Final Fantasy XIII Review : Micromanagement Promotion

I have finished the tutorial section of the game (so about 20 hours in).  The newly revamped active time battle system has created a fast paced strategy/puzzle game with an RPG wrapper.  Not all of the other aspects of the game are up to the same level, but luckily those can be easily ignored, leaving just a entertaining and challenging battle system.

A couple of somewhat minor gameplay changes have a significant impact on the game by significantly cutting down on the repetition and grinding.  I play games for fun and these changes allow me to focus more on what I find fun in this game.

1. The majority of battles are unique and present a challenge
2. Health is refilled and debuffs (poison, magics, etc.) are removed at the end of every battle
3. Both during a fight or immediately after losing a fight, you have the option to “retry”, which places you right outside of the last encounter, allowing you to make the necessary setup changes to your group before re-engaging, or allowing you to bypass the fight completely if possible
4. The linear nature of the maps allows you to know where you are going and significantly cuts down on the pointless wandering of its predecessors

With those changes mentioned let me go over the main aspect of the game, the combat system.  The combat happens in real time, with an action meter filling constantly, no more turn based battles and watching the same fire spell be cast and the same boring burning effect take place on the character.  Yeah it’s cool to see Odin summoned and take out a couple monsters, but watching that same cutscene hundreds of times a game is not fun.  Luckily this isn’t the case here.  Once action meter is full, it will execute the actions that you have selected.  You can select actions that consume a segment of the meter (or multiple segments for a more powerful action),  or you can select “auto-battle” and your actions will be automatically selected to fill the meter for you.  Now, although this does sound like it is removing the decisions from the game, the majority of the decisions are made at a higher level.  This game promotes the player from the micro manager they had been made into in the previous games to a more hands-off manager that makes the larger decisions.  This is much more fun.  The thing most JRPGs have been missing is a repeat last set of actions button.  I hate the grind and repetition.  XIII doesn’t avoid this completely but if you customize an attack there is a repeat button to have the character repeat those same actions, and you can avoid a good number of enemies if you want.

The real strategic decisions are made by deciding the roles that your characters should be performing at any moment.  Your team is usually made up of 3 characters, although not always.  The one combat twist is staggering.  Each enemy has a stagger meter and filling up this meter will stagger an enemy leaving them much more vunerable to damage.  The classes break down to this, Attacker, Staggerer, Tank, Medic, Player Buffer and Enemy debuffer.  Since you start every battle with full health no reason to have a medic right?, so your style is up to you, start off getting buffed and debuffing enemy or just come out all attack and hope to take out an enemy before you need to switch to a setup that has a medic.  Now when getting healed, do you want to have your other characters still attacking or maybe distracting the enemy so they don’t kill the medic.  Each set of charater roles is called a paradigm and so switching between this is called a paradigm shift.  So once you get past the naming, this is where the heart of the game is, and it’s great.  At any point during a fight you can call for a paradigm shift and all of your team members change what the are doing to correspond to their new role.  So although you could get through a good number of the fights but just staying in one setup like (Attacker, Stagger and medic) it would be much longer and ultimately boring.  Also the harder enemies and especially bosses would not succumb to that.  So the goal is figuring out the balance, figuring out when you can go all out, and when you need to defend and heal.  The battles have a decent variety.  You don’t face fight after fight of 3 monster x and one monster y.  You get introduced to a new enemy type and then fight 3 of type “A” and one of type “B”, after that maybe 2 and 2.  The variety combined with the scoring system makes the game a puzzle strategy game if you want to approach it that way.  After each fight you get a report and are rated based on the time it took you beat the enemy with a score of 0 to 5 stars.  So figuring out how to beat each encounter and get a 5 star rating is where the strategy puzzle aspect comes in.  Sure you could beat those guys in 2 mins if you had a medic the whole time, but you won’t get 5 stars so can you do it and get the 5 stars?  This simple mechanic and the variety of tactics that it takes to beat each enemy type with a 5 star rating is what keeps the game working for me, especially paired with the simplicity of restarting battles and linear maps.

The game does have issues though, but luckily most of them can be overlooked.  First I hate the characters and especially the English voice actors.  They are all straight terrible and I’m so sick of these JRPG character types.  But that being said you can skip every cut scene easily and it doesn’t hurt the gameplay at all.  I watched the first parts but got so annoyed and begin skipping all and it was the most freeing experience I’ve had playing these games.  I normally have felt that I played these games to see the story, but haven’t been impressed with JRPG story telling in a long time and skipping all the cut scenes no matter how pretty the graphics is so worth it.  Also the upgrade system for each character role is done in this awkward and unusable 3D environment.  The upgrade system is essentially a line with a couple branches coming off and there is no reason for it to be in 3D.  It just makes it confusing and a waste of time.  Dead space has the exact same upgrade system (as do many other games) but they are all done in 2D because that makes sense.  I also hate the weapon and accessory upgrade system.  I’m not going into how it functions, except to say, they made it complicated for no good reason.  This system is so annoying and unrewarding that I recommend just reading a FAQ, figuring out which weapon you want each character to use and then just stick with that one for the game.  That way you can avoid the grinding and upgrading system as much as possible.

In summation, the battle system when treated like a real time, tactical puzzle game is fun and rewarding, and I’m happy they have moved beyond the micromanagement and focused on strategic decisions.  Because what I find fun is a challenge.  I love a good story and characters too, but I’ll look elsewhere for that.