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I walk the line.
Ok, so I guess I do owe Square a bit of an apology here. I said on quite a few of the podcasts that I thought this game was going to be terrible. I was wrong. Final Fantasy XIII turned out to actually be quite good. It's just one of those games that sounds horrible on paper, but works out incredibly well in execution. It's not without its flaws of course, but what game isn't? I can honestly say, though, that I am glad that I took a chance with Final Fantasy XIII.
First of all, the one thing that made me think FFXIII was going to be terrible was the battle system. Everything I read about it prior to release just made it sound worse and worse. Starting with the fact that you only can control one character at a time. I really HATE it when RPGs don't let me control all of my party members. However, once I started playing the game I immediately saw that controlling every character would have just slowed down the pace of battle. So instead Square lets you barely control any of them at all. Mostly just picking general orders for what the main character does. If I were to put it in football terms, it feels more like you're the coach picking the plays than the actual player carrying them out.
It sounds incredibly boring, and it would be if combat wasn't so fast paced and fun to watch and at times incredibly tense. Its been a long time since I've felt a real sense of tension and danger in a Final Fantasy game, or had a party wipe for that matter. Death comes swift and sometimes sudden in Final Fantasy XIII; if the character you are controlling dies, its game over. Punishment for death isn't that severe, as you can basically just retry regular encounters, and boss battles send you back to the last save, which is usually five or six steps away.
Like many past Final Fantasy games, XIII has a job class system called “Paradigms” It's basically what defines the abilities your characters have in battle. There are six different Paradigms and all of the characters eventually get them all. You have melee damage dealers(Commandos), offensive spell casters(Ravagers), Healers(Medics), and tanks(Sentinels). Then there is Synergist and Saboteur, which are the buffer and debuffer paradigms respectively. You can set up to six different combinations of paradigms at a time, and change them on the fly in battle, which you will be doing constantly. It can get quite intense.
If you are familiar with the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X, you should feel right at home with FFXIII's Crystarium. It's basically the same deal: fight battles, earn experience points (Crystal Points) and use them to advance your character's abilities and stats. Abilities are specific to that paradigm, stats however are not, Even if you switch paradigms, you keep the stat increase.
While the combat system is one of the game's strong points, the story and characters are a bit of a weak point. The story is somewhat a little confusing at times, specifically at the beginning when a lot of things are happening in rapid succession, plus there are a lot of goofy terms being thrown around. It slowly starts to piece itself together and actually tells a decent story by the end. Still, I felt it wasn't the greatest fantasy ever told. The game is also an extremely straight line, running through a series of corridors. There is a chapter where the game does open up a little bit and offer some side quests, but I didn't really find any of these that interesting, or necessary. Mostly it was locate and kill monster X. Sort of like the hunting missions from FFXII
The characters are for the most part interesting, however I really do wonder who was in charge of naming them. Other than Sazh, they have the most uninspired names I've ever heard: Lightning, Snow, Fang, Vanille, and Hope. I know that Japanese RPG characters usually have stupid names, but this just seemed above and beyond terrible. Also, its been a long time since a character annoyed me as much as Hope. He was such a whiny bitch! I guess he got slightly better by the end, but the damage was already done by then, and the moment I didn't have to use him any more, he was never put back in my active party.
While Final Fantasy XIII was considerably better than I thought it would be, it is no where near a perfect experience. Had the story and characters been a little bit better it might have made it into my top three Final Fantasy games, also getting rid of Hope would have been a step in the right direction. Still, it is a very good game and worthy of the Final Fantasy title.
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System: |
Xbox 360
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| Genre: |
RPG
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| Experience: |
Finished the Main Story |
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