Is It Lucky 13 For Final Fantasy XIII?

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In practice, however, FFXIII is far from awful. It's unquestionably a huge departure for the series, but taken on its own merits, it works. If the quality of a game is defined by how well it lays down a series of objectives and proceeds to fulfill them (traditions be damned), FFXIII is an unqualified success. Yes, it abandons a great many RPG traditions, but it does so in the name of creating a highly focused experience. The elements it abandons are features Final Fantasy has rarely done as well as the competition, while the components it retains are the ones Final Fantasy does best.

Despite its deviations from tradition, FFXIII really does play to the series' core strengths. In many ways, it improves on them. Think of FFXIII as the essence of modern Final Fantasy: The series stripped down to little more than story and combat. As such, the quality of the game is entirely contingent on the quality of those two elements. To its credit, they're among the best the series has ever seen.

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The battle system, admittedly, starts slow; in fact, you have slog through about 25 hours of hand-holding warm-up before the game finally lets you have full access to party and skill selections. This is by far FFXIII's most significant shortcoming; the first ten chapters of the game feel incredibly limiting, and the utterly superficial opening hours are likely to be a huge turnoff to many. Stick with it long enough to take the reins for yourself, though, and you'll find FFXIII's combat is dizzying, tactical, and challenging. Fights revolve around "paradigms," which basically boil down to combinations of character classes. Each party member can train in six different classes and are strictly limited to performing a single class' role at any given time. For example, a Ravager can only use elemental magic attacks, while a Medic can only heal. To change your available options, you shift paradigms in the middle of battle, moving each character into a new role and locking them into a different set of skills.

While restricting each party member to a single role (attacking, defending, healing, etc.) could have made for a brain-dead game, it's actually tactical and involving. Each battle is entirely self-contained, and the only penalty for losing is being forced to try the current encounter again from scratch. There are no magic points, and health recharges after each battle. It's far less toothless than it sounds, though, because FFXIII's creators capitalized on these play mechanics to populate the game with impressively challenging battles. There are no random encounters, and beyond the game's opening hours you'll rarely find battle scenarios that can be breezed through by mashing the circle button. Despite the fact that two-thirds of your party is AI-controlled, FFXIII's battles may be the most involving the series has ever seen.

The A.I.-driven nature of the combat leaves you free to focus on managing general strategies and coordinating your party leader's actions for maximum effect. There's an easy rhythm to fights, and subtle visual and audio cues help you keep a bead on the tide of battle without the need to watch numbers and meters. Let a character be reduced to critical health and one of their companions will call out their name in concern so you know who needs help; switch over to a healing paradigm and the target of a healing spell will shout a word of thanks so you know they're in the clear again. It's these subtle details, along with more significant elements like the guard break-style "stagger" system, that elevate FFXIII's battles to excellence.

Still, combat in FFXIII is almost secondary to its story, as the entire experience is structured around telling a single tale from start to finish. Although the larger plot is nothing to write home about -- it's basically just FFX and XII chopped up and mixed through a salad shooter -- the overarching tale isn't nearly as important as the characters who take part in it. FFXIII's cast of six, primary characters is by far the best-defined group of protagonists the series has ever seen, and their growth (both as individuals and as a group) is what truly propels FFXIII.

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Though the game's script is hardly world-class writing, it demonstrates a certain genre-savviness unusual for the medium. You're left with the impression that the writers were well aware just how close their tale was drifting toward the realm of cliché and took care to subvert the potential for predictable shallowness. Snow is annoyingly thick-headed, and the writers know you probably want to punch him -- so they have Lightning slug him in the face. And they know Lightning could simply be your typical, sullen Square protagonist, so they quickly show her thoughtful, nurturing side as well. They know it's transparent when a villain launches into a plot-revealing monologue, so they make the party step back afterwards and say, "Well, obviously we can't take that bit of unsolicited exposition at face value." The writers know that RPG stories coast on contrivance, so they take the time to make sure FFXIII's developments are consistent and rational.

More importantly, the cast of FFXIII genuinely works well together. The game may not feature towns or significant NPC interaction, but in their place are countless minor conversations between the heroes. The world-building normally provided by townsfolk is set aside in favor of character-building through party interactions, and it goes a long way toward creating something truly rare: An RPG party that actually makes sense. The cast is your standard crew of strangers drawn together by fate, but rather than simply fight together because "that's how games work," they spend much of the early game trying their best to go their own separate ways. By the time the story pulls them inevitably together, they've worked through their differences and demons and feel like comrades.