Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

To be honest, Final Fantasy 13 is sort of a misleading title because from a traditional perspective it's not a typical Final Fantasy as far as gameplay is concerned. As seen in Final Fantasy 12 you either like the new inventions or you don't. So liking the game or not may heavily depend on whether you wanted it to stay true to its roots or you appreciate the dominance of new ideas. After basically so many Final Fantasies being turn-based with random battles i highly appreciate their effort of reinventing itself. However, not everything is well executed.

While there are surprisingly good inventions for the combat system, which is accessible and introduced by short and effective tutorials, it's also one of opposing natures - fast and slow. Though fighting is fast paced, every facet of the mechanics are slowly introduced, so that you see tutorials even after hours of playing.

Apart from that the game offers many annoying characters, who dont act or talk like real people would do, but let me explain. In a sci-fi world inhabited by alien like monsters and strange robots, the player needs a "normal" protagonist to connect with or relate to, but that's just not possible with weirdos like Hope and Vanille around. It makes me wonder what made the developers create them in the first place - were they conceived to be the funny characters? are we supposed to like them or find them funny? The only thing i could come up with is that there are demographic reasons. Hope should appeal to young girls, they find him cute right? Or they even identify with Vanille who thinks the world is a pony farm metaphorically speaking and everything is fluffy and bubbly for her making any possible danger in the game seem ridiculous. Then there is the black guy, a cool guy and a sexy resilient badass woman, who all should cover up a huge audience right? It's an obvious marketing decision to please as many kinds of gamers as they could and to instantly hit an audience worldwide with the game being a blend of western and eastern traditional game elements, hopefully making it a huge financial success.

Anyways, that makes it unlike any other Final Fantasy and certainly counts for the low difficulty, many save points and initial first 3 daunting hours of insultingly easy leveling options which leave no room for the players' creativity or let one work out a battle strategy as well. That could have been left out and replaced by automatic level ups. As the poor customization options - branches in the "crystarium" were you sort of distribute attribute points - lead in one or two directions only, the direction the developers wanted you to use obviously. Thus the game feels restrictive in many ways as seen in the world design, too.

The developers make you choose from the scarse repertoir of spell selections anyway, attribute points, attacks and so on and they poorly hide this fact.
For evolving the branches in the crystarium you need crystal-points which you earn after battles, meaning fighting many battles gives you many points,right? But at one point i couldn't use them. I didn't skip any fight until then so i had many points left and i couldn't evolve my characters abilities because the game didn't want me to until i reached a certain point in the story were i unlocked new branches.

So resultingly i realized why bother fighting when you only need a certain amount of points to evolve you party, right? The only advantage of my excessive fighting was that i could use those remaining points later on when I unlocked new branches in the crystarium and leveled up the characters' „jobs". However, you may choose between the different jobs and decide who evolves into which job direction, so that after roughly 5 hours of playing, eventually leveling becomes more interesting because of the modifiyng options of the weapons and accessoires which can be upgraded with items you received after winning fights. That eventually resulted in a little more freedom of choice and even the paradigm mechanics add some depth to the combat system, which is unfortunately available not until the first hour of the game.

The battle system is focussed on one character only, so that the others are controlled by AI. On disc 1 predominantly you play a group of 2(you plus someone else), so you control one character only but it's better that way. I don't mean compared to turn-based combat, but it works better within this fast-paced mechanics as you would have to frantically micromanage all partymembers instead and that would have been chaotic and not fun. The enemies attack patterns correspond to this fighting system as they unleash their attacks until their atb gauge is full, so again, micromanaging and healing everyone separately would be impossible, especially when you encounter large enemy groups.

The others are AI companions who can be semi-controlled by using the paradigm system that is basically an option to turn on aggressive or defensive battle behavior, which was strangely interesting and refreshingly fast-paced as it is semi-realtime; an atb gauge fills up until you can perform abilities and attack etc.

It gets slightly more complex within progress and i found it to be the strongest part of the game. At least after the daunting first 3 hours which are fundamentally 5 min fighting 5 min cutscene repeatedly and it gets much more uneven afterwards, as there appear to be tutorials for it even much later in the game. Until the 6 hour mark you may finally summon an esper, however, character development remains linear and story pacing uneven.

The combat system is very accessible but also very easy. You start with full health everytime you encounter enemies, so if you barely made it out of the previous battle you approach the next fight with full lifebars. Besides, if you use potions it heals everyone without having to use it on every partymember individually or separatetly and what also was very convenient, is the fact that you can immediately retry a lost battle without looking at the game over screen too much and loading a previous savegame. It can be seen as one of its drawbacks as well as the linearity, but it doesn't make it necessarily a bad game.

I played so many other RPGs that revolved around levelgrinding and finding collectables and buying many many consumables, that this way of playing is relieving because you don't need much time to figure out where to go next and you don't have to prepare for the next hard bossbattle.

But what i really missed was visiting new towns and cities by my own and simply do some travelling and exploring along the way, which is essential for an RPG. To that i loved almost every minigame the Final Fantasy series had to offer, mainly the cardgames, things FF was known for.

Anyways, the story is an uninspired save-the-world plot in a futuristic world, where Lightning was the best designed character of the game, as she is mysterious, which makes her the most interesting member of the cast. After 6 hours of playtime i didn't seem to know her what made me go on as i wanted to find out more about her, she is like water - "strong enough to hold a ship but able to slip through your fingers". The others are more or less generic and predictable in their talking and behaviour making them one dimensional and forgettable. For the most part the story is told with the partymembers going separate ways, thus after controlling Lightning you may control Sazh and so on, proceeding their part of the story. That's a traditional approach on telling a story as you may remember from FF8 or FF6 and what have you.

What's also worth mentioning, is how the partymember treat each other and think of each other. Lightning for example speaks her mind at one point in the story which made me feel empathic for her and there are several other occasions that turn the story into an unexpected new direction even early in the progress. As you experience a group of two characters maximum almost the entire time separately progressing (like Vanille + Sazh and Lightning + Fang and so on), you can feel the distance between those groups, even emotionally. So for a FF game the character constellation is different from previous games.

The whole gaming world opens up after 25 hours of playtime and the first disc is mainly focussed on a group of 2 playable characters. Incidentally the minimap is actually useless. The one-way tunnel world design prohibits any initial exploration anyways. The first half of disc 2 does it as well, but then you may play up to 3 characters and later on disc 2 you can give any character any job you like, plus you may choose between all 6 characters and form a party consisting of the characters of your liking. Assumed you like anyone of the cast.


Lightning is kinda well designed for a lead role in the series, she's mysterious and seems to keep herself back, but simultaneously appears to be strong and combative in several semantic ways, but too bad this entry destroys the canon of the franchise in many ways. Why didn't they use all their creative ideas on a separate game and try to stay true to the roots with this title. So conclusively speaking Final Fantasy 13 has its rare moments, but your enjoyment with it may rely greatly on whether you wanted it to stay true to its roots or not.