Final Fantasy XIII. The newest main title in the Final Fantasy series. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Tales fan, but I love jRPGs in general. I jokingly ‘hate’ the FF series, but it’s all in good fun and humor. After all, the Final Fantasy series really brought me into the world of jRPGs. I absolutely love Final Fantasy IX, though I’ve yet to beat it. In fact, FFXIII is now the first one I’ve beaten.
However, it’s also by far my least favorite of the ones I’ve played. Part of the reason I kept going with it is because I had nothing else to play. Another part is that a friend suggested I write a blog about it when finishing. And plus, it actually doesn’t have random encounters, which is a huge bonus for me.
*Note: Please don’t take this review too seriously. I did enjoy the game enough to play it for what it is, but it has a ton of faults that I, as a writer, cannot simply overlook. …That and I’ve been having fun exploiting/laughing at the faults of this game.
First off, I’m going to start off with what I love. I love the graphics—they were stunning, especially in a high-def scenes. The hair for Lightning and Vanille in normal cutscenes sometimes annoyed me, but that’s more trouble to explain why than it’s worth. Overall, the graphics were amazing.
Subtracting from that, I must talk about some design stuff. The characters are great. Lightning’s hairstyle isn’t my favorite, but whatever. I like the characters, and for the most part, they have nice outfits. However, the position of Lightning’s sword is a huge problem. In real life, the way it hangs down over her legs would cause it to beat on them every time she walks, even more so when she runs. It’d just cause problems, and is not a good place for a sword.
Continuing on with the weapons, most of them are collapsible. I have a few collapsible weapons in my story, but those are very simple weapons. However, the ease it shows with the ones in this game, just by flinging them in the right direction, is way too easy—that would cause problems in battle, as fling it the wrong way and the weapon would collapse instead of strike. This shows the biggest error again, with Lighting, whose sword like… I don’t even know. I tried watching it after battle to see how it shrinks, but it’s just weird the way it moves. You’d think a sword like that would cause a lot of problems, especially when covered with dirt and blood. Vanille’s… fishing rod, I think, is a bit like Lightning’s sword, where it just folds weird and unrealistically.
Another thing—her sword apparently turns into a gun once she gets enough attacks. A callback to Squall’s gunblade, perhaps, though I see no mechanics to make that possible. And then Sazh’s two guns… turn into a rifle or something? I stopped using him after a while, but there’s no mechanics that would make that possible. And Hope’s huge boomerang folds once (which makes me wonder why it doesn’t fold when hitting enemies) and fits in the back of his pocket. Somehow. Also, he can somehow control where it goes—when he gets a preemptive strike, it’ll hit every enemy without returning to him once, no matter how they’re positioned. Finally, there’s Snow. In the battle animation, he uses his fists. However, his weapon is like… the threads on the back of his jacket or something? It’s weird, and I don’t get it at all.
Leaving that, though, and getting back to the good things.
I also loved that there were no surprises with encounters. They’re not random, and you can see exactly how many enemies you’re going to fight on the screen. Plus, you can sneak up on them to get a bonus in battles. Also, having the party characters running around on the screen with me was a nice little touch (though sometimes they got in my way on a narrow pathway).
However, the battle system itself was bad programming, in my opinion. Let me explain.
There are six battle styles: Commando (attack), Ravager (magic), Sentinel (guard), Synergist (buff), Saboteur (debuff), and Medic (heal). Each character naturally gets three styles as follows:
Lightning: Commando, Ravager, Medic
Sazh: Commando, Ravager, Synergist
Snow: Commando, Ravager, Sentinel
Hope: Ravager, Medic, Synergist
Vanille: Ravager, Medic, Saboteur
Fang: Commando, Sentinel, Saboteur
As you can see from the start, the first three share two styles. While Commando and Ravager are each good for different things, I’d prefer the characters to have a little more variety. That’s just personal preference, really. Hope and Fang are the only perfect foils—that is, the only two that have a completely opposing moveset. On top of that, from what I’ve read, Hope is the best spellcaster (with Vanille getting moves quicker) while Fang is the best offensive fighter. Add whoever you want for back-up (for me, Lightning), and you have your party set no matter what the situation.
Expanding the styles is actually quite fun, but the way it’s used during the battles annoyed me from the beginning.
First off, they tried to combine turn-based and real-time battle system. I’ve heard that it has been done well, but not here. It was so slow that I could easily type to people while playing. You play one character, and only you can use items. If your character dies, then your party loses. End of story. Doesn’t matter if your teammates have a resurrection spell by then.
You get four options during battle:
Auto-battle (wherein they’ll use the known strengths and weaknesses of the enemy to use the best attacks)
Skills (wherein you get to choose the skills you want—but this soon gets so huge that it’s a waste of time to bother with it)
Techniques (wherein you can use skills that cost TP—Summon, Libra (to see enemy stats), Quake (earth spell), Raise (to revive someone with full HP), Dispelga (to dispel both your party and the enemies), Stopga (to… I honestly forgot), and no doubt others)
Items (wherein you can choose potions, phoenix downs, or a few other items)
As mentioned above, I rarely ever used ‘Skills’. Most of what you need can be done with auto-battle. Then you choose an enemy, and most times you won’t be switching that… So you just get to pressing ‘X’ a ton with almost nothing else.
There’s also no way to move your character in battle, so you can’t block or dodge. And your character won’t do that most of the time—I have seen it happen, but very scarcely—no matter how obvious the attack. But, there’s no real stat for defense—your only stats are strength, magic, and HP. For one that’s used to the side-stepping action to dodge enemies in Graces, not being able to move at all was a huge disappointment.
Techniques… Most of these are honestly useless. Summon and Libra are the only ones I ever really used. You get five TP max (which is only regained from winning battles with a good ranking), with Libra costing one and Summon costing three. Summon is great if you find yourself in a pinch—your summon will heal you to keep you alive while fighting with you for the first half, and for the second half, you get to ride on your summon to deal stronger damage. However, with further bosses, this became more and more useless, as the total damage done didn’t seem to really put a dent in it.
Libra, on the other hand, I used a ton. I could use it to see stats, and if the enemy was weak to fire, my fighters would all use fire. If it was weak to spells, they’d all use spells. However, I found that even this became pointless against most enemies, since the party will experiment to figure out what the enemy’s weak to. For example, Lightning will start out using all the main elements, but as soon as it blocks one, the monster data records it as being immune and neither Lightning nor Hope will use that element on it again.
I only used Quake once, and it didn’t look to hit most of the enemies. Plus, there’s nothing weak to earth. Which isn’t surprising, given that Quake is the only earth spell in the game. I never used Dispelga or Stopga because both seemed useless under normal circumstances. I’m sure Dispelga could be useful if the enemy has full buffs and you have few, but most of the time when I was against a boss, I had fully buffed myself first.
Items also became rarely used for me. You get nothing higher than potions, which heal by a number, not a percentage. There is an item to increase the effects of potions, but I traded that out for more useful accessories (speaking of, you start only being able to equip one weapon and one accessory and get more accessories as you advance through your styles—I ended with everyone having three).
Now then, there is one more option in battle. By pressing one of the L buttons, you can switch battle tactics. But let me back up before talking about those.
I mentioned the styles before. Once you have a party set, you can set up to six battle tactics—called paradigms or something like that. Each one of these are a combination of the styles your party uses. My favorites (in the order of Lightning, Hope, Fang):
Relentless Assault: Ravager, Ravager, Commando
Diversity: Ravager, Medic, Commando
Hero’s Charge: Medic, Synergist, Commando
Ruthless: Commando, Ravager, Saboteur
Decimation: Ravager, Synergist, Commando
Solidarity: Commando, Medic, Sentinel
I liked having Synergist and Saboteur separate since they had a different number of spells in each. This way, they would always be doing something useful and not just standing there, trying a debuff that would never work on the enemy.
I usually started off my battles in Relentless Assault. If it wasn’t a boss, I’d just go with that until my HP got too low. Then I’d switch to either Diversity or Solidarity (if there were a lot of enemies—this would make them all focus on Fang, who could guard to keep herself safe). However, once they’re all healed up, you have to switch back to Relentless to continue fighting.
You get used to the battle system, and I made the most of it. However, the thing that annoyed me most is that you can tell exactly what your teammates are programmed to do. There’s no good AI program. They work off the exact weaknesses of the enemy. I know it’s good to be able to predict what your teammates will do, since that makes it more stable, but to me, it’s boring and far too simple programming for games nowadays. It thus made the battles the same thing over and over again with set patterns for what to do.
Also, another thing that bothers me. Whenever the party’s switched out, you lose all the tactics you set. I know everyone has different moves, but it’d be nice if they at least saved what I last had with those three instead of defaulting back to the basic. Sometimes I had a hard time remembering my tactics… Because of that, I didn’t change out my party unless I had to. …And considering how forceful this game is with battle parties, my party got changed out a lot.
One thing I did like during battle was staggering. By hitting the enemy with a combination of spells and regular attacks, you could send their stagger bar up. When they’re staggered, everything does a ton more damage to them. Eventually, the physical fighters can launch them way up in the air (quite unrealistically, but it saved me a number of times). However, enemies with high defense can be extremely annoying to battle when they’re not staggered, especially if they take forever to get to stagger mode. And there was one boss that gained a barrier if you didn’t kill it with a summon, making it immune to everything until you put it in stagger mode. Which took a while.
I’m still working on the story post, but for some non-spoilery notes about things you’ll see in that post:
- There are tons of weird terms that it doesn’t stop to explain at all.
- Everyone has sensors for you. And I mean everyone.
- Having a summon is like having a baby.
- There’s lots of emo-ing. And melodrama.
- The party is good at making stupid decisions.
- Even the script writers must’ve gotten confused by everything.
- Fang is obsessed with protecting Vanille.
- The writers didn’t do the research.
- There are a few places that are just a complete mess in how they’re written.
Please look forward to the story review! I hope to finish that one soon, and for those waiting, trust me, it won’t disappoint you. 
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