I missed ToC25 again because everything seems to conspire against me making it home before 7 p.m. PDT. Besides, I’ve been having problems with terrible latency, as bad as 3,000 millisecond pings, which may actually be a problem with the latest patch if the forums are to be believed. So I ended up finally beating Final Fantasy XIII instead.

I played Final Fantasy XIII for a little more than 76 hours before finally beating it. I had actually gotten to the last boss last week, but I couldn’t get him down to past 25% with Fang, Lightning, and Sazh, so I ended up grinding for another week. I know grinding in cRPGs is nowhere near as bad as it used to be in the bad old days, and people have been able to beat this game without much grinding at all, but I’m weaksauce like that, I guess. I probably ended up over-leveling a lot, too, since supposedly the final form of the last boss should take a few staggers to down, but I was able to do it in one cycle.

It, however, took me about six or seven tries to beat the first form of the last boss, after fiddling with my party composition multiple times. The wisdom of the Internet suggested using Lightning, Vanille, and Hope, because you really do need to do a lot of healing and dispelling debuffs in order to survive, but with this party, I was only able to get him down to just under 50% before he somehow killed Vanille out of nowhere. (I even had two Seraph Crowns on, for 84% Death resistance, and I made sure that poison was always dispelled, so who knows.) Before this, I had tried Vanille, Sazh, and Snow, and couldn’t even get him to 75%. Because of the nature of the boss attacks, the Sentinel role is useless, and having a lot of HP doesn’t really help that much. It turns out DPS is even more important than healing/dispelling ability, and after about 200,000 gil spent on weapons upgrades and a few hundred thousand crystarium points to develop their secondary roles, Fang, Lightning, Sazh turned out to be the winning combination after all.

Haste—in all of the Final Fantasy games I’ve played—is totally overpowered, but I’m not complaining.

Barthandelus and Orphan are the creepiest bosses I’ve met in all the Final Fantasy series. Sure, Kefka actually succeeds in destroying the world, and Sephiroth is likewise intent on planetary destruction, but none of them seem as fanatically religious as Barthandelus and Orphan.

The whole conceit of the game is that the Big Bad is actually trying to manipulate you into destroying the world, because this is the only path to the Big Bad’s salvation.

Destroy the world in order to save it, indeed.

It kind of makes me wonder if Square Enix intentionally meant the game as a critique of doomsday-oriented cults, like Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for the Tokyo subway gas attack, or perhaps some of the millenialist fringe quasi-Christian cults that are intent on goading Israel into starting a nuclear war with any number of Islamic nations, in order to trigger Armageddon.

But what Final Fantasy XIII seems to allude to in many ways is Final Fantasy VII, which is probably one of the most beloved titles in the series, spawning multiple spinoffs and even a CGI feature film. The main protagonist of FFXIII, Lightning, was supposedly meant to be the female equivalent of the main protagonist of FFVII, Cloud Strife, down to details such as similar facial features. Like in FFVII, the opening scene of FFXIII takes place on a train. The starting location is a technologically advanced civilization amidst an otherwise primitive and undeveloped landscape (Midgar versus the rest of the Planet, Cocoon in contrast to Pulse.) One of the characters plays the role of the sacrificial lamb (Aeris in FFVII, Serah in FFXIII). Even the ending of FFXIII is vaguely reminiscent of the end of FFVII. (In FFVII, Meteor threatens to impact the Planet and is stopped by the Lifestream; in FFXIII, Cocoon threatens to crash down onto Pulse, and is stopped by Ragnarok.)

For whatever reason, though, FFXIII didn’t have the immersive quality that I felt with playing FFXII (although, granted, I did play FFXII almost continuously for several days in a row.) Maybe it was because FFXIII plot was too convoluted. Maybe it was because the end game basically degenerated into a lot of grinding. Maybe it was because I just didn’t get the sense of history in FFXIII that I got from FFXII. Maybe because Cocoon and Pulse just seemed a lot smaller than Ivalice does.

The music was pretty good though. I miss the Prelude and the Main Theme, but I liked the fact they used Lightning’s Theme for the battle music, and I liked their choice of “My Hands” by Leona Lewis for the ending theme.

In the end, I was entertained, and that’s all the matters, really. I am looking forward to playing FFXIII Versus, although no one seems to have any clue when it might come out. I’m not sure I’ll be trying FFXIV since I figure one MMORPG is enough (I wonder if FFXIV or Cataclysm will come out first.) And I hear FFXV is already in development.