Final Fantasy XIII: initial review

How I Got It
I did not pre-order this game. Sometimes you can get some cool items as part of your pre-order, most of the time this is not true. So, as my personal past experience has proven to me, if you just look around for highly anticipated games on release day, you can find some really cool deals out there (especially when many retailers will carry the game).

I had seen in the Sunday ad (thanks to my girlfriend Sarah) that Target was having a deal where you purchase the game for PS3 or 360, and you get a $10 giftcard (for free!).

So immediately when I got out of work yesterday (Tuesday March 9), I stopped at the nearby Target and purchased it (and of course before I left the store, I purchased some necessary food items with my newly acquired $10 giftcard).

Opening Scene
Now, I don't have a nice setup or anything, but I ended up watching the opening sequence on my 19 inch CRT TV. I know, it's terrible that I can't use the PS3's graphical powers to the fullest extent, but I'm more about story and gameplay anyway. Besides, there's one benefit to having a CRT anyway (see my video about why one would need a CRT here).

You open up with beautiful flowing cliffs and waterfalls and then "fly" into a city. It almost feels as though you're with the birds. It's a huge difference when compare to FFVII where you would still be able to see adjacent polygons get clipped because of overlapping each other (my friends and I used to called this "polygon fighting" because two adjacent polygons would "fight" to see which one came out visibly on top). Anyway, the range of motion with the characters throughout the intro are very fluid and look humanly natural. This has been evident in games as of late, but it still does not diminish the technical obstacles that need to be overcome to create something as impressive as that (being in the software industry, I have a great appreciation for this sort of thing).

The First 4 Hours: story/plot
I had read a few articles about this game and there are many varying feelings and some general overall gameplay opinions out there.

First I would like to say- the gameplay itself so far seems like a scripted RPG (similar to Uncharted/Uncharted 2). The plot advances very structurally and doesn't lend itself to world roaming. If there is a world to roam, I haven't gotten to it yet. But I sense that there won't be based on what I've read/heard.

The story takes place on Cocoon. The first hour or so you play as an able young woman named Lightning, a tough looking dude named Snow and an optimistic girl called Vanille. We also find out about a girl named Serah, comic relief character Sazh and a punk kid ironically named Hope (Hope, in all honesty, on several occasions in the beginning of the game, needs to grow a pair).

It introduces you to this world where fantasy and hard sci-fi intermingle (something that Final Fantasy VII and VIII fans longed for the franchise to come back to), and reveals the evil entity known only as the fal'Cie. It goes on to explain that there are fates worse than death, and individuals can be marked l'Cie- where the implications are realized immediately upon a certain plot point that I will not reveal.

Needless to say, I am deeply interested and enthralled in the story. I will definitely continue to play it through to see where it goes.

The First 4 Hours: character mechanics
First things first, you typically control only one person in battle, so you don't get the usual strategy of various characters. However, you learn quickly that there are various roles that all the characters can perform (Commando, Ravager, Sentinel, Medic, Synergist and Saboteur). Each role has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Each character increases his or her abilities by earning CP (I'm not 100% sure what it stands for, but it's probably Character/Customize Points or something similar). You augment skills, attributes and abilities- but the "track" you can augment is based on the role you wish to enhance.

You can actually upgrade all of your characters this way even though you can only control the "Leader" in battles (typically assigned, but I imagine later you can choose who will be the leader).

I think the coolest customizable options are Paradigms. It's basically a "mindset" for all your characters. For each paradigm you can set the role that each character will play, and usually for a a general overarching strategy. The AI is fairly diligent when you apply a Paradigm, so I'm excited to see how many interesting combinations that people come up with. You can see how the FFXII gambit system provided a lot of insight for a system like this.

The First 4 Hours: combat
FFXIII uses ATB (for those not familiar with it, it stands for Active Time Battle). Essentially it allows you to attack after a time bar fills up. However, in this game, they took it one more level. There are various commands that you can chain together for an entire attack. Attack takes one bar. But if your ATB bar is 3 bars long, you can do a 3-hit attack. But it give the flexibility to the player to attack with various hits and/or abilities by redeeming part of the character's ATB bar. I think it will come in handy when there are more advanced enemies that require chaining spells with attacks.

A new part of combat is the Chain Gauge. Each enemy has one and it increases typically when you hit the enemy more. Once it fills up, the enemy "staggers" and the bar drains. A lot of damage can be dealt to it in that state, and stagger wears off when the bar empties.

The pacing of the "normal" speed of battle is actually very fast and action packed. There's battle that looks like it would have been FMV cut scenes back in FFX, so there's always something pretty to look at. The ATB bar fills up quickly, and if you are the kind of person that likes to optimize, you're going to be in for a treat.

Conclusion
This is a nice start to the Final Fantasy 13 game. I will definitely continue playing it to see how it progresses. I hoped this initial review proved useful/interesting.

Thanks for reading!