Final Fantasy XIII: First Impressions
I bought FFXIII on release day, and I am currently about seven hours into it. I'm enjoying it so far. It's several million times better than FFXII, and I find myself actually enjoying fights, which is a nice change.
The battle system in FFXIII is considerably different than previous Final Fantasy games. It's a turn based, ATB system (that much at least should be familiar), and it was designed to try to engage the player more during the battle. This was done by putting the focus on speed: the game scores you based on how fast you defeat the enemies. Despite the fact that I'm not sure your score even affects anything in the game, I find myself buying into it. A number of times, I've made risky decisions in order to cut down on my battle time.
They've made a number of other changes to speed up battles. First of all, instead of choosing your moves after the ATB meter fills up, you choose them before, and they activate when the meter is full. They've also significantly sped up the meter. They get away with this by letting you queue multiple actions into one attack, allowing you time to choose actions without wasting time when the meter is already full. In addition, they added an "Auto-battle" command, which fills up your queue with actions that the computer thinks are a good idea. This would be a problem if the computer wasn't so good at choosing attacks. It does well, though, and you'll find yourself choosing Auto-battle most of the time, except in certain situations that require micro-management.
Speaking of cutting back on micro-management, you only control one character in the battle. The rest of your party acts independently, using the same logic that populates your Auto-battle command. At the beginning of the game, I thought that this was an extremely bad idea. It seemed like a lot of power was being taken away from me as a player. As the game progresses, though, you have other things to worry about than trying to control the other two characters. Since their AI is relatively smart enough not to get you killed all the time, I don't really find myself missing that element of control.
Instead of focusing on individual attacks, which have a tendency to go by in the blink of an eye, FFXIII changes the focus to the tactics of the characters. Each character has a number of classes. Before you get into a battle, you can set up sets of these classes (called paradigms). For example, you can create a set where Lightning is a Medic, Sazh is a Saboteur, and Vanille is a Fighter (or whatever that class is called). During battle, you can switch paradigms. This switch is pretty much instantaneous, and retains any queued actions that you haven't spent. This means that when you want an ally to cast a healing spell, you generally do it by switching to a paradigm where that ally is a Medic. It sounds sort of odd, but this really does help keep the battles moving smoothly. You have a very short list of paradigms which are accessible by pressing L1, so using a strategy doesn't require you to delve deep into a submenu for a specific action. If you've played FFX-2, this is an abstraction of the Dress Sphere system, with the difference being that it's really necessary to switch classes all the time, so it feels a bit less like a gimmick.
Another big change in the game is that there's no leveling up. You get more powerful by buying stat boosts and powers on a grid, in a similar manner to FFX. You have separate grids for each class, and each grid is fairly linear, with the only choices being whether or not to get a power or stat that's on a leaf. I wish there was a bit more choice; mostly the only choice you have is which class to power up. New classes and new class levels are unlocked at story points.
In general I really like the battle system, although one complaint that I have is that it doesn't work nearly as well when you have less than three characters in your party. There's a giant limitation in what you can do at that point, and it can be annoying, especially when you have two characters that don't seem to compliment each other well.
There are a number of other problems I've had so far with the game. It is incredibly linear, with nothing to do but move forward and fight enemies. Seven hours in, I haven't seen a town, and I haven't talked with a character other than in my party (although there were a few conversations I listened in on earlier in the game). The characters all seem a bit manic, swinging between emotions, and breaking out in drama at random times. I like most of the characters, but Vanille and Hope get on my nerves (Hope's character is worse, but Vanille's voice acting is annoying).
As you've probably noticed from the names I've mentioned so far, FFXIII suffers from some of the worst fantasy naming syndrome I've ever seen. It's not even internally consistent. The names are a huge mishmash of English nouns, French sounding terminology, and generic fantasy names. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to them.
That said, I've been enjoying the game so far. I would really like to get to someplace where I can just wander for a while, instead of following a path and fighting a boss every so often. I am, however, savoring the battle system. After FFXII, with its battle system that doesn't actually require a player, it's nice to be engaged in the battles.
The battle system in FFXIII is considerably different than previous Final Fantasy games. It's a turn based, ATB system (that much at least should be familiar), and it was designed to try to engage the player more during the battle. This was done by putting the focus on speed: the game scores you based on how fast you defeat the enemies. Despite the fact that I'm not sure your score even affects anything in the game, I find myself buying into it. A number of times, I've made risky decisions in order to cut down on my battle time.
They've made a number of other changes to speed up battles. First of all, instead of choosing your moves after the ATB meter fills up, you choose them before, and they activate when the meter is full. They've also significantly sped up the meter. They get away with this by letting you queue multiple actions into one attack, allowing you time to choose actions without wasting time when the meter is already full. In addition, they added an "Auto-battle" command, which fills up your queue with actions that the computer thinks are a good idea. This would be a problem if the computer wasn't so good at choosing attacks. It does well, though, and you'll find yourself choosing Auto-battle most of the time, except in certain situations that require micro-management.
Speaking of cutting back on micro-management, you only control one character in the battle. The rest of your party acts independently, using the same logic that populates your Auto-battle command. At the beginning of the game, I thought that this was an extremely bad idea. It seemed like a lot of power was being taken away from me as a player. As the game progresses, though, you have other things to worry about than trying to control the other two characters. Since their AI is relatively smart enough not to get you killed all the time, I don't really find myself missing that element of control.
Instead of focusing on individual attacks, which have a tendency to go by in the blink of an eye, FFXIII changes the focus to the tactics of the characters. Each character has a number of classes. Before you get into a battle, you can set up sets of these classes (called paradigms). For example, you can create a set where Lightning is a Medic, Sazh is a Saboteur, and Vanille is a Fighter (or whatever that class is called). During battle, you can switch paradigms. This switch is pretty much instantaneous, and retains any queued actions that you haven't spent. This means that when you want an ally to cast a healing spell, you generally do it by switching to a paradigm where that ally is a Medic. It sounds sort of odd, but this really does help keep the battles moving smoothly. You have a very short list of paradigms which are accessible by pressing L1, so using a strategy doesn't require you to delve deep into a submenu for a specific action. If you've played FFX-2, this is an abstraction of the Dress Sphere system, with the difference being that it's really necessary to switch classes all the time, so it feels a bit less like a gimmick.
Another big change in the game is that there's no leveling up. You get more powerful by buying stat boosts and powers on a grid, in a similar manner to FFX. You have separate grids for each class, and each grid is fairly linear, with the only choices being whether or not to get a power or stat that's on a leaf. I wish there was a bit more choice; mostly the only choice you have is which class to power up. New classes and new class levels are unlocked at story points.
In general I really like the battle system, although one complaint that I have is that it doesn't work nearly as well when you have less than three characters in your party. There's a giant limitation in what you can do at that point, and it can be annoying, especially when you have two characters that don't seem to compliment each other well.
There are a number of other problems I've had so far with the game. It is incredibly linear, with nothing to do but move forward and fight enemies. Seven hours in, I haven't seen a town, and I haven't talked with a character other than in my party (although there were a few conversations I listened in on earlier in the game). The characters all seem a bit manic, swinging between emotions, and breaking out in drama at random times. I like most of the characters, but Vanille and Hope get on my nerves (Hope's character is worse, but Vanille's voice acting is annoying).
As you've probably noticed from the names I've mentioned so far, FFXIII suffers from some of the worst fantasy naming syndrome I've ever seen. It's not even internally consistent. The names are a huge mishmash of English nouns, French sounding terminology, and generic fantasy names. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to them.
That said, I've been enjoying the game so far. I would really like to get to someplace where I can just wander for a while, instead of following a path and fighting a boss every so often. I am, however, savoring the battle system. After FFXII, with its battle system that doesn't actually require a player, it's nice to be engaged in the battles.