John Zeitler

So, some more thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII. I’m two hours into it, which is exactly one hour more than I was at the end of last night… in short, it’s not that the game is boring me, it’s that I have less time to play than I thought I would before I wind up face-down in my mug of chamomile tea.

(On an unrelated note, have you ever had chamomile tea? Of course you haven’t. Because you’re awake now.)

I can see where the complaints about linearity would come into play. There haven’t been very many branching paths, and what ones there have been all lead pretty much immediately to dead ends with a treasure chest sphere. In some circles that’s considered bad game design, and to an extent I agree. More to the point, some of the hallmarks of a good RPG don’t come into play until the two-hour mark, specifically the game’s progression system (here called the Crystarium, it’s a fusion of the Sphere Grid and… I’m getting to that, actually). Overall, a lot of the more strident complaints are valid.

The thing is, though, I’m looking at FF13 as something a little bit different. After the programmer’s-orgasm that was FF12 (which I liked, dammit, because strategy means training your soldiers to think on the battle-level while you think on the war-level), the designers went back to the drawing board and started asking, “do we really need all this stuff?” They redesigned the battle system, looking at it from the abstract point they did back in 1987 when designing the original Final Fantasy, and taking into account the technology that’s available now. The result is probably one of the most engaging systems I’ve dealt with so far, even if on a purely skill-based level it’s not as complex as, say, the Tales system or that found in Eternal Sonata. The short version is: you can still mash A to win every battle, but I can see now how they’re going to change things up on down the road, maybe five or seven hours from now.

What really makes an impression on me, though, is the Paradigm system. In brief: you give your party a “10,000-foot view” set of orders, and they assign themselves into roles based on that set of orders and adjust their Auto-Battle behavior accordingly. For example, in the Relentless Assault Paradigm, your party leader (in this case Lightning) takes on the role of Commando, while the other two active party members (in this case Sazh and Snow) become [I can't remember what they're called right now]. The roles are a hybrid of a character class (along the lines of FF X-2′s Dressphere Grid in that they can be changed on-the-fly) and something more akin to the general party roles present in Dungeons and Dragons’ fourth edition (but skewing more towards FF-traditional classes).

Really, the whole game (in terms of play mechanics) could be likened to D&D 4E. It’s a total revamp: a redesign from first principles and starting with a fresh view of the abstractions necessary. Viewed in that light, the resistance to the game’s changes is at once understandable and expected. But that still doesn’t make the kneejerk complainers right.

About the only thing that I can say is slightly disappointing is that the 360 version doesn’t look quite as nice as the PS3 version, but honestly, the differences (in my estimation) are so negligible as to prompt the thought “who f%$#@ing cares?“.

And the story? Well, I seem to recall thinking, back in 2006 in that darkened theater in Los Angeles, that Square Enix had their work cut out for them getting a decent story out of the concepts shown. And I also seem to recall being skeptical when SE announced that there were going to be no less than three games “branded” as FF13. Well, I have since become intimately acquainted with the flavor and texture of my sneakers, because quite honestly there’s possibly three dozen games to be made out of this story and these characters. Sazh in particular has grabbed my attention; the fact that he looks like he fell out of DJ Hero should not fool you for an instant, because there’s something up with him and I must know what. It has been a very long time since a game has made me feel this way, and it is a welcome feeling.