Final Fantasy XIII: As it should have been.

So I could review this game, but that would be kind of pointless, since most of the internet has done that already. It's okay. Not great. But compared to other Final Fantasy games, and yes, I include II, it's basically the worst thing ever.

I mean, what the hell?

So instead, I'll say something constructive. Here's what would have made it a really good game:

1. No TP. TP just doesn't make sense. There is one good ability, Renew, which is understandably expensive. What was the point of the other ones? I'd love to use Quake, there's a lot of enemies that are weak to earth, but I can't because I have to save all my TP for Renew and Summons. TP could have been fixed easily, by making Ethersols available in shops, for less than a billion Gil. Which brings me to number 2:

2. No Gil. What the hell? Is this not a Final Fantasy game? I want to be rolling in Gil. I want more Gil than I know what to do with. I want to be able to exploit the game until the Gil counter can't count up anymore. They've made it so fantastically hard to obtain Gil that they've made it pointless to grind for experience -- you'll get more experience than you'll ever need way before you get the Gil you'll need to upgrade your weapons fully. This is a simple fix as well: give me some Gil when I kill enemies, in addition to components.

3. Components. These should have been thrown out completely. Make them just for making Gil or something. The whole component system is unnecessarily complicated. You end up needing just a couple of the components (Sturdy Bones and Ultracompact Reactors), so why even have all the others in there? The solution: a pool of weapon points, dropped by every enemy. This eliminates the need for billions of Gil to buy Ultracompact Reactors with, and it makes it infinitely easier to upgrade weapons.

4.Weapons. Give them better stats so that I have a reason to use them. Enough said.

5.The world. The Cocoon section of the game went on way too long. In Final Fantasy VII, you had Midgar, a dystopian, futuristic society that most of the main characters hailed from. All the villains lived there. So the first five or six hours of the game take place there, and when you finally leave, it's a breath of fresh air. You have about sixty hours of solid game left, and you get to explore a bunch of exotic locations.

Why couldn't XIII have done this? Give me two levels of military stuff on Cocoon, and then sixty hours of exploration on Pulse. Let me backtrack to my heart's content. Give me towns to explore and societies to get invested in. That way I actually care about the world that's about to get destroyed. How am I supposed to care about Cocoon, which had been shown to be full of a mixture of ignorant racists and comically evil villains?

6. Give me a villain to care about. Barthandelus doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. He wants me to kill Orphan. But then he doesn't tell me what Orphan is? But then it turns out that he is Orphan. So he needed me to help him commit suicide? I don't get it. There is no reason for me to hate this guy. He has literally done nothing to offend me. Actually, the party tried to assassinate him for no real reason, and that's what started our whole "conflict."

Even if he had a cohesive motivation, he's still be a generic "old white dude." You know, the kind of archetype that's usually a villain for the first third of a game, before it gets revealed that he's just a pawn in the plan of some other character with a much cooler design. No one wants to fight old white dudes! A lot of game have been doing this lately (I'm looking at you, Devil May Cry 4), and it's really annoying. I want a bad guy who I can relate to, but who I still want to murder. Maybe when I'm an old(er) white dude, I'll care more about Barthandelus. But I doubt it.

So Square, you should remake your own game, and do it the way I said you should.