MAGE |
FOR |
HIRE |
Enemies of Cocoon: An Analysis of Final Fantasy XIII
Part Fourteen: Bait and Switch
Chapter Nine - The Palamecia
Oh hey, it’s time for one of my favourite chapters. In fact,
I think that the game mostly takes a positive direction from this point
onwards. While I like the first half of the game, despite various issues I’ve
gone into, it really got a bit too samey and dismal around the Vile Peaks/Gapra
Whitewood section, which is why I took such a long break at the start of
Chapter 7.
Chapter 9 is where the opening storyline comes to a close,
and stuff starts to properly kick off. It’s the end of the endless flight from
PSICOM, and where we meet our true enemies. So let’s get started!
The chapter opens with Lightning, Snow, Hope, and Fang in
the company of Cid Raines, leader of the Cavalry. Sazh and Vanille have been
taken aboard the airship Palamecia, and the other l’Cie mean to rescue them.
Remember how Sazh and Vanille happily left the others to PSICOM? No such
hesitation here.
They also sit up and take notice because Primarch Galenth
Dysley himself is on board. Cid believes that Dysley can be taken captive and
made to speak of the fal’Cie’s deceptions, so the plan is to free Sazh and
Vanille, and then kidnap the Primarch.
You can explore the Cavalry’s airship, the Lindblum, but
aside from some nice background details with ships moving around, it’s a fairly
bland and boring location. Not helping FFXIII’s stigma as a corridor game, it’s
just one small, thin platform. You can speak to a few people here, at least,
but you have nowhere else to go and it’s over quickly.
Our team of l’Cie have a brief exchange to show how they’ve
bonded since their experiences in Palumpolum, but Rygdea is jealous that
they’re all main characters and interrupts, eager to send them out on their
mission.
While the main party flies over to the Palamecia, we see a
brief introduction to Galenth Dysley himself, as Jihl Nabaat comments on his
unexpected attendance. He’s come up a couple of times before, of course – once
when he’s heard thanking the victims of the Purge during the opening over
loudspeakers, and also on the news during the flight from Lake Bresha. However,
this is our first proper look at him as an active character in the story.
His brief conversation presents him as a jerk. The original
Datalog entry for him explains that he was once seen to have the interests of the
people at heart, but became oppressive after the discovery of the Pulse fal’Cie
in Bodhum. We only really see the latter part in this conversation – he’s
apparently looking forward to the execution, and comes across as very pompous.
Still, we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy his company later.
We rejoin Lightning’s band as they get past security and are allowed to dock on
the Palamecia in a sequence reminiscent of Return
of the Jedi. However, “Code Red” is immediately declared, and they’re
attacked by a group of soldiers.
I earlier commented that this is one of my favourite
chapters, and it’s ironically for the same reason that I wasn’t such a fan of
earlier chapters. This is a classic Storm-the-Castle scenario, where you fight
your way through endless enemies on your way to the throne room (or
equivalent), so the direct structure feels appropriate. The final area of the
chapter can drag a bit, but generally speaking I found the pace to be fairly
spot-on.
It’s not all action, though. Partway into the infiltration,
the perspective switches over to Sazh and Vanille in a prison cell, and we get
filled in on what happened when Sazh was about to shoot himself. It seems that
Sazh couldn’t go through with it, and while he was struggling with that, Jihl
had her troops take the two l’Cie captive. Not one to miss an opportunity to be
annoying, she told Sazh that they’d make a memorial to Dajh for his service,
sounding not in the least bit sincere.
Back in the present, Sazh asks Vanille about what happened
with her Focus, since he’s now taking hope from the fact that she reawakened
from being a crystal. As Dajh also turned to crystal, Sazh supposes that this
means Dajh will come back some day as well. Vanille explains that she was
tasked with fighting Cocoon, finished her Focus (along with Fang), and then
went into a crystal sleep.
She clarifies some details about what happened when she and
Fang woke up on Cocoon. This sequence mostly confirms or summarises what we
already know – that Fang lost her memory, while Vanille lied, afraid of causing
more harm.
Meanwhile, Lightning and company are still trading threats
and blows with the Sanctum. We have another reminder that the soldiers are all
brainwashed by the fal’Cie, while the alert status is upgraded from Code Red to
Code Green. There’s not much to say about this section, really – it’s another
series of fights, and we’ve already seen the discussions about how indoctrinated
everyone is a few times. The l’Cie seem to have practically forgotten by this
point that, as far as they know, their task is to destroy Cocoon, as they never
note that the soldiers might be right to want to stop them.
After this section, we rejoin Sazh and Vanille, who are
about to be moved elsewhere in the airship. Sazh and the chocobo chick manage
to successfully take out the guards, while Vanille grabs a rifle and blasts the
weird robotic bee accompanying them. Sadly she then abandons this weapon in
favour of her weird slingshot staff thing, and the two of them head out to find
the others, as the alert status is upgraded to Code Purple.
Back at the bridge, Jihl is becoming flustered as her
attempts to capture the l’Cie continue to be unsuccessful, and she tries to
work out which alert status is most appropriate, muttering about it like it’s
some sort of algebraic formula. I don’t really have much time for this weird running
joke about Codes – it feels a bit laboured and out-of-place, but then not
everyone has to share my sense of humour, I suppose. I just don’t really see
the point of it. It’s more like a mild bit of office humour – was it snarking
at over-complex procedures at the Square-Enix offices? Or is it just showing
that the Sanctum is bloated with systems that render it inefficient?
I don’t really know the answer, but what I do know is how it
affected my take on the situation. It makes Jihl look incompetent, and when
they try to use it to give Dysley some authoritative weight, as he announces
Code White with gravity, it just conflicts with the fact that we’ve already
seen that their systems are ineffective.
After this point, it’s mostly combat sequences for a while,
as Sazh and Vanille fight through the engine room, while Lightning and co cross
the airship exterior. Partway along, they come under attack from a couple of
Kalavinka Strikers, and the team is finally reunited. Fang checks on Vanille’s
brand status, and then the two of them capture another flying beastie, which
they use to break into the bridge access area.
Now that the team’s back together, we also, finally, get to
change the Battle Team! It only took just over eight chapters to reach that
point. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the game won’t still change up
your party for certain sections of the game, which wouldn’t be so bad if not
for the fact that it resets all your Paradigms and, unless you feverishly spend
your Crystarium for every character, that you may sometimes find yourself
losing a fight (or needing to instantly Retry it) because your characters have
terrible stats.
This is the final area of the chapter that I mentioned
earlier, incidentally. It’s a large chamber comprised of various platforms
linked by bridges that need to be manually activated. After all the linearity,
you can finally choose to check out various different platforms rather than
just push for the finale, but given that everywhere is basically identical,
it’s not the most interesting series of sidetracks.
Still, that’s only a minor quibble from me. And it’s worth
taking the time to get some last Crystarium Points, because it’s time for a
major boss fight!
It’s time for the old classic villain switcheroo.
Everything’s set up for a good showdown with Jihl, after her incessant taunting
of Sazh up until now, not to mention that she’s in charge of PSICOM, and as
such responsible for most of the problems we’ve faced up until this point. She
hops down from the throne and adopts the boss-fight stance, but Dysley isn’t
interested in that. Coldly advising her to take her leave, he then callously
kills her and the bridge staff with a somewhat overpowered spell that he’ll
never use again.
I’m of two minds with this scene, as I am with so many parts
of FFXIII. Jihl was never the most interesting antagonist I’ve faced in video
gaming history, but in a game bereft of memorable opponents, she did at least
stand out a little (one of the chapter bosses was a weird plant monster, after
all).
However, I can also argue in favour of the decision. It’s
clear that they’re using Jihl to “sell” Dysley as the antagonist in this scene.
PSICOM is built up as the overpowering military force that the l’Cie have to
fight for half the game, but then their leader is discarded so callously by her
boss that we’re intended to sit up and take notice of him. Whether you feel
that works or not is another matter entirely.
As for not putting in a fight with her in this sequence, I
can understand that too. The momentum of this scene is firmly on building up
Dysley, so dividing up the focus between two villains would detract from this.
And for most first-time players, myself included, I suspect the impending boss
fight requires a few retries and character tweaks.
Anyhow, it’s time for the big reveal. Lightning suggests
that Dysley is a l’Cie, after his magical display, but he swiftly corrects her,
transforms, and announces his true identity as the fal’Cie Barthandelus. It
seems that Eden was never the one in charge, and he lays out quite clearly that
he doesn’t think much of people at all. Declaring that he’ll show the l’Cie
their place, he starts off the climactic battle of this chapter.
I like all of this sequence, despite my conflicted thoughts
about Jihl’s sudden departure from the story.
As I mentioned before when summarising the style of this chapter, it’s a
traditional showdown, but I think it’s a good example of one. The setting’s
great, Dysley’s delivery is convincing, and the fight’s a good one. I’m sure
some people breeze through it (I certainly do, these days), but I do remember
it giving me some trouble on my first visit, and there are quite a few threads
bobbing around the internet that indicate I wasn’t the only one to feel that
way.
The battle with Barthandelus is a decent indicator for
whether you’ve really grasped the game’s combat systems. After my year out, I’d
forgotten exactly how Ravagers and Commandos worked, and only got away with it
before because the game gives you automatic Paradigms with a mix of both. I’m
not the biggest fan of one-shot mechanics, but there is at least a tangible way
to stop the one in this encounter (smack him in the face a lot, very
technical).
As much as I enjoyed this boss encounter, and the set-up
surrounding it, we unfortunately have to put up with the tedious trope where
you beat a boss, only for it to then carry on with a conversation looking none
the worse for wear right afterwards. Dysley/Barthandelus shrugs away his survival,
claiming that the l’Cie weren’t fighting to win. He then states that the way to
properly kill off a fal’Cie is by becoming Ragnarok, and he confirms the truth
of their Focus.
They are intended to destroy Cocoon by killing the fal’Cie
that keeps it afloat, Orphan. Dysley doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that
suggestion, and instead encourages them to pursue that aim. When Snow tries to
claim that Serah’s Focus was to help them save Cocoon, Bart dismisses the
suggestion, explaining that her sole purpose was to assemble them so that they
could be Cocoon’s destroyers. He provides them with a ship, and, as the
Palamecia appears to be falling apart, they duly take him up on the offer and
fly away.
So this escape scene is where some more wonkiness arises. If
you remember, Rosch was shot down back in Chapter 7, and I whined about him
reappearing out of nowhere. Well, this is that moment. As the ship pilots
itself on an escape route from the Palamecia to the city of Eden, Rosch appears
in a war machine and tries to shoot them down, unsuccessfully. A pursuit scene
isn’t really the time to be pausing to discuss what happened to Rosch, but I
would’ve liked some more explanation at some point.
Well, there’s no point dwelling on that. Rosch pops in and out of the story in a flash, as the ship manages to bypass Eden’s shields, while he is unable to do so himself. The ship flies through the city proper, before setting itself on a crash course with one of the buildings. Just as it reaches it, the ship seems to teleport, and that’s the end of the chapter.