Final Fantasy XIII Review

17 Mar 2010 at 12:10:02 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

You already know what to expect of a Final Fantasy game, because you are a smart, smart person, and you are savvy to the ways of Final Fantasy games. You know that you're going to get an absurdly pretty game with a smart twist on Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system. You know that it'll probably be remarkably linear, but in a way that will fool anyone willing to suspend disbelief. You know that it's going to have a cast of teenagers off to save the world, with emotions raging and a few murky pasts to explore. By and large, you're right, but this isn't your standard Final Fantasy - if there is such a thing.

Things kick off in traditional fashion, with a jaw-droppingly pretty introduction showing off the game's world of Cocoon as well as some fast-paced action. From there, you're straight into the action, with tutorials taking you through the battle system as you wander the game's first dungeon.

Then you realise that you haven't actually levelled up at all, and that the combat system is pretty much only giving you choices between a standard attack and an area-of-effect attack, and there's no end in sight. Battles quickly devolve into you stabbing the X button your controller in boredom and holding the left stick forward outside of combat to get to the next battle and the next cutscene. This is your experience for the first few hours: hammering X to select the Auto-Attack function in the frequent battles, which reward you with absolutely no experience, and waiting for the next cutscene.

As openings go it's horrendously boring, which is a genuine shame because when the combat system actually gets going after the first few hours it turns out to be one of the most different, enjoyable, and fast-paced combat systems in the series. You only take control of the primary character, with the other two in your party run by a surprisingly clever AI, and to be honest, most of your actions with said primary character are going to be nothing more than selecting the standard option – Auto-Attack (or Auto-Heal, or Auto-Chain, depending on what role the character is in.) While you can individually select the attacks to perform, your role is really more about balance.

Superficially, it looks a lot like a minor twist on the usual Active Time Battle system. Characters build up their ATB bar and when full, they unleash a series of attacks, spells, or abilities. Each action takes up a specific amount of the ATB bar, which starts with three segments – a basic attack takes one segment, meaning that, when charged to an initial full bar, you can unleash a three-hit combo. Something like Blitz, a melee-focused area-of-effect attack, takes up two bars, meaning that you can chain together Blitz and Attack into one ATB combo. Alternatively, you can whack Triangle at any point to have the character launch into whichever attacks are charged. The fact that your Auto-Attack function tends to pick the best options for the task at hand (automatically choosing the person on lowest health to health, or selecting Blitz when enemies are clustered together) means that you rarely need to delve into the murk of the Abilities menu yourself.

Sounds boring? It's not. Which skills a character can use are limited by which role they're in at the time, which varies between Commando, Ravager, Medic, Synergist, Saboteur, and Sentinel. Commandos are the physical damage dealers, Ravagers can build up “stagger” combos with ease and are the primary offensive casters, Medics heal and revive, Synergists buff you party, Saboteurs debuff the enemy, and Sentinels “tank” by drawing fire from the enemies and focusing either on massively-boosted defense, self-healing, or counter-attacks. By the end of the game, any character can access any role, although for the first half they're generally stuck with three to choose from. In battle, you can change between assigned roles – called a Paradigm Shift - with a tap of a shoulder button, although you can't choose them individually in combat; you have up to six party Paradigms that you pre-set before combat.

What this means is that, with the speed of the combat, your task is to switch Paradigms at important moments. Starting off with a Commando/Ravager/Ravager party might be a good idea to build up some early stagger combos (which generally prevent enemies from attacking and let you do far, far more damage to them, but they take awhile to build up) but then again, if you're up against tough opponents, Commando/Ravager/Synergist might be a good idea to get Haste and a few other buffs on your party. If you're up against something particularly hard-hitting and party health is getting low, you might suddenly want to shift to Sentinel/Medic/Medic to get health back up, before swapping to Sentinel/Medic/Commando to do some damage while remaining on the defensive. As you can't change each character's role individually – only according to the ones you picked before battle – you need to plan out those six to cover all eventualities. If it comes to a point in battle where you desperately want Sentinel/Medic/Medic but you didn't set up that Paradigm before battle, then you might well have screwed yourself, particularly as pretty much any battle in this game is capable of killing you. This isn't your standard Final Fantasy, where you can grind through four or five battles before needing to stop and heal. Here, you're healed immediately after battle, and there are no magic points to worry about: each battle immediately puts you in top condition, and believe me, you'll need it. Good thing that a retry option on death puts you back to right before the battle so you can change everything up, eh?

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