FFXIII vs. FFVIII
Oct. 6th, 2011 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynSo, I've needed some distraction from my life recently and I've managed to get it by indulging in the secret, forbidden passion of video games. Specifically, despite my despair over JRPGs in general, I've been playing Final Fantasy XIII, which is for the most part a fairly good game. It took me most of a week (and over twenty hours of gameplay) to realize what about the game bothered me, before I realized that it was basically the second coming of Final Fantasy VIII. And so I decided to complain about it.
Disclaimer: I am not done with FFXIII. I am not even close to done. I am still in the first "half" of the game, as I guess the plot. So I have no opinion on the game as a whole, just what the beginning looks like.
Minor Spoilers for FFVIII follow. Also a great deal of my own opinions.
To start with, I have to point out that Final Fantasy VIII is one of the more controversial of the Final Fantasy line. Some people have chosen to express their severe disapproval of the game, while at the same time it remains one of the "popular" Final Fantasies, with its characters being tapped for a large "cool" role in Kingdom Hearts, as well as re-occurring throughout fandom.
For my own part, I rather liked the game. It eschewed a lot of Final Fantasy's traditional overblown style for a much simpler, quieter story. It embraced the foolishness and silliness of its story. It made you feel like you were somehow having fun. And most importantly, it was kept short. Unlike its storied predecessor, whose distinctly more epic story went for three disks, FFVIII was kept to a much tighter and more focused two.
Unfortunately, FFVIII shipped with two extra disks, which I can only assume were made out of scraps found on the drawing room floor and pieces of excess storyboard attached together with scotch tape. Once you get past the peak of the game's energy, which disappointingly comes at the end of the second disk, the flaws in the game design stand out. The Draw system becomes more and more of a monotonous, grinding liability. The card minigame becomes more useful, and also stupider. The plot gets completely unhinged, and the authors start bombarding us from orbit (sometimes literally) with new plot elements that would have been helpful to know earlier.
I suspect that FFVIII is the culmination of two different game ideas. One idea was to do a fairly simple "high-school coming-of-age" story, in which a bunch of kids get together and have an adventure, while the story focused on them dealing with their own emotional issues. The other idea was for a "typical" FF story, a vast epic in which a band of heroes with secret pasts would take up the fight against a tyrannical foe bent on world domination. This story would have tension, epic action, adventure, cackling villains, high-speed chases, assassination attempts, robots, spaceships, and time travel. Which turned out a bit odd, because the story that they chose to hang all of this on was basically the Science-Fantasy equivalent of Ernest Goes To Camp.
One of the things that hardcore fans would do well to remember about Final Fantasy is how badly they actually do dark, gritty drama. FFVIII is not dark and dramatic. In fact, one of the reasons I like FFVIII is because it's impossible to take seriously. It's a story about mercenaries who are being taught in this place called a Garden, which is basically a high school, and except for their casual (too casual to anyone who knows anything about combat veterans) tendency to rush into war zones, they behave like normal high school students. In fact, our characters come right out of the catalog of pre-fab high-school characters, the Loner, the Love Interest, the Ditz, the Too-Cool-For-School Exchange Student, the Class Clown, and the young, female instructor.
And not only do our characters radiate a lack of seriousness, the whole story is impossible to take seriously. For being rough and tough mercenaries who face death on a daily basis, our characters act remarkably like idiot high school students. The desperate resistance group fighting the Evil Empire consists of three people who plan their kidnappings and revolts on the floor of a train car. Our high school is secretly run by an overweight rabbit-yellow-thingy who looks like an object lesson in why Trix are for kids. Our sniper is afraid of shooting people with a rifle. Our headmaster gives us the devil, sealed in a lamp, without bothering to tell us what's inside. Buildings are built on top of giant screws. Other buildings pick up their skirts and fly. An entire country populated by soldiers who appear to have mattocks welded to their hands goes miraculously unmentioned for about half the damn game. And everyone, from enemy soldiers, traitorous generals, presidents, and street thugs in jail, play a single annoying card game. You could be forgiven for thinking that half the game was dreamed up by Squall while he was stoned on the bathroom floor.
Not even Squall can take these people seriously
In the background, the details are left distinctly vague. There's an Evil Empire, or something that's trying to take over the world. Or maybe not. Details are vague. Apparently there's another giant Empire that occupies the other half of the world, but is barely mentioned until the second half of the game. Something in space is interfering with radio signals, somehow. There's someone called a Sorceress who apparently has powers and is very important, maybe. Also, there was a war a few years ago. It might be important. There are some guys who might be villains, even if they're actually the high school jerk squad. Whatever.
Okay, I understand the city was hidden from sight, but how did people forget about this in seventeen years?
As long as FFVIII thinks that it's a light-hearted high school drama, things go okay. Misinterpretations and confusions abound. Mistakes are made. Girls have crushes. Guys have crushes. Hilarity sometimes ensues. The problem is when the game tries to take itself seriously, because it doesn't have the framework for it. Suddenly the game is trying to drop new concepts and important new actors to the drama on you halfway through, and trying to take seriously what you laughed out before. It tries to shoehorn a dramatic feel into what is a comical game.
Now, anyone who has played FFXIII will probably have started objecting at this point, because FFXIII is not a light-hearted game. It is a dark, intensely serious game, and it is played seriously. But I see a lot of similarities between the two, some good, and some bad.
It is an intently character-focused game: One of the interesting things about FFVIII was that it was clearly more interested in the six lead characters then it was in the world that they lived in. Unlike other JRPGs where your characters spend a lot more time acting, or reacting, to the actions of outside agents, your leads in FFVIII spent a lot of time talking to each other. It was clear from an early stage that our real interest should be on these characters.
FFXIII takes that another step, not only by upping the tension and time spent focusing on these characters, but taking great pains to round all of them out and develop them as real people. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better then what they did in the old days. You get a real feel for them, and I ended up liking most of them (actually all of them by this point), even the one who gives speeches all the time. The story always feels very intimate and personal, but this comes at a price...
The story is divorced from the world it lives in: FFVIII is replete with this, there's no real sense of what the world is about. All the history, all the geography, the sorceress, the Evil Empire (versions one and two), GFs and memory loss, various factions fighting for power, and who a bunch of mercenaries work for in a world dominated by one force, all of this is missing. Everything is distilled down to a site or two on the world map and mentions in conversation that don't come up until it's critical. Contrast this with more plot-driven games like FFVII or FFX, where they establish the major powers, and major players, in the world right from the start (well, FFX has some problems, but you meet Sin pretty quick).
FFXIII is made of this. There's no way to even understand the story without reading the Datalog, things are just thrown at you when they become absolutely essential. It's difficult to understand where you're going without just going where the nice yellow arrow points you. Drawing information about the world out of your characters requires a pretty hefty tractor, or for it to become suddenly plot important. Everything is just left to speculation, even things that would normally invoke a sense of wonder and excitement in the gamers. For the most part this is okay, since outside forces only appear when they're chasing you, and the story is interested in other things. Unless, you know, it's not.
They can't set up villains: Neither FFVIII nor FFXIII had a very good setup for its villains. In FFVIII there basically are no villains. The final villain never really does anything to you, so it's not like there's any personal satisfaction in taking her/it down. The main active antagonists consist of your brainwashed, stupid high school rival and his two flunkies, and they don't so much do things as show up randomly in inconvenient places. The game seemed to specifically avoid setting up possible antagonists, and as long as we're just bumming around on a road trip to self-discovery. But when the game tries to shift into plot mode there's no real fuel for the engine. Plots are driven by antagonists and protagonists trying to achieve specific, and often very different, ends. Video game plots are driven by your desire to eventually beat (or at least not be beaten by) particular opponents. In FFVII you wanted to beat Sephiroth and Shinra because they were evil, or at least annoying, and they had humiliated you and made your life hard, and for that they deserved a beatdown right in the little memory cells where they lived. In FFVIII, well, Seifer is annoying, I'll give him that, but there's not much emotion there, nor a lot of sense in his actions until you get to the end of the game, and then you can just dismiss the whole thing as a drug-induced hallucination.
Hey! Let's save on characters and make the recurring antagonists and the comic relief the same people! That'll impress the players!
FFXIII has the same problem. Just because a character is one of the few not wearing a face mask, and has a distinct voice actor doesn't make them a villain. Not when they don't have their own personality. Not when they don't seem to be actively doing something until it's already done. Not when they don't get together and do villain things. I mean, I can't even remember their names, which just shows how much interaction they've had either with the heroes or with each other. And how memorable they are. Which doesn't bode well to them being a major objective later on.
It breaks the rule of three: There are a whole bunch of "rules of three" in the world, but a good summation of this particular rule of three is that you need at least three parties to provide a set of viable alternate courses of action. If you are bidding for contracts, three parties opens up competition. If you are in politics, three parties requires you to break out of the "for-against" mode and come up with actual platforms. And in fiction three distinct parties is the minimum number needed to provide both diversity and the opportunity for intrigue.
In RPGs one group is always your party, or your avatar, who serves as your proxy in the world. At least one other group is usually the game's Big Bad, the final boss. But this simple black-and-white model of the world is very boring and leads to a restricted storyline. Ideally every character in the game, PC or NPC, is a fully-realized character with their own ambitions, but this can crowd a story past the point of floundering, given how many characters may be necessary. Some simplification becomes necessary.
FFVII did this very well - it introduced three major players very early on, the PCs, Shinra, and Sephiroth. While Sephiroth eventually rose to become the all-consuming goal of the game, for most of the story the player does not know beforehand whether the next section of the game will involve Sephiroth or Shinra. It provides a level of tension, and a level of uncertainty, to the game. As long as there are at least three sets of players, you never know whether the actions of a particular enemy will be against you, or against the other power group.
Some JRPGs do this very well. The Suikoden series (particularly Suikoden III) tends to draw a huge roster of characters from distinct ethnic or political groups, each of which have goals which are not entirely in line with those of your viewpoint characters. Xenogears left you stuck perpetually in the middle between competing political and social groups.
But FFVIII eschewed this approach, as did many of the FFs since then. Wherever you are in the game, you can basically name the enemy you are struggling against, and there is nobody hanging around to upset the balance one way or another. This is not necessarily bad, especially for a shorter game, or a game that depends on plot (see Persona 4 for an example of a game that is almost entirely character driven and plot-wise simplistic). But anything that involves "saving the world" as a final goal requires a complex plot, and FFVIII didn't give it one.
Neither has FFXIII so far. Even many hours into the game you basically have a few allies, and a whole host of enemies, none of whom you really know. The problem is that this means that there are no real surprises or sudden turns, or even a chance for the villains to develop some real character. It's all just us-vs-them, and that seems too simple to hang a game this complex off of.
It's not personal: Some games choose to make everything personal from the beginning, especially western RPGs from Bioware, where the enemy starts the game by screwing with your characters, and then keeps on doing it for the rest of the game. In those cases the plot is almost always a personal one, there is one antagonist out there who is making life hell for the protagonist, and is making the gamer's life difficult by throwing a never-ending secession of obstacles in their path.
This does very well because it makes the gamer want to beat the Big Bad at the end of the game, to wipe the smug grin off of his face if for no other reason. It gives the player an objective to work through.
Some games choose to eschew this. This is not in itself a good or a bad thing. Some games perform quite well with a story that you have to unwrap to get to the center. But some games...don't, and I think FFVIII fell into the latter category. The final boss barely touches your life prior to the point near the end of the game, in fact the Sorceress, who for most of the game seems to be the Big Bad's avatar, barely does anything directly to you, or even acknowledges your existence. By the time you get to the end of the game there ends up being a massive disconnect between the player and the plot, we have to defeat the Big Bad because, well, there are reasons, but they don't feel very personal. FFX did it worse, basically not even introducing the Big Bad mastermind until the very end, and making the whole ending lack emotional resonance.
I worry that FFXIII will do the same thing. In fact I've been warned about it explicitly. And for a game this long and sprawling, the lack of a primary antagonist to hold it together seems to be a near disaster.
The game can't change gears: As I said, FFVIII looks like two games unfortunately rolled into one, and where the high school drama dominates the first half of the game, the save-the-world plot dominates the second half. But transitioning from A to B takes a lot of work, and the game just isn't up to it. Because A really is a lighthearted romp with no real attachment to the world it lives in, there just isn't the necessary emotional or plotwise groundwork for B. And because B is a serious, dedicated plot it struggles constantly against the characters it's inherited from A. A lot of plot had to be dumped on us all at once, including things that we should have known, but didn't, and things that in retrospect, didn't make a lot of sense and came too fast anyway.
FFXIII doesn't have quite the same problem, because it's transitioning from a serious plot to a serious plot. But it's transitioning from a detached fugitive plot, where we're just running from something, to an active, focused plot without the necessary groundwork. As a result I can basically hear the engine stalling as it tries desperately to spin out enemies, objectives, and motivations from a dead start. To some extent the characterization carries it along, but given the paucity of what it has produced, I'm not optimistic that they'll be able to generate a fully-realized plot twenty hours into the game.
That being said... so far the game is exceedingly good. The combat system is fun and fast-paced, and with only a few instances of deliberately added difficulty to slow it down. The graphics are, of course, beautiful, as is the motion capture. And the characters themselves seem well done and well rounded. The story itself certainly wanders at points, but it's clear to me that it seems to be going somewhere, even if wherever it's going is a mystery to me at this point, and whether it gets there or not is up in the air. I could wish for better, but I can tell already I'm not going to get it. But the game is fun enough to play, and the scenery and background work is creative enough that the game does impress you. I just wish that I could look at it without worrying about the story falling apart halfway through.
Disclaimer: I am not done with FFXIII. I am not even close to done. I am still in the first "half" of the game, as I guess the plot. So I have no opinion on the game as a whole, just what the beginning looks like.
Minor Spoilers for FFVIII follow. Also a great deal of my own opinions.
To start with, I have to point out that Final Fantasy VIII is one of the more controversial of the Final Fantasy line. Some people have chosen to express their severe disapproval of the game, while at the same time it remains one of the "popular" Final Fantasies, with its characters being tapped for a large "cool" role in Kingdom Hearts, as well as re-occurring throughout fandom.
For my own part, I rather liked the game. It eschewed a lot of Final Fantasy's traditional overblown style for a much simpler, quieter story. It embraced the foolishness and silliness of its story. It made you feel like you were somehow having fun. And most importantly, it was kept short. Unlike its storied predecessor, whose distinctly more epic story went for three disks, FFVIII was kept to a much tighter and more focused two.
Unfortunately, FFVIII shipped with two extra disks, which I can only assume were made out of scraps found on the drawing room floor and pieces of excess storyboard attached together with scotch tape. Once you get past the peak of the game's energy, which disappointingly comes at the end of the second disk, the flaws in the game design stand out. The Draw system becomes more and more of a monotonous, grinding liability. The card minigame becomes more useful, and also stupider. The plot gets completely unhinged, and the authors start bombarding us from orbit (sometimes literally) with new plot elements that would have been helpful to know earlier.
I suspect that FFVIII is the culmination of two different game ideas. One idea was to do a fairly simple "high-school coming-of-age" story, in which a bunch of kids get together and have an adventure, while the story focused on them dealing with their own emotional issues. The other idea was for a "typical" FF story, a vast epic in which a band of heroes with secret pasts would take up the fight against a tyrannical foe bent on world domination. This story would have tension, epic action, adventure, cackling villains, high-speed chases, assassination attempts, robots, spaceships, and time travel. Which turned out a bit odd, because the story that they chose to hang all of this on was basically the Science-Fantasy equivalent of Ernest Goes To Camp.
One of the things that hardcore fans would do well to remember about Final Fantasy is how badly they actually do dark, gritty drama. FFVIII is not dark and dramatic. In fact, one of the reasons I like FFVIII is because it's impossible to take seriously. It's a story about mercenaries who are being taught in this place called a Garden, which is basically a high school, and except for their casual (too casual to anyone who knows anything about combat veterans) tendency to rush into war zones, they behave like normal high school students. In fact, our characters come right out of the catalog of pre-fab high-school characters, the Loner, the Love Interest, the Ditz, the Too-Cool-For-School Exchange Student, the Class Clown, and the young, female instructor.
And not only do our characters radiate a lack of seriousness, the whole story is impossible to take seriously. For being rough and tough mercenaries who face death on a daily basis, our characters act remarkably like idiot high school students. The desperate resistance group fighting the Evil Empire consists of three people who plan their kidnappings and revolts on the floor of a train car. Our high school is secretly run by an overweight rabbit-yellow-thingy who looks like an object lesson in why Trix are for kids. Our sniper is afraid of shooting people with a rifle. Our headmaster gives us the devil, sealed in a lamp, without bothering to tell us what's inside. Buildings are built on top of giant screws. Other buildings pick up their skirts and fly. An entire country populated by soldiers who appear to have mattocks welded to their hands goes miraculously unmentioned for about half the damn game. And everyone, from enemy soldiers, traitorous generals, presidents, and street thugs in jail, play a single annoying card game. You could be forgiven for thinking that half the game was dreamed up by Squall while he was stoned on the bathroom floor.
Not even Squall can take these people seriously
In the background, the details are left distinctly vague. There's an Evil Empire, or something that's trying to take over the world. Or maybe not. Details are vague. Apparently there's another giant Empire that occupies the other half of the world, but is barely mentioned until the second half of the game. Something in space is interfering with radio signals, somehow. There's someone called a Sorceress who apparently has powers and is very important, maybe. Also, there was a war a few years ago. It might be important. There are some guys who might be villains, even if they're actually the high school jerk squad. Whatever.
Okay, I understand the city was hidden from sight, but how did people forget about this in seventeen years?
As long as FFVIII thinks that it's a light-hearted high school drama, things go okay. Misinterpretations and confusions abound. Mistakes are made. Girls have crushes. Guys have crushes. Hilarity sometimes ensues. The problem is when the game tries to take itself seriously, because it doesn't have the framework for it. Suddenly the game is trying to drop new concepts and important new actors to the drama on you halfway through, and trying to take seriously what you laughed out before. It tries to shoehorn a dramatic feel into what is a comical game.
Now, anyone who has played FFXIII will probably have started objecting at this point, because FFXIII is not a light-hearted game. It is a dark, intensely serious game, and it is played seriously. But I see a lot of similarities between the two, some good, and some bad.
It is an intently character-focused game: One of the interesting things about FFVIII was that it was clearly more interested in the six lead characters then it was in the world that they lived in. Unlike other JRPGs where your characters spend a lot more time acting, or reacting, to the actions of outside agents, your leads in FFVIII spent a lot of time talking to each other. It was clear from an early stage that our real interest should be on these characters.
FFXIII takes that another step, not only by upping the tension and time spent focusing on these characters, but taking great pains to round all of them out and develop them as real people. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better then what they did in the old days. You get a real feel for them, and I ended up liking most of them (actually all of them by this point), even the one who gives speeches all the time. The story always feels very intimate and personal, but this comes at a price...
The story is divorced from the world it lives in: FFVIII is replete with this, there's no real sense of what the world is about. All the history, all the geography, the sorceress, the Evil Empire (versions one and two), GFs and memory loss, various factions fighting for power, and who a bunch of mercenaries work for in a world dominated by one force, all of this is missing. Everything is distilled down to a site or two on the world map and mentions in conversation that don't come up until it's critical. Contrast this with more plot-driven games like FFVII or FFX, where they establish the major powers, and major players, in the world right from the start (well, FFX has some problems, but you meet Sin pretty quick).
FFXIII is made of this. There's no way to even understand the story without reading the Datalog, things are just thrown at you when they become absolutely essential. It's difficult to understand where you're going without just going where the nice yellow arrow points you. Drawing information about the world out of your characters requires a pretty hefty tractor, or for it to become suddenly plot important. Everything is just left to speculation, even things that would normally invoke a sense of wonder and excitement in the gamers. For the most part this is okay, since outside forces only appear when they're chasing you, and the story is interested in other things. Unless, you know, it's not.
They can't set up villains: Neither FFVIII nor FFXIII had a very good setup for its villains. In FFVIII there basically are no villains. The final villain never really does anything to you, so it's not like there's any personal satisfaction in taking her/it down. The main active antagonists consist of your brainwashed, stupid high school rival and his two flunkies, and they don't so much do things as show up randomly in inconvenient places. The game seemed to specifically avoid setting up possible antagonists, and as long as we're just bumming around on a road trip to self-discovery. But when the game tries to shift into plot mode there's no real fuel for the engine. Plots are driven by antagonists and protagonists trying to achieve specific, and often very different, ends. Video game plots are driven by your desire to eventually beat (or at least not be beaten by) particular opponents. In FFVII you wanted to beat Sephiroth and Shinra because they were evil, or at least annoying, and they had humiliated you and made your life hard, and for that they deserved a beatdown right in the little memory cells where they lived. In FFVIII, well, Seifer is annoying, I'll give him that, but there's not much emotion there, nor a lot of sense in his actions until you get to the end of the game, and then you can just dismiss the whole thing as a drug-induced hallucination.
Hey! Let's save on characters and make the recurring antagonists and the comic relief the same people! That'll impress the players!
FFXIII has the same problem. Just because a character is one of the few not wearing a face mask, and has a distinct voice actor doesn't make them a villain. Not when they don't have their own personality. Not when they don't seem to be actively doing something until it's already done. Not when they don't get together and do villain things. I mean, I can't even remember their names, which just shows how much interaction they've had either with the heroes or with each other. And how memorable they are. Which doesn't bode well to them being a major objective later on.
It breaks the rule of three: There are a whole bunch of "rules of three" in the world, but a good summation of this particular rule of three is that you need at least three parties to provide a set of viable alternate courses of action. If you are bidding for contracts, three parties opens up competition. If you are in politics, three parties requires you to break out of the "for-against" mode and come up with actual platforms. And in fiction three distinct parties is the minimum number needed to provide both diversity and the opportunity for intrigue.
In RPGs one group is always your party, or your avatar, who serves as your proxy in the world. At least one other group is usually the game's Big Bad, the final boss. But this simple black-and-white model of the world is very boring and leads to a restricted storyline. Ideally every character in the game, PC or NPC, is a fully-realized character with their own ambitions, but this can crowd a story past the point of floundering, given how many characters may be necessary. Some simplification becomes necessary.
FFVII did this very well - it introduced three major players very early on, the PCs, Shinra, and Sephiroth. While Sephiroth eventually rose to become the all-consuming goal of the game, for most of the story the player does not know beforehand whether the next section of the game will involve Sephiroth or Shinra. It provides a level of tension, and a level of uncertainty, to the game. As long as there are at least three sets of players, you never know whether the actions of a particular enemy will be against you, or against the other power group.
Some JRPGs do this very well. The Suikoden series (particularly Suikoden III) tends to draw a huge roster of characters from distinct ethnic or political groups, each of which have goals which are not entirely in line with those of your viewpoint characters. Xenogears left you stuck perpetually in the middle between competing political and social groups.
But FFVIII eschewed this approach, as did many of the FFs since then. Wherever you are in the game, you can basically name the enemy you are struggling against, and there is nobody hanging around to upset the balance one way or another. This is not necessarily bad, especially for a shorter game, or a game that depends on plot (see Persona 4 for an example of a game that is almost entirely character driven and plot-wise simplistic). But anything that involves "saving the world" as a final goal requires a complex plot, and FFVIII didn't give it one.
Neither has FFXIII so far. Even many hours into the game you basically have a few allies, and a whole host of enemies, none of whom you really know. The problem is that this means that there are no real surprises or sudden turns, or even a chance for the villains to develop some real character. It's all just us-vs-them, and that seems too simple to hang a game this complex off of.
It's not personal: Some games choose to make everything personal from the beginning, especially western RPGs from Bioware, where the enemy starts the game by screwing with your characters, and then keeps on doing it for the rest of the game. In those cases the plot is almost always a personal one, there is one antagonist out there who is making life hell for the protagonist, and is making the gamer's life difficult by throwing a never-ending secession of obstacles in their path.
This does very well because it makes the gamer want to beat the Big Bad at the end of the game, to wipe the smug grin off of his face if for no other reason. It gives the player an objective to work through.
Some games choose to eschew this. This is not in itself a good or a bad thing. Some games perform quite well with a story that you have to unwrap to get to the center. But some games...don't, and I think FFVIII fell into the latter category. The final boss barely touches your life prior to the point near the end of the game, in fact the Sorceress, who for most of the game seems to be the Big Bad's avatar, barely does anything directly to you, or even acknowledges your existence. By the time you get to the end of the game there ends up being a massive disconnect between the player and the plot, we have to defeat the Big Bad because, well, there are reasons, but they don't feel very personal. FFX did it worse, basically not even introducing the Big Bad mastermind until the very end, and making the whole ending lack emotional resonance.
I worry that FFXIII will do the same thing. In fact I've been warned about it explicitly. And for a game this long and sprawling, the lack of a primary antagonist to hold it together seems to be a near disaster.
The game can't change gears: As I said, FFVIII looks like two games unfortunately rolled into one, and where the high school drama dominates the first half of the game, the save-the-world plot dominates the second half. But transitioning from A to B takes a lot of work, and the game just isn't up to it. Because A really is a lighthearted romp with no real attachment to the world it lives in, there just isn't the necessary emotional or plotwise groundwork for B. And because B is a serious, dedicated plot it struggles constantly against the characters it's inherited from A. A lot of plot had to be dumped on us all at once, including things that we should have known, but didn't, and things that in retrospect, didn't make a lot of sense and came too fast anyway.
FFXIII doesn't have quite the same problem, because it's transitioning from a serious plot to a serious plot. But it's transitioning from a detached fugitive plot, where we're just running from something, to an active, focused plot without the necessary groundwork. As a result I can basically hear the engine stalling as it tries desperately to spin out enemies, objectives, and motivations from a dead start. To some extent the characterization carries it along, but given the paucity of what it has produced, I'm not optimistic that they'll be able to generate a fully-realized plot twenty hours into the game.
That being said... so far the game is exceedingly good. The combat system is fun and fast-paced, and with only a few instances of deliberately added difficulty to slow it down. The graphics are, of course, beautiful, as is the motion capture. And the characters themselves seem well done and well rounded. The story itself certainly wanders at points, but it's clear to me that it seems to be going somewhere, even if wherever it's going is a mystery to me at this point, and whether it gets there or not is up in the air. I could wish for better, but I can tell already I'm not going to get it. But the game is fun enough to play, and the scenery and background work is creative enough that the game does impress you. I just wish that I could look at it without worrying about the story falling apart halfway through.