This review contains spoilers
"This is our ark - our haven. It will be called Bhunivelze..."
A shockingly well-told story of people who cannot conceive of a better world other than what we have, and doom it as a result, with one of the tightest, leanest scripts you'll see in a modern JRPG. Caius Ballad, the man raging aginst the unjustifiable injustice of the world, is not the villain here: it is Hope Estheim, the nice boy who over the course of 500 years, is never able to imagine a future for the human race beyond regressing to the Cocoon that trapped them. Hope sees the doom that will one day face the earth - ecological collapse and extinction - and decides that the way to prevent it is to just do what humanity has done before, and hope it works differently this time. I don't want to say something as pithy as "Hope Estheim is Final Fantasy's Elon Musk", but it's not like that's a million miles off the mark.
The moment Hope utters the word "Bhunivelze", the name of the malevolent deity who made this world and hangs over the cosmology of this game like the Sword of Damocles, you know the world is doomed.
The combat is stellar and brings out the potential of FFXIII's system, the music is fantastically varied and uniformly great, and you get to put little rail worker hats on monsters and oh my god it's so cute.
Fairly rubbish DLC aside, this is short, sweet, and powerful, with an jaw-droppingly good ending. Secretly one of the best RPGs of it's generation.
A shockingly well-told story of people who cannot conceive of a better world other than what we have, and doom it as a result, with one of the tightest, leanest scripts you'll see in a modern JRPG. Caius Ballad, the man raging aginst the unjustifiable injustice of the world, is not the villain here: it is Hope Estheim, the nice boy who over the course of 500 years, is never able to imagine a future for the human race beyond regressing to the Cocoon that trapped them. Hope sees the doom that will one day face the earth - ecological collapse and extinction - and decides that the way to prevent it is to just do what humanity has done before, and hope it works differently this time. I don't want to say something as pithy as "Hope Estheim is Final Fantasy's Elon Musk", but it's not like that's a million miles off the mark.
The moment Hope utters the word "Bhunivelze", the name of the malevolent deity who made this world and hangs over the cosmology of this game like the Sword of Damocles, you know the world is doomed.
The combat is stellar and brings out the potential of FFXIII's system, the music is fantastically varied and uniformly great, and you get to put little rail worker hats on monsters and oh my god it's so cute.
Fairly rubbish DLC aside, this is short, sweet, and powerful, with an jaw-droppingly good ending. Secretly one of the best RPGs of it's generation.