Well, I picked up Final Fantasy XIII yesterday. Unfortunately, it was also a Tuesday yesterday which means raid reset for WoW, so I was busy doing WoW stuff until about 11:00. However, after that I ended up putting in nearly 3 hours of play into the game before heading off to sleep.
People are right, at least in the beginning, the game in incredibly linear. Like, so linear that it might as well have been an action/platformer game. However, the story begins pretty epically. The music, graphics, and overall presentation are off-the-charts good. While I like some characters better than others, I don’t yet find any of them annoying. In fact, I completely adore Lightning. Yes, she is totally a female Cloud, a brooding ex-soldier type, but she is a complete and total bad ass so far. She is strong and powerful and her voice acting has rocked my world so far.
Combat in the game is fast and fluid and I see a lot of potential there. I say that because I am not yet to a point in the game where it has opened up all the possible options during combat, I think. I only JUST learned about paradigm shift right before turning in last night. Paradigm shift injects much needed tactics into what has previously been “mash the x button” combat for the first 2.5 hours. Paradigm shift is somewhat like an on the fly AI change for the CPU controlled party members. It also shifts your available skills, I believe. A simple example: you set your paradigm to “balanced” so that people fight and your healers keep people healed. Then when the enemy’s weak point is opened up, you switch to all out commando attack paradigm so maximize the opportunity. If Square-Enix delivers with it, it should inject some much needed tactics and consequence to choices made during combat.
My biggest problem with the first 3 hours of the game were not that it was so linear, believe it or not. My problem was that the game starts and you aren’t gaining experience, or AP, or TP, or anything resembling some sort of “reward” for winning combat and advancing your characters. You can see that you are rated at the end of combat, and it awards you a number of “points” but so far those points are useless other than to be used as a measure of how good you did in the battle. Protip: during the early battles, your options are so limited that pressing ‘x’ repeatedly (on the auto-battle option) as fast as you can will result in 5 stars for every fight. I am hoping that this changes, and the Paradigm Shift option that opened up should provide a way for the game to make it so. Only time will tell though.
Literally the last thing that happened before I went to bed was the opening up of the Crystarium system. For people who have played Final Fantasy 10, this is the sphere grid. For those who haven’t: it is the syetem the game uses for character advancement. In combat you earn a certain amount of CP (crystarium points) and you spend them on the crystarium board. The board has a variety of areas, one for each Paradigm available to that character, and in each area are a series of crystal nodes that you can “go to” by using up your CP. Each node you reach unlocks something new; HP/MP upgrades, skills, attributes, etc. THIS is what I was waiting for. Now the game is starting to feel like an RPG. It is a shame that it took 3 hours for the game to introduce this system to me, but then again … it is explained by what is going on in the story.
So that’s it for day one! I am going to try to blog about my progress in the game as I play it. I probably wont keep up on a day to day basis, but I will try to be as close to that as possible, even if it means some shortish posts.