Final Fantasy 13 rant
And while I'm randomly updating LJ and not feeling sleepy... I think darthhowie is the only one of my friends who actually played FF13? Unsure. Well, I wrote this up already for a forum post, and I'd like to log it away for my personal reference anyway, so. This is pretty much written assuming you've played FF13. I'm in the final dungeon right now, putting down my thoughts before I see what amazing hat trick they're going to pull to make everything make sense. (Yeah, right.)
I will say without fear of spoilers that Final Fantasy 13 features the touching story of the flying, teleporting, telepathic, fetch-quest giving stone statues in an empty stone tower who fight a randomly aggressive Fal'Cie (=spirit-monster thingy) who hangs out there. As Vanille says, "we each fight evil in our own way." Perhaps they can don costumes and fight... crime, next?
FF13 also features an out-of-the-blue, no provocation, attack on, um. A NASCAR race. By the good guys. They also probably murder a bunch of drivers via crashes / actively carjacking them and tossing them into the road, while causing a panic in the stands that probably lead to more people getting trampled and dying. What. (Then we mostly forget about this. Perhaps for the best.) It means nothing and is a random plot tumor grafted on, so it's not a spoiler either.
Chapter 10
Okay, first, this level is way too repetitive and long. I compare this to Halo 1's Library - they flagrantly copy & pasted the same area 5 times and filled it with hordes of enemies. But more to the point, you're not really advancing the plot in an interesting way here. This is a giant training hall to fight crap in and grow stronger. Wouldn't it be more interesting to be forced to fight crap and grow stronger while trying to avoid death, or achieve an objective? Bah.
Next, rando-Cid for a boss fight and MOTIVE REVEAL! That is impossibly lame. I realize it's hard to do "sympathetic antagonist whom you must fight!" but this was just stupid, especially after your party offers to do nothing and says they don't really want to destroy Cocoon, but let's fight anyway. Saying that all those close escapes before were because the Cocoon fal'Cie and so on were helping is... interesting, and fits with Bart's reveal at the end of Chap 9->10, but also denies the desperate efforts of the protagonists somewhat. Meh. I'm also a little confused on how Cocoon l'Cie work - are their focuses more clear? Does Dysley just tell Cocoon l'Cie what their focus is? Because the whole game, it seems like the Focus is more a threat - you aren't actually mind controlled, you'll just turn into a monster if you don't take steps to finish your Focus. But Cid apparently knew exactly what he was supposed to do, and gets mind-controlled again in Chapter 12, so huh. Also, if Cid came here of his own free will, how'd he even know where to look? Only Dysley would have known where the Pulse l'Cie escaped to.
Fine, Cid was lame and at best should have been saved for Chap 12, but then we get to hack through a bunch more, eventually collect Bahamut, though I dunno how convinced Fang is of saving Cocoon yet. Then. Rando-portal to Pulse in front of us! I... guess this was arranged by Dysley as well? I have no idea what for, if so, as you don't get anything on Pulse that particularly convinces you Ragnarok is awesome. Moreover, while I'm not averse to going to Pulse, this feels more like putting the protagonists on rails again - not the graphical kind, but the plot kind, which is weird for our "Defiers of Fate." Couldn't Our Heroes have just found a new ship and decided to head for Pulse of their volition to try and get rid of their brands? This would make the boss fight with Bart at the end of Chap 11 make moderately more sense, as it'd be "get back to work you lazy bums" rather than "hi, let's fight, then you should do what I say."
Chapter 11
So. Cieth Stones. Kind of an odd choice for a way to do sidequests when there's a large current of "screw the fal'Cie" in the game's arcs. Just because a mighty magic being ensorcelled you to do a task doesn't mean that task is right, so picking up MORE of these tasks? Sigh. While I'm also nitpicking, I'm still not clear on what was so shameful that Vanille had to lie to Fang about. Considering Fang's plan was "raise hell and see if our memories come back from messing with Cocoon" if the goal was to save Cocoon, Vanille didn't do a very good job. I'm fine if Vanille was just confused / scared and panicked, of course, but I'm still feeling left hanging here as if there's going to be more explanation as to what the heck happened in the past.
That said. Pulse does something interesting, which I'm not sure I agree was the best narrative direction, but certainly has its own potential. This being the whole NOBODY IS HOME thing. (For narrative potential and more characters, I probably would have had Pulse be its own society a la Tales of Symphonia's two worlds and you could have done a reconciliation plot then. But sure, you don't always have to do this.) The party members express some frustration at not finding anything at the very beginning of Chapter 11, but... but... nothing like the full-scale [i]panic[/i] I'd expect from Vanille and Fang. Now. I wouldn't overly object to a Super Metroidish-take on the situation where you explore ruins yourself and come to your own conclusions with no need to talk about the obvious. Except, this is FF13, a game where everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves and say things like "I realize I've been deceiving myself the whole time!" Plus, you DO get to see some of Vanille and Fang talking, and they only really do it about becoming Ragnarok centuries ago - and then leave unsaid any further useful information. But they don't appear to be particularly on-edge otherwise.
This... is... crazy!
First off, the Ark was described as being "like Pulse." And the Ark looked like a subway station in a lot of places - so trains, giant guard robots, high-tech labs, etc. Fine. Except the Pulse we find is a vast naturely landscape filled with monsters. Some more explanation of "here's what Pulse is like, guys!" would be appreciated. If, for the player, they decided that such an explanation would be boring and they should show not tell... fine, in most cases... except one like this where there's a major mystery afoot. Is finding no humans, let alone human settlements nearby, expected? Or did Pulse have giant National Park zones where it wouldn't be shocking for this to happen? Even if so, wouldn't the fact that the parts of Pulse we travel to that were blatantly manipulated by humans - like the mining stuff in the caverns - is also abandoned? If you're going to have a post human extinction world, milk it! This is Vanille & Fang's time to do plot stuff.
Temejin's Tower was an abomination. Really, this kind of fetch-questy dungeon is fine normally... except... when you are introducing an ENTIRELY NEW WORLD. And what we learn about Pulse are its telepathic statues of goodness whose power has been sealed by monsters who chill out in a bizarre tower that seems to have no purpose at all. I'd have been happier if this was ye old generic "ancient temple with artifact, go raid it to find ultimate power" you see in every RPG that needs an excuse for dungeons with sealed passages and monsters and such. And, again, Fang and Vanille don't bother explaining what the hell at all. What was this tower FOR? Why do we have to climb a tower to reach a town?! Yeah, RPG logic, but seriously guys, you can do better. Here, I'll show you. "This is impossible! There has got to be some people around somewhere. Or evidence of where the Gran Pulsians left to, and what calamity struck. Let's go look at this communications tower. There'll be SOME record there of what happened." Then run around finding keys and turning on power as per usual to explain the fetch quests, reach the bottom, and... hell. The party doesn't even have to find anything aside from a nasty monster lair. Just emptiness and no records and no piles of bones and a giant freakin' mystery.
Okay. Oerba. ++++ on the music here. And... you can investigate things and get more details! Why was this not in the game otherwise?! It makes me WANT to explore everywhere! In fact, they didn't need to make there inexplicably be only one route through town here. Since there's a sidequest here anyway, remove the blockages and let me explore on my own. I very much approve of the mood at least here, even if we don't see Vanille and Fang talk at all, except about Vanille's pet robot. I mean... this is a major sanity check here. Your hometown is infested by monsters and the people are GONE, not even dead in their beds. Let's see some reaction! If not right away, perhaps at the end. Which I'm still not entirely sure why we're going onto this bridge to nowhere, but we do, and...
...wtf. Barthandalus shows up again, on Pulse?! Why is he here? Narratively, I mean. Oerba is where Vanille's plot is supposed to get some advancement, not having the main plotline show up. It'd be like visiting Fran's village in FF12 with Fran being completely silent and then having Gabranth (Basch's foil) show up. Just bizarre storytelling here. More blather about "I'm fighting you and dressing up as Serah so do as I say!" Right. Not exactly the master manipulator here.
Also, I'm a little confused, though I think FF13 is too. So. Barthandalus's version of events: Serah's Focus was to gather a band of new l'Cie to destroy the world with (which she totally didn't do intentionally, but uh sure). Everyone else's focus is to destroy Orphan and thus Cocoon. However, Vanille talked to Serah, and Serah had the same dream as everyone else. Snow apparently knew this too, and had already figured out that Barthandalus must have been wrong - they all had the same dream. Cool. Except... the record at the end of Oerba seems to indicate that the Pulse Fal'Cie really DO want to destroy Orphan and Cocoon. Fine. But then why did Serah turn to crystal if she too was supposed to bring about Ragnarock? She certainly hadn't succeeded yet. Not willing to call it a plot hole yet, though I'd like to have seen a more coherent end-of-Chap 11 conversation for what our protagonists think - too many unreliable sources here (especially Bart), so there may be weird assumptions yet undone.
Also. Pep talk about making a stand and history recording them. Fine, though you're a little vague on the details of what exactly the plan is here...
Chapter 12.
More Cid plot. Where is this revive-> mind-control stuff coming from? This doesn't gel with Fang & Vanille's experiences, so I guess we chalk it up to Cocoon l'Cie being different again? The mind control apparently doesn't even work in the one scene we see Cid-2 in. And is dispensed with quickly anyway. This is once more a pointless plot graft that means nothing.
Okay, see above about the "charge in summons blazing vs. NASCAR" thing. What. I thought the scene in Palompalum where Snow was shooting a machine gun into the air going "I'm a Pulse L'Cie who will kill you all!" in an attempt to herd the civilians away from Psi-Com - and thus save their lives - was pretty awesome. It'd be one thing, maybe, if Our Heroes attacked a military base outright, but a civilian event? What could they POSSIBLY hope to gain here? Stay in your darn ship and land it as close to Orphan as you can. If you get made by the military, then land somewhere far away from civilians for having your big battle. I'm willing to overlook a lot since RPGs require a lot of fighting so fine, no way to negotiate, you must kill 100 soldiers to advance, but this is just a blatant attack on civilians Luca Blight style. What.
Now. We are expected to believe that the Cavalry are a serious threat to Orphan. This [i]better[/i] be a stupid lie from Bart meant to incite the party who foolishly fell for it. If all it took was a military team to destroy Orphan, then Bart could have gotten rid of it ages ago. Remember Chapter 1! This is a society that cheerfully purged an entire city at the government's orders. Just tell the army / Psi-Core to plant a big bomb at this strange entity that's been infected by Pulse (warp in a handy Pulse monster you have lying around if necessary). If this would work, then Bart could have been rid of Orphan whenever he wanted. I actually buy the idea that it requires Pulse l'Cie or Pulse fal'Cie to blow up something like Orphan as far as making Bart's plot make sense, but it looks like they're throwing that away. Also. It's not a big deal, but I'd be interested as to how exactly Bart is inciting the Cavalry to attack Orphan. Maybe I'll find out shortly, but while I can see "have Cid provide intentionally bad leadership to provoke a civil war," directing said war against Orphan seems tricky.
Furthermore. While the party was strangely blase about it, it did gain one very important bit of information on Pulse. That is, EVERYONE (seems to be) DEAD. Therefore there can't BE any Pulse invasion because there's no humans left on Pulse! You know the truth! Information is power! TELL EVERYBODY about this! It might be hard but this seems like an actual way to tone down Pulse-invasion paranoia, if people knew that a Pulse invasion was impossible. I'd much rather have my quest be "get to the television station and broadcast The Truth to everyone" then this mess that plays directly into Bart's plans. (Even if the Cavalry really can blow up Orphan, we only know that they might do this thanks to Bart, which should give everyone pause.)
Roche: "But you are l'Cie. Humanity will decide its own destiny!" WHAT. Roche was a Psi-Com villain. Since when is he "on our side" and "wants the same thing?!" The game has been willing to use villain-cam before to show us things the party couldn't possibly know. Therefore, if you want to evolve your villains, then *show it*. Last I checked Psi-Com hates us because Pulse is eeevil and we've been mind-controlled to raise hell on Cocoon (which... isn't far from the truth, maybe, given the archive we found at the end of Chapter 11? At the end of a random broken bridge by semi-accident?). Also, Psi-Com thinks Cocoon l'Cie are awesome (see Dajh). Siiiiiiiiiiigh. And didn't Roche die back in Palumporom? Guess not.
Also. There's the narrative trick of having tons of Pulse monsters hanging around, ready to be unleashed at all. Fine, I guess this fits into Bart's plot, sort of, but we just got done fighting tons of mindless Pulse beasties. Wouldn't it be more interesting if we just returned to a straight civil war between humans while we tried to navigate the sides and explain the truth? It'd be a chance to talk with humans again, which hasn't happened in ages aside from Roche.
Okay, Snow's NORA crew shows up. This makes absolutely no sense that they'd be in the right place at the right time in such a fashion - what were they doing on Eden? How did they know where Snow was? but whatever. This is the kind of plot hole I don't care about because they needed to find an excuse to check up on these guys again. That said, the coolest way they could think of for them to help was to open a gate? You can do better than that.
A whole bunch of soldiers turn to Cieth! So Roche's band was a bunch of Cocoon l'Cie? Given intentionally failing missions, or is this due to Orphan's hypothesized instability? Also not sure I approve of having the transformation be instant. This is horrifying. Make it be like Resident Evil with a full 10 seconds of piteous moaning before switching to BRAINS mode.
Roche is on our side after all! But might fight us anyway! Because! Okay, fine, this actually isn't TOO bad at this point after they've already switched his motivations, but meh. They needed to show what he was up to in Chapter 8-10.
Chapter 13
And... what. The Cavalry turned into Cieth? Huh? Were they all l'Cie too? Or turned into l'Cie when they attacked Eden then given hopeless Focuses?
Blatant last dungeon vibes here. But that doesn't make any sense- or rather, it does if we were trying to get the "bad ending." Orphan is where we'd go if we WANTED to turn into Ragnarok and eliminate Cocoon. The actual quest is to save Cocoon, ne? We have no guarantee that Barthandaelus is there, and moreover, no reason to think we can actually really defeat him yet, since he's just cheerfully shrugged off the first two fights as playthings. There are still two hard quests, and both seem to be being ignored - A, stop the civil war and mass panic, and B, get rid of the brands so that we don't turn into Cieth. It sure looks like we're attacking Edenhall / Orphan right now to blow up Cocoon, so I kinda doubt we're really succeeding at A, and the quest to get rid of Pulse brands made the most sense on Pulse, where we could theoretically have researched the issue, or at least talked to a Pulse fal'Cie. Except that quest got ignored. I'm totally fine with this, except that this means that the party is going to turn Cieth after they fail to blow up Cocoon, and I doubt FF13 has the stones to do a Shadow Hearts 2 ending. Alternatively, they explain how their focus was something different after all, but with no Pulse fal'Cie available, I dunno how they're going to sell that. Sigh.
Despite all the ranting above, it's amazing in many ways how little happens in Chapter 10-12. Which means that there are large parts of the plot that still feel unexplored, so I have no idea how they're going to close this all out now. Bah. Well, we'll see, I guess.
On the bright side. darthhowie was correct that The Archlyte Steppe; would totally be a great overworld theme, if FF13 had an overworld. Dust to Dust is also fantastic in context. The FF13 soundtrack still has the problem that about a third of the tracks are variations on the main FF13 theme, including these two, but whatever. Also, to be clear, I'm still liking FF13 overall, just... wow, the last 1/4 of the plot has problems.
I will say without fear of spoilers that Final Fantasy 13 features the touching story of the flying, teleporting, telepathic, fetch-quest giving stone statues in an empty stone tower who fight a randomly aggressive Fal'Cie (=spirit-monster thingy) who hangs out there. As Vanille says, "we each fight evil in our own way." Perhaps they can don costumes and fight... crime, next?
FF13 also features an out-of-the-blue, no provocation, attack on, um. A NASCAR race. By the good guys. They also probably murder a bunch of drivers via crashes / actively carjacking them and tossing them into the road, while causing a panic in the stands that probably lead to more people getting trampled and dying. What. (Then we mostly forget about this. Perhaps for the best.) It means nothing and is a random plot tumor grafted on, so it's not a spoiler either.
Chapter 10
Okay, first, this level is way too repetitive and long. I compare this to Halo 1's Library - they flagrantly copy & pasted the same area 5 times and filled it with hordes of enemies. But more to the point, you're not really advancing the plot in an interesting way here. This is a giant training hall to fight crap in and grow stronger. Wouldn't it be more interesting to be forced to fight crap and grow stronger while trying to avoid death, or achieve an objective? Bah.
Next, rando-Cid for a boss fight and MOTIVE REVEAL! That is impossibly lame. I realize it's hard to do "sympathetic antagonist whom you must fight!" but this was just stupid, especially after your party offers to do nothing and says they don't really want to destroy Cocoon, but let's fight anyway. Saying that all those close escapes before were because the Cocoon fal'Cie and so on were helping is... interesting, and fits with Bart's reveal at the end of Chap 9->10, but also denies the desperate efforts of the protagonists somewhat. Meh. I'm also a little confused on how Cocoon l'Cie work - are their focuses more clear? Does Dysley just tell Cocoon l'Cie what their focus is? Because the whole game, it seems like the Focus is more a threat - you aren't actually mind controlled, you'll just turn into a monster if you don't take steps to finish your Focus. But Cid apparently knew exactly what he was supposed to do, and gets mind-controlled again in Chapter 12, so huh. Also, if Cid came here of his own free will, how'd he even know where to look? Only Dysley would have known where the Pulse l'Cie escaped to.
Fine, Cid was lame and at best should have been saved for Chap 12, but then we get to hack through a bunch more, eventually collect Bahamut, though I dunno how convinced Fang is of saving Cocoon yet. Then. Rando-portal to Pulse in front of us! I... guess this was arranged by Dysley as well? I have no idea what for, if so, as you don't get anything on Pulse that particularly convinces you Ragnarok is awesome. Moreover, while I'm not averse to going to Pulse, this feels more like putting the protagonists on rails again - not the graphical kind, but the plot kind, which is weird for our "Defiers of Fate." Couldn't Our Heroes have just found a new ship and decided to head for Pulse of their volition to try and get rid of their brands? This would make the boss fight with Bart at the end of Chap 11 make moderately more sense, as it'd be "get back to work you lazy bums" rather than "hi, let's fight, then you should do what I say."
Chapter 11
So. Cieth Stones. Kind of an odd choice for a way to do sidequests when there's a large current of "screw the fal'Cie" in the game's arcs. Just because a mighty magic being ensorcelled you to do a task doesn't mean that task is right, so picking up MORE of these tasks? Sigh. While I'm also nitpicking, I'm still not clear on what was so shameful that Vanille had to lie to Fang about. Considering Fang's plan was "raise hell and see if our memories come back from messing with Cocoon" if the goal was to save Cocoon, Vanille didn't do a very good job. I'm fine if Vanille was just confused / scared and panicked, of course, but I'm still feeling left hanging here as if there's going to be more explanation as to what the heck happened in the past.
That said. Pulse does something interesting, which I'm not sure I agree was the best narrative direction, but certainly has its own potential. This being the whole NOBODY IS HOME thing. (For narrative potential and more characters, I probably would have had Pulse be its own society a la Tales of Symphonia's two worlds and you could have done a reconciliation plot then. But sure, you don't always have to do this.) The party members express some frustration at not finding anything at the very beginning of Chapter 11, but... but... nothing like the full-scale [i]panic[/i] I'd expect from Vanille and Fang. Now. I wouldn't overly object to a Super Metroidish-take on the situation where you explore ruins yourself and come to your own conclusions with no need to talk about the obvious. Except, this is FF13, a game where everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves and say things like "I realize I've been deceiving myself the whole time!" Plus, you DO get to see some of Vanille and Fang talking, and they only really do it about becoming Ragnarok centuries ago - and then leave unsaid any further useful information. But they don't appear to be particularly on-edge otherwise.
This... is... crazy!
First off, the Ark was described as being "like Pulse." And the Ark looked like a subway station in a lot of places - so trains, giant guard robots, high-tech labs, etc. Fine. Except the Pulse we find is a vast naturely landscape filled with monsters. Some more explanation of "here's what Pulse is like, guys!" would be appreciated. If, for the player, they decided that such an explanation would be boring and they should show not tell... fine, in most cases... except one like this where there's a major mystery afoot. Is finding no humans, let alone human settlements nearby, expected? Or did Pulse have giant National Park zones where it wouldn't be shocking for this to happen? Even if so, wouldn't the fact that the parts of Pulse we travel to that were blatantly manipulated by humans - like the mining stuff in the caverns - is also abandoned? If you're going to have a post human extinction world, milk it! This is Vanille & Fang's time to do plot stuff.
Temejin's Tower was an abomination. Really, this kind of fetch-questy dungeon is fine normally... except... when you are introducing an ENTIRELY NEW WORLD. And what we learn about Pulse are its telepathic statues of goodness whose power has been sealed by monsters who chill out in a bizarre tower that seems to have no purpose at all. I'd have been happier if this was ye old generic "ancient temple with artifact, go raid it to find ultimate power" you see in every RPG that needs an excuse for dungeons with sealed passages and monsters and such. And, again, Fang and Vanille don't bother explaining what the hell at all. What was this tower FOR? Why do we have to climb a tower to reach a town?! Yeah, RPG logic, but seriously guys, you can do better. Here, I'll show you. "This is impossible! There has got to be some people around somewhere. Or evidence of where the Gran Pulsians left to, and what calamity struck. Let's go look at this communications tower. There'll be SOME record there of what happened." Then run around finding keys and turning on power as per usual to explain the fetch quests, reach the bottom, and... hell. The party doesn't even have to find anything aside from a nasty monster lair. Just emptiness and no records and no piles of bones and a giant freakin' mystery.
Okay. Oerba. ++++ on the music here. And... you can investigate things and get more details! Why was this not in the game otherwise?! It makes me WANT to explore everywhere! In fact, they didn't need to make there inexplicably be only one route through town here. Since there's a sidequest here anyway, remove the blockages and let me explore on my own. I very much approve of the mood at least here, even if we don't see Vanille and Fang talk at all, except about Vanille's pet robot. I mean... this is a major sanity check here. Your hometown is infested by monsters and the people are GONE, not even dead in their beds. Let's see some reaction! If not right away, perhaps at the end. Which I'm still not entirely sure why we're going onto this bridge to nowhere, but we do, and...
...wtf. Barthandalus shows up again, on Pulse?! Why is he here? Narratively, I mean. Oerba is where Vanille's plot is supposed to get some advancement, not having the main plotline show up. It'd be like visiting Fran's village in FF12 with Fran being completely silent and then having Gabranth (Basch's foil) show up. Just bizarre storytelling here. More blather about "I'm fighting you and dressing up as Serah so do as I say!" Right. Not exactly the master manipulator here.
Also, I'm a little confused, though I think FF13 is too. So. Barthandalus's version of events: Serah's Focus was to gather a band of new l'Cie to destroy the world with (which she totally didn't do intentionally, but uh sure). Everyone else's focus is to destroy Orphan and thus Cocoon. However, Vanille talked to Serah, and Serah had the same dream as everyone else. Snow apparently knew this too, and had already figured out that Barthandalus must have been wrong - they all had the same dream. Cool. Except... the record at the end of Oerba seems to indicate that the Pulse Fal'Cie really DO want to destroy Orphan and Cocoon. Fine. But then why did Serah turn to crystal if she too was supposed to bring about Ragnarock? She certainly hadn't succeeded yet. Not willing to call it a plot hole yet, though I'd like to have seen a more coherent end-of-Chap 11 conversation for what our protagonists think - too many unreliable sources here (especially Bart), so there may be weird assumptions yet undone.
Also. Pep talk about making a stand and history recording them. Fine, though you're a little vague on the details of what exactly the plan is here...
Chapter 12.
More Cid plot. Where is this revive-> mind-control stuff coming from? This doesn't gel with Fang & Vanille's experiences, so I guess we chalk it up to Cocoon l'Cie being different again? The mind control apparently doesn't even work in the one scene we see Cid-2 in. And is dispensed with quickly anyway. This is once more a pointless plot graft that means nothing.
Okay, see above about the "charge in summons blazing vs. NASCAR" thing. What. I thought the scene in Palompalum where Snow was shooting a machine gun into the air going "I'm a Pulse L'Cie who will kill you all!" in an attempt to herd the civilians away from Psi-Com - and thus save their lives - was pretty awesome. It'd be one thing, maybe, if Our Heroes attacked a military base outright, but a civilian event? What could they POSSIBLY hope to gain here? Stay in your darn ship and land it as close to Orphan as you can. If you get made by the military, then land somewhere far away from civilians for having your big battle. I'm willing to overlook a lot since RPGs require a lot of fighting so fine, no way to negotiate, you must kill 100 soldiers to advance, but this is just a blatant attack on civilians Luca Blight style. What.
Now. We are expected to believe that the Cavalry are a serious threat to Orphan. This [i]better[/i] be a stupid lie from Bart meant to incite the party who foolishly fell for it. If all it took was a military team to destroy Orphan, then Bart could have gotten rid of it ages ago. Remember Chapter 1! This is a society that cheerfully purged an entire city at the government's orders. Just tell the army / Psi-Core to plant a big bomb at this strange entity that's been infected by Pulse (warp in a handy Pulse monster you have lying around if necessary). If this would work, then Bart could have been rid of Orphan whenever he wanted. I actually buy the idea that it requires Pulse l'Cie or Pulse fal'Cie to blow up something like Orphan as far as making Bart's plot make sense, but it looks like they're throwing that away. Also. It's not a big deal, but I'd be interested as to how exactly Bart is inciting the Cavalry to attack Orphan. Maybe I'll find out shortly, but while I can see "have Cid provide intentionally bad leadership to provoke a civil war," directing said war against Orphan seems tricky.
Furthermore. While the party was strangely blase about it, it did gain one very important bit of information on Pulse. That is, EVERYONE (seems to be) DEAD. Therefore there can't BE any Pulse invasion because there's no humans left on Pulse! You know the truth! Information is power! TELL EVERYBODY about this! It might be hard but this seems like an actual way to tone down Pulse-invasion paranoia, if people knew that a Pulse invasion was impossible. I'd much rather have my quest be "get to the television station and broadcast The Truth to everyone" then this mess that plays directly into Bart's plans. (Even if the Cavalry really can blow up Orphan, we only know that they might do this thanks to Bart, which should give everyone pause.)
Roche: "But you are l'Cie. Humanity will decide its own destiny!" WHAT. Roche was a Psi-Com villain. Since when is he "on our side" and "wants the same thing?!" The game has been willing to use villain-cam before to show us things the party couldn't possibly know. Therefore, if you want to evolve your villains, then *show it*. Last I checked Psi-Com hates us because Pulse is eeevil and we've been mind-controlled to raise hell on Cocoon (which... isn't far from the truth, maybe, given the archive we found at the end of Chapter 11? At the end of a random broken bridge by semi-accident?). Also, Psi-Com thinks Cocoon l'Cie are awesome (see Dajh). Siiiiiiiiiiigh. And didn't Roche die back in Palumporom? Guess not.
Also. There's the narrative trick of having tons of Pulse monsters hanging around, ready to be unleashed at all. Fine, I guess this fits into Bart's plot, sort of, but we just got done fighting tons of mindless Pulse beasties. Wouldn't it be more interesting if we just returned to a straight civil war between humans while we tried to navigate the sides and explain the truth? It'd be a chance to talk with humans again, which hasn't happened in ages aside from Roche.
Okay, Snow's NORA crew shows up. This makes absolutely no sense that they'd be in the right place at the right time in such a fashion - what were they doing on Eden? How did they know where Snow was? but whatever. This is the kind of plot hole I don't care about because they needed to find an excuse to check up on these guys again. That said, the coolest way they could think of for them to help was to open a gate? You can do better than that.
A whole bunch of soldiers turn to Cieth! So Roche's band was a bunch of Cocoon l'Cie? Given intentionally failing missions, or is this due to Orphan's hypothesized instability? Also not sure I approve of having the transformation be instant. This is horrifying. Make it be like Resident Evil with a full 10 seconds of piteous moaning before switching to BRAINS mode.
Roche is on our side after all! But might fight us anyway! Because! Okay, fine, this actually isn't TOO bad at this point after they've already switched his motivations, but meh. They needed to show what he was up to in Chapter 8-10.
Chapter 13
And... what. The Cavalry turned into Cieth? Huh? Were they all l'Cie too? Or turned into l'Cie when they attacked Eden then given hopeless Focuses?
Blatant last dungeon vibes here. But that doesn't make any sense- or rather, it does if we were trying to get the "bad ending." Orphan is where we'd go if we WANTED to turn into Ragnarok and eliminate Cocoon. The actual quest is to save Cocoon, ne? We have no guarantee that Barthandaelus is there, and moreover, no reason to think we can actually really defeat him yet, since he's just cheerfully shrugged off the first two fights as playthings. There are still two hard quests, and both seem to be being ignored - A, stop the civil war and mass panic, and B, get rid of the brands so that we don't turn into Cieth. It sure looks like we're attacking Edenhall / Orphan right now to blow up Cocoon, so I kinda doubt we're really succeeding at A, and the quest to get rid of Pulse brands made the most sense on Pulse, where we could theoretically have researched the issue, or at least talked to a Pulse fal'Cie. Except that quest got ignored. I'm totally fine with this, except that this means that the party is going to turn Cieth after they fail to blow up Cocoon, and I doubt FF13 has the stones to do a Shadow Hearts 2 ending. Alternatively, they explain how their focus was something different after all, but with no Pulse fal'Cie available, I dunno how they're going to sell that. Sigh.
Despite all the ranting above, it's amazing in many ways how little happens in Chapter 10-12. Which means that there are large parts of the plot that still feel unexplored, so I have no idea how they're going to close this all out now. Bah. Well, we'll see, I guess.
On the bright side. darthhowie was correct that The Archlyte Steppe; would totally be a great overworld theme, if FF13 had an overworld. Dust to Dust is also fantastic in context. The FF13 soundtrack still has the problem that about a third of the tracks are variations on the main FF13 theme, including these two, but whatever. Also, to be clear, I'm still liking FF13 overall, just... wow, the last 1/4 of the plot has problems.