Final Fantasy XIII - Battle system

 If there's one thing that I can rightly comment on about Final Fantasy XIII, it would be the battle system. A lot of talk has gone into how this system has made battles more fast paced, fun, and at the same time breaking down the tedium of random battles. After playing this game for over a day, I can honestly say that I don't agree with any of it. This is, of course, my opinion, and I have to look at it from the viewpoint of two separate gamers that live inside my head. It's important to think about, I think, because this game really marks a strange bit of RPG evolution that may or may not be good in the future.

 The whole idea really seemed to come from the monotony of the grind, and how to make that more accessible to the common gamer. Squeenix was really hoping for newcomers to the series, and you can tell in the way the battles are structured. It really comes across as some mix between Xenogears/Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy : Dissidia. Three characters fight in each battle, and because the action is so heavy and lightning fast, the system put in place was one that charged up the ATB to provide more than one action at a time. Instead of throwing one attack into the air, the character would have a queue of attacks to unleash in a string. You only control the main character, so it's not the most complicated thing in the world. It's not even all that different from a regular RPG, because even though you have this series of attacks, you're still just pressing the auto attack button as one single attack command. Nothing really changed much when you break it all down, but it's so fast paced that the illusion of change is there.

 In order to fight effectively, you need to use your "paradigms" carefully. These are set roles that a party member can play, and there are six to choose from. The Medic is self-explanatory, the Sentinel is basically a defense heavy tank that soaks up damage and draws fire away from the more fragile members of the party, the Saboteur and Synergist are roles that focus on enemy debuffs and ally buffs, and the Commando and Ravager complete the list as offense heavy roles. When going into a boss batttle, for example, you would set your party as a Sentinel/Medic, Synergist, and Saboteur to make sure that you're in no immediate danger while throwing out all of your status buffs while weakening the enemy at the same time. When all of the pieces are in place, you perform a paradigm hotswap towards the offensive side of the spectrum. Each fight needs a different strategy.

 One fight, for example, had me fighting a gunship that all but required me to use a Medic/Sentinel/Commando group with extremely limited offensive output. The reason was that there were about 5 turrents unleashing attacks on me every second, and I needed to make sure that there was a huge amount of defense preventing me from dying. Lightning, my hardest hitting character, needed to take out a couple of guns to take the overwhelming heat off of me by herself. It took time, but as the guns went down I was able to occasionally hotswap a little more firepower for a turn at a time, then immediately switch back to keeping characters alive. There is strategy to it, and each battle remains different, yet completely the same.

 I mention Dissidia as a clear influence on this game because of the "stagger" mechanic that's incorporated into every fight. Your Commando role bases itself off the strength stat, and while your character could have excessively too much strength, running in and stabbing people doesn't do the damage you would expect it to. The role isn't useless at all, but unless you're facing enemy cannon fodder, you won't actually do any damage. This is where the chain system comes into play. By stringing together attacks and keeping up the assault, the chain meter goes up in percentage-like fashion. Hit an enemy with a sword, and the chain meter goes up VERY slowly, but also has the effect on solidifying chain-decay. The chain-gauge is always decaying as time passes in between blows, and only a few things will slow that time down. The two most effective ways of doing it is with a stop spell or getting hit by the commando.

 Trouble is, a commando will never get that meter to go up in any way. The only way to get that meter to go up is with magical attacks, which significantly increases the amount of chain bonuses you get, but also decays in a hurry. So the tactic you're always using is to mix magical and physical attacks to get the meter leaping forward while putting enough of a physical beating on the opponent to make sure that gauge stays slow to decay. Also, I mentioned percentages. If you just slash the opponent, then a meter beginning at 100% will rise anywhere from .0 to .3 with each hit. A magical blast will make that meter rise 3-10%, and maybe more, depending on how effective your magic is. As the percentage rises, so does the damage. A 250 HP strike from your commando will suddenly leap forward to doing over 9000 pretty damn quick, and this is in the first 12 hours of the game. What's more, there's a break point for each enemy that, once reaches, staggers the enemy and immediately doubles your percentage, allowing you to string criticals like mad. What's more is that your magic attackers get a HUGE boost in the percentage points they can deal, so if you persist a little longer on the magic assault, not only will you break the opponent, but you will drastically boost the damage your Commando can do. It sound complicated, but it isn't, and hotswapping the paradigms can lead to laughably huge damage numbers flying everywhere in the screen.

 This is where the criticism really starts to fly. Someone decided that since Final Fantasy is now on the PS3, everything needed to be bigger. I'm commonly causing damage in the 10-20,000 range and I'm not even close to beating this game, which sounds insane on its own, but that kind of damage is usually seen within a string of 20 hits in a mere second, so you can imagine how many numbers are being bounced around at any given time. It's really difficult to make this adjustment. Just think Cloud's meteor rain attack and make that every mundane action in the game. At first, you don't know who's causing the damage or how much damage is even being done to you. The numbers seem practically useless because for the first time, you're really not looking at how much damage is being dealt as much as you are checking every health bar you can see. If your health bar drops in a hurry, then you know you're being hit hard regardless of what the red number says, and it's time to heal. Same with the enemies. If their health bar is going down fast, then you know to keep up the pace. If it's taking too long to drop, then you know you need to hit them with magic spells to cripple them, then assault them until you see results on the bar. The HP numbers just aren't important anymore, and every number in the game is already huge that it would be excessive to do number crunching in this game unless you're a masochist. Does the bar go down? Good. You could be hitting for 50,000 HP a strike, and it would not be impressive in the least unless that bar moves. Even the statistics are exceedingly crazy. My main striker at the moment has 690 for her strength stat, and my main nuker has a magic stat of about 605. Every number in this game is big. The only number I can see staying with convention is the party HP which seems to be set at a maximum of 9,999 as per tradition.

 So how do the battles actually feel? Well, it's a twitch fest. If you don't twitch paradigms as fast as humanely possible, you will die. If you do not take advantage of your 2 seconds of full health to launch a massive attack, you will make no progress and probably die. I fought the exact same battle three times, and the first two times I just spammed magic and crushed everyone in 30 seconds flat. The third time, I didn't open immediately with a flurry and the enemies crushed ME because I have them two seconds to open up their own barrage of hate. Once that happened, and I really don't know how, I could not deal any damage to them like I was in the first two fights and they seemed to be twice as strong, too. I don't really get it, but apparently, the lesson is that twitching is important. You can, and will, switch paradigms so often that 5 seconds can actually mean 5 different setups. The action happens so fast that you absolutely cannot even think about what you should do for strategy. Remember when you would think for a couple of seconds about what spell you should use on an enemy in any other RPG, just to get your head straight about how the battle is going to go down? Well, stutter on the controls ONCE and get yourself off course, and you will think for one single second about what paradigm you should use to turn the tide of battle. Once that second is over, you will find yourself staring at a Game Over screen because you were just gangbanged. I am not kidding.

 In what comes across as the blatant acknowledgement of twitch based button mashing in an RPG, save points are no longer an issue, because you can retry EVERY battle you fight. Even in the middle of battle, you can pause the game and hit a retry button if you think your strategy sucked. Yes, Squeenix knows that you are going to think for a split second and die from it, so in order to make sure that controllers aren't put through TV's everywhere, they made sure that you absolutely cannot lose any progress in your game no matter what mistakes you make. You never had to go far for a save point in the first place, as you can easily walk from a room with a save point, through a door, and into another room with a save point pretty much everywhere in the game. Now, you get to retry battles, too. It's so cheapened, but then again, the battles can be so random at times that it's absolutely necessary.

 To illustrate how dumbed down this battle system is, the prime example would be how you cast magic. Once you learn a spell, a character is able to add it to the attack string without any user configuration. A character will throw out a thunder, blizzard, thunder, blizzard string automatically so long as they are in the role of a magic user. This leads to a HUGE number of complaints. If a character knows cure but is set in the magic user (Ravager) role, then why aren't they able to heal anyone else? Also, the casting requires absolutely no thought process from the user. You don't have to spend any brain power whatsoever on determining what spells to cast, because the computer launches attacks based on the enemies weaknesses on its own. Why even bother having weaknesses to begin with? You're not exploiting anything, you're just throwing out a generic magic spell.

 Even buffs and debuffs work in this way. If there's an enemy that has protect and shell turned on, has just poisoned you, and is hitting you for ungodly amounts of damage, switching your party to a Medic/Synergist/Saboteur will erase all of those problems in 5 seconds flat. Why? Because the Saboteur will immediately string together deprotect, deshell, and everything else in the debuff book in one turn. You don't even have to prioritize, because they do it automatically. Your medic will immediately cast esuna on everyone, effectively giving you the ability to null a marlboro status bomb with the push of a button. And, of course, the Synergist will start flinging out protect spells to everyone, though this takes surprisingly longer to do. Though, if the enemy is a fire breathing bastard, the computer will actually reorder the casting on its own to make sure you have a fire buff, then shell, THEN protect. All of this happens by pressing L1 then X, requiring no thought from you.

 So, all of this makes me extremely torn, and I really have to think of this in two distinct ways.

 One part of me is thinking that all of the BS time wasting has been removed from games, and everything you wanted to do in the first place involves nothing more than deciding that a certain action needs to happen. Do you need to manually select each attack, buff, and spell and then choose what to use it on every single turn?  You're going to figure out the enemies weakness anyway, and when you do, you're just repeating the same thing over and over again. How many times have we wished, as JRPG fans, that you could spend less time micromanaging your fights when you know it's just a rinse-and-repeat process anyway? Well, Final Fantasy XIII achieves this in ways I cannot describe. All you have to do is decide when things need to be done, and it all happens with minimal interaction from the user. Time to heal? Tell them to heal up and you're golden, without picking through menus. Time to just unleash? Well, you can do that by clicking a button, too, and the CPU will automatically determine which attacks you were going to want to use anyway. If you already know that you're going to span thunder because it's the bad guy's weakness, then why bother doing anything else?

 The game does all of that for you, which means that anyone with fingers and average reflexes is capable of getting into a deep RPG, though the depth is highly debatable. It really just automates everything you already planned on doing. Basically there's just a bright blue "kill" button you hit repeatedly. It seems like an evolution, breaking down RPG's to ts most accessible level and streamlining everything possible.

 On the flip side, there is virtually no interaction, no thought process, no experimentation, and no creativity involved in fighting a battle. Essentially, what you're doing is pressing X and L1 a million times and letting the computer play the game for you. You don't have to do any work in discovering weaknesses, and you certainly don't have any time to think about what you're doing at all. It took everything that made RPG's so involved to begin with and dumbed it down to its base level. It sometimes even reminds you that this is what you're doing the whole time in RPG's, just slower. Yet, you still don't feel involved with these characters at all. They don't even have skills that make them unique (yet), so as long as one person can fill a role, then upgrade that person's weapon and you will never have any need for their backup. The game even has a trophy/achievement that is given when you max out everyone's sphere grid, and since you have the ability at a certain point in the game to learn every single role, that sort of says, "here's a reward for making every character the same."

 Even developing your characters outside of battle is linear in itself. Each character already has a set strength at first, so when it comes to getting the most out of your characters you are going to want to make sure that the things they do well, they do VERY well. All that means is that you're going to plunk down your experience points in a straight line down the job path without ever really giving that person any real diversity. Any other RPG would have you mixing abilities so that your tank can revive a downed mage, beefing your mage's HP to the max so that they don't die a lot, or simply finding every possible way to jack up the stats on certain characters to make sure that everything they do does twice the damage that they should ever be doing at a given point in a game. Squeenix even found a way to make that part automated. Now, I'm sure there are players out there who are already finding ways to exploit the system, but right now, I don't see how it would really be exploiting it. If you want Lightning to cause massive damage, then all you need to do is drive a straight line down the Commando path, and she will be absolutely decked....but you were meant to do that! There's nothing about this game that I've had to think about doing, and it's driving me insane. Rather than be exciting and innovative, the game has become bland, boring, and taken all the mental challenge of RPG's and replaced it with button mashing. To whatever idiot said that this system removed the monotony out of fighting, well, you're an idiot. I've found myself tapping X over and over and over while drinking a coke and holding a conversation with someone, not even looking at the screen. Seriously, it's boring, and is actually less entertaining since the battles require no thought outside of boss battles. Of course, buff- heal- rush-repeat is what all RPG boss battles are like, so in cyclical fashion, I wonder if this is evolution.

 Well, Final Fantasy XIII has officially killed off the JRPG for good. They have finally made the entire genre pointless. You're not actually playing a game anymore, and it doesn't even feel like an RPG. You're doing absolutely nothing to shape the game when you play. Everything you do is a straight-lined path in any given direction. The battle system actually made me care less about the already difficult to accept plot, if you could call it that, because I simply look at this game as being all flash and no substance. It caters to the lowest common denominator of fans who just want to see numbers fly and get their rocks off with that and a slick sword-finisher. So really, what is the point of JRPG's anymore? It's all a movie now, and it has done that so well that all you're doing is playing an automated game that occasionally lets you watch a cutscene to tell you why you should be caring.

 So thank you, Squeenix, for taking the fun out of JRPG's for good. You have come out and convinced even the JRPG fans how absolutely pointless the genre is. I was hoping that maybe you would try to return it to its former glory, but you really never cared. All you care about is that the player gets to see numbers fly while taking on shotguns with swords, because that's "cool". It's a complete mockery, and unless something absolutely earth shattering happens to change your direction, this is the absolute last Final Fantasy game I will ever play. You've finally managed to ruin it for me, and I truly feel like playing your games have been a complete waste of my time. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit