Probably still not very final
Hey gang, Final Fantasy 13 is finally out! From the sound of it, it just managed to beat the ill-seeming Final Fantasy 14 to market. This might come as a surprise to those of you who have mental defects, but I haven’t played it. I’m sticking to my promise made ten years ago when Final Fantasy 8 burned me hard: I will not pay full price for a Final Fantasy game. Which does mean I’ll probably pick it up out of morbid curiosity when it’s ten bucks and I’m bored.
I’m being unfair here. It’s irresponsible of me as a game critic to assume the game’s going to be awful just because almost all of the games in the series have been. I’ll be positive here; I’m hoping that Final Fantasy 13 is finally good enough to redeem Final Fantasies 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, and especially Final Fantasy 8, all of which were a gigantic waste of binary digits. And that’s the good thing about the internet’s gaming community — we can judge the reviews in aggregate, since there are so many of them, and come out with a pretty good picture of whether or not the game’s worthwhile before we spend our own money on it.
Had you going there, didn’t I? I mean, look at this. The game’s obviously terrible. And the mass of reviewers are going to praise it to high heaven, because they’re tasteless, uncritical sheep. These are the same people responsible for the utterly non-excellent Bioshock winding up with a metascore of 96. 96! For a half-finished and completely unbalanced FPS with four different mobs in it that makes you play Pipe Dream about three hundred times. No, the idiots who did that are also going to give Final Fantasy 13 high marks just because they think they should, and meanwhile it’s going to suck the lights out.
