Final Fantasy XIII
Jun. 11th, 2011 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Purge has begun. A Pulse Fal’cie has appeared in Cocoon, and the military has been authorized to remove anyone who might have been in contact with it. Six people gain mysterious powers and kill the gods responsible for this injustice in Final Fantasy XIII.
As a reminder going in: I’ve played pretty much every non-online Final Fantasy game at this point, with my favorite being FF4 and my least favorite probably being FF2, with most of the more recent games in the middle of the pack. I’m perfectly cool with lock-step storylines but occasionally have issues with non-standard leveling and equipment systems.
And it is very linear and lock-step. In the the first 20-25 hours of the game are a straight line (if there’s a place to turn off, there’s an item there and it’s a dead end), with effectively no grinding or shopping/re-equiping needed, and stopping for plot every ten minutes. Then suddenly we’re on the wide open plains with sidequests everywhere (virtually all of them are "kill this monster on the other side of the map") and a ton of room for grinding in the character development tree. You’ll be there for 10-20 hours (depending on how many of the sidequests you do), then you have another ten hours or so of renewed linearity and plot. In the post-game, you get access to the highest tier of the skill tree, and can go back and try to do all of the remaining sidequests and bonus bosses.
I enjoyed the first part quite a lot, as I like linearity just fine and there's enough plot and characterization that the constant cutscene-ing is pleasant, not distracting. That whole section is half-movie/half-game, so Jethrien was watching it with me while I played. The middle segment went on too long for my tastes, especially given the lack of plot in the back half of the game. (Also, you’re surrounded by monsters, half of whom you need to kill lots of in order to level your characters, and half of whom will kill you dead really quickly.) It feels like they have about 25 hours of game worth of plot and maybe 5 hours of dénouement, but they needed the game to last 70 hours so they added the middle sidequesting section and post-game, and that very much hurts the narrative thrust. I suspect the game would have been better without the middle section at all; if you’d just played the entire story and then the post-game opened up the missions.
Visuals: It’s so pretty, it’s so pretty. The cutscenes are nicer than The Spirits Within was, and the system comes pretty close. They’re getting much better about uncanny valley, and fire is starting to finally look right. (They got water and clouds down ages ago.) They’ve also gotten good at making things realistically gigantic. Later in the game, you can look across the plains and see a monster than has to be 50 feet tall—and know that you should stay the hell away from it.
Initial reports that it requires you only to press "X" to win the game are inaccurate; you must also occasionally press L1. The first two hours or so of the game are before you get special powers or access to the leveling system, so the battles there can get a little tedious. Honestly, I got a little annoyed at how repetitive several areas (the Fifth Ark, in particularly) get—you pass through the same sequence of hallways four times, and really, that's unnecessary padding. You notice it much less early on because of the abundance of cutscenes, but late in the game it gets tiresome.
To clarify: Combat is mostly automated. MP is unlimited and HP refills at the end of every battle. Two of your three characters are computer-controlled, the remaining one give you an “auto-battle” option that chooses attacks/spells for you, which is usually your best option. Both auto-battle and allies take into account enemy weaknesses and immunities as long as you’ve learned them (either by trying them, or using Libra to scan for them), which means you don’t get into stupid loops of allies spamming status effect spells that will never work. Actually, spamming status effect spells is often a very good strategy, because you can cast them enough times that even with low hit chances, they eventually stick. L1 changes your “paradigms”, which is the setup of which classes (physical fighter, black mage, white mage, buffer, debuffer and tank) your characters are using. Most of the game’s strategy is setting up and switching between paradigms.
Enemies don’t drop money, they only drop vendortrash that can be used to enhance your weapons and accessories or sold for money. The save points function as stores and upgrade points, and are pleasantly frequent—you’ll find one after about every ten minutes of play. The item upgrade system is a bit obtuse and it’s hard to get enough materials to upgrade everything you need to, but you can mostly ignore it and still beat the game just fine, which is pretty much what I did. For that matter, if you fight everything you see, you can get through the main game with very little grinding (especially if you do the first 17 missions before advancing the plot) and stick to only the main classes available to each character without serious trouble.
I came to an amusing realization in the late-game: A number of the most annoying Standard Status Effects don’t exist in this game. No petrification, no sleep, no mini/toad/pig/moogle transformations, and best of all, no confusion. I suspect it was a combination of these effects breaking the fast-paced nature of the combat system, and them looking silly. Also, it would require a way for the characters to inflict friendly fire damage that didn’t cause an instant game over. The classic way of curing sleep is to hit the character, and the classic problem of confusion is hitting your allies or yourself in an uncontrollable manner. There’s also very little instant-death magic, because if your main character dies, it’s Game Over.
Game over, though, is very kind in this game. You retry right before that battle (If it was a random encounter, you can avoid it; if it was a plot battle, you can go to the menu first), with no penalties that I could see. This is the tradeoff from not being able to run from battles.
Something that occurred to me regarding the prevalence of save points: There’s no “endurance” aspect to this game. There are very few consumable items and you don’t have the money to buy more anyway; MP is infinite and your HP refills after battles. There are no towns and no inns. You could (if you didn’t sleep) in theory play the entire game without stopping. So there’s no reason to limit save/recover points the way many other games do. (Battles are actually scored on how fast you win them, so there aren’t even really “endurance match” fights!)
Oh, yeah: You get a star rating for beating fights quickly, and getting 5-star rankings on various fights is required for several of the trophies. Getting higher star rankings refills your TP meter, which is used for Libra (enemy scan), several powerful special abilities, and summoning. The summons are all transformers and therefor incredibly awesome, and the in-battle summon mechanic is okay, but they aren’t really powerful enough given how rarely you’re able to use them. If you can’t win a battle with your characters as they are, you pretty much aren’t going to win it using a summon, either.
Overall: It was fun, I liked it, I’m glad I had it on the list of games it was worth buying a PS3 for. The story was fabulous. The graphics are gorgeous. But the game itself has some serious flaws in terms of repetitiveness and pacing. Oh, and would it have killed them to put a few minigames in?
As a reminder going in: I’ve played pretty much every non-online Final Fantasy game at this point, with my favorite being FF4 and my least favorite probably being FF2, with most of the more recent games in the middle of the pack. I’m perfectly cool with lock-step storylines but occasionally have issues with non-standard leveling and equipment systems.
And it is very linear and lock-step. In the the first 20-25 hours of the game are a straight line (if there’s a place to turn off, there’s an item there and it’s a dead end), with effectively no grinding or shopping/re-equiping needed, and stopping for plot every ten minutes. Then suddenly we’re on the wide open plains with sidequests everywhere (virtually all of them are "kill this monster on the other side of the map") and a ton of room for grinding in the character development tree. You’ll be there for 10-20 hours (depending on how many of the sidequests you do), then you have another ten hours or so of renewed linearity and plot. In the post-game, you get access to the highest tier of the skill tree, and can go back and try to do all of the remaining sidequests and bonus bosses.
I enjoyed the first part quite a lot, as I like linearity just fine and there's enough plot and characterization that the constant cutscene-ing is pleasant, not distracting. That whole section is half-movie/half-game, so Jethrien was watching it with me while I played. The middle segment went on too long for my tastes, especially given the lack of plot in the back half of the game. (Also, you’re surrounded by monsters, half of whom you need to kill lots of in order to level your characters, and half of whom will kill you dead really quickly.) It feels like they have about 25 hours of game worth of plot and maybe 5 hours of dénouement, but they needed the game to last 70 hours so they added the middle sidequesting section and post-game, and that very much hurts the narrative thrust. I suspect the game would have been better without the middle section at all; if you’d just played the entire story and then the post-game opened up the missions.
Visuals: It’s so pretty, it’s so pretty. The cutscenes are nicer than The Spirits Within was, and the system comes pretty close. They’re getting much better about uncanny valley, and fire is starting to finally look right. (They got water and clouds down ages ago.) They’ve also gotten good at making things realistically gigantic. Later in the game, you can look across the plains and see a monster than has to be 50 feet tall—and know that you should stay the hell away from it.
Initial reports that it requires you only to press "X" to win the game are inaccurate; you must also occasionally press L1. The first two hours or so of the game are before you get special powers or access to the leveling system, so the battles there can get a little tedious. Honestly, I got a little annoyed at how repetitive several areas (the Fifth Ark, in particularly) get—you pass through the same sequence of hallways four times, and really, that's unnecessary padding. You notice it much less early on because of the abundance of cutscenes, but late in the game it gets tiresome.
To clarify: Combat is mostly automated. MP is unlimited and HP refills at the end of every battle. Two of your three characters are computer-controlled, the remaining one give you an “auto-battle” option that chooses attacks/spells for you, which is usually your best option. Both auto-battle and allies take into account enemy weaknesses and immunities as long as you’ve learned them (either by trying them, or using Libra to scan for them), which means you don’t get into stupid loops of allies spamming status effect spells that will never work. Actually, spamming status effect spells is often a very good strategy, because you can cast them enough times that even with low hit chances, they eventually stick. L1 changes your “paradigms”, which is the setup of which classes (physical fighter, black mage, white mage, buffer, debuffer and tank) your characters are using. Most of the game’s strategy is setting up and switching between paradigms.
Enemies don’t drop money, they only drop vendortrash that can be used to enhance your weapons and accessories or sold for money. The save points function as stores and upgrade points, and are pleasantly frequent—you’ll find one after about every ten minutes of play. The item upgrade system is a bit obtuse and it’s hard to get enough materials to upgrade everything you need to, but you can mostly ignore it and still beat the game just fine, which is pretty much what I did. For that matter, if you fight everything you see, you can get through the main game with very little grinding (especially if you do the first 17 missions before advancing the plot) and stick to only the main classes available to each character without serious trouble.
I came to an amusing realization in the late-game: A number of the most annoying Standard Status Effects don’t exist in this game. No petrification, no sleep, no mini/toad/pig/moogle transformations, and best of all, no confusion. I suspect it was a combination of these effects breaking the fast-paced nature of the combat system, and them looking silly. Also, it would require a way for the characters to inflict friendly fire damage that didn’t cause an instant game over. The classic way of curing sleep is to hit the character, and the classic problem of confusion is hitting your allies or yourself in an uncontrollable manner. There’s also very little instant-death magic, because if your main character dies, it’s Game Over.
Game over, though, is very kind in this game. You retry right before that battle (If it was a random encounter, you can avoid it; if it was a plot battle, you can go to the menu first), with no penalties that I could see. This is the tradeoff from not being able to run from battles.
Something that occurred to me regarding the prevalence of save points: There’s no “endurance” aspect to this game. There are very few consumable items and you don’t have the money to buy more anyway; MP is infinite and your HP refills after battles. There are no towns and no inns. You could (if you didn’t sleep) in theory play the entire game without stopping. So there’s no reason to limit save/recover points the way many other games do. (Battles are actually scored on how fast you win them, so there aren’t even really “endurance match” fights!)
Oh, yeah: You get a star rating for beating fights quickly, and getting 5-star rankings on various fights is required for several of the trophies. Getting higher star rankings refills your TP meter, which is used for Libra (enemy scan), several powerful special abilities, and summoning. The summons are all transformers and therefor incredibly awesome, and the in-battle summon mechanic is okay, but they aren’t really powerful enough given how rarely you’re able to use them. If you can’t win a battle with your characters as they are, you pretty much aren’t going to win it using a summon, either.
Overall: It was fun, I liked it, I’m glad I had it on the list of games it was worth buying a PS3 for. The story was fabulous. The graphics are gorgeous. But the game itself has some serious flaws in terms of repetitiveness and pacing. Oh, and would it have killed them to put a few minigames in?
