Final Fantasy XIII Postmortem Talks About the Game’s Shortcomings

I always love reading postmortems about games. It gives you an insight into what the developers think about their game, straight from the horse’s mouth, not through chopped up interviews that get tossed around the blogs and beat down in the redundancy and speculation of what’s popularly known as “Games Journalism”. In spirit of said journalism, here’s a link you should read for some excerpts from the October 2010 Game Developer Magazine Final Fantasy XIII Postmortem by Motomu Toriyama and Akihiko Maeda for some interesting insight on a fairly popular, triple-A title.

Final Fantasy XIII received some pretty decent reviews. Averaging a Metacritic score of about 82%, we can safely say that FF XIII is not a bad game.

My personal experiences however, are not mirrored in the Metacritic score. I felt that the story of FF XIII was fairly bland, the overall design of the world was a straight line, and the item and leveling up system was too simplified but not simplified enough, if that makes any sense. The only two aspects of the game that I really enjoyed were the visuals, and the battle system. I didn’t complete it, so I’m not going to try to review the whole game in this already ballooning news post.

In the postmortem there are several topics of discussion that if improved, probably would have made the game better in my eyes. Such as the realization of the game’s vision by the entire development team being incomplete until the demo in the Advent Children Complete blue-ray was released. This was a year before the game came out, and the game was announced in 2006. Something about those last two sentences just doesn’t add up to me.

Another of the topics discussed was the late use of focus groups from international players. I feel like these paragraphs sum up the whole discussion fairly well:

Linearity and command-based battles were two of the features being perceived negatively. This was something that the team was very conscious about, and there were concerns about whether JRPGs would still be accepted in the West. Because Final Fantasy XIII’s mission was to succeed worldwide, we could not ignore this issue, as we felt it could deeply affect the future of the franchise.

Around the same time, we were experimenting with Western development methods, and there were talks within the team of global focus groups, which we had rarely conducted with previous projects. At the same time, Square Enix set up international focus groups for certain titles, including Final Fantasy XIII.

Unfortunately, we were already quite far along in development, and knew it would be too late to implement most of the feedback from the player test sessions…

The discussion goes on to talk about how the development team felt that the play tests were worthwhile, and gauged what the western audiences wanted. However, there was poor communication between departments and few of the changes derived from the feedback actually went into the game. Which is a shame because it probably would’ve helped out with the whole “running down corridors and fighting enemies until a cutscene, then an anticlimactic boss fight, then repeating”. Again, I didn’t complete the game, so take my opinion lightly if you thought the game holds the same significance as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

I highly recommend reading the excepts at the link above if you’re interested in the whole story, and if you really want to you can get the digital version of the magazine that the full article appears in for $3.95.