Your six character party and the extended cast is mostly made up of people I wouldn’t cross the road to save, and with so many cutscenes in the game you’ll have plentiful opportunities to build up a seething resentment towards them and their lovely hair. The core group of characters is led by the much-despised Lightning, who I actually like, since she’s a functionally identical protagonist to FFVII’s Cloud and FFVIII’s Squall in being a grumpy, spiky-haired warrior with a cool yet utterly impractical sword. The story, set in the two warring states of sci-fi city Coccoon and the wildlands of Gran Pulse, follows a mostly irritating group of characters who are cursed by gods known as the Fal’cie into fulfilling their destiny-which I think, feeling my way through the impenetrable terminology, is saving the world.
The first 20 hours of Final Fantasy XIII are like a long tutorial, just walking in a straight line between battles and cutscenes. This controlled levelling is highlighted by the frequent difficulty spikes in boss battles. Enjoy it, though, because it’s the only real freedom that Final Fantasy XIII offers, and even in the case of Paradigm Shifts and the Crystarium, they put a ceiling on progression throughout the story so it’s hard to ever overpower the party members. It’s a little like a board game in the way you unlock new skills and stat boosts based on how you spend experience points. This is underlined by a somewhat freeform progression system called the Crystarium. Every battle gives you a rating out of five based on speed and efficiency, so there’s a sense of racing against yourself to throw the right tactics together. The eventual goal is to stagger the enemy by mixing up attacks until the bar on the right hand corner of the HUD reaches full-after which, you get a brief window to perform more damage. Setting up pre-loaded sets of strategies and using them to control the flow of battles is a brilliant bit of in-depth and systems-driven design ingenuity, the sort of idea Final Fantasy has always been very good at. One of the better parts of this is being able to create new paradigms in the menu outside of battle, to mix and match classes to my preference-so if I want three characters to focus on ravager abilities, I can set that up and load it next time I’m in a fight.
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