Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 4: Finally Finished

With story mode anyway. Story mode... not sure why I called it that, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. FF13 is two games. First you play through the linear story going from chapters 1 to 13, and after you beat it you get to play the second game. You can play the "other game" a little bit in chapter 11 but you aren't really supposed to. What you are supposed to do is wait until after the credits have rolled, and only then can you play what sometimes seems like the REAL Final Fantasy.

I knew from the beginning that you could continue playing after defeating the final boss. I knew this because the strategy guide told me from the very beginning. It's authors went out of their way to tell me not to bother power leveling my characters or items until "much later in the game" (Chapter 11). Once I got to "much later in the game" they encouraged me to quickly return to the main plot. It's not until after you beat the game that you are supposed to do the side quests.

Why wait? Because the final level of the crystarium isn't unlocked until after you beat the last boss. I knew this, but I was under the impression that the game just continues after the credits. I thought it would let you keep on running around doing shit and explain it as, "you beat the evil boss and your reward is to run around Pulse killing shit." This isn't the case however. After the credits you are asked if you want to save your game. When you do, you are transported to a save point just before the last boss, and it's like you never fought him! There's nothing wrong with this I guess, it's just so ass-backward. Why did they do it that way? Maybe they wanted you to be only so powerful for the last fight. It's a little jarring that's all.

Anyway the game is great. Not GREAT great, just regular. I've had fun with it and I'm sure I'll put just as much more time into it as I already have.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 3

Warning, minor story spoilers!

40+ hours in:

So I've reached the part of the game where things branch out a bit. I'm on chapter 11 where the party has finally arrived on Pulse, the giant world that the much smaller Cocoon floats above. There is a very nice cut scene involving an airship just before the party gets there, and then another impressive one right after that. The second is a montage of Pulse with some voice-over exposition that showcases some of the world's more fantastic features. So that was fun. Pretty soon after getting to Pulse you get to the first real open area in the game. There are some monsters here that are gargantuan and are not meant to be taken on at this point in the game. It's cool to see what you have to aspire to in the late game. This area is also the first opportunity to take on a sidequest and go somewhere other than the next checkpoint. The game has missions that are a lot like XII's hunts. You track down a specific beastie, subdue it, and receive some high quality rewards. You can do the missions more than once but you'll only get the reward once.

In my last addendum I mentioned that at the beginning of chapter 10 you get to choose your party. Well right after I posted that I got a little further and the "crystarium" opened up so that all characters can learn all job rolls. This diminishes my earlier criticism of the linearity of the progression system but only a little. First it sucks that it took 30+ hours of play before I get to choose who does what. Second it's still pretty linear, you're just choosing between 6 lines now instead of three. Third the three extra rolls each character has are much more expensive to develop that their primary rolls, encouraging you to stick to the primaries. Finally each character's primary rolls offer a much better spread of abilities. For example, Snow is designed to be the best sentinel as he gets great stats and all of the sentinel abilities. However if you wanted to make him a healer and developed his medic roll you would find that he gets much fewer abilities than Hope does. The characters are designed to be specific things, so there isn't much point to developing their extra rolls until you've completed the primaries. So mad about that.

Also a little irritated by the eidolons. In order to get them you have to fight them. Nothing new there, it's a standard of the series. Only now you're not so much fighting them as you are auditioning for them. It's like a summoning tryout. You have to figure out which abilities they like and then use those abilities in the battle to fill a Gestalt gauge (this game is big on gauges). Fill the gauge and hit the X button and it transforms into these awkward "vehicles" that look like they were made from K'nex, and you get to ride them. That's a cool idea in theory but there's nothing I hate more in a game than not knowing what to do. Maybe it's just my personal psychology but I don't want to fight a battle AND solve a puzzle, that's not fun for me. I realized that the whole thing is kind of like a mating dance. You're trying to discover how to attract this strange and wondrous creature to you before it bites your head off. Of course I was never good at that sort of thing... WHICH IS WHY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. Or maybe it's the other way around. My failings at social interaction aside I like the idea but it still feels a little to trail-and-error-ish to me. The last one I fought I more or less knew what I had to do, but finding the perfect paradigm to fill the gauge in time (did I mention there was a time limit?) took me about seven tries. I was at the controller throwing stage by the end of it.

Did I mention this game is hard? It's freaking hard.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 2

I'm at 30+ hours now, and at the beginning of chapter 10. Just got to the point where I have everyone together and I can choose who is in my party, so I'm excited about that. Got to pick who I wanted for the boss fight at the end of chapter 9. I decided I wanted to switch out Fang and bring in Sazh to join Lightning and Hope. This allows me to have a Commando and two Synergists for the openings, a Commando and two Ravagers for offensive chaining, Two medics and a Synergist for when I get in trouble, and two Commandos and a Ravager to finish things off. It's worked out pretty well so far.

In my review I don't think I made it clear just how gorgeous this game is. I don't usually care to much about graphics but it's hard not to be impressed by every environment and model. The battles are really spectacular. They did a great job with the spells, which are flying around constantly. The fights are chaotic and because of the speed at which they progress and the prevalence of flashy spells and attacks they are a joy to watch.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 1

So It's been out for 10 days. I've had it for 9. A lot has been said about it in that time, some have spoken praise and some have spoken words of derision, including people who's opinions I hold in high esteem. But now I'm going to have my say. The following is my initial impression of the game. I'm currently about half way through the main story (chapter 8 of 13) and have logged 24 hours of play time.

The curse of the Final Fantasy series is that it's never really final. There are 13 of them (including X-2 and excluding XI) and every new installment has to been held up to all those that have come before. As perhaps the most celebrated RPG series in the world, living up to your predecessors is no small challenge. There is folly in comparing the games however because each one stands alone as its own complete experience, the installments having only token similarities that are really more like traditions than rules. Perhaps the greatest Final Fantasy tradition is to break with the standards of previous games. What makes a Final Fantasy game then isn't so much what it has in common with the others but what it does differently. Invariably fans will cry foul, declaring that the series has been ruined, screaming of sacrilegious changes to familiar formulas and calling for designers' resignations. I believe the whole point of Square Enix's flagship series is to push the company to produce something that is both familiar and totally new at the same time. Well with Final Fantasy XIII they have certainly done that.

So I know it's ironic given what I just said, but I'm going to start of by comparing XIII to another game. More than anything else this game reminds me of FFX. The story is similar. It’s about a small band of people who's mission will likely spell their doom whether they succeed or not. They both have a progression system that abandons traditional levels in exchange for a branching path that increments attributed one at a time. They are both highly linear games with limited opportunities for sidequests or exploration. Finally, they are both the first Final Fantasy games for their respective console generations, setting new standards for graphical excellence.

So there's that comparison. Now lets talk about what makes XIII unique, and we'll start with the obvious, the battle system. Back in 1991 Square put out FFIV and with it a new battle system called the Active Time Battle system. ATB changed the way we fought battles from a turn based system to one in which time "flows" and characters act when their individual ATB gauges fill, usually a function of their speed stat. Since FFIV every game since has had some variation of the ATB system (with the exception of FFX).

FFXIII's variation is the most radical yet. Your character has a bar that fills like normal only now the bar has segments and different actions use up different numbers of filled segments. This means that you don’t have to wait for your bar to fill completely before executing an action. For example a basic attack only costs one segment. If you had a bar with two segments filled you can hit a button and use up the first two segments to instantly perform two attacks. If you had the third segment half filled it would carry over to the first segment, so you it wouldn’t be wasted. This can be useful if you know an enemy is only going to take two more hits to kill. You can finish it off quickly and move on to the next without having to wait for the bar to fill.

It doesn’t stop there. Did you notice before I said “your character” has a bar? It’s singular for a reason. In battle you directly control one lead character. The other characters in your party (max party size is three) are controlled by the computer and their actions are dictated by whatever their paradigm roll is; more on rolls in a moment. So what happens if your one controllable character dies? Game Over. This means that paramount to anything else is your lead character’s health.

So what are rolls and paradigms? Rolls are like the job classes of the past, only instead of a job with a mix of actions that could span attack and defense the rolls are strategic foci and are highly specialized. When assigned to a roll a character will do one specific thing; a commando attacks, a medic heals, a sentinel defends, a synergist buffs, etc. There is no crossover. A medic cannot do a simple weapon attack for example. The paradigms are pre-set roll assignments for the characters in your party. Paradigms can by shifted on the fly during battle. So you can go from having a commando and two ravagers (a second attacking roll used to drive up a chain gauge, more on that in a moment too) to having a sentinel, medic, and synergist with the push of a button (OK two pushes and some stick work). This would be useful if you were low on health and needed to shore up your defenses.

So what then is a chain gauge? Each enemy you fight has a chain gauge along with their health bar. Buy damaging the enemy their chain gauge will fill up. When the gauge is full the enemy becomes staggered and will take more damage. Staggering enemies is a vital part of FFXIII’s battle system. The whole thing works like this. Enemies have weaknesses that when exploited will drive their chain gauge up faster. Ravagers can cast elemental magic and perform elementally charged physical attacks. You either use a librascope (an item) to scan the enemy’s weakness or let the AI figure it out by trail and error. The ravager’s pound the enemy with its weakness element while a commando, just by being there, slows the chain gauge’s recovery. The enemy gets staggered and the commando starts doing beaucoup damage until it is dead or it recovers from the stagger. Rinse, repeat. And that’s your combat system folks.

So I mentioned that the progression system is like FFX’s. There are no character levels, just stats that are boosted one at a time. FFX had the sphere grid which let you occasionally choose which path you wanted your character’s development to take. FFXIII is similar but instead of a grid you have this weird crystal lattice thing. Each character has three rolls that they can be assigned for the main portion of the game (you get more after you beat the story). Each roll has a path with stat nodes on it. Spend Crystal Points (experience points basically) and you can move along the path from one node to another. Occasionally you can choose whether or not to branch off the main path but this usually only leads to one side node and then you’re back on the main path again. At first glace it has the appearance of giving you a choice but it’s really pretty linear. The only choice is deciding which roll to level up first. The crappy thing is that you can’t power level at all in the main story. Your crystal paths will come to an end and you have to wait until the next chapter of the game before more of the path opens up.

The third big change is the way you get equipment. Every save point is also a store. It’s like a futuristic shopping terminal. You can access stores virtually through the terminal… and I guess they beam you the products you buy Star Trek style. It’s a neat idea that doesn’t make a lot of sense but whatever. There are no traditional stores in the game, you just use the save points. You can equip a weapon and at least one accessory to protect you or confer some ability. Weapons and accessories have levels, and herein lies the true method of power leveling. Enemies you kill drop loot instead of money. You can sell the loot or you can use certain types of loot called components to upgrade your weapons and accessories. This is a game in and of itself with a complicated system for determining how much a component improves an item. Since you can keep fighting enemies and collecting loot you could theoretically build up a really strong character early in the game. However, because of how long this would take it’s really not worth investing a lot of time on loot farming until later in the game.

Well there’s the synopsis of the game. So what are my impressions of FFXIII? For starters let me just say that bottom line, it’s a good game. Is it an amazing, perfect 10? No. What I think Square Enix was trying to do was create a more cinematic and action-oriented game than Final Fantasy games of the past. The battle system is designed to be streamlined and fast moving, and it is! There are times when the flurry of attacks and the rapid shifting of paradigms create a truly exciting game play experience. The thing I don’t like about it is not being able to control all three characters. It was a cool idea and most of the time I dig the paradigm system. But sometimes I just want a character to do a very specific thing and I can’t tell them to do it. All I can do is paradigm shift and prey the AI figures it out. I wouldn’t mind it so much except you can’t dictate who your leader is, that’s determined by where you are in the story. I’ve always found it annoying in FF games when I’m stuck with a certain group of characters but at least in past games I could control those characters. So, it’s an interesting idea SquareEnix but next time no thanks.

The second problem I have is the pacing of the game. Like I said, they made it very cinematic. There are tons of cutscenes! These scenes tell the story at regular intervals throughout the game. The trouble is that they tend to break up the action too much. In past FFs you would enter a new area, have a cutscene, play through the area having many battles, get to the boss, cutscene, boss fight, cutscene, next area. In FFXIII you’ll have a cut scene at the beginning and end of each area but you’ll also have three or four during passage through the area. That could actually be pretty cool except that you only get two or three battles between each cut scene. At first this was OK but as I got towards the middle of the story I found that both the cutscenes and the battles were getting tedious. The battles would get really long because the enemies were stronger but they weren’t interesting enough to justify the length. The cutscenes stopped being impressive around chapter 6. I wish they would just put it all in one big scene and sum it up so I can get back to playing the game. I’ve read elsewhere that the momentum picks back up in the latter third of the game. We shall see.

Hands down, the weakest part of the game is the crystal leveling thing. Like I said before it doesn’t give you the freedom to develop your character as you might think it would. Really it just feels like work. Instead of leveling up my character automatically they make me do it, but the experience doesn’t have any appeal or feel rewarding. I’m just holding a button while watching a line and some crystals light up. On top of that the whole thing is presented in this 3D crystal model which is pretty to look at but unwieldy to use. It’s just too much trouble when I have to use the thing every ten minutes. Something like the sphere grid from FFX or even better the license grid from FFXII would have been a better choice.

That’s the bad stuff. On the plus side the graphics and amazing; even on my dinosauric standard definition TV. The story is pretty good. It’s your standard Final Fantasy story. It’s not going to win any awards but it’s engaging none the less. It’s interesting enough that I’m anxious to see how it turns out. OH! And they get a big thumbs-up for putting a story summary in the game that you can read at any time. I love it when RPGs do that, and they really went all out creating an encyclopedia with people, places, history, and the game summary that updates as you go. The characters are your typical Final Fantasy characters. They can be annoying but none of them are as obnoxious as Brother from FFX/FFX-2 so fear not.

I really do enjoy the battle system despite its flaws. The paradigm system is fun and exciting. The biggest impact of the new battle system is that it increases the difficulty of the game. Having the loss of one character end the game creates plenty of opportunities for failure. I don’t think I’ve ever died this much in a Final Fantasy and that’s a good thing. Finally, I like the weapon upgrade mini game a lot. It’s fun the way the bazaar from FFXII was fun, but it’s a little more straight forward too which is nice. I just wish it played a bigger roll in the early game.

I don’t give games number ratings because I think they’re misleading. All I can say is that I have had fun with the game and plan to spend a lot more time with it. I would recommend it to fans of Final Fantasy and RPG fans in general provided they take into account the negatives I mentioned. If you’re too much of a traditionalist you may just want to go back a play an early FF over again. I can’t say that I’d recommend paying $60 for the game either. It’s $60 worth of game no doubt, and I don’t feel like I wasted my money. However, I’ll bet most folks could stand to wait a while longer until the price drops. If you’ve never played an RPG before this may be a good place to start. It’s simpler than a lot of other RPGs out there, and it might appeal to a more action oriented player.

As I continue to play the game I’ll add updates and let you all know how I enjoyed the latter half of the game.

It's Been Four Years, I Can Wait Nine Hours

So It's 0100 on Wednesday the Tenth of March, which means two things. First my Dad is an hour into his birthday, Happy Birthday! WOOO! And second Final Fantasy XIII has been available in North America for a day and an hour. Due to the cancer in my life that is my job I have not been able to pick it up yet. The Universe is testing me... but I shall prevail. I've been waiting for this game since 2006, I can wait until GameStop opens at 1000 this morning.

The Price of War

I beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran yesterday, leaving me with just Fallout 3 to finish before I feel ready for Final Fantasy XIII. It was a satisfying win to be sure but I was surprised that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There were certainly some really hard levels. I mentioned Takedown in the last post and I feel I must bring up Contingency and Loose Ends as well. These three levels are exercises in pain. In a lower difficulty Contingency isn't that bad but on veteran you have to finish a certain part in a 3 minute time limit. This negates the essential strategy for beating veteran which is to go slow and take your time. For a level like Takedown it's a strategy you must employ but in Contingency you have to run through as fast as you can and I found myself doing something that bordered on trial and error, running through it 20+ times trying something a little different each time. Loose Ends is a level that just pisses me off, there's no other way to put it. It was a pain in the ass on regular and it was a rage inducing shit-fest on veteran. The whole level is a paper cut and lemon juice festival but the last segment is just one big kick-in-the-balls-cake with a big fuck-you-cherry on top. I'm not going to spoil it for you, if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't be prepared. I'm not kidding, the game literally gives you a big fuck-you at the end as a special thanks for playing.

Those three levels aside, it wasn't that hard. My basis for comparison is Call of Duty 2 in which every level is agonizing on hardened and up. I really like MW2 though. It may be the best shooter I've ever played. You feel like you are in a summer blockbuster, every second is a fantastic set-piece battle. Having gone through it twice I was still eager to go back and find all the intel items, which I did on recruit. Let me tell you, recruit is an entirely different game. Parts that on veteran would take you 30 minutes to slog through take 30 seconds as you execute a brisk walk through a raging firefight. The difficulty levels in a Call of Duty game are kind of like a spectrum ranging from arcade to simulation only instead of arcade having more enemies it has less which makes it not as fun. That's what they need for the next game, a mode with recruit level damage but a veteran or more level of enemies. I'd play it.

On a bitter-sweet note I just got 10 great cds for 30 bucks. The bitter sweet part is that it was from a going out of business sale for my favorite used cd store. Damn this recession, damn this recession to hell!

Preorder

A few days ago I preordered Final Fantasy XIII along with the collector’s edition guide book. I know this goes contrary to my normal practice of buying games more than a year after they come out and at a fraction of the price but part of the reason I do that is so every few years I can afford to buy the newest Final Fantasy game. The total between the game and the book will be over $90. Well worth it (hey I could have spent $120 on Tony Hawk Ride). Final Fantasy is the exception to my rule. Which rule? All of them. I am not the kind of person who gets excited easily. Things that get most people worked up to a frothing frenzy of joyous anticipation usually only manage to induce from me a shrug and a muttered "meh". But for Final Fantasy I am what could be modestly described as a fanboy. And to be a Final Fantasy Fanboy (or F3 if you will) you pretty much have to be unimpressed by things. You have to have an unhealthy amount of patience and the uncanny ability to distract yourself from diabolically long development times. FF13 has been in development since before 12 came out. That was in 2006. That was four years ago. It's a good thing the games are so long you can spend at least some of that time hooked up to the Final Fantasy intravenous drip, a few precious months where the black muddy cloud of life can be diluted by a water-color rainbow. When you're chasing the dragon the rest of the grime smeared world fades away behind you, your vision tunnels as if approaching the speed of light, and the ground falls away beneath you while you float without effort suspended by naught but your neurons in the humming syrupy aether. At this point the existence of self is barely credible, an argument held aloft by a chorus of laughing sub atomic particles mankind will forever lack the fortitude of spirit to discover.
So yeah, March 9th, woo-hoo.

My task now is to complete all of my other self imposed gaming obligations so that my plate will be squeaky clean for the advent. This will mostly consist of trying to finish Fallout 3 to a satisfactory extent. That last sentence is a fool’s errand in and of itself. Epic poems could be written about "finishing" a game like Fallout 3. The word "sisyphean" comes to mind. On top of that I've decided to try and beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran. If you've read previous posts you have an idea of my relationship with Infinity Ward and their venerable franchise. Challenging their dreaded hard mode is an act of suicidal self destruction that has produced in me fits of rage so pure they result in memory loss and permanent increases in blood pressure. These are periods of my life where I can only recall the aftermath; as if I awoke to stumble from my basement storm shelter and found that my home was no longer there. They call it "veteran" instead of "hard" because you come out the other side with post-traumatic stress disorder; like you've lived through something that will be read about in textbooks by bored school children. No man knows how he will die, but for me I would put money on a Call of Duty-induced heart attack or stroke. The description for veteran says, "You will not survive". They are not talking about the game.

I'm optimistic though. I'm already half way through it and the hardest level of the game, "Takedown" is behind me. As for Fallout 3, if I just concentrate on completing the official missions I could feasibly be finished by the end of the month. But then there are the expansions and the temptation to play through again as an evil character... and then again as a neutral one...

The New Toy part 2

So why the 360? I'll start with the small reasons. Price really wasn't a big issue but I suppose it mattered. Obviously the 360 is cheaper, but it can be argued that the PS3 plays blue ray disks and the online is free. Still the price difference is pretty big, 100 to 200 dollars currently. I don't know I guess price really didn't play too big a roll since you can compare system features and bundles until your face turns blue. I spend several hundred dollars on games a year anyway so whatever.

I think one big thing that got me was that most of my friends had 360s already and being able to play with them was a draw. I'm not usually into doing the popular thing, but in this case it pays off. I have old school friends all around the country, California, Virginia, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, even a friend stationed in Italy (who's never friggin online). If they all had PS3s would I have a PS3 now? It would be more likely.

Another thing that drew me in was achievements. The community has grown to have a love/hate attitude toward achievements. Some people think too much emphasis is put on them and that they distract from gameplay. Other people say they create new reasons to play a game and provide more to do. Others are obsessed with bumping their gamerscore. Others hate the people who are obsessed with boosting their score and couldn't give a crap about their own. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. Back before the system came out I was reading about the features and the magazine that had the article described achievements as a way for gamers who aren't into climbing online leaderboards and prefer more single player games to show off what they have accomplished. At that time I wasn't really into online play (and was under-enthusiastic about the online revolution in video games) and I was intrigued with the idea of a gamerscore. Now I have to admit that I am one of those people who are obsessed with it. Getting an achievement is a great feeling and I like seeing my gaming habit tied to an ever-growing number. I even track my gamerscore in a spreadsheet, how nerdy is that? Very. So do I think achievements are ruining my gameing experience, distracting me from the gameplay? Can an addict admit he has a problem?

Getting off topic. A third reason I chose the Xbox360 is the games. Now most of the big games that come out now come out for both systems. There are few noteworthy exclusive titles (percentage-wise). However, It seems like the 360 exclusives are more frequent. I don't have numbers to back that up it just seems that way. I only own a couple at the moment, one of which is Forza 2 (which is awesome and I may have to do a post on why its better than the GT series). Shit, I'm beating around the bush here, allow me to knock that off.

The only game I really care about is Final Fantasy XIII. Originally this game was going to be exclusive to PS3. At E3 last year it was announced that this was no longer so. Coffin nail. In my last post I claimed that I was not a fanboy. This is true to the extent that it does not include Final Fantasy. I will always buy Final Fantasy games. Even if they came out with a really crappy one I would buy it blindly and the next one as well. I short, I like them. When that announcement was made I was already leaning towards the Xbox and that was the final deciding factor.

So now that I have had the system for a few months, what do I think about it? I shall evaluate it in a future post.