Final Fantasy XIII - Disk 1

Final Fantasy XIII - Disk 1 retrospective
Having just finished Disk 1 this weekend I've got to experience the brunt of this game. (Though I'm sure I'm going to experience a lot more in the second disk onward but for the most part I've got the basics I'm assuming.)
The combat system has been fully flushed out, adding the paradigm system and the stagger system.

Paradigm let's you change the role of your characters, for example: going from having a tank like character (sentinel) to a warrior type (commander) and a variety of mages (medic (white mage), ravager (black mage), saboture & synergist (support mages, pro, shell, debuffs, etc.) This sounds neat in practice, till you find it's tedious and a bit over complicated. You /can/ switch during battles, but it usually causes a lag to happen between your actions and when your new "roles" take place. So if you try to switch in a pinch, you most likely will end up getting a party member killed before the person you assign as a medic manages to get the ability to cast something, or you get to fire off an emergency potion. It leads to a lot of frustration in the long run. Otherwise it's basically the same repetitiveness as before the system was added. You basically just keep hitting "Auto" every turn till something is dead, healed, buffed, or debuffed. There's really not a lot of strategy involved in the combat system so far.

I did briefly mention "stagger" in the first part of my review, but I'll go a little deeper into here. When you're fighting a monster, you deal 100% of your damage (unless the monster has protect or a similar spell/effect up) as the battle goes on if you keep attacking the same monster a small bar will begin to fill up. The more you attack the monster in succession, the higher the % indicator on the bar, and the more damage you'll do. The bar however, will begin to drop if you take no action on the monster. Once the bar reaches the bottom, you have to start over again, but if you manage to attack before it does it resets back to it's highest point and climbs up slightly based on the damage/attack you did. When the bar gets full, you start doing 200% of your damage, (ie: double) and the damage modifier will continue to climb till the bar empties out. Some monsters while staggered have a terrorized effect and can't attack or cast spells, or some have lowered attack and speed to go with the fact you're doing more damage. It does add a bit of extra flair to fights, but most of the time the monsters you stagger don't live long enough for you to get full effect of it, or they've got so much hp that once you manage to fill the bar up and stagger them (outside of boss battles of course) they're already pretty much dead so there's no point.

One of the fun parts though, is when you manage to get the ability to use summons. The summons in this game, work really similar to Final Fantasy X. You hit the action to summon, the eidolon comes out, takes the place of your other party members except for the one who summoned, and basically goes on an auto-attack rampage. Doing anything from melee attacks or casting spells. You do have the option to do special attacks with the eidolon, but once you do (depending on the ability) the summon leaves till you can fill your ability bar again. This sounds really cool but most of the abilities that are series staples for being impressive, really aren't. Take Zantetsuken for instance. In every other Final Fantasy game, it's a 1 hit K.O. move on anything bar a boss. In this game, (at least from my experience) it's a very very lack luster attack that hits all enemies for mediocre damage. I'd of done more damage with the eidolon, by just keeping them out on auto attack.

Another rather challenging (more so annoying) thing, is getting the eidolons to join you in the first place. You have to do mini battles against them where you have to fill a certain objective in the fight to get them to join you. This will lead to lots of rage. Lots of rage in some cases. Trying to get Odin took me three tries because of the way he attacks and bad placement by my characters. (Yes lets all huddle really close together and get hit by area attacks and all of us die...) But once you manage to get them to accept defeat, you're greeted by one of the biggest slaps to the face I think this game does. It takes industry standards of Super Monsters, and turns them into mechanical monstrosities. You get "Shiva" but it's not actually Shiva, it's her sisters? I'm fine with that, but when they go all contoured and turn into a motorcycle I get a little pissed off. And Odin, considered one of the strongest Summons in the series, he turns into a horse. Yes, the great Norse god Odin, turns into a horse, just a regular four legged horse. It really shows you have serious they take the fans and how serious they've taken this game.

I was also introduced to the "level-up" system this disk as well. It's based similarly to the Sphere Grid of Final Fantasy X. Almost a direct copy, I say almost because it, like much of this game, is very.... linear. You have a circular pattern you must go to unlock new abilities for the different "roles" your characters have, and also going around this circle will give you permanent status boosts like extra HP, STR or MAG. But you really have control on this, you have to go the direction they show you and tell you to go. Of course you'll come across some branch points to get a certain ability, or a path with slightly higher values for things. But the path is a dead end in most cases, and you'll have to go the direction they want you to go in order to progress up in ranks and "levels". There's no free roam or character customization. Yeah, all your characters will be different from one another, but if you compare them to someone else (like me to you) our characters will be exactly the same. Where as the system from Final Fantasy X, you could make anyone do anything. I could give Lulu full blown physical attack attributes, and made Tidus a black mage. Yeah they make no sense to do that, but I could if I wanted to, because there was freedom involved. Not here. You're very restricted on what kind of customization you want to do.

I won't comment too much on the content of the story (trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible), but I'll give a general opinion of it, and our "cast". It's very bland. Plain and simple, it's trying to be a mixture of the older Final Fantasy archetype with a spin on it to make it seem fresh. It doesn't accomplish that at all. It does accomplish the feeling that it's repetitive as all hell and boring to boot. I'm having a hard time trying to get any type of connection or feel for the characters. There's too much going on that they're trying to feed at you at once. You've got the central story arc that isn't really explained all that much. Followed by all these other stories trying to be woven together. Tied together with frequent flash back cutscenes and general discussion between characters. You can't really get a feel for anyone, or get a feel for the story because they don't give you the opportunity to really grasp at anything. What they give you comes off as something like garbled fan fiction story telling, the kind that just assumes you know what's going on and you're going to understand everything right away. This would be good for a game that followed just one character, but the game insists on feeding you these 5 characters (soon to be 6 in disk 2 I'm sure). So it doesn't accomplish what I think it set out to do.

The massive influx of inconsistent information delivery, and the erratic behavior that it puts you in a role to have experience with the characters, makes it hard for you to get attached to them. I really have no feelings either way if Lightning is supposed to be our lead, or that Snow is in love with her sister Serah. I know that it's supposed to be information that's supposed to be a general "yeah that's how it is" but I couldn't care less. You could kill off any one of the five "mains" and I don't feel like it'd affect anything drastically. That's how little I care for these characters. I do find some of their interactions humorous though. Some of the scenes with Sazh and Vanille are funny on a certain level. And on the reverse, a lot of the scenes with Hope make you want to slap the little pissant with a 2x4 across his skull and say "Stop being a little bitch". So if that's what the game set out to do, then well mission accomplished.

Final thoughts for the end of Disk 1?

It's not an awful game, but it's not a good one either. A lot of the fights so far have been like I said, repetative, and very boring. The story isn't all that interesting, and there's plenty of "gods this is a pile of shit" moments so far. When you compare this game to the previous 11 single player entries you really get a scope of how far this series has fallen. The focus really changed from "lets make a good game" to "lets make this look as good as possible". That's the feeling I get and stand by when it comes to any final fantasy game after X-2. (That's a guilty pleasure of mine, I know it's a very flawed game, but hey it's still better than 12 and 13 lol.)

What good do I have to say about it? I still really dig the music of the game, the battle theme and zone themes are very catchy and don't get stale even after you sit through you're 12th or 13th fight in a row. I find myself enjoying some parts but over all there's really very little focus needed to do much of anything. I could probably play a game on my DS or PSP at the same time I'm playing this and be fine. It makes me wonder if this game was for a hand held console, if I'd have different feelings about it. It has that vibe to it, you have limited controls, and objectives are pretty straight forward for the most part it seems like it'd be a perfect fit for the PSP or a version made for the Playstation Vita. I just expect more from the company when it comes to a console game.

After word:
I know this seems really long and winded, but this covers pretty much the basics of the game so far. At the end of disk 2, I'll comment more on the story and characters rather than the gameplay unless a new mechanic is added for me to go over. You won't hear another peep about mechanics until I finish the game and get a full review up, I swear *scout's honor*


(In case you didn't gather from my comment about disks, I'm playing the Xbox 360 version of the game, it's spread across 3 disks instead of just one Bluray disk like the Playstation 3 version.)