FF13: Still fairly early on, still enjoying it.
I'm now in Chapter 4, which means that among all my characters combined I have access to all six roles. I'm continuing to get the hang of the battle system. The key appears to be minimizing the amount of time characters spend in non-offensive roles. I may start a fight with my Saboteur (debuffer), get defense and magic down on the current target, then swap over to Ravager (magic/elemental damage), switching in a Medic (healer) if needed, and repeating the process for the rest of the fight. Most of the time I get four or five stars for a battle; occasionally I get three, and for one particularly long and drawn-out fight before I understood the need for debuffing, a grand total of zero. I've found that debuffing is crucial for a Ravager + Ravager party, not so much if there's a Commando (melee/physical attacker) involved. I haven't done much with my Synergists (buffers) and at the moment I don't have a Sentinel (tank).
FF13 basically takes the mechanics of an RPG, distills them down, and produces a very streamlined experience. With the Crystarium, you don't need to level-grind, but you can't powerlevel yourself, either. It's fairly easy to get enough CP from standard fights to come close to capping off the currently accessible areas of the Crystarium; fully capping them might require a small amount of backtracking, but not all that much if you're fighting everything you come across. Right now weapons and accessories are fairly straightforward as well; if you get an accessory that increases your lightning resistance, you'll probably want to equip it as that means a boss that uses lightning attacks is probably coming up fairly soon. (For added fun, give Lightning the lightning resistance.)
It does take a few curious steps backwards from FF12. The biggest of these is that if your party leader dies, the battle ends. Luckily, you don't have to reload from the last save spot (and save spots are quite plentiful); instead, you start on the map right before the battle, thus giving you a chance to possibly initiate a preemptive strike. I've only had this happen to me once, when some unlucky combo attacks took Lightning from a mostly-full HP bar to zero, but given that I had a fourth party member accessible at the time, it was annoying that I couldn't just swap him in. Not being able to choose my party when I have more than three people available is also somewhat annoying; from a plot perspective it makes some sense that Hope would rather not fight, but he is right there, tagging along, so it's not like he's halfway across the world and thus unavailable if I need him to step in. Thankfully, inactive characters also receive CP, and if they're with you, you can spend it in the Crystarium just like you can any active character.
I wasn't expecting a separate battle screen. I was figuring that fights would just take place on the map like in FF11 and FF12. Given that there's a results screen at the end of every fight, I suppose some sort of separation was needed, but I think it could all be done on the same map.
Gone are the central city and vast sprawling areas of FF12; maps are very linear and you get the impression of constantly being on the move, trying to keep one step ahead of things. This fits well with the story and honestly makes a lot more sense than constantly returning to Dalmasca, occupied by Imperial soldiers who, y'know, might actually be interested in arresting you but never actually seem to notice that you're the ones who broke into the castle/formed a resistance/should have been ruling the kingdom now. While I liked the freedom of exploration in FF12 at first, after a while it became "Oh yay, another huge desert area."
A while back I was discussing FF12's License Grid system with grysar. I said that at the beginning, I tried to customize my characters, but eventually I had so many LP that it was just as easy to have everyone do everything. It might have cut down on the challenge a little if all my characters could toss out Curaga and high-level black magic, and had loads of HP and MP, but at that point I also didn't care. I mused that while some previous FF games had job systems, there was never a system that actually limited the jobs a particular character could have. You pretty much imposed limits by choosing which jobs the characters primarily used (or in the case of FF10-2, placing spheres on the Garment Grid), but there'd never been limits given by the game, and I wondered what it would be like to work with them. I also thought it'd be interesting to have a system to develop jobs in parallel, letting you concentrate primarily on one job or spread things out among several without having to constantly swap characters in and out of various jobs. Well, hello there, Crystarium and Paradigm System -- you are perhaps a bit more restrictive than my hastily-developed theoretical systems, but the core idea is the same. (I hear that eventually all characters gain access to all roles, but by that point you've basically not got much of an incentive to deveop the ones you haven't been working on.)
Also interesting is that a role isn't the same for all characters. Right now any of my characters can be a Ravager, but the elements they use and their styles of attacking are different. Some are pure spellcasters, while others mix it up with a combination of magical and physical elemental attacks. (Appropriately, Lightning has Thunder spells and abilities while Snow has Ice.) I am assuming that eventually I'll have access to all the elements on any given trio of characters, given that it doesn't appear you can swap characters in a fight, just the roles of the current party.
One problem I can see arising involves equipment; if I'm swapping a character from a physical to a magical role, I may wish to swap out their weapon or accessory accordingly. However, this would add another level of complication, so I can see why it wouldn't be implemented, plus there's the whole customization system which I have yet to get into.
So while FF13 doesn't do anything truly new, it does take familiar RPG elements, condense them, and offer something with a fun twist. If you're the sort who cannot stand the idea of not directly controlling your party members, this is not the game for you. (Most of the time I find myself just hitting auto-whatever for my party leader and it pretty much always works out.) Again, we will see how I feel about the linearity after a while and if I eventually start going "Dammit, just let me pick my own party!"
Character-wise, Sazh continues to be far and away my favorite; it may say something that I identify more with the older character caught up in all this craziness than with the younger members of the party. The writers get points for making Lightning not some sort of super-ranked soldier given her age (she turns 21 the day before the events of the game start); in a flashback her commanding officer in the guard says that he'll put in a recommendation for her for officer training soon, which doesn't seem out of line with military at all. Snow is kind of a one-note character so far; he's earnest and hot-blooded (ha ha) but oddly single-minded and rather oblivious to reality. Hope is still not as bad as I was expecting; given all the crap he's been through since the start of the game, he's earned the right to not be terribly happy about his situation, though I wish he'd make an effort on some things. Vanille... is apparently the offspring of Vaan and Penelo, and the party needs to keep her on a leash and possibly gagged. (Perhaps I have problems with FF characters whose names begin with "V," although I didn't mind Vincent at all.)
The story is interesting, both in the material and how it's told. We're thrown into the middle of the action and are slowly learning about the events that brought things to that point. I could do with a little more exploration between cutscenes, but it's not a Xenogears-level of interruption. And hey, I'm always rather fond of telling Destiny to go screw itself (before it screws you).
FF13 basically takes the mechanics of an RPG, distills them down, and produces a very streamlined experience. With the Crystarium, you don't need to level-grind, but you can't powerlevel yourself, either. It's fairly easy to get enough CP from standard fights to come close to capping off the currently accessible areas of the Crystarium; fully capping them might require a small amount of backtracking, but not all that much if you're fighting everything you come across. Right now weapons and accessories are fairly straightforward as well; if you get an accessory that increases your lightning resistance, you'll probably want to equip it as that means a boss that uses lightning attacks is probably coming up fairly soon. (For added fun, give Lightning the lightning resistance.)
It does take a few curious steps backwards from FF12. The biggest of these is that if your party leader dies, the battle ends. Luckily, you don't have to reload from the last save spot (and save spots are quite plentiful); instead, you start on the map right before the battle, thus giving you a chance to possibly initiate a preemptive strike. I've only had this happen to me once, when some unlucky combo attacks took Lightning from a mostly-full HP bar to zero, but given that I had a fourth party member accessible at the time, it was annoying that I couldn't just swap him in. Not being able to choose my party when I have more than three people available is also somewhat annoying; from a plot perspective it makes some sense that Hope would rather not fight, but he is right there, tagging along, so it's not like he's halfway across the world and thus unavailable if I need him to step in. Thankfully, inactive characters also receive CP, and if they're with you, you can spend it in the Crystarium just like you can any active character.
I wasn't expecting a separate battle screen. I was figuring that fights would just take place on the map like in FF11 and FF12. Given that there's a results screen at the end of every fight, I suppose some sort of separation was needed, but I think it could all be done on the same map.
Gone are the central city and vast sprawling areas of FF12; maps are very linear and you get the impression of constantly being on the move, trying to keep one step ahead of things. This fits well with the story and honestly makes a lot more sense than constantly returning to Dalmasca, occupied by Imperial soldiers who, y'know, might actually be interested in arresting you but never actually seem to notice that you're the ones who broke into the castle/formed a resistance/should have been ruling the kingdom now. While I liked the freedom of exploration in FF12 at first, after a while it became "Oh yay, another huge desert area."
A while back I was discussing FF12's License Grid system with grysar. I said that at the beginning, I tried to customize my characters, but eventually I had so many LP that it was just as easy to have everyone do everything. It might have cut down on the challenge a little if all my characters could toss out Curaga and high-level black magic, and had loads of HP and MP, but at that point I also didn't care. I mused that while some previous FF games had job systems, there was never a system that actually limited the jobs a particular character could have. You pretty much imposed limits by choosing which jobs the characters primarily used (or in the case of FF10-2, placing spheres on the Garment Grid), but there'd never been limits given by the game, and I wondered what it would be like to work with them. I also thought it'd be interesting to have a system to develop jobs in parallel, letting you concentrate primarily on one job or spread things out among several without having to constantly swap characters in and out of various jobs. Well, hello there, Crystarium and Paradigm System -- you are perhaps a bit more restrictive than my hastily-developed theoretical systems, but the core idea is the same. (I hear that eventually all characters gain access to all roles, but by that point you've basically not got much of an incentive to deveop the ones you haven't been working on.)
Also interesting is that a role isn't the same for all characters. Right now any of my characters can be a Ravager, but the elements they use and their styles of attacking are different. Some are pure spellcasters, while others mix it up with a combination of magical and physical elemental attacks. (Appropriately, Lightning has Thunder spells and abilities while Snow has Ice.) I am assuming that eventually I'll have access to all the elements on any given trio of characters, given that it doesn't appear you can swap characters in a fight, just the roles of the current party.
One problem I can see arising involves equipment; if I'm swapping a character from a physical to a magical role, I may wish to swap out their weapon or accessory accordingly. However, this would add another level of complication, so I can see why it wouldn't be implemented, plus there's the whole customization system which I have yet to get into.
So while FF13 doesn't do anything truly new, it does take familiar RPG elements, condense them, and offer something with a fun twist. If you're the sort who cannot stand the idea of not directly controlling your party members, this is not the game for you. (Most of the time I find myself just hitting auto-whatever for my party leader and it pretty much always works out.) Again, we will see how I feel about the linearity after a while and if I eventually start going "Dammit, just let me pick my own party!"
Character-wise, Sazh continues to be far and away my favorite; it may say something that I identify more with the older character caught up in all this craziness than with the younger members of the party. The writers get points for making Lightning not some sort of super-ranked soldier given her age (she turns 21 the day before the events of the game start); in a flashback her commanding officer in the guard says that he'll put in a recommendation for her for officer training soon, which doesn't seem out of line with military at all. Snow is kind of a one-note character so far; he's earnest and hot-blooded (ha ha) but oddly single-minded and rather oblivious to reality. Hope is still not as bad as I was expecting; given all the crap he's been through since the start of the game, he's earned the right to not be terribly happy about his situation, though I wish he'd make an effort on some things. Vanille... is apparently the offspring of Vaan and Penelo, and the party needs to keep her on a leash and possibly gagged. (Perhaps I have problems with FF characters whose names begin with "V," although I didn't mind Vincent at all.)
The story is interesting, both in the material and how it's told. We're thrown into the middle of the action and are slowly learning about the events that brought things to that point. I could do with a little more exploration between cutscenes, but it's not a Xenogears-level of interruption. And hey, I'm always rather fond of telling Destiny to go screw itself (before it screws you).