Quarter Up

The danger from the Fal’Cie comes from their ability to forcibly recruit humans to do their bidding by tattooing them and then calling them L’Cie. This tattoo will enable them to use magic and have general powers that your home grown human wouldn't normally have. These powers however come with a price. The Fal’Cie gives its chosen L’Cie a mission or focus that must be completed.  If the focus is not completed in an unknown amount of time, the L'Cie is doomed to become Cie’th, a mindless zombie like creature. Should a L'Cie complete its mission then he or she will be granted eternal life...as a crystal. It is because of the punishment and reward humans branded by any Fal’Cie consider it a death sentence.  To make matters worse L'Cie are not told their focus outright.  It is left to the L'Cie to figure out via a short vision seen shortly after being branded.

We have Lightning (whose real name is revealed during the course of the story) a pink haired 'gun blade' wielding former soldier. I was pleased to see a REAL female in the lead role for once since Terra in Final Fantasy 6(Jpn). The constant barrage of goofy haircuts, attitudes and men who looked as well as acted like little girls was getting old rather quickly. Lightning has a straightforward attitude and has no problem literally punching people in the face should they get in her way. I was very happy to have a main character that acted like a man for once than the past few "male" main characters, funny how that works out.

Sazh was the token black man with a sweet Afro, baby chocobo living in his hair and a set of pistols. Sazh was actually a great character during the course of the game. He has some of the best lines and a great voice actor. Sazh is a former pilot and the one that tries to bring a dose of reality to the group during those hopeless times. He keeps his head down when he needs to but can bust out some nice good ole fashioned ass kicking when the time is right.

Fang is the second tough chick from Australia apparently, due to her accent. She has no relation to the Road Warrior so I was instantly turned off. Carrying around a spear and a will to use it, she is the strongest character physically in the game. She has a connection with Vanille's dark past that puts her right in the middle of the action.

During a battle, enemies now have what is called a "stagger gauge" as well as a health meter.  Should you manage to stagger your enemy, damage will be increased, you will be able to use techniques normally not available and possibly stun them.  The downside to this is that the goal of fights appears to be simply staggering them as quickly as possible and finish them off.

The only character you have any real control over in a fight, is your “lead” character. If your lead dies, the fight is over. Previous Final Fantasy games required all members to die before the battle is lost.  After completing a battle, you are given a rank of zero to five stars. These ranks depend simply on how fast you won the fight in comparison to the "par time".  This does nothing expect fill up what is called a TP gauge to use in other fights.  This gauge allows the use of Libra (to find weaknesses), quake and even summon.  But other than that, the ranks for fights are useless.  You gain the same amount of CP or Crystogen Points whether you received five stars or zero.  The CP you gain from these fights, can then be later spent on the Crystarium.  This is a slightly modified rehash of the sphere grid from Final Fantasy 10.  After a few hours of using this system again, I started to miss leveling up.  The cost of spheres increases dramatically and was almost depressing at times because I realized how many fights I needed just to get 100 more hp.

As with FF12, random encounters have been removed.  You can see enemies on the 'over world' and they can be avoided, although doing so is not advised.  If you're able to successfully sneak up on your enemy this grants you with a "Preemptive Strike" or a near full stagger gauge.

The job classes you can obtain are fairly simple and boiled down to base MMO classes. You have the Commando (physical attacker), Ravager (magic user), Saboteur (debuffer), Synergist (buffer), Sentinel (tank) and Medic (healer).  Each of these can be learned by any character in the later stages of the game. Sadly, some characters are painfully not as good as others at the same jobs. The other downside is that not everyone can learn the exact same techniques for the same job.  This is, of course, a good thing as there won't be a homogenization of characters but also bad, in that this leads to a tier system in a way, which brings me to my next point.

I found that out of the six characters, three of them (Fang, Hope and Lightning) were better versions of the other three characters (Snow, Vanille and Sazh). I didn’t enjoy Fang as a character, but she was simply a better Snow. I forced myself to use her but then decided later on to not let stats determine who I used. I urge you to do the same.  It didn't make the game too much harder but in my mind I knew I would be dealing far more damage if I had chosen the "best team". I'm not sure what may have helped this issue, possibly some more variety in the stats area.

While I did enjoy the characters I never found myself attached to one of them (I liked Snow's attitude but he wasn’t someone I could identify with). As a whole it’s a good idea to have a character that your audience can get behind. But if you don’t care too much about your characters your interest will die very quickly and so will your wallet.

Final Fantasy 13 has also done away with the towns of long ago and replaced them with shops at save points. Now this could be useful or liked for some but I felt as though I was constantly in one long dungeon with no time for a breather. I also bought very little from these shops, as a matter of fact, I didn’t utilize it at all as you gain zero money from fights. You must sell things you find in order to get money, no one likes grinding for items, so why add to the already frustrating grind out list.

With the absence of shops and towns there is a distinct lack of people to talk to. You occasionally bump into people every now and again but they would say very little.  I felt as though it was just me and the enemies going at it for 40+ hours in a giant hallway with zombie like bystanders here and there.

All in all I can’t call this game bad; I enjoyed the story and half the cast. The ending was decent and made sense. There was growth in the characters, they felt more like real people with a big problem than characters that were unstoppable and nothing fazed them. The main villain took too long to be introduced and wasn't interesting at all but he was difficult. I wouldn't go very far to give the game a high rating like most places have been. After you’re done you may feel the typical “Meh” or “Feh, it was alright”. So I will have to give it 3/5, a decent game that Final Fantasy fans may love or simply just like.  It’s not perfect but it’s not terrible either.