FFXIII: “It’s Very Difficult To Tell A Compelling Story” In An Open World

So Final Fantasy XIII (the Japanese version, anyway; the North American version isn’t out until March) hasn’t been getting the most favourable of reviews from places like PSM3 and GamesMaster. It even fell a single point short of the almighty, highly desired 40/40 score from Japanese magazine Famitsu. Why? According to Director Motomu Toriyama, the answer is simple. “We think many reviewers are looking at Final Fantasy XIII from a western point of view.”

In other words, FFXIII is too linear for us folks outside Japan. Right?

On the face of it, Square-Enix’s defences ring at least somewhat true. “We try not to listen to the critics too much. Most of the criticisms have come because the first half of the game is very linear,” Producer Yoshinori Kitase told XBox World 360. “But we’ve got a story to tell, and it’s important the player can engage with the characters and the world they inhabit before letting them loose…”
Motumo Toriyama continues. “When you look at most Western RPGs, they just dump you in a big open world, and let you do whatever you like… [It] becomes very difficult to tell a compelling story when you’re given that much freedom.”

Looking at games like Bethesda’s Oblivion or Bioware’s Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2, you can certainly see what Motumo is attempting to say. Western games - and Western gamers - almost always prefer to have, if not a genuine open-world experience, at least the illusion of such. Eastern gamers, on the other hand, generally prefer a more scripted, linear experience, a standard to which the first half of FFXIII conforms. As he says, it’s nearly impossible to have ‘great‘ storytelling in a truly open world experience. Giving the player freedom means that developers, as storytellers, have so many more variables to try and deal with. What if the player goes here first, kills this person, sells this thing here? The entire story is boned! Not to mention pacing and all sorts of other little things.

The deal is, though, that ‘open world’ means a lot of things to a lot of people. Probably at present the best examples are MMOs and Bethesda’s ‘open-world’ RPGs, Fallout 3 and Oblivion - none of which are generally praised for their intense, brilliant stories. Next up to bat would be sandbox games generally praised for their stories, but when you think about it, actually contain a great deal of gameplay and story segregation. The preeminent example here would be Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, specifically Grand Theft Auto 4. The story is tragic, depressing; a tale of crime and its consequences, of violence and revenge in Liberty City. It’s an interesting tale with an interesting message to tell. All of this is kind of pointless though when your war-weary Serbian avatar can be commanded to beat the crap out of hundreds of hundreds of people and then blow up their cars in a humongeous chain reaction. How can you effectively portray a character as tragic and yet let the player have a large amount of freedom within the game world? Answer: keep the story and the game functionally seperate.

What about Bioware? The recent cinematic hit Mass Effect 2 could certainly be seen to be an ‘open world’ kind of game; you have control of the Normandy, you can move from planet to planet, you can do missions in whatever order you so choose. But there’s the trick: You can do ‘missions‘ in whatever order you so choose. In game design terms, that’s just a choice between different sections of linearity, as opposed to a truly open world. It’s the same for many games, including Troika’s swan song Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Black Isle’s classic Planescape: Torment. Bottom line; freedom in this sense is an illusion… or somewhere between ‘full linearity’ and ‘open world’.

That said, since FFXIII is so linear, logic says that it must therefore have the BEST STORY EVER. Or so I’d like to believe. His comments probably ring true for the type of cinematic, heavily scripted story that the Final Fantasy series (bar XI) is known for, but whether XIII is up to the task is unknown - for now. But there’s a middle ground, there’s always a middle ground. It’s possible to have multiple paths through a story, or add in side-quests or ‘freedom’, and yet not have to sacrifice story. Will Square-Enix learn this for XIV? Who knows.