So here's the deal,

This week, I, like many an intrepid controversy whore, was privy to Jim Sterling's thousand comment generating Final Fantasy XIII review, and if you actually needed that link to read it for the first time, I would politely ask you to point me in the direction of the particularly dense rock under which you live.

Like I was saying, I, like many, was shocked to read the review, and the overall score it received



Now in general, I try to ignore the numbers that are attached to reviews. This is a relatively new way of reading them for me, but I find it very worth while. I get a better overall sense of the game, and maybe the drawbacks that made a certain game a 7 were ones that I really didn't mind, and to me, the game would be a 8.5 or 9.

So in light of this, I did my best to set aside my general dislike (I won't sugarcoat it) for Mr. Sterling, and find out what he had to say, what his opinions were. None to my great surprise, I found that I disagreed with most of his criticisms. Now I have not actually played the game, but as you will see, my qualms with the review didn't require me to.

There were two criticisms that stood out in my mind that I take issue with. The first goes like this,

"Player choice is stripped to a bare minimum as well. Most of the time, players can't even choose their own battle party until the end of the game..."

There are three reasons I disagree with this criticism. First, the reason that player choice is stripped to a minimum is because Square Enix wanted to tell a cohesive, engrossing story with this particular installment in the series. Similar to Modern Warfare 2, there was a story to be told, and the devs didn't want to muck it up by the pacing introducing options for the player that would simply complicate things.



The second reason is that in my mind, the lack of ability to chose your squad for most of the game is a plus. It forces you to learn how to use each of the party members, get to know them in combat, and it lets SE show you the work they put into making each one balanced and unique in their combat roles.

The third and final reason that the main way that anyone could criticize those two parts of the game is because they're comparing it to others in the series. Now personally I don't have a problem with this, but Mr. Sterling seems to, he says that this game should not rely on the success of its predecessors to carry it as a title. I agree with this too, but you can't have it both ways. You can't refuse to compare FFXIII to other games in the series when it comes to its successes, and do nothing but compare it when it comes to its failings. This is just an example of the overall negative bias this review tended to take to the game in my mind.



There was another example of this slanted criticism later in the article, when Mr. Sterling stated that "once you know when and where to switch Paradigms, your fingers start working on autopilot." This is not a valid criticism, because it is true of any situation. Literally any situation you can think of. It is psychologically proven that once we become practiced or adept at something, the brain needs to devote less power to the task, and it becomes more an automatic function than an active undertaking.

The worst part of this entire experience, though, is the way the masses followed these opinions blindly. There was a disproportionate number of people saying things like "great review, Jim, way to be brutally honest."

This pains me because if these people had read a bit deeper, they would have noticed that this review was more slanted than honest. There is a reason that the game holds a rating of ~85% on gamerankings. It's because this is the rating it deserves. By calling this review brutally honest, I think the commentors did something that they didn't intend to do. Or at least, something I hope they didn't mean to say.

By calling this review brutally honest, the commentors basically called every reviewer who gave the game a good score a liar. They're saying that Mr. Sterling's review was the correct one, and every single other reviewer sugar coated their opinions, just because of the merit of the previous titles in the series, that they compromised the integrity of what they believe just because it was a Final Fantasy game.



And I simply refuse to believe that this is true. I think in this case, while he did bring up some incontestably valid points, based on what I saw and what I know to be true, Mr. Sterling's review was, for the most part, unfair. I won't pretend to know enough about him to venture a guess at his motives for the slant in the review, but I will leave you (and hopefully Mr. Serling, if he reads this) with some oddly appropriate lyrics from the song The Weary Kind:

"This ain't no place for the weary kind,
and this ain't no place to lose your mind,
and this ain't no place to fall behind,
pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try"*

*The song is much less cheesy than it sounds here

Now I realize I only kinda disproved two of the criticisms in the review, but that was kinda the point. I invite you to go back and read the review again with the fact that it might be slanted in your mind. Then come back and tell me if you honestly think it's as correct and as fair as you did the first time you read it.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe this article is 100% correct. But in the even that I'm not, I hope you'll come back haveing learned to form your own opinions before blindly following Jim's, or anyone's for that matter. Hell, why should even the opinions expressed in this article earn carte blanche?

PS, Shout out to Beyamor, and any other BC resident for that matter. I'm home in Vancouver for the weekend and loving it.