On to the review of Final Fantasy XIII!
This is the first Final Fantasy game to be released onto the Playstation 3 console, so you can place your bets that the guys and girls at Square Enix have put a lot of work into creating something beautiful. Before you even get the “New Game” option, you’re welcomed by theopening cinematic, which has the most amazing graphics you’ve probably ever seen. Of course, that’s my opinion – depending on the games you play, you may have a different opinion. Nevertheless, truly amazing. The opening theme sets you up for the game ahead, and is also very pleasant. Afterwards, a quick click on “New Game”, and you’re on your way to uncover the story ahead.
Which is good... when you get to grips with understanding certain things.
You’re Lightening, a female soldier making her way into the depths of the world she lives on called Cocoon. Why? It’s very vague at this point, but during a battle cinematic in which you’re introduced to another of the main characters, Sazh, you know Lightening means business. You quickly learn that Cocoon has turned into a war zone, and you switch to another character called Snow (AKA “Mr 33cm”... his shoe size. Woah.), who is, I presume, is the leader of a rebel group. Again, the cause is rather vague.
To cut the long story short, Lightening is after her sister, Serah, who is a L’Cie. Snow is also after to rescue Serah, who is his fiancé. What is a L’Cie? Who knows at this point. All you know is that they’re considered the enemy, and have to be put into quarantine. The two ‘teams’ eventually meet up and find Serah, who looks incredibly weak, leaves them with a few words along the lines of “Save Cocoon”, and collapses in Lightening’s arms. She then turns to crystal.
***I wasn’t paying attention to it at this point, but there’s a Datalog in the menu which may or may not explain certain things to you at this point. So my advice would be to pay attention to that every now and then. I know it’s hard to take your eyes away from the stunning graphics, but you need to if you wish to understand a few things.***
So basically, a L’Cie is someone who has been marked by a Fal’Cie, the beings/machines which created Cocoon and help keep it running for the ordinary citizens. The Fal’Cie make the people believe that the L’Cie are the enemy, and that they should be feared. Now... when someone becomes a L’Cie, they are given a ‘Focus’, a vision of a goal the Fal’Cie wish them to complete. The Focus is almost meaningless, but the L’Cie have to pass their Focus in a small amount of time to be able to return to ‘normal’... meaning eternal life locked inside a Crystal. However, if they fail to complete it, they become a Cie'th – a walking, crystallised corpse. Forever, until someone kills them.
Lovely.
Without explaining too much further, Lightening attacks a machine thing, which is a Fal’Cie, and turns all five of the playable characters at this point into L’Cie. Nice going, Light.
Given their Focus, they go off in search to find the answers to complete it. Whether they pass or fail, I will not tell – that’s up to you to find out...
Besides the sudden jump into the story, and not understanding things as well as you should with a story that could be rather complex, it’s still fabulous. It’s quite easy to pick up after a while, or (as mentioned before) if you read the Datalog. Do it. Regularly.
The thing that bothered me a few chapters in was the lack of exploration. It’s very linear, moving your party in a continuous straight map. A few places lead off this way and that, but they most of the time (read: all the time) lead to a dead-end, with a treasure orb. It’s hardly exciting; the world doesn’t open up for you until you reach Gran Pulse in Chapter 11. Chapter 11 took me just under 30 hours to get to. Granted, I took some time out to grind CP (I’ll get to that further on), so someone could get there in much less time, but over 20 hours until you get to pick a direction to go in? It’s lucky the story is so good; otherwise I’d have bored of the game before the really good stuff.
Gran Pulse is the other world in the Final Fantasy XIII universe. It’s a world that has long since been abandoned by its former occupants. Pulse is a dangerous and wild place, with beasts that walk the land. It’s kind of no wonder no one lives there, really. It’s pretty, but I’d rather not be trampled by an Adamantoise, and have my remains eaten by a lion-like creature, thank you. The L’Cie find themselves there looking for answers, and a way to complete their focus.
To be honest, I didn’t actually understand what they gained from their visit there. Maybe I spent too much time exploring to bother with the story at this point, and simply missed that part when they chirped up: “I know what we have to do! Let’s do this and that, and maybe that... then we can complete the Focus!” For me, up to a point, it was a quick detour from what I was supposed to be doing. Instead of making my way to Fang and Vanille’s old hometown of Oerba, I engaged in more CP grinding and the missions. All in all, I spent about 30+ hours on Pulse doing nothing story related, and forgetting what the meaning of it all was. Fun times.
The character development is interesting. You watch an aggressive soldier become warm and ‘almost’ motherly – you certainly see Lightening smiling more later on in the story. She’s so quick to attack everything that angers her at the start. Which, I don’t always blame her considering, but I thought she was a bit of a bitch. She attacks the Fal’Cie, gives Snow a bollocking, and screams at a whiney Hope for being... whiney (>>;), and then slaps/punches Fang around a bit. Fang almost seemed amused at this, asking something along the lines of “Do you feel better now?”/”Does that solve your problems?”
You also watch young Hope transform from a whiney, chicken-wuss into a courageous teenager (before you say “Uh oh. That ‘teenager’ word...” you’ll be pretty relieved when he toughens up – trust me). He’s too scared to confront and get revenge on Snow over something that occurred on Cocoon near the start, and despite being encouraged by Vanille a few times, he doesn’t. Seeing that Lightening resents Snow too, he decided to follow her to gain experience for when he’d be ready to take on Snow. Snow works out the issue later on, and protects Hope from a nasty fall during a battle. Hope is thankful, and decides that what happened wasn’t Snow’s fault.
The Roles are:
Commando = Devastating physical based attacks. Handy against staggered enemies.
Ravager = Devastating magical based attacks. Handy to stagger enemies.
Sentinel = Tanking /damage takers. Taking the attention away from certain members who are focusing on a different role.
Synergist = Buffing the party. Handy protection.
Saboteur = De-buffing the enemy. Handy against stronger enemies who can be de-buffed.
Medic = Healing party members. Important for healing. Duh.
Because you can have three characters in the party, and six Paradigms to play within a battle using the Paradigm Switch, you can have a lot of fun with this feature to find what suits you. With a possible total of eighty-three Paradigms available, it pays to do some experimenting. I’ve spent over eighty hours in the game, and have stuck with less than twenty in most case scenarios. No matter what, I always found Aggression (COM/COM/RAV), Relentless Assault (RAV/RAV/COM) and Combat Clinic (MED/MED/SEN) to be particularly important. It wasn’t until far later into the game that I started experimenting with buffering and de-buffering, and furthering the use of my tank.
Much more fun than FFXII on that front, less time consuming, and certainly less complicated.
Now on to the Crystarium: the new “levelling up” system. Characters are no longer exp reliant to level up, because... well, they don’t level up. Instead, the power of your characters is determined by how far you’ve progressed in the roles you can learn. Think of the Sphere Grid from FFX, give it one path to follow instead of it being totally optional, and you have the Crystarium. This is where CP collecting/grinding comes in handy. For every skill a character can learn in the Crystarium, there’s a certain number of CP cost. It starts off as little as a few hundred CP per skill – possibly less. Now, I’m farming to get the one-hundred and twenty-thousand CP points I need to get the good stuff.
As amazing as it looks, the Crystarium isn’t without its faults. Personally, I didn’t mind this as much (mainly because of the pretty noise it makes when you level up), but a lot of people didn’t like the way you have to press and hold the (X) button to go to the next skill... and then wait for the spark thing to reach the skill orb. Apparently it’s unnecessarily time consuming – most people would rather select something that they want over waiting for it to happen. To me, it gave me a sense of achievement when I’d collected enough CP to make it shoot across the Crystarium. Some people also didn’t like how linear it was, and they’d have preferred to take certain characters down certain routes earlier. Well... I worked with what I was given, and it worked out fine for me.
As for Crystarium Points (the CP I’ve been going on about)... that’s been frustrating to collect at times. I spent best part of three hours running up and down a corridor to farm it. As you can imagine, it got boring fast, but it gave me some pretty strong characters for an upcoming boss battle, and some left over CP for later spending. That wasn’t so bad when I think about it now. Now that I’ve finished the game, and have to earn one-hundred and twenty-thousand CP for certain skills... there’s nowhere decent to farm. I had an excellent farming space, where I was earning two-hundred-thousand CP every six or so minutes... guess what? It was taken out of the game. The Tesseracts (my farming place) will live long in my heart, and I’ll remember it for when I want to replay the game. *sigh*
Now I’m lucky to farm just over thirteen thousand CP in about a minute by running up and down a flipping hill. Or taking on an Adamantchelid, which is still a pain for me to do at the moment (maybe I lack the patience? I certainly have the skill and the HP...).
In previous Final Fantasy games, you had to purchase new weapons and armour/accessories if you wished to make your attacks stronger. In FFXIII, that’s not how it works. Whilst you can still buy weapons and the like, you can only ever buy low levelled gear. Why? Because you can now upgrade weapons and the accessories using various components found after defeating an enemy, in treasure orbs, or in the store. Upgrading requires a lot of trial and error, especially if you have no idea what you’re doing or how much exp an item needs before it reaches its maxed level.
It’s not like in FFVIII, where you needed specific parts if you wished to upgrade a weapon – you can now use anything. However, certain parts are better for doing certain things. To get the most out of your upgrades, you need to up the exp multiplier (after using a large amount of a certain item, future items used to upgrade will have an effect of a max of x3). Usually, from what I discovered, it’s always the components that give the lowest exp that can boost the multiplier quickly. Once that’s up, using things like... oh, the Ultra Compact Fusion Reactors, which can SERIOUSLY add some exp to your weapon (we’re going into a hundred-or-two-thousand exp using about three).
I’ve not dabbled in the accessory development much, putting my concentration on the weapons. I’m not too sure what to make of it now that I’ve unnecessarily spent loads of money on parts that I didn’t need/couldn’t be bothered farming for. I think that that aspect of the game requires too much attention if you wish to go ahead and get the Treasure Hunter trophy. Probably too much. To fully max the weapons, you need to buy/hunt Trapezohedron... which costs two-million Gil and is a rare drop by my friend the Adamantchelid. To make matters even harder, you also have to fully upgrade some accessories using Dark Matter, which costs eight-hundred-thousand Gil and is a rare drop from Shao Long Gui, who appear after a certain mission to replace the Adamantchelid. A lot of work indeed...
Going on to the expense... where’s the Gil? It’s incredibly difficult to get Gil in this game. You don’t earn Gil after battles; you earn it by selling particular items you rarely get from battles. Really, you don’t need Gil unless you rely on healing items at the start. You only really need it when you get to around the Gran Pulse stage, or perhaps even further than that. Everything you can buy can be found in treasure orbs if you look out for them, which is much more cost efficient that buying everything.
In closing, because I can see that I’ve gone on for a while, Final Fantasy XIII is a fabulous and welcome addition to the franchise. It has its flaws just like most video games, but if you look past that, there’s a very good game to be found. Action filled battles, likeable characters (to a point, Hope and Vanille), epic bosses, lots to do and a decent story line... it was totally worth the £60 I paid for the Collector’s Edition. Especially since it gave me over eighty hours worth of play time.
9/10
Totally worth it.
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