Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

[myghty]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Final Fantasy XIII North American Release Date

Oh Snapz! Its coming real soon!

[Flawless]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

New Details on Final Fantasy XIII Weapon Upgrade System

According to the somewhat light details, players will gather certain materials over the course of the game that can be used for weapon upgrading. There will be over 100 different kinds of such materials, and the right combinations will allow weapons to gain experience and upgrade into new forms.

Two examples were provided for the weapons of two party members. First is Lightning's sword, which starts off as "Blaze Edge" but with the right modifications can become the improved "Slash Carbine." Second is Snow's weapon, which apparently is just a coat, but with the right modifications the coat's stats not only improve but its patterns and colors change altogether.

From the sound of it, the weapons upgrade system sounds like a combination of a similar weapon upgrade system seen way back in Final Fantasy VIII, and, if you think about it, kind of like the way you evolved MAGs in Phantasy Star Online. It's not clear, though, whether upgrading is the only way to get new weapons (as it was in FFVIII) or if you'll be able to purchase/find new weapons as well.

Now be sure to tune back in next week, when Square Enix will no doubt reveal the system for purchasing items in FFXIII's shops, or something or other.

New screens:

[LionsFanNJ]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Of course this has to release the same time as God of War. Of course. Well i'm getting it regardless. 4 months is enough time to save up $120 plus tax.

[Flawless]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

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[ryanm1058123]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Haven't been this excited for a game in a LONG time. It's a long time coming since FFX. (never got a chance to play ff12)

[masterkembo]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

IGN put an article together outlining most of what is known about the game. It's a good read.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/105/1055980p1.html

Game comes out in Japan today - only another 3 months until the NA release!

[bcruise]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

...And here's where I sign off from this thread until after I beat the game (which of course won't be until after March). Have fun gents!

I saw Kotaku's already busily posting spoilers...geez.

[myghty]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Game comes out in Japan today - only another 3 months until the NA release!

Man, that is not fair...

[Flawless]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Final Fantasy XIII: One Million Served

Square Enix announced yesterday that Final Fantasy XIII had seen an initial shipment of 1.8 million units. Impressive indeed, but how many of those were actually sold to customers?

Today, the company revealed just that. FFXIII sold a massive one million copies in its first day of sales on the 17th.

This is particularly impressive when you consider that as of last week, the PS3 hardware had sold just 4 million units life to date in Japan. It's unknown how many people bought the PS3 hardware with the game yesterday, but this does appear to be a high attach rate.

For Japan, FFXIII instantly became the best selling PS3 game in history, and the only game to cross the million mark. Previously, Metal Gear Solid 4 was the system's highest selling game.

The one million figure does not include units sold as part of the special "Lightning" limited edition PS3 model. It should also be noted that it only covers one day of sales. Next week's sales charts will also include Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Perhaps total first week sales for FFXIII will be closer to Square Enix's initial shipment.

[Flawless]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Some great non-spoiler impressions from 1UP:

Optimizing My Paradigm

Believe it or not, FFXIII's battle mechanics really are an evolution of all the battle systems from the series' PlayStation 2 chapters. Supposedly the team's real ambition was to create battles that felt as dramatic as the brawls in Advent Children, but fortunately they drew upon the series' heritage (i.e., videogames) to achieve that cinematic aim. Like I said in my preview, there's a lot of FFX-2 here: The pacing, the overlapping actions, the need for teamwork, the ability to change classes immediately in the thick of battle. But FFXIII also incorporates the need for strategy that I loved in FFX and a tactical element of indirect party control similar to FFXII.

It's interesting to see reactions to FFXIII by people who haven't yet played the game, because the response to things like our hands-on preview and impressions posted on various Internet forums is overwhelmingly negative. Yet the actual experience of FFXIII is pretty damn positive, even if the structure of the game is maddeningly linear. I'm really not too happy about the world design, which is basically one long corridor, but I'll be damned if the fights that take place in that tube of a universe aren't some of the best I've ever seen in any game with "Final Fantasy" in the title.

FFXIII does not reward complacency. It does not allow you to spam fight-fight-heal. Sure, the early battles don't require much thought, but once the game makes Paradigm Shifts available, all bets are off. You'll quickly begin meeting foes who can only be taken down with well-considered strategies, and not just the bosses; you'll have to adjust your tactics on the fly to account for the special defenses and abilities of plenty of cannon fodder mooks, too. Relying on the safe trio of Attacker/Blaster/Healer will only get you so far; sure, you probably won't have to worry about dying if someone in your party is set to work as a permanent healer, but some foes just can't be beaten unless you pour on the offense or the debuffs. And since the level of your efficiency in battle determines how quickly your valuable Tech Points are refilled, it's a pretty dumb idea to chip away at a high-defense foe for one percent of its max HP per round.

Paradigm Shifts are basically a way to switch tactics between the various modes of action seen in every Final Fantasy. But there are a few unique wrinkles in FFXIII that allow the game to raise the stakes in a way that's decidedly rare in this series. For starters, there's no such thing as a Magic Point. Instead, every action a character takes requires a point of the Active Time Battle meter; a spell like Thunder costs one point, the same as a physical strike, while crowd-control techniques may cost two or three points. This equalizes the cost of magic and spells; there's no worry about recharging MP, and there's not even a need to worry about healing after the battle, since HP is recharged once the fight ends. And so, fights can be tricky. Effect spells that used to be cost too many MP to have any real value in Final Fantasy's throwaway battles -- be it Slow or Poison or whatever -- are no longer too expensive. Battles have therefore been balanced almost more like those from a Shin Megami Tensei game, where every fight could be the end for an unwary player unless they employ the proper tactics. Despite the more action-oriented feel of battle, it's not superficial. It's not mindless. It's not shallow. On the contrary, it's meaty and involving.

The Eyes Have It

Unfortunately, no one's really gone the next step since MGS2. Characters' eyes in many games move as they talk, sure, but they always have this glassy thousand-yard stare. They look at a fixed point and stare unwaveringly at it. It's especially jarring in otherwise impressive BioWare games, because the person talking to you in a game like Mass Effect stares obsessively at you until the conversation's over, then they glance to the side, then their head turns in the same direction, and then their body rotates to follow so they can sidle away. It's awfully mechanical.

Well, not in FFXIII. I was struck some time ago by the early trailers for the game in which we see heroine Lightning up-close and her eyes flicker about slightly, but I didn't think too much of it; that was all pre-rendered CG, and CG does all kinds of fancy things that you never see in-game. But no! Much to my surprise, FFXIII's real-time cutscenes feature those same realistic eye flickers for its characters. And I'm impressed.

Does this seem too minor a detail to write about? It probably is, but it's a detail that's really caught my attention. The motion capture and character modeling in FFXIII aren't really that much better than in other games, but the eyes truly sell the characters.

My Favorite Cross-over

Don't get me wrong; the two games are hardly the same. Chrono Cross was more traditionally turn-based, which is to say that you could take as long as you needed to act; FFXIII has no patience for your musings and ambivalence and will destroy you if you hesitate. But as I progress further into the adventure, I find myself using one of the key tactics that defined Cross -- namely, interrupting my characters' full turn order to act more quickly.

The way ATB works in FFXIII is thus: Each character has several bars on their ATB meter which fill one by one over the course of a few seconds. Each bar represents an action point, and all attacks, spells, and techniques cost a certain number of action points. A simple fight command costs just a single point, but advanced spells cost two or three. You input your commands as the meter fills and your character carries them out as soon as his or her ATB meter maxes out. If you've queued up four single-point commands, you'll act four times as soon as your meter is full. But, you can interrupt the meter by hitting the Triangle button, which causes you to perform only as many actions as you have points for.

This becomes an essential technique once you clear the first few chapters of the game. Initially, just about everyone on your team has only two bars in their ATB, so their meters hit max pretty quickly. After a while, though, you're upgraded to three and four bars, and the status screen layout suggests everyone will end up with at least six. That's great and all -- it means you'll be able to pull off some high-cost super-spells, no doubt -- but your meter doesn't fill any faster when it gets longer. Which means it takes twice as long for a character with four ATB bars to act as it did when they only had two.

And just as it was often a good tactic to cut your attacks short early in Chrono Cross in order to save up stamina for collaborative group attacks, it's pretty important to learn how to use that Triangle button interrupt in FFXIII in order to use more effective group tactics. Once again, this has everything to do with the need to get enemies into Break status so you can inflict massively multiplied damage. As you advance into the game, you start to meet enemies that are more or less invincible if you don't get them into Break. And if you wait for your ATB meter to fill completely for every round, you'll never get that Break to work.

I realize I keep going on and on about FFXIII's battle mechanics, but, well, I'm a sucker for RPGs with interesting battles. And the more of play of them, the more interesting these are becoming. Even if they are barely anything like the battles in the original Final Fantasy.

Decompressing the RPG

The impressions I've posted of my time with Final Fantasy XIII have been overwhelmingly positive so far, but I hate to give the sense that I'm completely and unreservedly in love with the game. So far, I've been focusing on the combat mechanics, which are an important part of any RPG for me -- boring battles make for a boring game -- and I really do love the game's combat. But there's more to an RPG than simply fighting, and outside of battle FFXIII does things that don't sit entirely well with me.

If you've paid any attention at all to the Internet's other write-ups and postings about FFXIII, there's a single recurring theme that everyone keeps coming back to: This is an incredibly linear game. Linearity has long been a complaint about Final Fantasy, but within each prescribed sequence of events has always been a bit of flexibility. You can stop in towns to talk to people, walk astray into extraneous areas to fight unnecessary battles, explore systems and mechanics, whatever. None of that is true of FFXIII -- at least, not the first 10 hours of FFXIII. I have literally walked a single path from the beginning of the game to the point where I am now. The game totally tricked me into thinking it was opening up once I made it past the sections covered by the playable demo from a few months ago. But it was a lie! "Exploration" in FFXIII consists of peeping around a corner into a shallow spur from the main path. As someone who loves the open, rambling nature of entries like FFVIII and FFXII, this constricted design is killing me.

At the same time, it's also forcing me to question why, exactly, it bothers me. It's not like the linearity results in less game than usual; early reports from Japan suggest people who have rushed through the adventure are finishing the game in about 40 hours -- which is completely par for every 3D Final Fantasy game to date. And there are supposedly quests and other optional distractions further into the story that'll run up the clock time for those who demand big numbers on their save files. At the ten-hour mark, I feel like I've reach the same point that I'd be at ten hours into any other recent Final Fantasy entry. The entire battle system is open to me, I've started uncovering my Eidelons to summon, I've unlocked the weapon crafting and upgrade system, I've seen a lot of story but still haven't met the main villains. The "dungeons" I've travelled through have taken about as long to complete as in any other game in the series; I spent at least two hours in the Vile Peaks area alone. So it's not like FFXIII's structure is cheating me of content.

The best word I can use to describe FFXIII's structure is "decompressed." It feels like Square Enix has taken the contents of another Final Fantasy game, with the labyrinthine dungeons and such, and straightened them out into a line. If the path through a normal RPG is a jumble of yarn laying on the floor, FFXIII is a jumble of yarn that some type-A personality has collected and rearranged into a single length. From what I can tell, the main difference between FFXIII and, say, Bayonetta comes down simply to the fact that FFXIII's battles play out with menus, and you have a larger inventory.

The whole thing chafes at my RPG-loving sensibilities. There have been a lot of comparisons made to Final Fantasy X, and FFXIII is very much the sequel to that game -- same aesthetic, same structure. Yet FFX still offered openness that's lacking here; there were compelling reasons to go back and explore previously covered territory later in the game. I have trouble imagining that I'd ever need to or want to retrace my footsteps here -- the possibility of missing treasures or even enemy encounters is zero, since everything in the game is right there along your singular path. There are no NPCs to talk to. Does FFXIII actually offer less freedom than other RPGs, or does it simply do away with a pretense of freedom that Square's been dressing up their linear adventures in all these years? I can't decide if FFXIII is cruelly limiting, of it's simply honest about its limits.

Last week's episode of Active-Time Babble was dedicated to parsing precisely what an RPG is. Of course, we didn't come a definitive conclusion, but the loose consensus we eventually arrived at describes a game that bears only the faintest resemblance to FFXIII. So does FFXIII represent a new evolution of the genre, or does it stray so far from the RPG's core tenets that we should probably just call it a turn-based action game? Or does it even matter? Maybe it doesn't. Ultimately, I suppose, whatever the hell FFXIII is should be judged for its own merits... and I'll have to reserve my own judgment until I play the game all the way through in English in a few months.

[greenegt]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Thanks, Flawless. Can't wait to pick this up. So happy it's coming out on 360.

[bcruise]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Okay, I lied about the whole not coming back to this thread thing (though I'm not reading anything in it, at least):

Free overnight shipping from GS


I had been waiting for something like this...since there doesn't appear to be a collectors edition this time I'm just about to pull the trigger.

[aukevin]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

Okay, I lied about the whole not coming back to this thread thing (though I'm not reading anything in it, at least):

Free overnight shipping from GS


I had been waiting for something like this...since there doesn't appear to be a collectors edition this time I'm just about to pull the trigger.

I'm waiting to see what pre-order bonuses are going to be out for the game. I generally get all my games from amazon.com because they have release day delivery for free (I'm not sure if it is just Prime members or not), but if someone has a real good pre-order bonus, I sometimes go with them.

[Pokes]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

I'm guessing I'm the only person here who imported the game?

[J-Clutch1]

Re: Final Fantasy 13 (PS3/XBOX 360)

I'm guessing I'm the only person here who imported the game?

Probably. If you've played it, how are you liking to so far (if you're liking it at all)? No spoilers please.