Final Fantasy XIII has basically two parts to it: the initial set up of the game, and then the actual game.
The first 20 hours is the initial set up of the story and characters, and tutorial to the battle system.
You might say 20 hours is a long time just to get to know the characters and initial story and get used to the battle… and you’d be right…
Let’s talk about that first part:
It’s interesting to get to really see the characters’ personalities and get attached to them, and I think that’s what was intended — in order to try and suck you into the game. However, it feels overdrawn; the cutscenes are long and unneccesarily dramatic, turning off those who don’t like long drawn-out movie-like drama. They could have cut out a lot of it, or make it a bit more interesting — not everyone likes to see such emotional characters in a game.
Getting to know the characters… takes too long, as they only tell you their back-stories a little at a time. A role-playing game is supposed to make you feel involved in the adventure, as if you have a ‘role’; the initial story progression is too slow in doing that, and it doesn’t feel like you have a role in the adventure at all, it just feels like a movie. It really does feel like a long set up, with your adventure beginning only once you reach the 2nd part of the game, 20 hours in.
There’s no exploration, whatsoever, in the first part; you basically go to point A to point B, in a quasi-straight line… even the treasure chests are either right in your path, or very close. The surroundings are beautiful though, that’s for sure; but simply walking in a straight line is boring.
The meat of the game is in the battles, and man, are they fun; they’re fast-paced, the animations are cool, and the harder ones require some interesting strategy. You control one character at a time, and select a chain of abilities for your character to combo with when a gauge fills up — it fills up quick, so there’s little waiting around. Switching between roles to either attack, heal, defend, etc, in the actual battle, is a big part of the battle system, and it’s amusing. You don’t level up your characters in this game, you level up ‘roles’, which is well done; different roles have different abilities and advantages of which you can make use in battle. For those that are lazy about combos, there’s an auto-combo feature, and even a repeat feature, so you can more or less button-mash if you want.
However, you quickly realize that you aren’t allowed to use the battle’s full potential until the second part of the game, as you are given very little to level-up, in fact, they only give you a little at a time, so that you can’t get over-powerful. Being able to customize your team how you want, using roles and different types of weapons, surely is awesome, but you don’t get to do much, if any, of that in the first part, as you have very little available to you. It’s to get you used to the battle-system and to certain basic strategies, but the problem with this is that it’s longer than it should be and feels very repetitive. However, you realize the potential of awesomeness that’s coming, and drool.
So, the game only really starts after many hours of sometimes tedious storyline, walking, and gameplay; this could have been prevented.
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To comment on a few other things, they did a really good job in removing many outdated RPG elements, such as the constant buying of new Armor and weapons. There are fewer weapons in this game, and even the first one you get can stay good throughout a good chunk of the game, since you can upgrade them using enemy drops. Different weapons and accessories have different advantages, rather than simply being superior to the previous ones, so it feels a lot more strategic.
Another thing they removed is MP, which turns out to be a great idea, because the battles feel a lot better more balanced, intuitive and fun, with being able to use magic freely. Strategies from past games, with magic, consisted mainly of not using magic in normal battles (Attack Attack Attack), and then only using magic in boss battles — rather boring. Although, now, TP which is needed for summons, can be conserved for tough battles, so those tho like to conserve things still have something to look forward to.
Speaking of summons… some of them look very cheezy ( a car, and a motorcycle transformation?! dude…)
Overall, the game has a long and slow beginning, but at least it has awesomeness to look forward to after the initial 20 hours set up, when it starts to open up a bit more. I’m not that far in the second part yet though, so I’m looking forward to what’s to come.
