Final Fantasy XIII is the first of three games in the FF13 set featuring a lovely cast of characters, an engaging story, and creative gameplay.

Rating: T for Teen
Players: 1
Genre: JRPG
System: Xbox 360
Publisher: SquareEnix
Release Date: March 9, 2010

RENT/BUY

Anyone who knows me knows that I am completely obsessed with the Final Fantasy games. Even though X-2 and XII aren’t on the top of my list of favorites (a spot held by IX), I still enjoyed playing through them. So, of course, when I went to pick up this game, I had very high hopes and, admittedly, high expectations. Almost instantly, I’m captivated with the opening cutscenes and find myself squeaking and crying out “Chocobo!” when I get the first glimpse of Sazh’s baby chocobo that lives in his hair.

One thing I both liked and disliked were the characters. The cast spanned a wide spectrum, featuring one of the few black characters, Sazh, in the series’ history, and many personality types not normally focused on. We have the bubbly, compassionate young woman Vanille, then the sullen and sometimes whiny Hope. Snow, who wants to save the world and his fiancee while being everyone’s best friend, is always at ends with Lighting, the headstrong, independent older sister of his fiancee. Then Fang, the mysterious woman you don’t meet until mid- to late-game, rounds out the party. While these characters provide some interesting and entertaining dialogue, after a while you kind of want to slap Hope for whining and wish that Vanille would tone down the bubbly, peppiness.

The story is my favorite part of the whole thing, as it should be. I’ll admit, SquareEnix can rarely do anything wrong in a game in my mind, and they never let me down in terms of story. From the beginning, I was captivated and wanted to work through the grinding and the issues I had with it. Though I knew a little about the history and story before I first loaded up the game, it still surprised me at some of the scenes I had already known about. There’s so much stuff they don’t explain through dialogue, but that’s where the datalog comes into play!

The datalog is the in-game encyclopedia of all the history including information about the l’Cie, fal’Cie, NORA, and other groups/places/etc. There is also a bestiary, a collection of the tutorials, menu explanations, and a story recap that goes chapter-by-chapter. It’s a big help if you want to read up on things that are confusing or that you’re curious about, though if you’re not, it takes a bit of time to clear out everything so the annoying “new information” square doesn’t appear or blink anymore.

I was happy to see the ‘optimize’ option appear in the Equipment menu again. Those are some elements from Final Fantasy 9 and a couple earlier games that make things so much easier. Optimize allows you three choices, basically balanced, attack, and defense, and the game will automatically equip the selected character with the best gear to fit those roles. It helps when you have a lot of gear and can’t quite decide what you want to use… or if you’re just lazy and don’t want to deal with it yourself.

My big complaint about the game is the combat system. Gasp, I know. A lot of people were raving about the combat before the game’s release, calling it creative among other things. It’s not a bad system, by any means, and using it is no more difficult than playing bingo games if you’re an FF newbie, or any of the recent systems in the last few iterations of the franchise. It’s a good system when it comes to being an Active Time system. What really irritates me is that in the beginning you can’t move or block. It’s fun to be able to string attacks together, even if it’s two basic attacks or one special ability, like Lightning’s “Blitz” ability.

Fortunately enough, later on in the game (around the start of Chapter 3) a storyline event allows you the use of magic and more abilities. It also introduces the paradigm element as well as the Crystarium system. As you find out from the very first battle, you can only control your party leader, who is either Lightning, Snow, or Vanille for the first few chapters. The game ends when your party leader dies, so you have to be very careful to not let that character die.

The paradigm system comes into play about this point of the game. It allows you to use a “Paradigm Shift” midcombat to change your party members’ roles in combat. You can turn Vanille from a Ravager who focuses on dealing damage and building up chains, to a Medic that will constantly heal and revive your party. Snow can become a Commando which is essentially the one who designates targets and hits heavy. There’s a few other classes, and each of them are a big help in specific combat situations. You can use default paradigms or customize your own from the main menu. If you press X while highlighting a set, you can change it to your active paradigm that you will start all combat with.

You will also notice that you don’t level up like you have in previous Final Fantasy games. You get CP or Crystarium Points. Some of you may remember the spheregrid from FFX. This is similar, but in my opinion, better. It’s the same principle. You earn CP in battles then spend it to increase stats and learn new abilities. What’s different is instead of having one giant grid where all characters can eventually cross over into other characters spheres, each character has a crystarium tree for each paradigm role they can fulfill. Vanille, for example, has a Ravager tree and a Medic tree. Lighting, likewise, has a Commando and Ravager tree. Some characters have three different roles, like Hope’s Ravager, Medic, and Synergist, that they can act as, and therefore get three branches.

New Crystarium branches appear after key boss fights, so you don’t always have a constant supply of abilities to work toward. Some characters will also learn new classes as you get further in the game. The joys of not always having abilities in whatever tree you want to specialize in is that any stat-boosting skill you learn in any tree is still applied. So if you have some HP boosting or stat pumping talents in, say, the Ravager tree and you’re focusing as a Medic, you can still get them and have them applied to the character.

In combat, you have a ranking system which consists of 0 to 5 stars after each battle. The more stars you get, the better chance for better loot and SP you have. It gets frustrating when you 5-star everything until one random battle. Not that it really matters how often you 5-star in the long run, except on the Cei’th Stone missions and the final battle, but it’s still a pride issue with some of us more… hardcore completionist JRPG players.

Another issue I had was the grinding. Yes, it’s true that you have to do a lot of combat to get SP so you can fill out your skill trees, and it is time consuming, but for fans of this game and the series itself, it’s nothing new. Sure, it’s tiring. I’ll admit that I can’t stand it. It’s not so much a downside for those that don’t mind combat, but for people like me, it gets tiring because it keeps us from the plot and pretty, pretty cutscenes.

Despite the complains about PS3 owners losing content from the Japanese version because of the translation of the game to the Xbox 360 due to rumors of not wanting a 4th disc, I was happy with the 3 discs. It reminded me of the earlier playstation 1 games where you would get the “please insert disc 2″ screen at the end of each. There’s a moment of happiness and accomplishment when you get to change discs for the first time. Maybe that’s just me though.

I haven’t made my way through the entirety of this 3-disc epic mainly because of doing some grinding and limited time because of school and other things, but in the end, I definitely recommend this game as a buy for any Final Fantasy fan as it is a wonderful addition to the series. JRPG fans as well will probably love this game. If you’re new to the RPG genre or you don’t like the idea of long periods of grinding, I’d suggest renting it first and see if it is something that you’re into before dropping the $60 on it.