Final Fantasy XIII News

At last after 4 long years of development, Final Fantasy XIII is finally here, but is it worth the wait? This will be a spoiler free review.

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Story

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The story has always been one of the most attractive aspects in any Final Fantasy game. Unfortunately Final Fantasy XIII doesn't have that triple A story that one might have hoped for. The game starts off by just throwing you into the action, without any knowledge of the characters all the while spouting off terminologies like Fal'Cie, (Pulse) L'Cie, Cieth, Cocoon, and many of these are not explained very well until later in the game. Having said that, the story does get better over time. Every chapter seems to improve the story more, or perhaps this is just because things started to make sense and some connections to the characters began to form. Once chapters 8 and 9 came along the story was finally what I expected the game to be. The story was intense and epic, and shocking but I guess the developers couldn't keep this up forever since starting with chapter 10 the story essentially hit rock bottom, and never really caught my interest again, it almost felt detached from the rest of the game.

While there were some excellent parts in the game which will have you on the edge of your seat, there are other parts which will have you confused, and yawning.
7/10

Graphics

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Final Fantasy XIII has some very nice graphics, and for a third party game, they are some of the best graphics for either system. The following remarks will be for the in game graphics, not any of the cutscenes. The game is anti aliased quite nicely, and there is absolutely no screen tearing. The textures are ok, though there are some that are very low resolution. For the most part the frame rate is a constant 30, however there are some noticeable dips in battle when there is a large amount of action going on, and sometimes even when you are riding a chocobo the framerate will stutter. As far as animations are concerned, they are pretty simple and not realistic, but they get the job done.

So while the game is no Uncharted 2, the game does look very nice and definitly one of the best looking third party games that I have played.
9/10

Music and Sound

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The music in Final Fantasy XIII, composed by Masashi Hamauzu, is a mixture of elevator music and epic orchestral and choral pieces. During most of the gameplay, the music is simple, but never had much of a melody, at least not very memorable ones. However, during the cutscenes, the music was very well done, and managed to enhance the story significantly. And the battle music is very good all around, from the standard battle theme to boss themes, and all the way to the epic choral themes which are played for the more important boss battles.
8/10

The sounds in Final Fantasy XIII are somewhat of a hit and miss. While the voice acting for the main cast is great, essentially all of the NPC voice acting will have you cringing. Similarly, while the battle sounds are great, sounds out of battle are sub par, for example the footstep sound probably wouldn't even pass for a PS2 game sound effect.
6/10

Gameplay

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Some of the biggest complaints and controversy with the game is the gameplay section. I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times, but here it is again. The game is very linear. For the first 20 hours of the game, you are practically going in a straight line with almost no deviations., then the game opens up for about 10 minutes, and then is linear again for the next 20 hours. Now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but when you compare it to FF XII's non-linearity, you will be feeling like the series is going backwards not forwards since the last time the game was this linear in one of the main titles was FFX almost 10 years ago. So while it doesn't really make the game bad, it doesn't make it really that good either, instead it is more annoying than anything because the game could have been so much better if they did a more FFXII method of exploration.

Now when it comes to battles, this is an improvement since FFXII. In FFXII, you could control all of the characters in battle either directly through issuing commands, or indirectly by using gambits which the player would define manually. In Final Fantasy XIII it is a little more automated, which is both good and bad. You can control only the commanding character directly though issuing commands, or you can control all the characters indirectly by choosing a paradigm and allowing them to auto battle, or chose what they think the best attack for the situation is. For the most part auto battle works really well, although it would be nice to at least be able to tell the other characters which enemy to attack. It is annoying when your allies will be attacking the 'enemy reinforcements' rather than the enemy calling the reinforcements. But for the most part, while the battle system is simple, it is also very fun and somewhat strategic.

The camera system in the game is pretty horrible. One of the worst things about it is your character is never centered on the screen, they are either on the left half of the screen or the right half, and it randomly switches between the two, sometimes 3 or 4 times within a couple of seconds depending on where you are going, and how narrow the path is you are traversing. For the entire game I found myself fighting with the camera. If there were a way to turn off the auto camera then that would be different, but whenever I wanted to rotate the camera, half the time it was in a fixed position since it seems that when you move your character, the camera decides to be fixed.
7.5/10

Replay Value

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Final Fantasy XIII seems to be lacking many of the sidequests and mini games that the series is known for. Really the only sidequest in the game is the monster hunting, compare that with FFXII which had two types of monster hunting, but also other smaller sidequests like fishing. FFX even had more sidequests than FFXIII. Both of those mentioned games you could probably spend more than 150 hours playing the game before you did everything, but with FFXIII all the sidequests can probably be completed in under 80 hours.

As far as wanting to replay the game from start to finish for multiple times, because the game is so linear, there was really only one way of going through the game, so replaying the game would seem superfluous. Unless you really loved the story, I can't see much reason for replaying the game.
6/10

Overall Score

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From reading this review you might be worried that the game will get a horrible score, but lucky for Final Fantasy XIII that many of the aspects of the game play off each other and when combined, they actually make the game better than that single aspect. For example I gave the story a 7/10, but if you add the music to that, the music did a really good job at adding emotion to the story, and make it more intense. Virtually all of the aspects of the game help to do this, however there are still a few inexcusable parts of the game, such as the camera, and lack of sidequests.
8.5/10


 Forum Discussion

Posted By: SouKingdom
Date:

OMG what happend with the news E3 is coming and no news about FF VSXIII WOW.

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Posted By: Xavier
Date:

Is OLD OLD already Ff 13. I want Versus, that s all. I understand there are no news but cmon...

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