I had some expectations for Final Fantasy XIII. Then I read about 20 reviews before release, which focused and refined my expectations. Now that I am playing it, I want to revisit my expectations from the reviews and see how my impressions matched up or anything that I thought would be nice to know but did not see mentioned in the reviews. Spoilers kept to a minimum; played on PS3.
Linearity
This pops up in all the reviews, and it is accurate so far. I have also seen it described as “streamlined” which is a description I would recommend given my RPG preference; I never use a guide a first time through, and I refuse to leave any treasure behind. In most games, this means looking at every dead end turn and every corner of a map. This is always a bit of a pain with random battles (though it gets some grinding out of the way); with no random battles in FFXIII, we have no problem there. A related annoyance is that whenever I come to a crossroads in these games, I have to try to figure out the “wrong” (i.e. non-story advancing) path so that I don’t miss anything. While years of RPG experience usually can get me down the “wrong” path, it is always annoying to accidentally advance the story when you really didn’t want to. FFXIII’s pointer eliminates that problem, as you can run around and explore everywhere that is not in the direction of the arrow (even if it is a smallish area).
Battle System
Reviews mostly praise the battle system but state that it takes a long time to get built up. The impression I got from reviews was that combat would be blandish and limited to groups of two until the 15-20 hour mark they all reference when things open up. I will say that the first 2 or 3 hours of combat (I was obviously playing after midnight, so don’t remember exactly how far in :-) ) is pretty humdrum as you are mostly limited to the “attack” command. This boils down to hitting auto battle, selecting the target, and maybe using a potion if things get ugly. Luckily, the beginnings of the story, meeting the characters, and just being excited about FFXIII should easily carry you through this early portion. I am happy to say that you will be fighting with three characters pretty early on as well, though the team is constantly switching. These parts give you a feel for having to monitor three characters plus enemies on the screen while inputting commands, which will need to be second nature eventually. The system gets much more exciting when you get access to the classes for each character; I won’t go too much into this as I think the reviews have covered it well. Let’s just say that exploring the battle system has been just as gratifying (if not more so) as exploring a town, and far more exciting.
Character Progression
I was expecting to have very little to decide this early in the game. Reviews had me thinking that you would reach the set caps really quickly, making progression a non-factor during the beginning of the game. Perhaps it is too soon in the game to have reached what they are referring to, as I fight every monster and would love to have extra CP (points used to buy character upgrades) to fill out the limited ability trees that I have access to. I am constantly figuring out where the points are best spent and figuring out what bonus or ability makes the most sense to head towards for each character. Maybe things will be different a little farther in, but for now it is very enjoyable.
Story
Some reviews were hot on the story, some not. Five hours in I probably can’t say too much, but one element has struck me as at least pleasant. In most JRPGs, the “unlikely band of heroes” is “bound by fate” to come together and save the world. Seems to me that what they usually mean by bound by fate is that your characters have a loose excuse to work together, and “fate” is the excuse to make sure that they really do end up sticking it out together. I won’t go into more detail about this, but consistent motivation makes things that much more believable. In the case of FFXIII, the characters have a legitimate reason to stay together; they are bound to the same team, given the same goal, and they are more or less alone. Now, why certain characters were around when this event happened you could question, but overall they do a convincing job. For the record, I think I did see this point mentioned in one review, but certainly not in most.
Conclusion
Hopefully this gives some details you could not glean out of the many reviews, or at least cleaned up what the reviewers meant in a more specific manner. How have your guy’s first few hours gone? Did I miss something? Questions?
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