You remember a while back when I posted those trailers for Final Fantasy XIII and Transformers: War For Cybertron? Lightning being all mopey, Hope being all mopey, Snow being all mopey- all while Leona Lewis blared loudly in the background. That trailer alone nearly killed my desire to play this game. Seriously- I would have much preferred it if they had just shown us ten minutes of Harrison Ford already working around the clock. However, as the reviews started to trickle in the days before the game’s release, I started to look past the crappy pop-music, emo trailers, and NBA promos to get to the game’s delicious center.
Much of how much you’ll like Final Fantasy XIII depends on how you prefer your RPGs. Do you like exploring towns? How about heavy micromanagement? Do you like rambling around pointlessly in a huge overworld with nothing to do but get into random battles every ten seconds? If you’re like me, the answer is no. But removing these aspects may leave Final Fantasy purists with a bad taste in their mouths. To me, Final Fantasy XIII stole a few pages from Persona 3’s playbook, and they’re much better off for it. At the time of writing, I’ve played through the game’s first ten hours, and I’ve mostly enjoyed every minute of it.
The combat system uses the Active Time Battle system seen in previous Square-Enix endeavors. In this incarnation, as the meter fills, you’re able to queue up a series of actions (as of right now, the most anyone in my party can queue up is four actions). When the meter gets full, the character executes said actions, and you go back to assigning actions for the next time the meter fills up. In a sense, it does maintain that menu-driven/turn-based Final Fantasy feel, but there are several different wrinkles in the system that turn combat into something wholly different.
For one, if the meter fills and you still haven’t picked an action, you’re basically losing actions and giving your opponent an extra opportunity to wipe you off the face of the earth. Also, you will find yourself switching party roles on the fly (the roles correspond to classic Final Fantasy character types: fighter, caster, defender, healer, and two support roles- one for ally buffs, the other for enemy debuffs). Switching these “paradigms” requires an understanding of what’s happening on screen as well as picking the optimum time to switch so that you gain the maximum number of actions possible. If you master the method of knowing what strategies to start out with, when to switch, and what strategies to switch to, the combat system becomes fun and addictive. In that sense, it managed to take the strategy elements of Persona’s battle system and improve them greatly by adding a psuedo class system.
Another aspect of combat that may be off-putting at first is the fact that success or failure depends entirely on keeping the party leader alive. In these early hours, I’ve not been given direct control of assigning a party leader yet, but in most cases I’ve managed to survive even though I’ve made leveling and upgrading Lightning a priority.
Of course, “leveling” is sort of a deceptive term in this game. You’re no longer given a numeric level for each character. Since characters can switch freely between different roles, CP (or Crystarium Points, which are used in lieu of traditional experience points) is given from battles, and it allows you to increase your stats and learn new abilities in each of the different roles. In the early going, it’s often best to have each party member focus on a single role, and maintain party balance by using a single paradigm. However, the party quickly begins to go into separate directions, so it becomes necessary to develop secondary or tertiary roles for each character. Fortunately, you can usually move from one ability crystal to the next after only a few battles, so you’ll always be getting slightly stronger (rather than waiting hours to gain a level and increase your strength- one of my very few complaints about the superlative Final Fantasy XII). I’ve even found myself saving, quitting, and re-loading the save to double back and fight the enemies that re-spawn at earlier stages of the area I’m located at, just so I can fill out the Crystariums for each role.
It’s tough to argue that an RPG consists of anything other than two basic elements:
1) Story
2) Combat
We’ve already talked a good deal about the combat, so let’s talk about the story thus far in a nice, spoiler-free manner then, shall we?
One thing that the game does well is that it throws you into the middle of the action at the beginning, then stops along the way to fill in the gaps. While this can be a little disconcerting, it at least saves the characters from giving too much exposition to other characters who somehow don’t happen to know anything about the world they’re living in. Instead, some of these tidbits are put into datalogs that can be accessed through the in-game menu. If you want to immerse yourself in lore about Cocoon and Pulse, then go nuts. If you’re like me, however, and just want to let the game’s story paint the picture for you, then you can just keep pushing forward.
Then, there’s the characters. I won’t sit here and talk about each one in detail. Instead, for the sake of expediency I’ll give you my nicknames for the characters:
Sazh: “Frocobo” or (if he’s being pointlessly negative) “Louis” (as in Louis from the first Left 4 Dead)
Vanille: “Retard”
Snow: “Goober”
Fang: “Crikey!”
Hope: “Whiney little (insert derogatory curse word based on the severity of his whining about Snow and his refusal to do anything about it)”
Who gets left off of the nickname bus? Lighting- who is easily the most likeable protagonist in a Final Fantasy game since the SNES days, or possibly ever. Let’s go down the list of Final Fantasy protagonists (of the U.S. numbered releases), shall we?
Red Warrior (Final Fantasy)- Basically your personal avatar, so he’s cool.
Cecil (Final Fantasy II/IV)- Badass.
Terra (Final Fantasy III/VI)- Wait, I’m a chick? Hot!
Cloud (Final Fantasy VII)- I’m of two minds about Cloud: he started out strong in the game’s early hours, but after the death of You-Know-Who, he became the archetype of the Whiny-Emo-Asshat that would come to mar the Tetsuya Nomura (a.k.a. “Belty McZipper”) era of Final Fantasy games.
Squall (Final Fantasy VIII)- Starts out emo from the get-go. It’s 30 hours of Rinoa trying to get this guy to cheer-the-fuck-up, and 10 hours of him actually doing something about it.
Zidane (Final Fantasy IX)- I … really don’t know what to say about this guy. He would be a forgettable second third-banana in any other game, yet he gets the lead in this one.
Tidus (Final Fantasy X)- Life is hard because I’m the main character! Waaaaaah!! This game would have worked so much better if Auron had been the main character.
Vaan (Final Fantasy XII)- Like Final Fantasy XIII, the story for XII really revolved around the entire cast, yet it always gravitated towards Vaan, who just couldn’t hack it in a cast with Balthier, Ashe, Basch, and of course, Fran.
Looking at the list, the strong-willed, no-nonsense Lightning stands tall over the rest of the field. Who am I kidding? She won my heart when she punched Snow in the face on multiple occasions over the games first few hours and told Hope he was useless. It’s like I think it, and she says/does it for me.
While all the reviews seem to indicate I still have a long way to go before I get to experience the game at full-stride, my early verdict is that this is a surprisingly entertaining and addicting RPG that, if you were turned off by the melodramatic media blitz that we were subjected to, is actually a pleasant surprise.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, Lightning and I need some private time …
Pingback: Final Fantasy XIII-2 Announced | The Porcelain Idle