 The Ending to Final Fantasy 13 (with spoilers)
Submitted Monday, March 15, 2010 - 11:37:21 PM by Klaitu
Alright, for those of you who feel no need to punish yourselves by slogging for 40 hours through a game that is completely awful, I will relay the entire Final Fantasy 13 plot here.. as best as I can understand it, because it's not easy to follow, nor does it make much sense.. nor even does it obey it's own rules.
Final Fantasy 13 takes place on two worlds, one is named Cocoon, the other is named Pulse. Cocoon is some kind of artificial world that was constructed in ye olde days by an entity known as "the maker". From the outside, Cocoon looks like a sphere, or perhaps a moon. The people who live in Cocoon seem to live inside it, and the interior of cocoon looks just like a planet, which is weird and confusing.
Cocoon seems to orbit Pulse, or at least float above it. Cocoon is not in space, it is in the sky of pulse, and somehow or another people are able to take off from the inside of Cocoon and fly outside it into Pulse's atmosphere, but when you look down you can't see Pulse, despite it being at least 20 times larger than Cocoon.. All this makes you scratch your head at the first of the game, because it's lame and makes no sense.
Anyways, Pulse and Cocoon have traditionally been at war with one another. There are two races in this FF13 universe: Humans, and Fal'cie. The Fal'cie are machine-like magic creatures who have natural properties that help humans live. One provides sunlight on the interior of cocoon, one provides food, one provides electricity, one refreshes the air, etc. Pulse also has Fal'cie, but the game never tells you what they are supposedly up to.
A few hundred years before the game, Pulse attacks Cocoon, and somehow one of their fal'cie spaceship things manages to crash inside cocoon. The Cocoon government knows about this, but I guess doesn't care, because they just leave it there. Inside it are a Pulse Fal'cie and 2 l'cie.
A l'cie is a human who has been somehow altered by the fal'cie. They can cast magic without the need of technological implants, and each l'cie bears a funky magical tattoo that gets stupider looking as time goes on. l'cie are assigned a specific task to complete by their fal'cie, and if they do complete it, they instantly become encased in crystal and have eternal life. If they do not complete their task, they turn into really annoying creatures that you get to kill about a million of throughout the game.
Anyways, the 2 l'cie inside this fal'cie spaceship thing that's stuck are in crystal form. They de-crystalize. One runs away, and the other wants to complete her assignment.
Now here's where things get complicated!
There's this girl named Sarah, she's the girlfriend of Snow (the guy in the ugly ski hat) and Lightning's sister (the emo girl on the box cover). Through a series of obviously plot-driven and nonsensical events, she ends up turning into a l'cie and getting stuck on the pulse spaceship thing as it moves to terrorize a nearby town. Lightning and Snow hatch their own seperate rescue plots, and both of them bump into all the different party members you will collect, including the black guy with a bird in his fro named Sazh, who is the only character who doesn't suck in the entire game.
During this rescue attempt, they locate Sarah who says to "save cocoon" and then she turns into crystal. The team seems to get pissed off at this, because they attack the fal'cie flying the spaceship (while they are on board said spaceship) and before the fal'cie dies, it turns all of them into l'cie as the spaceship thing crashes into the ocean (which again, is inside cocoon, even though it makes no sense).
For the next 12 hours or so, you get to listen to the various characters whine about how they don't like being l'cie, because this makes them an enemy of the people of cocoon. The military attempts to hunt them down and kill them, because they think that your party is a Pulse invasion force.
Because the team members are totally emo, they all decide to split up into several groups who are ineffective in combat so that you can learn the combat system. One group decides they're gonna kill the fal'cie. One group gets captures, and one group decides.. to visit an amusement park and pet chocobos.
Wouldn't you know it though, events conspire to bring them all back together!
As it turns out, only half of the military is trying to kill them, the other half is trying to rescue them.. and luckily for you, the half that is trying to rescue them has an airship and the Cid character. Some of your team is captured by the bad guys, so you go to rescue them on the president of cocoon's airship.
And heck, once you rescue them, why not go ahead and try to assassinate the president too? Well, suprise, the president is actuall a fal'cie in disguise, and he tells the party their assignment for being l'cie. Their assignment is to destroy a fal'cie named Orphan. Orphan's role is responsible for providing fuel to all other fal'cie. If you kill Orphan, the fal'cie running cocoon die, and Cocoon crashes into pulse, killing everyone.
So, why would the fal'cie bad guy president man want this to happen? Because he's like the Terminator, he can't self-terminate, and the president guy thinks that if everyone dies, the maker will come back.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure how this would be useful, since everyone would be dead including the president guy.
So anyways, after you do a few boss battles, the president sends you to a "pulse ark" which is some kind of bunker from Pulse, hidden in cocoon. How'd it get there? Why didn't anyone notice it? I have no idea. The president sends you here so that you can fight the "really tough monsters" so you can be totally at your max for killing Orphan.
In other words, he tells you to grind some mobs because your level is too low for the main quest.
So you go and you grind some mobs. You end up being transported down to Pulse, which is a lot like Africa. 2 of your team members are from pulse (the ones that were crystals earlier) but they don't really seem to care that all the humans on Pulse died, and their village (apparently the only one on the entire planet) is decimated. After you kill 5 stages worth of monsters, the president beams down in front of you and decides to fight you.
So you do that, and then he sends you an owl that transforms into a spaceship.. and speaking of transforming, along this whole journey you've collected your summons, but this time instead just summoning a powerful creature you summon.. TRANSFORMERS!!!!
Yeah, that's right. Shiva? She transforms into a motorcycle. Ifrit transforms into a dune buggy, and Odin transforms into a horse. Who's the one that gets a giant AT-AT walker thing? Why, give that to the 12 year old school girl so that she can squeak orders which decimate the enemy!
So anyways, you take this owl spaceship thing back to cocoon and land in the middle of what appears to be a motorcycle race. There's a 10 minute long FMV scene if the team fighting with their transforming summons for apparently no reason.
It's at this point where the team decides that they are going to deny their assignments and save cocoon instead of destroying it. How are they going to save cocoon? They're going to save cocoon by killing Orphan.
Now wait, you're thinking "huh?" because you've just been told that destroying Orphan = destroy Cocoon. This doesn't make any sense to me either, but let's just keep going and see what happens!
After a series of increasingly annoying battles, you finally come to the big bad boss.. and who should be there but the President.. again. And guess what, you have to fight him.
So the president, who wants you to destroy Orphan and thus destroy cocoon is now trying to stop you from killing Orphan in order to save cocoon.. even though destroying Orphan is going to destroy Cocoon. Yeah, you try to follow that one.
So, of course you kill the president guy, but then he.. melts into fluid and flows into a fountain.. and that somehow merges him with Orphan.. I guess.
Oh, but it's not over yet. Because they just failed their assignment, everyone turns into monsters, except those 2 people from Pulse. The monsters then eat one of the pulse ladies, but just before she gets killed, she transforms into a lion with giant glowing boobs and tentacle hair and starts humping the forcefield that is protecting the Orphan/President blob thing.
Oh, sadly, I was not exaggerating.
anyways, the humping pays off and the shield breaks, which somehow turns the tentacle lion back into the original human person she was, and then the party shows up to encourage her.. even though they were monsters, I guess they decided.. to not be monsters anymore? or something? anyways, then you fight the orphan/president hybrid thing.
In a battle that takes forever, but is in no way epic, you defeat the big bad guy who again melts back into the fountain thing. Then a giant clock with smiley faces emerges from the fountain and taunts you.. so what the heck, you decide to go ahead and kill that too. Turns out that this is Orphan.
So you kill Orphan to save the world, but guess what? Killing Orphan turns off all the other fal'cie and Cocoon starts to fall.. you know, just like the president told you it would like 20 hours ago. The team decides that they can save the world if they all hold hands! (yes, this is exactly their plan.. to hold hands and save the world)
The 2 team members who are from pulse, however do not hold hands with the rest. They hold each other's hands and turn into that tentacle lion with the glowing boobs. The tentacle lion then flies around like a rocket down to Pulse, where it jumps into a pool of lava that just happens to be there. the pool of lava erupts up into the sky, where it hits Cocoon and melts the bottom of it too. the tentacle lion thing spews lava around the surface of cocoon, and then there's a cut.
you see Lightning turned into crystal, but then she inexplicably turns back human again. She sees that Cocoon is now held up in the air by a bunch of crystals that formed from the lava. The rest of the team is there with her, except the 2 from Pulse. Sarah decrystalizes too, and every is hugs and smiles, and at the center of Cocoon is now the 2 from Pulse holding each other's hands in crystalline form. Meanwhile, all the people from Cocoon are now somehow on Pulse, even though it's still thousands of feet in the air.
And then the credits happen... and there is no after-scene like every other FF game in the universe. The credit song isn't even the FF credit song, it's some J-pop garbage sung by some westerner.
and there you go, FF13 in a nutshell. It makes no sense, is stupid, and is not fit for any human person.
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