Five years in the making, Square Enix finally brought the 13th installment of their flagship series to North America on March 9. Final Fantasy XIII is the first game in the series to make an appearance on the PlayStation 3, and Yoichi Wada and company wanted to make sure that it was a cinematic experience for the player. The question is, did they fall prey to the Xenogears trap and make it more movie than game?

Unfortunately, in some ways, yes, yes they did. The game is divided into 13 chapters and 12 of those chapters don’t allow for much exploration at all. As a result, you’ll find yourself running down long corridors, enjoying some beautiful scenery, fighting a few enemies and then having a cutscene. After the cutscene, you get to run and fight some more, and then enjoy another cutscene, or as in the case with one area, you just run from cutscene to cutscene for a while without even fighting. As a result, outside of the one chapter where you can explore, the game is much more like an interactive movie than a Final Fantasy game. The only other game that was this linear was Final Fantasy X, which was developed by the same director. During many of the cutscenes, you get plenty of action, but sometimes there isn’t as much story as one would hope for.

At first, some of the characters you meet are pretty annoying, but the adventure serves to humble them, each in their own way. Snow starts out self-aggrandizing to the point that no one else can take him seriously, but part of the way through the story, the events force him to change his perspective a little, and, as a result, he learns to tone it down considerably. Hope is the token over-emotional character. He starts out depressed and whiny enough that I found myself wishing his mother was in the party instead (especially because “Moms are tough!”), but once he resolves some of his personal issues, he actually goes a bit too far in the other direction, almost seeming a bit like Tidus at times. The other characters all go through some personal growth during the story as well, but most of them are a little less pronounced since they weren’t quite as extreme to begin with. Sazh is perhaps the best character of all, a pretty normal guy that brings the comic relief to the story; plus, he has a chocobo in his hair.

When you’re not advancing the story, there are plenty of battles to be had. As you run around the map, you can see the enemies, and if you make contact with them, battle begins. If you can manage to get behind them without them noticing, you gain the advantage of a preemptive strike, which fills your ATB gauge at the start of battle. The battle system uses a modified Active Time Battle that is perhaps best described as a cross between the dress spheres of Final Fantasy X-2 and the gambit system of Final Fantasy XII. Your active party is comprised of no more than three people who can learn different jobs such as commando (physical attack), medic (healer) or ravager (magical attack). You combine sets of these jobs into Paradigms that can be swapped mid-battle. Characters can only use healing spells as a medic, perform magic attacks as a ravager, etc, and you can only have up to 6 Paradigms set up at a time, so planning ahead for battles is crucial. You can only directly control the leader of the party, but you can order “Paradigm Shifts” that cause the other members to change their job; so, if you need a healer, you select a combination that turns one or more party members to a healer. Each action takes a certain amount of the ATB gauge which refills as the real-time battle goes on, but sometimes it is faster to swap to a new Paradigm which may already have a full ATB gauge. As the game progresses, it becomes virtually impossible to win most battles without actively swapping your Paradigms. The system is an interesting change from traditional turn-based RPG battles that instead almost draws on a mixture of tactical RPG and real time strategy elements. Die-hard traditionalists may not enjoy such a big change, but it is a refreshing change of pace. It does take some time getting used to it, but luckily there is almost no penalty. If you die in a battle, you get the opportunity to restart right before the battle, not at your last save point. This means that you can feel free to experiment with different techniques and Paradigms without worrying about losing everything. On the down side, the lack of a penalty for dying means that Square Enix ignored trying to balance the difficulty from area to area. There are some areas where every battle is a struggle, but suddenly, the next area is a cakewalk; so, you will probably make plenty of use of the retry system.

After battle, you see another big departure from the rest of the series. Instead of receiving money and experience points after defeating an enemy, you receive Crystarium points, items and a star rating. This is because technically, your characters in Final Fantasy XIII don’t level up. Instead, you spend your Crystarium points, oddly enough, in the Crystarium, a 3-D yet somehow more linear version of the sphere grid. Each job class has their own Crystarium, and by spending points, you learn skills for each respective class as well as stat boosts such as HP and strength that apply to all classes. The star ratings that you receive are based on the time it takes to win a battle. The ratings partially determine the quality of your rewards, and spoils you find from battle can be sold or applied to your weapons to strengthen them, increasing their stat bonuses. At first, the lack of money and levels may seem like a huge problem, but the fact that the game lacks any true town system means you won’t be running back and forth to the local village while you are grinding levels. Instead, you can buy and sell your potions and materials at the save points, which seem to pop up every hundred yards. These save points are also the only place where you can upgrade your weapons; so, while it is nice that they’re conveniently located everywhere, for the first time in the history of gaming, it seems like there might be too many of them.

As I alluded to above, Square Enix wanted to make a beautiful and grand experience for Final Fantasy XIII, and it certainly did. The beautifully styled environments are almost enough to make one forget that the game is on rails for 12 of the 13 chapters. Almost. If you keep your head down as you are running through the valleys of Pulse and halls of Cocoon, you miss out on some of the most detailed landscapes ever in a video game. Of course, the environments aren’t the only thing that they spent time on, the enemies and characters are all highly detailed as well. During the cutscenes, you can see variations in skin tone and scars on the skin of the characters, adding a little bit more detail than the average game. The cutscenes also have some very well animated action sequences that involved flying speeders and planes that I wish I could have taken part in instead of just watching. The character designs themselves are not as unusual as many other games in the series; in fact, outside of a few accent pieces, most of the characters look pretty normal. It’s an interesting change from seeing moogles or black mages running around, and it fit the setting much better than trying to shoehorn in more outrageous outfits. It is by far one of the prettiest games on the market.

Even though Nobuo Uematsu didn’t have a hand in the composition for the first time, the music was also very well done. Masashi Hamauzu did a great job composing and arranging the score. I especially enjoyed the music during the final chapters quite a bit. I do wish that they had kept the Sayuri Sugawara song instead of switching it for Leona Lewis’ “My Hands,” though. I get the feeling that “Kimi ga Iru Kara” fits the scenes where it is used much better than “My Hands.” The arrangement of the Chocobo theme that was used was cute, but I’m sad to say that I didn’t hear any variations on the classic victory theme at all. Most of the voice acting is good, though some of the script could have been better. Ali Hillis as Lightning and Rachel Robinson both really stood out. Vanille’s voice actress seemed to have an Australian accent most of the time, but there were times where it almost disappeared and it created some dissonance between expectation and reality. It’s an odd thing to say because Georgia van Cuylenburg is actually Australian, but she seemed to overplay or underplay it during different dialogues.

If you come into this game with the mindset that it is a Final Fantasy title and everything that goes with that moniker, you may find yourself frustrated and disappointed. However, if you look at this game as more of a tactical or strategy RPG with a more active battle system and great graphics, you’ll probably enjoy it thoroughly. I wish that the game wasn’t so linear, but the fact that you can come back post-game and explore more does help alleviate some of that frustration.

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2 Responses to “Keep It Or Trade It?: Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)”

1. Class action brought against Square Enix and Sony for Bricked PS3's | G.A.M.E.S. on 07 Jun 2010 at 10:01 am #

   [...] know Dan didn’t have this problem as he has finished the game (His review here) and still has a functioning PS3. Did you get your system bricked by playing [...]

2. Release Week Primer (Week of 12-December-2010) | G.A.M.E.S. on 13 Dec 2010 at 11:02 pm #

   [...] latest Xbox 360 release of FINAL FANTASY XIII  (see Dan’s Review here) features an easy mode option for battles, and includes a bonus booklet with first-run copies of [...]

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