So I finally broke down and bought this gods awful game, got it and 13-2 for around 10 bucks total from a recent game sale (both brand new copies) so after putting it off for the past month, here's part 1 of my Final Fantasy 13 review.
You start out with a very, interesting opening sequence, that explains nothing at all about who you are, what you're doing or what's going on. The opening segment is really similar in a way to Final Fantasy 7. You start on a train, have an interesting cgi sequence then get booted into a fight that explains the basics of the game through a tutorial system. (You better get used to this tutorial thing, you'll be seeing it a lot for the first part of the game.) Then you fight a giant scorpion like monster, again, much like the first boss fight for Final Fantasy 7.
The problem with the game right as of this point, isn't the long winded tutorial segments, but rather the fact that they've gotten rid of everything in the battle system that the series is known for. You have the classic active time system, but it's rather pointless. Items don't use your timing, you can only control one character period, so far you can't even direct your other character what to do. All you have is an "Auto-Battle" key, and a section to pick abilities. Which at this point is less than useful. The games AI system it uses to direct your character is really spot on for the most part, if you spam auto-battle it'll do exactly everything you need to do bar using items. And that's the problem. There's no semblance of strategy required in the game. In older Final Fantasy titles, you could pick strategically between using items, using abilities and attacking. But not in this one, the game does it all for you. Oh and did I mention you can't run away from fights? They took that mechanic out of the game entirely, instead you have a "Restart" function. This will automatically remove you from battle, no wasted items and put you to just before you encounter the enemy.
Oh and you don't get gil, or experience points for beating monsters anymore, hell the game's random encounter system is all but gone as well. You see your opponent on the field, like in Final Fantasy 12, and they give you a variety of field items so you can flat out avoid confrontation if you wanted to. And to beat all, you get your health restored fully after every fight no matter what. So the only time you'll use potions (by the way, they target the entire party now instead of just one person) is during a fight and you're getting your ass beat too badly to finish the mob off.
It's just amazing how they totally got rid of one of the most interesting parts of the game and moved it to being something that barely resembles the actual combat system of the old games. There's even this "stagger" system in the game, you do enough damage to something to fill up this bar and for however long this bar stays full you do 2-3x more damage. (Making fights even easier)
The exploration in the game is choppy too, you have a grid based map section that you get to explore in, and you have to interact with certain parts to get over obstacles, or reach the next cutscene or "mini-boss" type encounter to progress the story. The exploration system is sort of like 12's and the interaction is like 10-2. You can't control what you jump over, or when, but when you hit certain spots? Better watch out yo, I can jump like Mario.
So far the game likes to shift you between parties like crazy. You start out with playing as Lightning and another character, Sazh. Sazh, is probably the more entertaining out of the two, although he has that Chris Tucker from Rush Hour vibe to him. He's basically the comic relief at this point, I mean, tall black man, who talks like he's from the hood with a Chocobo living in his afro? After you play around with these two for a short period, it puts you in control of Snow, and his gang of "heroes". Get used to two things from this character, the words "SERAH!!!" and "hero" because he says them A LOT. Three or so hours into the game and he's said them both about 14 or 15 times so far. He reminds me of Tidus in that regard. He claims he's the hero, that he's on a quest to save his love when you don't really get the feeling that he's all that important to the story apart from being the love interest. After your brief stint with Mr. Hero you get shot back to Lightning and her token black friend, continue on, then back to Snow and then you get put with two other characters. Hope, who fills the role of emo problem child, the guy takes to his knees more than a two-dollar whore getting her work day done. He reminds me of Shinji Ikari from the Evangellion series, although with no redeeming qualities that Shinji has (granted he doesn't have many but he does have some!). And Vanille, Vanille is your started cheery jailbait character. She's basically Rikku from Final Fantasy 10, just voiced with a person with a British Accent. Yes an accent. Every single person in this game speaks flat standard English, then you get Vanille and she speaks with an accent, that's poor voice director work if you ask me. She's also the character who has the monologues between cutscenes and at the start of the game.
I'm not going to go into story details, as I'll try to keep this as spoiler free till the final part of my review. But so far what can I say about the story over all? It's rather dull. They just throw you into a situation with no back story as to what's going on, who these people are, why they're fighting, who they're fighting or even where they're fighting. In previous games in the series you got a feel for the characters right off the bat, or they were shortly explained as to what they were or who they were. The game doesn't give you any of this information out front (they do explain some things in the "data log" I'll get more into that in part 2 of my review) and what they do give you is just vague representations that don't really explain much. In final Fantasy IV for instance, you learned right away who the characters were, what's been happening in the world and what some of their motives were. Final Fantasy IX is another good example of good detailing. You get introduced to the major players of the story real quickly, and get told some back story, motives and even some history of what's going on in the world they live in. Maybe I'm just used to having something to go on, but I really don't like the approach that Final Fantasy XIII has taken with a lot of things so far.
I'll wrap this part up with some Pros, Cons and a few other things.
The Good: The graphics. The Music.
The game looks absolutely amazing. The character designs aren't too bad, though some are a little mind boggling. The world looks amazing, and the transition from CGI scenes to game play is pretty soft that it's not really easy to tell when it changes.
The music is stunning like always. For not being a game that has a soundtrack by Uematsu, the person working on it is very subtle. He's worked on Final Fantasy X as a co-composer and you can get the feel that the music from this game is really similar in tone to that game.
The Bad: The Battle System.
The battle system in this game is atrocious. Coming from a long time fan of the series, it's just awful. The only thing that makes it remotely similar to any of the older systems is the "Active Time" system. And even then they've changed that enough that it doesn't really resemble what it should be. Instead of taking an action during it, you can do a series of actions based on how much of the bar you have filled. (Attack twice, use a special ability, attack three times, etc.)
This blog site'll be for all the game reviews I decide to do, because of the size and scope of this game I'm doing it in multiple parts as this is my very first play through of it. I'm not sure how many parts it'll be but this is just my first impressions of the game. I call this game "Final Fantasy - Crystal Lite" because of how little it resembles the series.
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