedia-esque feature as far I'm concerned, but I kinda like ending up there out of curiosity and not so much obligation. Maybe it's because I have issues with authority? I don't like being told what to do? I dunno. For what it's worth though, I don't think it outright ruined my enjoyment of Final Fantasy XIII.

I probably enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than at least three or four other mainline Final Fantasy titles, and I think it's unabashedly one of the most Final Fantasy entries in the series. I love the character designs (Lightning and Fang in particular Appeal to My Interests), I had fun with the combat sometimes, music is sick as hell; the visual concept of Cocoon and Pulse is powerful shit, though it feels underutilized both functionally and thematically. The game overall has this really rad 80s/90s anime vibe but with those sleek 00s sci-fi aesthetic touches; it's almost like Toriyama and team were making a secret AAA Phantasy Star title. The game is way more gorgeous than it has any right to be, which is unfortunately sometimes all the game is.

I wanted to kick down the door and scream "IT'S NOT HALLWAYS IT'S NOT HALLWAYS" so badly, but unfortunately, it is definitely hallways. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, Final Fantasy VII Remake's also hallways! But I think what makes it particularly excruciating in Final Fantasy XIII is that that's kind of all it is, and many environments repeat ad nauseam (that fuckin' forest level was definitely overkill with the same exact environmental structures over and over with only a couple narrative chokepoints to break up the pace), an issue that I don't remember the other Final Fantasy with a similar structure, Final Fantasy X, really having. This isn't something that's necessarily new to Final Fantasy at least, I think my least favorite aspect about going back to the pre-PSX Final Fantasy titles is The Caves. I wanna say Final Fantasy V was probably the best about it, but it got really bad in Final Fantasy VI sometimes and that game manages to be good as hell in spite of that.

Except, Final Fantasy VI does share some other issues with Final Fantasy XIII, like awkward scripts and translation, but I suppose it's a lot more noticeable in Final Fantasy XIII when real people are speaking dialogue that no person would ever say ever. I think my favorite "this translator was maybe being overworked god I hope they paid them enough at least" moment was when a villain told one of the good guys that "the next time you open your eyes will be the last" which like, what does that even fucking mean in the context of English. Like I've taken a decade of Japanese studies so I know it's most likely a direct translation of a vaguely idiomatic expression for "waking up", but it's so fucking funny that it got to the voice actor phase and nobody questioned it. I'm not even like, clowning on it, it's just extremely interesting to me.

Either way, my point isn't to say Final Fantasy VI or any other Final Fantasy is actually the Bad Game, my point is that Final Fantasy XIII is a reflection of the games that came before it both conceptually and logistically and maybe we should give it a break sometimes because it's a decently enjoyable experience when you aren't being cranky about the parts that maybe aren't perfect. And I won't lie, I definitely got cranky a few times; ironically I got the most crankiest at the point of the game that most people claim is "when it gets good". Friend, the game was already good, putting in a Xenoblade level isn't gonna suddenly make the game worth it, you either bought into it by that point, or you didn't, honestly.

One more thing that's sorely missing from Final Fantasy XIII though: minigames or minigame adjacent activities. Like, I think in this game of all games, a little extra would've gone a long way cuz sooooo fucking much of the game is just fighting the same exact guys over and over. I don't even think there's puzzles? I hated the puzzles in Final Fantasy X, but by the end of Final Fantasy XIII I almost missed them. They also find ways to put more of the same enemies in levels that by all means should NOT have those enemies, and like I get it, it's an issue that Final Fantasy X ran into as well, at a high enough fidelity it's probably not possible to make enough unique models/enemy types to fill out an entire 40 hour RPG's worth of content, but the lack of variety is notably pretty rough in XIII. I think the best signifier of that is how early and often you fight behemoths, a mob that's typically reserved for like, the last few dungeons of a given Final Fantasy title if not the final level outright. Plus, battles end up feeling pretty exhausting like, at least in Final Fantasy X the bosses with a bajillion health points are being fought via a fully turn-based system; the battles are strategically more simple in XIII, but they always took a lot more out of me due to the relatively fast pace of the action itself and the amount of moment-to-moment babysitting you're engaging in.

I don't really feel like getting into spoiler territory for this one, not that I think it's even possible to spoil anything about Final Fantasy XIII that aren't things you'd find out in the first few chapters or so anyways, but either way, lemme awkwardly transition to a conclusion where I talk about Lightning. She's probably in my like, top 10 favorite fictional characters designs despite Final Fantasy XIII not even breaching my top 100 favorite games. She's like, if you combined Utena Tenjou with Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. She kinda sucks really bad as a person early on, but I like that she grows from her whole "being a cop who punches people for no good reason" phase after getting scolded by a lesbian for being that way. Pretty excited to see how they simultaneously ruin her characterization and make her even cooler in the other two games in the trilogy! Half expecting Lightning Returns to end up as my favorite of the trilogy since it looks like it's the funniest, but we'll see.

Also I originally had this whole bit at the beginning about the tangential relationship being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Final Fantasy XIII, but I dropped it cuz I couldn't really work it into a broader cohesive point, but I think they're cool fucked up 7th gen console zeitgeist siblings, and my brain just associates them with each other cuz of that. Anyways, this discussion is pretty much pointless because we ALL know and have unanimously agreed upon as a culture that Final Fantasy XV is the actual best Final Fantasy.

I don't know what really to say. This game finally gave me Alan Wake brain worms. I get it.

There are nitpickable details about the mechanics, and maybe some parts of the structure, but it truly doesn't matter. This game is an artistic marvel and a masterclass in presentation. I've played through it twice and I can't stop thinking about it.

Alan Wake I (and it's DLCs + American Nightmare) left me loving the idea of Alan Wake but not necessarily the experience of it. I loved thinking about the world and Alan's situation. Playing the games felt a little bit like homework to get into that headspace.

Alan Wake II instead sees Remedy taking everything they've learned over the years and nailing the execution, presentation, structure, and artistry in a way that I don't think they've done before.

In no way do I feel well-spoken or intelligent enough to add anything of value to the meta-narrative and events of this game, but all I'll say is you need to play this game. It's an insane undertaking that entirely pays off, I genuinely haven't been this enamoured by a game in a long, LONG time.

Initiation 4 alone makes this game a 10/10

I will end this with a bit of a warning though, as I have a decently powerful PC but had so much trouble with audio stuttering and frame drops, so if possible I'd avoid playing on PC for a perfect experience.