Final Fantasy has been known for a long time for its intricate story and beautiful graphics. How does FFXIII stand in these categories? Quite well. It's obvious that these were the driving force in development. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly in the target audience for these attributes. I hooked my Xbox (not PS3) to an old CRT monitor. I did not have the resources to be any more impressed with Final Fantasy's graphics than any other game. As for the story, I'm not exactly the best guy to ask.
I can enjoy just about any plot, so that isn't much of a make or break issue for me. I can't say too much about the story because I didn't pay attention the whole time and don't want to spoil anything anyway. There was a lot going on, but not all of it was gripping material. That's not to say it was bad, I actually enjoyed what I've seen, but the story will only be interesting if you take the time to pay attention (something I advise anyone playing to do).
One thing that I did notice in the storyline, that I think is a good thing, is my attachment to the characters growing over time. At first, I didn't like any of the characters (save one). After playing for a while, they acknowledge their faults or changed them in a manner that gave them a human dimension apart from the generic, and generally negative, labels I had placed on all of them before. The fact that I didn't like the characters to begin with seems like a bad thing, but if that's what they were going for, they pulled it off very well.
All that we have left to talk about is gameplay. There's a lot to be said about that, so buckle down. If you have yet to play FFXIII and you have a desire to play, stop reading now. I'm about to nitpick at every aspect of gameplay. The average player may not notice all of the things I'm going to complain about, and it would probably be for their benefit if they do not. That isn't to say you shouldn't play FFXIII, it's not a bad game, but its gameplay could use a lot of work, and that's what I'm going to talk about.
The rest of this post will take a very negative tone to the point it may sound as though I hate the game. That is not the case. This was actually the closest I've ever come to feeling completely neutral towards a game. You can sit down and play it, two hours pass, and you didn't even notice. My roommate likes to describe it as "an achievement in mediocrity." All the bad things I'm about to describe diminish the parts that make the game "good" but are minor enough to keep the game from being bad.
The combat system is where most of my complaints will reside. The fact that each iteration of Final Fantasy changes the combat in some way is something I respect. Too often, old mechanics remain in simply because that's how it always has been. Unfortunately, the combat hasn't changed drastically enough, leaving a fairly muddled mix of real-time and turn-based combat.
Before I go too much further, there is one thing about combat that I absolutely love: The Stagger Gauge. The more you attack one enemy, the more damage that enemy will take. If you focus your attacks on one enemy for long enough, they will become staggered, allowing you to stun the opponent and deal massive damage. I think that this feature should be used in more games when appropriate. It rewards the player for tuning their focus and does it in an exciting and fast paced way that looks and feels really cool upon success.
The problem with combat revolving around such a fast paced feature is that it forces turn-based combat to become too fast for its own good. While there is an option to slow down combat, when the average battle length is 2-3 minutes going normal speed, I'd rather take my chances at that rate than waste more of my time going slowly. So while they've technically acknowledged my complaint by making a slower battle option, that really doesn't do it for me because of how long battles last.
Actually, I have to make this point before I go much further. To almost every complaint I have, they have some form of accommodation. The accommodation is usually pretty weak and feels fairly tacked-on, but it is there nonetheless. I will try to do my best to say how things could have been done better, but I honestly think the best thing they could have done is to pick between real-time and turn-based instead of doing both.
A lot of the games problems stem from this one element: Combat is too fast. The game that you play is actually just a bunch of accommodations to the fact that the game moves too fast for its own good. You only directly control one character. You can give everybody basic roles they can fill, but you can't tell them exactly what to do. In fact, combat is so fast, it's hard to control just the one guy they give you. That's why they gave the "Auto-battle" feature. It does just what it says: It plays the game for you. I tried to avoid using that button for as long as possible, but I gave up after a few hours. It's just too hard to play otherwise.
Wait a second, if you don't choose your commands in combat, what do you do? The main task assigned to the player is switching "Paradigms." In the game, a paradigm is a specific set of roles for each party member. The player decides what six paradigms they will bring into battle and they can choose from those on the fly. There are six roles total, but each character specializes in three. The roles are as follows:
- Commando - Non-elemental damage and slows the degradation of the stagger gauge
- Ravager - Elemental damage and high boosts to stagger gauge
- Sentinel - High defense and taunts enemies into attacking him/her
- Saboteur - De-buffs the enemy by lowering attack, defense, speed and other effects
- Synergist - Buffs teammates by raising attack, defense, speed and other effects
- Medic - Heals teammates and removes status effects
One thing that really bothers me is that if your party leader dies, the game ends. You can resurrect members in combat, but not the party leader (the character the player controls). There isn't anything wrong with the mechanic that, if the main character dies, it's game over. My complaint is that, for the first twenty hours or so, the player has no choice in the party leader, but it's not always the same character. There isn't a main character because each one of the six is just as important as the others. There is no reason you can't have your other members resurrect you. This problem is exacerbated when some enemies can kill certain characters in one hit.
The item system seems a little tacked-on to me. You can use items at any time and it doesn't consume an action. Potions affect everyone in the party instead of just one target making them significantly more powerful than in previous Final Fantasy games. When I heard about these features, I was very excited about how useful items could be in this game. Unfortunately, using items as a "free action" isn't as free as the system implies. You can't use items if your party leader is being knocked around into the air or otherwise incapacitated. That isn't so bad because it makes sense, but it would be nice if the first available member would use it. It also takes a while to navigate to them menu, taking about as much time as using the item allegedly saves.
Potions are very powerful at the beginning of the game, but once you get healing magic, they become useless. This is not because healing magic is so good, which it is, but because items don't get any stronger. There are no Hi-Potions or X-Potions. You get Potions, and much, much later Elixirs. There are a few others thrown in, but they don't heal your party (Phoenix Down aside). My big issue with the system is the fact that accessing items from the menu is a very cumbersome experience.
Classic Final Fantasy would have the menus overlay the further in you go, so you can more easily determine where you are in the menu. There is no sense of depth in FFXIII's combat menus. This isn't a huge issue all the time, but if you accidentally select the wrong option, it can take a few seconds to figure out why the menu you are looking at isn't what you expected and how to get from there to where you want to go. Fortunately, the special menus like items and TP consuming techniques have their options color coded to give you an idea of where you are.
A tedious aspect of the menus is in the animation. When you select anything, you have to wait for the current options to animate off to the side of the screen and the new options to animate back in. It only take maybe a tenth of a second, but it's enough to take away a sense of immediacy from the player. I'm used to turn-based games where, if I press the A button three times, I'll select three options and attack the enemy. Now I have to either time my button presses to sync with the animation or just mash it until I get what I want. This is why Auto-Battle is so useful. It can make the selections I probably was going to make anyway instantly when it would take me three to five seconds to decide what I want and search through the menus to find it.
Another weird aspect that further drives apart real-time and turn-based aspect in combat is positioning in battle. You can't control or even suggest where your party members stand and, obviously, have even less control over your enemies. Some moves are more effective if enemies are bunched together because you can hit them all at once. The same thing goes for your party. That isn't necessarily bad in all cases. In fact, Chrono Trigger used that system and did it quite well. The key difference between Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy XIII is the amount of time the player has to decide to use an area of effect move. Chrono Trigger moves more slowly and the player can pay more attention to how frequently enemies move and attack. Final Fantasy's enemies attack at seemingly random intervals, because nobody has to wait until their ATB gauge is all the way full. They can wait until it is partly full and attack once, or wait until it is all the way filled and attack 3-5 times. The same option is available to the player which adds a timing aspect to combat that never feels quite right.
Melee attacks can sometimes miss entirely if the enemy decides to attack someone and moves away quickly. This can work in the player's favor at times, but there isn't really a way to do it intentionally. You either get lucky or unlucky, but it feels more like a bug than a feature. The stop and go rate at which the ATB gauge fills feels arbitrary until you figure out exactly how it works. I've died quite a few times because my ATB gauge stayed frozen at empty for a good five seconds before starting to fill when I needed to heal my teammates. I have learned a way to circumvent that problem, but I'm not happy I have to go out of my way to force the system to work the way I think it should in the first place.
Anytime the player is idle in combat, their ATB gauge fills up. Once the player begins an attack, the ATB is frozen and goes down in chunks for each action performed. This makes sense, but, in retrospect, I think I would rather it always go up at a slower rate and stop once it fills all the way up. The reason is you can be attacked while you are performing actions. Usually getting hit will stun you for half a second, but certain moves knock you into the air and you land on your back and have to stand up again before you can start to attack again. You can almost completely fill your ATB gauge in the time it takes to stand back up, but, if you were attacking, your meter is frozen because it doesn't move when you are performing actions. However, if you cancel all of your actions when you get knocked in the air, you can fill your ATB gauge while you are sitting around doing nothing.
All in all, my biggest problem with combat is that I never feel that losing is my fault. If I die, I think to myself, "If I didn't have to wait for the paradigm shift animation, I could have started healing in time to survive." "If my healers didn't stand next to the tank, they wouldn't have gotten hit with all of those area of effect moves that they weren't even directed at them." "If the game didn't end because the character I was controlling died, my medic could have raised me." If I ever felt like it was my problem, maybe I would care. When the game kills me because it feels like it, I lose the drive to get better because it feels like ability is irrelevant.
The game is difficult at times, there's no denying that, but I can't figure out if it's because my strategy is wrong, if the combat system is getting in my way, or if my characters are under leveled. Which brings me to my next point, leveling up. Characters don't have levels or experience in the conventional sense. They have a Crystarium. When you spend points in the Crystarium, you spend them in a particular role. That means your character can be a Level 1 Ravager, Level 3 Commando, and a Level 2 Medic. Unfortunately, the maximum role level is five, meaning there are a lot of gray areas when trying to determine how powerful your character is.
The other strange aspect of the Crystarium is that you aren't free to do whatever you want with it. You can only upgrade your character as much as the game wants you to at any point in time. Your Crystarium expands as you progress through the story. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but there are no difficulty settings. In older Final Fantasy games, if you got stuck, you could just level up some more. In this one, you are left at the mercy of the game designer. Another, more personal, issue I have with the Crystarium is that it limits specialization. I like making my characters really good at one thing, but when you arbitrarily put a cap on how good I can get at that one thing, it is impossible for me to get better without branching out. Branching out isn't bad, but that's not how I like to play games if I can avoid it. Once again, that is a personal complaint that really has no bearing on the quality of the game, I just prefer the ability to specialize.
The Crystarium menu itself is overly intricate. To increase your character's statistics and abilities, you purchase little nodes on the Crystarium. Each of these nodes are connected by lines, meaning you have to buy the previous node to access the next one. These nodes are separated into a series of rings that are stacked on top of each other. The big issue is that the menu incorporates a bunch of flash that is really unnecessary.
The entire Crystarium could have easily been a straight line. Despite everything being shaped into fancy rings, it's a linear leveling process. Yes, there are, in fact, branching paths, however, I think the largest branch is only 3 or 4 nodes deep. Whenever you want to purchase a node, you can't just select it and say "buy," you have to hold down a button until an animation filling up the line connecting one node to another fills up. It looks nice, so it's not a huge complaint, it is just entirely superfluous and, if you are like me and don't level up until you are too weak to continue, it can take quite a long time to level up all of your characters.
Okay maybe I exaggerated a little. Leveling takes a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, it's short relative to everything else in the game, meaning it takes four times as long as previous iterations of Final Fantasy. Let me make myself perfectly clear, I admit, I haven't played every Final Fantasy game religiously. I played the ones on released on Playstation. I didn't have a PS2 so I missed out on X, X-2, and XII. I never played XI, but that one was an MMO, so it doesn't really "count." Anyway, as I was saying, it feels as though they artificially lengthened aspects in FFXIII, to make sure they take up at least as much time as earlier Final Fantasy games.
Average combat time for standard enemies is somewhere between 2-5 minutes, depending on how strong you are and assuming you aren't incredibly powerful. This is fairly standard for the Playstation Final Fantasy games as well. Unfortunately, in the time it takes to perform one action per character in the earlier games, you perform four. Combat feels like it drags on because every action is only about a quarter as strong, as far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of lengthening combat.
Boss battles can take around 20 minutes. That isn't too bad, except you won't always win the first time. Even if you figure out the right strategy to beat the boss, if you don't perfectly time the paradigm shifts you do several times a minute for twenty minutes, you have to start over. The boss battle length isn't a problem by itself, but, the longer you play, the more likely one of the random combat problems I mentioned earlier is to happen and the more likely you are to get frustrated with the game. I, personally, would enjoy the game more if they did one of two things. Either cut the battle length to a quarter and keep everything the same, or slow down the combat by the same amount, but have the length be the same. Something just have to give. If you want the game to be fast, make it fast. If you would rather the game be slower so it will take longer, then make it slower. All I ask is for a little consistency.
There are a lot of interesting quirks with the games pacing. A very common statement is "The first 20 hours of the game are okay, but it really picks up after that." Well, there's a reason that's a common statement. It's pretty much true. You don't get to select your party members until around that 20 hour mark. This isn't a huge deal because the characters are often separated by story events, so you obviously couldn't group with everyone. It's a shame that you can't even pick your party leader, though. If you get stuck as the flimsy spellcaster who can get killed in one hit, every battle could be a game over at any time. It'd be nice to switch over to a character with a little more health just to make sure you don't instantly lose, but it would be even better if you had to wait until the entire party dies before the game ends.
There is one thing that is good about the game, anytime you lose a battle, you can restart right before it, so you don't really lose anything for losing except for time and maybe a little pride. You also gain all of your health back at the end of the battle and casting spells like Fire don't cost MP. Instead, you have TP which maxes out at 5 and you can use for summons and other powerful techniques. It's nice that you don't have to worry about being out of health and magic before a boss fight, but it loses the tension that comes with dungeon-crawling. I liked having to pick between using spells to blow apart weak enemies before they can touch me, or waiting until a formidable foe. I'm okay with the new system in theory, but that also means that every battle is scaled so there is always a chance that you will die when you are at full strength. There aren't any battles that whittle away at the player, only life or death encounters. In theory, this would mean that I am always on edge in battle, but, because there is no penalty for losing, it means I usually don't care.
The other thing that irritates me is the fact that I even need to save the game at save points anymore. In previous games, you would use save points so you had somewhere to start in case you died. Now that I always restart before a battle begins anyway, why can't I have a save feature that allows me do the exact same thing at any time? If that were so, where would I shop since save points function as stores as well? To that I say, I'd still shop at save points, which is to say, anywhere. If they can explain access to shops randomly placed throughout the wilderness, why can't I wear the same functionality on my wrist?
Another feature in the game that I think could have been done better is the item upgrading system. When you defeat a monster, you get random body parts as loot. This helps explain the classic "Haha, why do monsters drop gold and weapons?" It's a shame that this means the player doesn't get money from battles anymore. You will always be poor unless you sell that loot. This wouldn't be a problem if that was the sole purpose for loot. No, you can use that loot to upgrade your existing weapons and equipment to make them more powerful. Once again, that isn't too bad, but when there are probably close to a hundred different types of loot, how do you decide what to sell and what to use to upgrade?
The main problem is that the system encourages experimentation, but any experiments are very costly to the player. Certain upgrade items multiply the effectiveness of later upgrade items, and this upgrade depends on what and how many of the item you used. You also can't be certain as to what the item will turn into. Some upgraded items have fairly non-sequitur results. For example, a scarf that anyone can use eventually turns into boots that only helps the Sentinel role. Technically, you can only upgrade at save points, so you can reload if you aren't satisfied, but it still costs the player time which, hopefully, isn't an unlimited resource. If the system was simplified, I think the weapon upgrade system could be really cool.
There are so many different kinds of objects that drop from monsters, but most of them overlap in functionality. Monsters drop higher quality items of the same type, which is fine, but with so many types, it quickly clutters your inventory. If, instead, they dropped larger quantities of the same items as the weaker enemies, crafting would be a much more streamlined experience. If you really want to streamline it, make loot only useful to sell. Then you can purchase the upgrades directly. There is something to be said about a system that encourages experimentation, but the associated cost is quite high in this case.
My roommate suggested that the upgraded weapons sell for a reasonable price. I agree entirely. The selling price of the upgraded item is only slightly higher than the original one. It does not at all take into account the amount of money and loot spent to upgrade it. Because most of the game is linear, players can't easily gather these resources. They can only get what the game provides. If you incorrectly use what the game provides, it's pretty much just gone. Experimentation is much more stressful with that thought looming overhead.
One thing I find interesting is that the game is inherently more complex than it lets on. Crafting aside, there are a lot of little things in combat that the game doesn't tell you, but are slightly useful. Like the fact that the gun wielding character deals double damage in the Commander role than any other attack role. It's fun to speculate that they are trying to increase the demand for player's guides, but I won't go so far as to accuse them of such a thing.
Another, comparatively short-lived complaint I had is that it takes two hours before you can level up. Not two hours before you can get more powerful, but two hours until you can even gain experience. That means there is pretty much no benefit to even playing the first two hours of the game. As a story event, it makes sense that players can't level up until a particular plot point happens, but I wish they tried to speed it up a bit. I'd be fine if it took twenty minutes or so, but two hours is a bit much. It's just a prelude to the fact that they won't trust you with your party members for another twenty hours.
I was going to wait until I fully beat the game before I posted, but I can't bring myself to play through the last two chapters. I have gotten to the "good part" so all of my complaints can't be written off as ignorant. It's just the fact that the little things add up. I might not have cared that you can't access your inventory or check your characters' stats while riding on a chocobo, but there's only so much I can take before it upsets my playing experience.
If you haven't played the game yet, but you are interested in Final Fantasy, don't play this one. My recommendations would be FF9 or FF6 (FF3 in the US). I even went through the trouble of converting the roman numerals which become admittedly cumbersome. Those are good games to start with because they aren't talked about much. This way they don't have to live up to the hype of, oh, say Final Fantasy Seven. Also, they have the advantage of not being Final Fantasy Eight. (I just didn't like that one, I won't go into why now, but it was still better than Thirteen).
If you've played all the other Final Fantasy games, you've probably played this one too, so you have your own opinion. If you are anybody else, I recommend renting it. After all, you can't complain about something if you haven't played it. Okay, that was a little harsh, I'll let you decide for yourself. I'm still a little bitter that I put so much time into it without completing the game. (Not to mention the time put into this post).
Thanks to anyone who put up with this massive post, I hope you found it enjoyable. If not, better luck next time. Have a great day.
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