Final Fantasy XIII

• 1. A World Above the World

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  Final Fantasy XIII opens in a place that should not exist: Cocoon, a massive artificial sphere floating above the surface of Gran Pulse, kept aloft by mechanical gods called fal'Cie. Development of the game began in February 2004, and when it finally reached Japanese players in December 2009, it had spent five years reshaping what a role-playing game could look and sound like. In that first week alone, more than one million copies sold in Japan. The questions the game raises from its very first scenes are not about battle mechanics or level-ups. They are about fate, about whether a sentence handed down by an unknowable power can be refused, and about what a group of strangers owe each other when survival depends on trust they have not yet earned.

• 2. Lightning and Her Companions

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  Lightning, voiced in English by Ali Hillis and in Japanese by Maaya Sakamoto, is a former soldier whose younger sister Serah has been branded as a l'Cie, a human servant marked by a fal'Cie from the feared world of Pulse. That branding makes Serah an enemy of Cocoon's government, the Sanctum, and Lightning's mission to save her pulls five other people into a shared catastrophe. Snow Villiers, voiced by Troy Baker, is Serah's fiancé and leads a paramilitary resistance group called NORA. Sazh Katzroy, voiced by Reno Wilson, is a civilian pilot whose young son Dajh has also been turned into a l'Cie. Hope Estheim, voiced by Vincent Martella, is a boy processing grief and rage over his mother's death. Oerba Dia Vanille, voiced by Georgia van Cuylenburg, narrates the game while concealing a secret about her own past. Oerba Yun Fang, voiced by Rachel Robinson, works with the Sanctum's Cavalry branch and carries knowledge that predates all of them by centuries.

  Director Motomu Toriyama's instructions to scenario writer Daisuke Watanabe were structural as much as creative. Toriyama's outline noted things like "Snow and Hope reconcile" and asked Watanabe to decide how that reconciliation would unfold. Watanabe adjusted each character's personality to serve the story's emotional logic. He deliberately avoided giving the group a calm, reliable leader at the start, because the story demanded that the reader feel the confusion and fear of people suddenly condemned by powers beyond their understanding. Toriyama specifically cited the scene where Sazh attempts suicide as an example of the darkness he felt the game needed. Sazh's Chocobo chick, a small bird nesting in the man's hair, was kept in the game to balance that weight.

• 3. The Rules of Fate

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  Every l'Cie in the world of Final Fantasy XIII is given a Focus, a task assigned by the fal'Cie, communicated not in words but in visions the l'Cie must interpret themselves. Complete the Focus and turn to crystal, gaining legendary eternal life. Fail and become a mindless monster called a Cie'th. The six protagonists share the same cryptic vision: a creature called Ragnarok. What Ragnarok means, and whether carrying out their Focus would be salvation or destruction, drives the entire narrative forward.

  The story's central reveal arrives aboard the airship Palamecia, where the party confronts Galenth Dysley, the Sanctum's Primarch, who turns out to be the fal'Cie Barthandelus in disguise. Barthandelus tells them plainly: their Focus is to become Ragnarok, destroy the sleeping fal'Cie Orphan, and bring Cocoon crashing down onto Pulse. The fal'Cie want Cocoon's destruction to summon the Maker, the creator of worlds. They cannot kill Orphan themselves. Only marked humans can do it, which is why they have been engineering this crisis all along. Vanille and Fang then reveal that they lived through the same Focus centuries earlier, during the War of Transgression, when Pulse l'Cie attacked and tore a hole in Cocoon's surface. The fear of that war is what the Sanctum has used ever since to keep its citizens obedient.

• 4. Building a New Engine

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  In May 2005, the development team saw a tech demo for Final Fantasy VII and decided to move the project from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3. That decision required building an entirely new engine from scratch. Square Enix created the Crystal Tools engine, described as a seventh-generation multiplatform game engine intended to speed up development across multiple titles. In practice, the opposite happened: the engine had to accommodate requirements from several other games alongside XIII, and the delay stretched longer than anyone had planned.

  The Xbox 360 version was not announced until late in the development cycle. Because of technical limitations, it ran at a maximum resolution of 720p and shipped across three discs. A PC port had been considered during development but was rejected. Square Enix cited the video game market situation at the time and the company's lack of experience with PC-specific issues such as security. The Windows version did eventually release in October 2014, and it arrived to sharply negative criticism. A modder named Peter Thoman produced an unofficial patch within a single day of release that fixed many of the port's issues; the official Square Enix patch, released two months later in December, was noted to add only the features Thoman's external patch had already provided.

• 5. Sound and Score

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  Masashi Hamauzu composed the soundtrack for Final Fantasy XIII, taking on the first main-series Final Fantasy game to carry no compositions at all from original series composer Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu had been announced for the main theme but moved to Final Fantasy XIV instead. Parts of the score were orchestrated by Yoshihisa Hirano, Toshiyuki Oomori, and Kunihito Shiina, with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra performing. For the game's international release, British singer Leona Lewis's song "My Hands", from her second album Echo, replaced the Japanese theme "Kimi ga Iru Kara" by Sayuri Sugawara. Square Enix president Yoichi Wada later said the American branch should have produced an original theme from scratch, but a shortage of staff led to licensing an existing track instead.

  The main soundtrack album, Final Fantasy XIII Original Soundtrack, was released on four compact discs in 2010 and sold 16,000 copies on the day it arrived. Square Enix released two gramophone record albums of selections from the score that year, W/F: Music from Final Fantasy XIII and W/F: Music from Final Fantasy XIII Gentle Reveries, along with an album of arranged pieces titled Final Fantasy XIII Original Soundtrack -PLUS- and a separate album of piano arrangements. A playable demo of the game was included in the Japanese release of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete on the 16th of April 2009. Toriyama said that demo, which had not been in the original development schedule, helped the team finally settle on a shared vision for what the game should be.

• 6. Reception and the Linearity Debate

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  Final Fantasy XIII received a score of 39 out of 40 from Famitsu, and Dengeki said the game deserved a score of 120 because 100 would not be enough. Metacritic recorded 83 out of 100 for the PlayStation 3 version based on 83 reviews. Praise focused on the visuals, presentation, and combat pace, with one publication describing the battle system as "among the genre's finest" and another saying the battles might be "the most involving the series has ever seen". Edge called Cocoon "an inspired setting blessed with a vibrancy and vivid colour that often leaves you open-mouthed".

  The game's linear structure divided critics sharply. GamePro described progress through much of the game as walking "a long hallway toward an orange target symbol on your mini-map". Edge lowered its score to five out of ten primarily because of the linearity. The absence of towns, free exploration, and non-player character interaction compounded the issue for many reviewers, with some calling the opening chapters "boring" until Gran Pulse opened up. After release, Toriyama attributed negative Western scores to reviewers accustomed to open-world games, a design philosophy he felt made it harder to tell a focused story. Producer Yoshinori Kitase went further, saying the game was in some ways closer to a first-person shooter than a traditional role-playing game. In Japan the response was warmer: the game was voted best game ever in a Famitsu reader poll in January 2010.

• 7. Sales Records and Sequels

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  Final Fantasy XIII sold 1.7 million copies for the PlayStation 3 in Japan by the end of 2009, making it the fastest-selling title in the history of the series at that point. The game sold more than one million copies in North America during its release month of March 2010. As of 2017, the console versions had sold over 7 million copies worldwide, and the Windows version had sold over 746,000 copies according to SteamSpy. By September 2014, the entire Final Fantasy XIII series had shipped over 11 million copies worldwide.

  A direct sequel, Final Fantasy XIII-2, arrived in December 2011 in Japan and in January and February 2012 in North America and Europe. It opens three years after the events of the original game, with Serah and a newcomer named Noel as the main protagonists. Toriyama and Kitase returned in their same roles. A second sequel, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was released in November 2013 in Japan and in February 2014 in North America and Europe, wrapping up Lightning's story. Before the sequel was even announced, Toriyama had written in the Ultimania Omega companion book that he hoped to tell a story where Lightning ends up happy. The game was added to Xbox One backward compatibility in November 2018, alongside both sequels, and received Xbox One X Enhanced treatment allowing it to run at a higher resolution than its original release.