Final Fantasy XIII

April 6, 2010 | 7:13 PM PST

So few games have been as hyped as long as Final Fantasy XIII. Square Enix has been taunting its fans for, well, years with secretive countdowns on their website, screenshots, and teases of gameplay footage. The only demo players could get was from purchasing the Blu-ray version of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and even then, that wasn’t a complete build of the combat system. Players had an idea of what the game entailed, but they didn’t have a firm grasp on what to expect. So when the game finally released, there was a huge chance it would fail due to the high anticipation and the overhyped marketing.

It most certainly did not.

The story revolves around a hodgepodge of characters who not only resemble those from Final Fantasy games past (in both appearances and personalities), but also have been forced together to try to save the world of Cocoon in a fashion that only a Final Fantasy game can deliver. In other words, it’s a bit complicated. The Reader’s Digest version is that these six characters have been enslaved by a magical being called a Fal’Cie. In their case, the Fal’Cie happened to be from Pulse, the world below the floating world of Cocoon, which is greatly feared by all Cocoon inhabitants. As a result, the people of Cocoon are terrified of them and wish nothing but for them to die a nasty death. Meanwhile, they must try to figure out their Focus – what the Fal’Cie want them to do – or they will become monsters and eventually stone.

Unfortunately, the story does take awhile to fully develop and really get interesting. Even worse, the only way for players to fully understand what is going on is to read the continually updated Datalog in the game’s main menu. Within lies the mythology and history of the Fal’Cie, Cocoon, Pulse, Cocoon’s governing body, and anything else you can imagine. None of this is specifically explained in-game, which is the worst part of the entire experience. Even after 35 hours of gameplay, players still won’t fully understand most of the game’s world, such as what a Fal’Cie is or what Sanctum is, without reading this Datalog. Even though all of the characters grew up in Cocoon and do not need anything explained to them, the player is clueless and should still be educated through story elements without having to read the Datalog. The only thing that is nearly as bad as the Datalog requirement is Vanille’s voice-acting (does she have an accent or doesn’t she?).

While the story slowly revs up and players take breaks from reading the lengthy Datalog, the combat will definitely keep them entertained. FFXIII introduces a completely new style of turn-based combat – called Combat Synergy Battle– that features three party members all taking turns using a familiar Active Time Battle (ATB) gauge to unleash attacks or special abilities. Different abilities take up different amounts of the ATB gauge; for example, a Cura spell will take up two of four available sections of the gauge and therefore can only be cast twice, whereas a Cure spell can be cast up to four times because it only fills one ATB section. As a result, there are no MP in this game; just Technique Points (TP) characters tap into for (shocker!) techniques such as summoning and scanning. TP is earned according to the player’s star rating at the end of each battle.

However, unlike previous iterations of Final Fantasy, players can only control one of the party members at a time (the Leader) and the others are all AI-controlled. Even then, players can order the Leader to perform specific abilities or select “Auto Battle” and let the AI choose the best abilities for the situation. While that may seem cheap and boring, the “Auto Battle” selection was one of the best ideas the developers had, especially since the action is extremely fast and several things happen on the screen at once. Without this choice, it would be incredibly easy to become overwhelmed with the rapid and unforgiving enemy assault and die within seconds.

This does not mean that the AI is completely in charge of the other party members. Players can control their roles (magic caster, attacker, healer, party buffer, enemy debuffer, or defender) by creating paradigms (sets) of their roles and shifting the paradigms during combat. For example, if the party needs healing, switch to a paradigm that contains one or two healers. If the party needs to go all out, switch to a paradigm that contains a few attackers and/or magic casters. The paradigm shift is one of the most unique elements of any battle system, and it opens up a whole new world of strategy for players. Every enemy and boss can be taken down by switching through two or three different paradigms and by carefully selecting the strongest characters for those paradigms. One character may be a great magician, but he’s horrible at healing. Another is a great sentinel (defender), but she’s not the best saboteur (debuffer). Sometimes defeating a boss isn’t even about leveling up; it’s about switching out the characters and paradigms. The learning curve is rather steep, but the game coaches players through it as the story progresses, and it doesn’t take long to learn how to create and switch paradigms like a pro. If JRPGs incorporated the paradigm shift early on, more people would play them today as it’s not nearly as time consuming and boring as traditional turn-based faire found in Final Fantasy X or Lost Odyssey.

With such quick combat, it may seem like this game will be shorter than the average Final Fantasy, but Square Enix didn’t forget about the sidequests. RPGs in general are infamous for their optional sidequests, especially when it comes to unlocking them close to the end of the game. FFXIII is no different, except that players can play the sidequests (called Mark Missions) at any time once they are unlocked, including after the story is over. No need to boot up a save point before the final bosses to tackle these missions at a later date; they can be saved all for the very end to keep the fun of the game going for as long possible. Game missions, too, are replayable at any time post-story to check out that favorite environment or earn the 5-star rating. There’s a special Trophy/Achievement for obtaining 5 stars on all the missions, and this will surely tempt many a gamer to try, try again. That said, the Missions are not exciting and exist for little more than component harvesting and level grinding like every sidequest in most other RPGs. Those who have played Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII will notice a similarity between these Missions and those that Zack Fair had to go through in Crisis Core, in that they’re all the same: hunt down a mini-boss and kill it. At least here, players are treated to a bit more variety when it comes to scenery.

As for the overall scenery, it is also a conglomeration of palettes from Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X, like the characters. The environment of Cocoon is filled with technology and booming metropolises and consists mostly of dark colors, much like Midgar of FFVII. In fact, the early sequences that take place on Cocoon’s Hanging Edge feel like they were taken straight from the Midgar and Shinra. Everything is dark and foreboding, and one can’t help but feel that there is something inherently wrong and possibly evil when it comes to Cocoon, much like what Midgar and the Shinra building radiated in FFVII. In contrast, the lower world of Pulse is right out of the brightly colored Final Fantasy X. The environments are bright, contain lush colors, and take place out in open nature with crumbling ruins. Fortunately, Pulse is one place that players can rest a bit and try to absorb the beauty of it all. The fact that there are no random encounters makes it even easier to explore the region and take it all in. It would have been nice if FFX allowed players to do the same at times.

The character and environment similarities to FFX were obviously not enough, as FFXIII’s developers chose to implement a leveling system that is far too similar to FFX’s sphere-grid system to be coincidental. Here it’s called the Crystarium, and players activate crystals instead of spheres, but the idea behind it is still the same. With every battle, instead of earning the usual “experience,” the party earns crystogen points. Each crystal in the Crystarium costs a certain number of crystogen points, so players have to use these points to purchase the crystals in order to learn new abilities and obtain stat boosts. Each character has a separate Crystarium for each paradigm role, and since each character learns abilities at different Crystarium stages, it’s advantageous to level up certain roles before others, thereby adding another level of complexity to the paradigm shift system. At first, this system doesn’t seem to be as big of a beating as the sphere grid, because at least here, the characters’ Crystariums are not connected and there are no keys to unlock other areas of the Crystarium. However, when the crystals become ungodly expensive in the upper stages of the Crystarium and it takes an extraordinary amount of time to level just one role for each character, the beating goes above and beyond the now mere annoyance of FFX’s sphere grid.

This somewhat complex and time-consuming Crystarium coupled with the slow story will prevent JRPG-haters from converting into fans, despite the more exciting combat. They may initially enjoy it when they see the vibrant scenery and play around with the battle system, but once the Crystarium enters the picture and they realize how slowly the plot moves, the bliss will quickly dissipate. Most will not even make it to the 25-30 hour mark, which is when the sidequests unlock and the environment becomes more open to exploration. JRPG fans, particularly FF fans, though, will eat it all up and ask for more.

The Rundown
Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy installment is everything fans have come to expect from this franchise: a complicated story, characters both familiar and complex, a variety of cool weapons, a turn-based battle system and different jobs for each character to take. At the same time, it has enough unique aspects – particularly with the combat – to stake out its own homestead in the Final Fantasy universe. The story, albeit slow, is engaging, and the combat has enough depth to stay fun throughout the game. The only things fans should have to complain about are the necessity of the Datalog and the missing traditional “Victory Fanfare” at the end of each battle. Despite the omitted tune, Final Fantasy XIII overall is a high quality RPG that is worth every ounce of the hype. It most likely won’t change the minds of those who dislike JRPGs, but fans of the genre will love every minute of the 70-100 hours they will invest.