I should preface this review by saying that I played just over 22 hours of the game before I was too uninterested in it to continue. According to the strategy guide, I completed just over half of the actual story.

The first thing you will notice about FF13, besides the relatively marvelous looking graphics is the completely bat***t crazy stupid battle system... that is to say, "new battle system".

I have to give credit to the people who are tasked every two or three years with remaking the battle system to a nearly legendary series with rabid fans such as I, that's how we got the refreshing detour from the norm that was the FF12 battle system, but sometimes the wheel only needs to be repaired and not reinvented.

The battle system of FF13 is active time like so many others in the series. (Final Fantasy 10 was the only one in recent years to stray from the active time battle system.) There are two speeds to the ATB gauge, and I thought the battles were still very fast paced on the slower setting. You are only given complete command control over one of the characters in your party, who is designated as the party leader. Read that carefully, it's not "one character at a time"; it's just "one character", period. Considering how fast paced the battle are, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I would have preferred it if they slowed the battles down a bit just to allow full control over all of the characters. Personally I would like it if they got rid of the active time battles all together and stuck with what worked in Final Fantasy 10. No matter the condition of the other party members, if the party leader dies, it's game over.

Even though you have complete control over one of the characters, the designers did their best to downplay that by making the game play itself for the most part with the "auto battle" option. The game tries to determine the best action to take against the current enemy and seems to follow 3-4 rules from what I can tell.

Suspected Auto Battle Logic:

1. If the enemy has a known weakness, you character will automatically select that type of attack. 2. If possible, it will alternate attacks. (This has an effect on the stagger gauge which I will explain later) 3. If there are two or more enemies in close proximity, it will queue up an area effect skill. 4. If you are a Saboteur, it will select the same debuff to cast 3-4 times. (Debuffs can fail, so I'm guessing the logic was to try and try again? feels like a waste of ATB bars to me most of the time.)

You can also choose to enter commands manually from the list of abilities your character knows for the currently selected class. Your character has a set number (3 to start) ATB bars and each action takes a certain number of bars to perform. You select the actions you would like your character to perform and add them to the queue, you then select a target for those actions. When the ATB gauge is full, you character starts to execute the queue of commands. At any point while the ATB gauge is filling, so long as the first command has enough ATB bars full, you can have your character execute the queue, any unfilled actions are dropped, and the others are performed like normal. This is obviously to help give you more immediate control over the battle and allows you to get direly needed attacks/heals/potions sooner. If you prematurely execute a queue as described, any partially filled ATB bars remain intact, however the ATB stops charging while you character is active.

In the same manner, you can cancel a queue that hasn't been executed, and even the unexecuted commands in a queue that has already been started. Again, this is to give you more immediate control of the battle and allows you to issue critical commands if they are necessary.

In reality, you will find that you only bother issuing commands manually when the auto battle is being stupid, or you need to heal/resurrect someone in your party. I don't know if it's just me, but issuing commands manually seems to take longer than it should or would in any other Final Fantasy game. It might just be that the game doesn't gear you towards being ready to issue commands manually, but I think it's actually the menu's being too flashy with it's graphics. Instead of an instant decision, you have to wait half a second for the menu to execute it's animation.

The primary strategy in the battle system comes from switching between "Paradigms" at the right times to "stagger" enemies and do massive damage to them while they are in the staggered state. The massive HP and high defenses of most bosses REQUIRE staggering them to avoid grinding away at them for hours on end. A paradigm is a set of character classes for the party. (A sample being: Medic, Commando, Ravager or Medic, Commando, Commando)

There are 6 classes available, although not all of them are available to every character in the beginning.

In no specific order, the classes are:

1. Commando - Heavy hitter, mostly melee and elemental melee. 2. Medic - Medic is as Medic does. 3. Ravager - Ranged elemental damage aka Mage. 4. Sentinel - Defensive based, "Tank" class. 5. Saboteur - Debuff enemies. 6. Synergist - Buff your party.

At least for the first half of the game, you will mostly be switching between paradigms to boost the stagger gauge, then heal, then boost the gauge some more, and finally when the creature is staggered you will switch to an offensive paradigm. Rinse and repeat if the creature is able to regain its balance before you kill it. Later on you will get in to using buffs and debuffs, not much more depth added though, just another paradigm to switch to.

The one thing I've noticed about the stagger gauge is that repetitive attacks will not be effective. The enemy builds up a sort of resistance to the attack and its stagger gauge depletes much faster. It is most effective to pair up a ravager or two with a commando, or if you only have two characters you can alternate between a commando/medic to heal and commando/ravager to stagger. The ravager's attacks boost the stagger gauge up by a lot, but the gauge will deplete very quickly unless the enemy is attacked by a commando. The commando's attacks boost the gauge by very little, but the gauge depletes much slower. The stagger gauge appears to deplete based not only on the last attack it received (that would be horrible) but based on an average of the last few attacks, so if you attack with a commando, then your ravager, the gauge will still deplete much slower than if it was only attacked by the ravager.

Boosting the stagger gauge on it's own applies a percentage boost modifier to the damage done to it, as soon as an enemy is staggered it gets an immediate additional 100% added to the boost modifier in addition to the enemies defenses and resistances being lowered. It's not uncommon to see damage go up by 3 or 4 times once an enemy is staggered. As soon as the stagger gauge is depleted (whether the enemy was actually staggered or not) the boost modifier resets. Attacking an enemy once it's been staggered does not prolong its staggered period, the only advantage (which is a major one) to staggering an enemy is the damage boost.

In addition to staggering an enemy, you can "get the drop" on enemies by getting a preemptive strike. Preemptive strikes are pretty straight forward; engage the enemy before it has become aware of your presence. Preemptive strikes were pretty difficult for me to get, but getting one is extremely helpful as it starts the battle off with every single enemy close to being staggered and you with a full ATB gauge.

You are able to apply a "shroud" to your party before engaging enemies. Shrouds are items that you use outside of battle to enhance your chances of survival. There is a shroud that gives your party a host of defensive buffs, there is one for offensive buffs, and another one that cloaks you so it will be easier for you to sneak up and get a preemptive strike. Shrouds aren't really used in every battle, I saved mine for boss battles or groups that I knew would be very difficult without them.

At the end of battle you are presented with a screen giving you a score based solely on how fast you finished the battle compared to how fast it thought you should finish the battle with your current party and their power. You start out with a score of 10,000 points and every second you are over or short of the goal time, it subtracts or adds a set number of points to your score. The set number of points is determined based on the type of creature you are fighting. Based on your score, the game gives you a 0 to 5 star rating which only affects the drop rate of rare items and shrouds. The lower ratings have a higher shroud drop rate, and the higher ratings have a zero shroud drop rate but higher rare item drop rate.

For at least a couple hours of gameplay you don't receive any experience of any type, but just as you begin to think they redid the character progression, they reveal the crystarium and CP (crystogen points).

I'm sorry to say it people, but after writing all of that, I've realized that I can't rightly classify FF13 as an RPG. FF13 is related more closely to a game like God of War than it is an RPG like any other game in the main Final Fantasy franchise. Reminds me of the Best Buy employee I met who called Prince of Persia an RPG.

I think a short conversation I had with a friend sums up my thoughts about the battle system nicely:

Me: I didn't care for any of the characters, story, and the novelty of the battle system wore off pretty fast Me: novelty of the battle system and graphics Friend: ouch so basicly u hate the game? Me: i wouldn't say I hate it... it's like ramen, not bad, but it's still just ramen. Friend: makes sense when you put it that way Me: I get bored with ramen Me: =)

Staggering enemies shouldn't be such an integral part of the required actions in battle. Imagine that they took something that should have only been a status ailment, like say poison, and made the rest of combat revolve around inflicting poison on an enemy so you could actually do damage to it. That's essentially what they've done with staggering. It's something that should not have been more powerful than the common status ailment, but they've made it all but a required element of the battle system.

The battle system works fine once you realize everything that is going on (which isn't much to begin with), as in the conversation I quoted above, I can't exactly say that I hate it. It, however, wasn't something that I got much enjoyment from. Today's penny-arcade is quite accurate, and as usual Tycho words it perfectly:

Tycho:

One of the three games writers I respect the most has called it good - great, in fact - but I don't have the raw time required to polish this thing until it chooses to shine. I'm willing to play a game for many hours as a purely exploratory exercise, my mind is constructed thus, but (like our primitive forebears) I can only chew on woody pulp so long before I begin to crave some nourishment.

The last thing I would like to mention about the battle system (I guess it's more about the game in general, but I'm putting it here anyway!) is that the difficulty seems to me to be inconsistent. Most notably was near the beginning where the regular creatures seemed to be very easy, but the boss encounter at the end of the section wiped me across the floor several times. There were several boss battles and regular creature battles that were based on avoiding the creature's one-shot kill ability.

I wish they didn't mess up what was, in my opinion, perfected in FF6, 7 and 10.

I didn't get much into using the Eidolons (aka summons) so I won't be discussing them. What I did see from the two or three times that I used them was good in theory, but I didn't like how it was executed.

Couple quick notes related to battles:

1. You never have to heal once the battle is over, this is quite nice. If a support character is dead, they'll be unaffected once you finish the battle. You may still need to use potion and phoenix downs during the battle to heal/revive them. 2. Potions are always used on every character in the party during battles, and since you are fully healed after every battle, there's no need to use them any other time. 3. Enemies appear on the world map like in Final Fantasy 12, but you load a separate battle screen "arena" when you engage them. 4. Very little load time between battles I'm assuming because the enemies are already rendered, and the "arena" is probably stored in memory.

The crystarium is closely related to the sphere grid from Final Fantasy 10, only three dimensional, and with crystals, not spheres. After a certain point in the story, you begin to earn CP from most battles and gain access to the crystarium to spend them in. I called this a less annoying sphere grid before because you don't have to do as much manual manipulation. In FF10 you could spend hours just allocating the sphere levels you had accumulated, manually selecting the power sphere for the HP and STR slots, a mana sphere for the MP and magic slots etc. The crystarium is much simpler in that you hold a button to spend the points, and if you have a directional choice to make, you just press that direction.

Each character has a crystarium which is split up in to the individual classes. As you progress through the crystarium, you start to progress in physical levels (aka floors) away from the center of the crystarium, and eventually in class levels. The individual nodes on the crystarium are standard pluses to strength, HP, magic and abilities.

According to the strategy guide, increasing one character's class level helps that characters strength in the class and the strength of other characters in that class as well.

Nothing much critical to say of the crystarium, from the 22 hours that I played, it appears to do its job without being a major distraction. It's everything good about the sphere grid in FF10, and nothing bad.

I'm not going to discuss the story mainly to avoid spoilers. I will only say that the story didn't get me hooked in the first 22 hours, and the only reason I gave it that long was because I wanted to do this review. Why is Vanille in the party?

Based on the strategy guide's recommendation, I refrained from upgrading items in the early game, and I quit playing just before the guide started getting in to that. Needless to say, I won't be discussing this part of the game. It does sound like a nice feature, I enjoyed the item upgrading/moding of Parasite Eve very much.

Save for a few instances when you could potentially drive the story on by talking to a person, all interaction with NPC's and other characters is done automatically when you approach them. There is no dialog box. I thought this might be an annoying feature, but it really wasn't annoying unless you specifically tried to make it annoying by passing the same NPC several times.

The graphics are the best of any Final Fantasy I've seen. I could nit pick about the lack of polygon's on the character model hands or elbows, or the small flashing textures on Szah's afro, but reality is it's not that big of a deal and everything else looks pretty damn good.

Speaking of nit picking:

1. Party members are always running ahead of you, and the enemies are oblivious to them.
2. Party members don't move out of the way when you walk in to them. This really only effected my in one location that was a narrow ledge.
3. Camera during battle could be better. It tries hard to give you a cinematic like view of everything that's currently going on, but I found it to be more distracting than useful. You do have minimal control over the camera during battle, although that doesn't really matter since it will just continue to do it's preprogrammed routine. The same can be said for the out of battle camera, although it moves less, and you have a little greater, and longer lasting, control over it.

The strategy guide was the first I've seen from Squaresoft to not be Brady Games. It was informative and much better than some strategy guides I've seen, but it was structured as to not give any spoilers. I think I like my strategy guides with spoilers. If I didn't want spoilers, I wouldn't be using a guide.

If you do enjoy the game and was wondering about the strategy guide, I can absolutely recommend the strategy guide from Piggyback Interactive, it was very informative and although some of the formatting wasn't what I was used to (spoiler free) it still got the job done properly. They even had a graph in the guide that showed how "spoiling" specific sections are.

The game provides change to the typical battle system found in most of the series. Some people might like that change, but I believe that if you are a fan of the series as it was (specifically 4 through 10), you will not enjoy the changes that have been made to the battle system in Final Fantasy 13.

The story provided nothing to keep me interested, the graphics while very appealing in most respects, are completely meaningless to me when determining the games value.

While there are several minor improvements (no need to heal after battle, among others) they don't add enough to the game to offset the damage done by the battle system and story. I can't recommend this game as a purchase to fan's of the Final Fantasy series, and I would caution anyone else against its purchase.

FF13's grasp on the RPG genre and Final Fantasy namesake is weak at best.

Game Developer and Publisher: Square Enix (Squaresoft forever dammit!)
Strategy Guide: Link
Strategy Guide Publisher: Piggyback Interactive
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