I think it's important for me to say straight away that I haven't quite made up my mind on this game yet. I'm probably going to finish it either way, but I have very mixed opinions so far. So, here we go!
First off, yes Final Fantasy XIII is extremely linear. The player is put at one end of a map and has to run to the other end in order to proceed, then rinse and repeat. That said, it's no more linear than Final Fantasy X (your mileage may vary on whether or not that's a good thing) and it's not as though you're walking down a corridor, the environment does twist and turn quite a bit. Ultimately, the party is traveling in one direction, but from a story perspective it makes sense, these are characters who are on the run after all, there's no time for sightseeing. Whether or not this is a problem will depend on the individual, but for myself it isn't a big deal.
What I don't like about the world is that (so far) it's effectively one long dungeon. Every area is battle after battle after battle and it gets monotonous after a while. When the game was first released in Japan and it was revealed that there were no traditional towns, I wasn't all that bothered because I didn't care whether I bought my items at a save point or at a store. But the more I play, the more I miss the towns. Towns offer the player a period of respite from fighting, they change up the game's tempo, and provide the player with something to think about other than how to win the next fight.
Meet Snow, he wants to be a hero
At the point I've reached in the game I am in a town, but it's not a town in the sense that you get to explore and interact, it's just another dungeon type with another series of battles. To be fair, there have been a few instances areas without fighting, but the time spent there is so brief that it does nothing to alleviate the feelings of tedium I'm struggling with.
The battle system is extremely fast paced, sometimes to the point that I've won battles without quite understanding how. Because the the player still has to deal with navigating menus to perform attacks, responding quickly to enemy actions can prove difficult at times. As if in response to this there's a convenient "Auto Battle" feature that queues up and executes the most effective attacks for a given enemy automatically (provided you've scanned them for weaknesses already). It almost feels as though Square-Enix wanted to create a real-time battle system, but was afraid of the response and threw the ATB system back on top.
There's so much to learn that it's safe to say that I was still getting tutorials 10 hours into the game and because of this the game is slow to get to the meat of the combat, but here's how it basically works: The characters each have a series of jobs which the player then mixes together in order to create paradigms that can be switched in battle to respond to a given situation. For instance, Lightning has the Commando, Ravager, and Medic jobs and Hope has the Ravager, Medic, and Synergist. With these jobs I can set up paradigms that I think might be useful in battle such as Commando/Ravager, Commando/Medic, Ravager/Ravager, etc. If I want to chain a lot of damage in a battle I'll start with the Commando/Ravager paradigm, but if characters start taking a lot of damage I'll switch to a paradigm with a Medic.
It gets a lot more complicated the further into the game you proceed, but this should give you an idea of how it works on a basic level.
Fights for everyone!
The characters are a mixed bag. You have all your JRPG stereotypes: the stoic warrior, the spunky girl, the moody teenager, the mysterious stranger, etc. For the most part Vanille grates on my nerves, particuarly her voice, and if I hear Snow say the word "hero" one more time I may tear my hair out. The biggest surprise for me has been Sazh who is perhaps the most down to earth character I've encountered in a Final Fantasy game. Sazh is just an ordinary man with problems I think anyone could relate to. Who knew that an ordinary man could be such a breath of fresh air?
The rest of the characters I'm rather ambivalent towards. All of the characters come with a lot of baggage and they're all trying to make the best of a bad situation. There's a lot of potential for character growth (some of which I've started to see), so I can only hope that the payoff is there in the end.
I don't want to say too much about the story, perhaps I'll do a separate post on it another time, but so far it's been an interesting experience. Final Fantasy XIII throws a lot of terminology and information at the player right at the beginning. There is a codex that explains a lot of what the characters are talking about, but I've found that if you give it time, the game will eventually explain everything in a way that doesn't feel completely forced. The only information that isn't readily available is information that the characters themselves don't have.
Something I really like about the story is how the narrative is split around the game's opening event. There's the part of the game that the player is directly in control of that picks up after the event and then there are the flashbacks that tell why and how the event came about. It's a bit like the in media res concept in which the story has already begun and the background is filled in later. This dynamic adds a sense of mystery to exactly what is going on as the player is slowly given the information necessary to piece the plot together.
Because an afro is like a bird nest, get it? Me neither
So those are my initial impressions of the game, although I didn't even get around to discussing the visuals or the music. I would recommend that anyone interested in playing Final Fantasy XIII play until at least the 5 hour mark since that's where things start to get interesting from a gameplay perspective. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the game before all is said and done, so stay tuned!
Very good write-up -- I agree with pretty much everything you have said. Good point about the towns, I had never really thought of them like that; as a place to simply take a break from the action and calm down the gameplay for a little bit.
ReplyDeleteHow far are you into the game now, out of curiousity?
I'm around the 25 hour mark now. There was a section of the game just after what I wrote about where I thought I was starting to like the game...but now I'm not so sure. I want so badly to like it that I don't want to admit that maybe I don't.
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