Final Fantasy 13

Final Fantasy 13 starts with a bang. The game drops you right into the action without really jumping too much into the story. The sci-fi like introduction area of the game is a surprise for a Final Fantasy game. The series hasn’t focused on the futuristic aspects like those presented at the beginning of the game since Final Fantasy 8. Things have really stepped it up since then, the new visuals especially help to show off an amazing location that’s technology focused.

As expected the presentation is top notch, from the graphics, to the music and voice acting, to the overall character and location design. The story is also fairly unique and an interest departure from the usual Final Fantasy storylines. The action and dramatic scenes are work really well and the pacing is great.

Over the first hour or so, you come to learn that the world is at war. The game begins in a place called Cocoon, it’s a floating city above the world of Pulse. The army are fighting against enemies from Pulse known as the fal’Cie. while the fal’Cie on Cocoon has been generous and helped the humans, the main enemy are from Pulse. In general the fal’Cie mark people and give them a ‘focus’ to accomplish. This also gives them the ability to use magic. These people are cursed and if they can not complete their focus, they will become monsters. A group of civilians whose homes were near the pulse fal’Cie are being ‘evacuated’ from Cocoon to Pulse, but it’s really a death sentence. Our protagonist, Lightning, uses the transport vehicle to sneak in and confront the fal’Cie. At the same time Snow, the leader of the resistance has a similar goal as Lighting. After their paths cross, they end up sharing a huge destiny along with several civilians who happened to be with them.

Like FF12 the game continues to stay away from random encounter. All monsters appear on the field and running into one activates the battle. Touching one from behind initiates a preemptive strike which immediately makes enemies easier to stagger. Staggering enemies make them take take much more damage than usual and is key to winning battles.

The return of the ATB (Active Time Battle) system is a very welcome change from FF12′s grind fest MMO style real time combat. At first the combat system seems a little basic. Characters only have a regular attack, one special attack, and the auto-battle option makes it seem like you can win any battle by mashing the confirm button. But that changes as the game goes on and your characters evolve. They learn many new abilities to use and the combat becomes much more strategic. The battles are very fast paced and quite hectic.

You have a certain amount of slots you can use for every attack, and using those slots you can chain abilities together. You can also execute attacks to get the first attack or two out quicker and then fill up your attack slots again.

You can choose who is the leader and who else is in your party. In combat you only use the party leader, while commands for the other members are preformed by the computer. You do have a minor bit of control by setting your Paradigms. A paradigm a role that your characters will follow in battle. Setting this tells you computer controlled players how to behave, and you can switch it constantly during battle to react to any situation. It’s nice because the roles manage themselves, it’s like the gambit system from FF12, except that you don’t have to set them up. The downside is that you need to have them set up in advance, while changing paradigms the action continues, to combat going through a long list of types you can only have a couple set up at a time. I think it would be a much better fit if the game just paused and you were able to change each characters role separately, that way you could create paradigms on the fly. One annoying thing is that you are constantly forced to change them. Early in the game if you have a character set as a healer or buffer and the party is fully healed/buffed, they just stand around doing nothing.

Death to the party leader means game over, so it’s really important to watch your health. This is a feature that can make the game annoying. I think they should have taken a page out of FF12 and just let the player switch to another character once the party leader has died.

Leveling up in the game resembles the Final Fantasy 10 system more than anything. The game gives Crystarium for winning battles instead of the usual Experience points. Each character has certain roles that you can use the Crystarium to evolve. You can level up different roles for each character as well. The roles are set up like a mini sphere grid from FF10. Using Crystarium on a role will move along a path and gain stat upgraded and additional skills for that character. There’s also an opportunity to choose how to move through the grid which can add some customization to character growth.

The common complaint with Final Fantasy 13 is that it’s very linear. While the rest of the series (especially FF10) are mostly linear for the first half of the game before opening up, FF13 takes this much further. The game doesn’t open up until quite close to the end, and the rest of it doesn’t give even close to the amount of exploration that was available in the previous FF titles. You are really just running through single path environments filled with enemies throughout most of the game. You even shop at the save points, and there’s no side quest or anything to take your mind off the mind story until very late in the game. This isn’t a bad thing, it keeps the action going, but it’ll really hurt the overall appeal of the game for the hardcore JRPG player.

All in all, FF13 is the JRPG I’ve wanted from the FF series, it’s a great story with some great characters and incredibly fun to play. I was not a fan of the gameplay in FF12, so if you really enjoyed that one FF13 may not be for you. The game feels much more like FF10, and in my book that’s a very good thing.

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