Final Fantasy XIII

This game was very pretty, and it had bad voice acting, and it was boring, and stupid. -Libby

One of my favorite parts of this game was that everyone wore the same clothes all of the time, for days on end. And this reminds me of how at the very beginning of Final Fantasy VIII you could change your outfit from a biker suit and a feather boa to a boring navy blue school uniform for no reason. But in that game, you could eat hot dogs, or read through text that had to do with hot dogs. Nobody ever eats or uses the facilities or does anything but fight, except for one strange spot in the middle when one character says for no reason that he is tired and needs a rest. But even in the flashbacks to days ago, everyone is wearing the same outfit, like I wouldn't be able to recognize who anyone was unless they had the same colored stuff on.
One of the most hurtful parts of this game came at the very beginning, when I handed the controller to Libby and watched her press the circle button through hours of the needless, unnecessarily simplistic beginning of the game, which split up what would have been a five minute tutorial into a stupid show where 1% of the gameplay was unlocked. "A Stupid Show" is a pretty accurate description for this game, seeing as how one of the half-dozen full cg sequences where giant cliche monsters from Final Fantasy fight each other is actually a laser-light show display for the thin hapless white people who live in the game. The lesson of this game is that it is okay to murder everything when something is at stake. The only problem is that it was never clear exactly what was at stake until the last minute and a half before the credits, after defeating the easiest boss in the history of video games. I spent 60 hours playing this game all together, at least 15 of which must have come from progressing through the computerized menu screens, which I had to visit every time I wanted to make my characters stronger, or get them stronger weapons, or try to figure out how to make them the strongest, so I wouldn't die. And I died a few times, because this game is merciless in its ambiguity and ambivalence. I found myself asking a few too many times, "What is going on? Where are we going? What is happening right now?" which should be fine in any other scenario, except here I was expected to piece together the previous 13 days of a story I had nothing invested in and couldn't understand at all.
There are a few breaks from the monotony of the action which just make this game absurd. One great example is when Sazh's baby chocobo chic bird baby gets lost three times in a row in a chocobo garden, or something, and I had to walk from one side of a tiny level to the other, three times in a row, to find it, which was the only way to advance the story. Another situation in which, after beating a big metal bulldozer suit type thing, I get to control it for 3 minutes in which I casually walk through the level, stomping on enemies I would usually have to fight, smashing them out of the way while a bowling ball hitting the pins noise comes out of the speakers. Why did these things happen in this game? Nothing ever comes of them, and maybe the bulldozer part is referenced one other time in passing. Nevermind that the entirety of the "side quests" of which I completed a few but am not done with consist of "go over there and fight this monster".
Final Fantasy XIII also suffers from the problem that the Star Wars prequels suffer from. It is supposed to be for children, like it has fighting and monsters and brightly colored stunning visuals, but why does one character have to make a gesture like he is about to commit suicide with a handgun by blowing his brains out? Is that really appropriate for anything, ever? The game has its most compelling moment wrapped up in this type of display. The young boy whose mother was accidentally killed by the recklessness of an older man who becomes his ally has a strong urge to kill this man in revenge. At the end of the game, the older guy's fiance comes back to life, the afroed suicide prone guy is happy to get his son back, the main character who has no emotions and looks like a paperclip gets her sister back, who is also that one guy's fiance, but the young kid has nobody and nothing. His mother died in the first 15 minutes of the game and his father is impossible to care about because you only see him once and are left to presume that he dies in the terrible disaster that happens at the end of the game.
This game makes me not want to play another Final Fantasy game again, ever. They turned the summoned monsters into transformers, so enough is enough. One day I will be bored enough to get back into the game and play through the extra missions. But until then I am going to be looking for a game that is actually compelling.