Trivia / Final Fantasy XIII

• Bad Export for You:
  • A minor case, but nonetheless worthy of mention; the difficulty setting is absent in the overseas releases except for the 2014 Steam release.
  • Also worthy of mentioning, that the Steam release for Asia is only available in Japanese and lacks a language select screen. This is extremely frustrating to Asians who don't speak Japanese. Square has pretty much released all their games with both English and Japanese audio tracks after this.
• Dawson Casting: Zig-zagged with Hope's voice actor, Vincent Martella. He was 17 when the first game came out in English while Hope was supposed to be 14 in-game. In XIII-2, Hope was aged up to 24, meaning Martella (then 19) was actually younger than him, inverting the trope. Then in Lightning Returns Hope was de-aged back to 14 while Martella was 21 by now.
• Dueling Works: With Xenoblade Chronicles. Both were big JRPGs released during The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games, with 'Final Fantasy XIII being developed by Square Enix while Xenoblade Chronicles was headed up by former Squaresoft employees over at Monolith Soft. The two games also released on mutually-exclusive platforms, as XIII was initially planned as a PlayStation 3 exclusive but ended up being a multiplatform release on the PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows; Xenoblade Chronicles was a Wii exclusive as a result of Monolith Soft being owned by Nintendo. Furthermore, XIII had No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom and was a very linear game, while Xenoblade Chronicles had a linear design but with wide-open areas that allowed for exploration at the player's discretion and many different sidequests.
• Fake Australian: In the English release, American actress Rachel Robinson voices Fang with an Australian accent.
• Irony as She Is Cast: In a sense; a few people not from Oceania panned Georgia Van Cuylenberg's Australian accent as Vanille has being stilted or forced, while simultaneously praising Rachel Robinson's own accent. The only issue with this is that the former is from Melbourne (and was using her natural accent) while the latter is from Los Angeles. ^note The explanation is that the Western Australian accent is far less common in American media than the Eastern Australian one, so it sounds off to foreign ears.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The European edition comes with a soundtrack disc, artbook, and a l'Cie temporary tattoo, so that you too can impress your friends with your totally bitchin' Mark of the Beast!
• No Export for You: The prequel novella titled Final Fantasy XIII: Episode Zero - Promise that tells the story of the immediate 13 days prior to the game's beginning as well as how Snow & Serah met was unavailable for a long time. The only way for English speakers to read this was through a fan translation on the dilly-shilly blogspot blog. Finally, after over 9 years, Yen Press published an official paperback translation in April 2019.
• Posthumous Credit: Despite Yoshinori Kanada's fatal heart attack five months before the game's release, he is still given a credit as a storyboard artist.
• Similarly Named Works: Fans of this game might see the Ford Focus differently to other people:
  On Cocoon, Focus drives YOU!
• Trend Killer: This game was the nail in the coffin for the No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom trope trend that Eastern RPGs had been moving toward during the the sixth and seventh generation of console games. The game was heavily criticized for leaning so hard into the trope that every single map felt like a "hallway" with no towns or NPCs to interact with. It also didn't help that not long after Final Fantasy XIII came out, Xenoblade Chronicles received widespread acclaim for being a JRPG from former Squaresoft developers that put an emphasis on exploration with its world design, offering areas that were structured in a linear fashion yet open enough to play host to many different sidequests and not feel restricting. Since then, the majority of subsequent Final Fantasy games, as well as most other current-gen Eastern RPG games, have opted to go with a Wide-Open Sandbox approach — until Final Fantasy XVI, by which time the tastes of many gamers were moving back towards more linear, story-based experiences, as the result of Wide Open Sandbox games being seen as over-saturated.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to the Final Fantasy XIII Ultimania Omega, the development team at one point considered making Vanille the official main character of the game, but dismissed the idea as they had already released a trailer and art featuring Lightning in that role.
  • Gilgamesh was intended to appear as a regular character; a fal'Cie with giant swords. It is speculate that he was likely supposed to be the ultimate opponent of Titan's Trials as opposed to Attacus, as Attacus uses the exact same progressive battle tactics that Gilgamesh did in Final Fantasy XII, and you are arbitrarily given the store Gilgamesh Inc. as a quest reward for finishing half of the Trials fights. Getting this store as a reward for beating their namesake would have made more sense.
    • Titan himself also would have been fought as a boss, but his model was just too big to impliment a proper fight against it. This limitation was overcome for the sequel and led to a boss fight with Atlas, a modified Palette Swap of Titan.
  • The fal'Cie Siren wasn't just in the Pompa Sancta, but is Bodhum's fal'Cie. However, since the player never gets visit Bodhum properly, the only time one can see Siren is in cutscenes.
  • Fang was originally supposed to be a man, but was changed to a woman when the developers had to drop Serah from the party. Noel was likely based off those designs.
  • Lightning was originally supposed to have a much more flirtatious and carefree personality, but it was determined that her role required her to be more serious and her original personality was largely transplanted to Fang and Lumina.
  • Serah was conceived as being the seventh party member, with a more serious personality to match Lightning's more frivolous one. She was reduced to an NPC due to unspecified "implementation problems". The changes to Lightning and Fang can ultimately be traced back to Serah's removal from the party.
  • The game was to have an extra dungeon, called the Seventh Arc, a hidden facility designed to train fal'Cie, which contained a superboss named Nemesis. The dungeon was cut for time (although it seems to have inspired the Augusta Tower dungeon), and Nemesis is recycled into Final Fantasy XIII-2 as Proto-fal'Cie Adam.

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