Final Fantasy is one of the world's best-loved role playing game series. Throughout the years it has barely changed its formula; turn-based battles that offer a constant to-and-fro between hero and enemy, coupled with an engaging story to push the gameplay along. The thirteenth entry in the franchise mixes things up a bit, by letting the story dominate the flow of gameplay.
As a result,
Final Fantasy XIII starts off as an extremely linear experience – something that importers of the Japanese version may have noticed already. But the narrow adventure paths in the first half almost seem a necessary evil –
Final Fantasy XII was lambasted for its confusing and rather odd battle system. The same would no doubt happen in
XIII if there was nothing to help guide the player through the new game mechanics.
In a series where familiarity is king, breaking off from the norm is considered a gross misstep by the fans. And
XIII breaks tradition in more ways than just the linear start, with few town areas to explore, an inability to control all your team members in battle and, of course, the game's appearance on the Xbox 360.
But it's worth sticking with
Final Fantasy XIII regardless, because in the brief segments I played there seemed to be a lot of promise. You journey through the game as one of six characters, whose paths cross when they are marked by their government as l'Cie – magic-wielding servants of the legendary Fal'Cie. Which is bad.
The fate of a marked l'Cie is either death, crystalisation or transformation into a beast. So naturally, lead heroine Lightning and afro-dude Sazh break out of captivity and try to escape the high-tech, futuristic world of Cocoon. This is where the game begins – a daring escape off of a narrow bridge. It's not long before you meet your first military-clad enemy, at which point you endure several interruptions in the form of tutorial boxes that outline different facets of the battle system.
For someone like me, who's not really been too hot on Final Fantasy, these text boxes are rather handy. And while it might seem like there's not a lot to do in combat, as you progress you unlock more and more layers of the battle system, which helps you you understand how each feature fits with another more easily (most RPGs are happy to fling me the entire combat structure with no hints and expect me to figure it out. I don't think so).
The basic process of battle goes like this; you have an Active Time Battle Gauge, which is split up into a number of blocks. You fill up those blocks by selecting moves and manoeuvres from a menu, as you would in a traditional
Final Fantasy game. After selecting an enemy for each move, your chosen moves are acted on once your time bar fills up.
If you really want to kick some arse, the Summons mode makes a grand comeback with allies that are all the more fabulous to watch in high definition. Lightning's Summon is Odin, who has the power to beat down your foes with great force; but the real treat is in the Summons' Gestalt Mode, which makes them transform into various vehicles and objects for greater damage. Odin, for example, turns into a horse, while Snow's Summon features two spirits that combine to create a motorcycle! Sweet.
While you can have a party of up to three in battle, all of your options are limited to the leader. The CPU controls the actions of your teammates, but you can manipulate their style of combat. You can create a list of attributes for each character in your team, called a Paradigm.
Each attribute gives the character a certain attack style or strategy; the Commando mode lets the fighter rush in with close range weapons, Rangers attack from a distance and Medics spend their time healing and supporting the party. At any point during battle you can initiate a Paradigm Shift, which changes the attributes of your party players to suit your current situation. Switching Paradigms is key to tackling bosses and challenging enemies.
In particular, these Shifts came in handy during my second playtest, which was in the huge fields of Grand Pulse. You hit this area much later in the game, once you leave Cocoon and most of the game's quirks have been explained to you. In the distance you can see huge (and small) beasts roam around in real time – there's no random battles to grind through here – and the graphics certainly impress the most at this stage of the game. It feels like you're walking among dinosaurs half the time (although I did spot the odd Cactuar as well – those nippy buggers are hard to beat), and it's great.
The main method of progression here is in completing missions in the open field, which will normally require you to find a particular beast and slay it. There are other challenges as well which help make the tasks a bit more varied, but a lot of the time you'll be kicking some scorpion arse. As you complete missions, more become available to you, and finishing these will get you that much closer to the game's ending.
Of all that I saw however, the elements that spoke the loudest to me was in the game's customisation options. There's a huge number of different options and features that RPG fans get get stuck into in
Final Fantasy XIII, from the character ability upgrades (performed by spending crystals to unlock new powers in a Crystarium) to the creation of whole weapons using various materials and parts.
Final Fantasy XIII may have initially disappointed me when I approached the linearity of the game's start, but as I dug underneath various elements I started to see a lot of time-sapping features that the series is known for. I guess, with the battle system introduction and story-driven gameplay, this could be considered the 'accessible'
Final Fantasy title. Will that work in its favour though? Well, it's out in a month's time for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – time will only tell.
