So, I bought a movie.
Not a particularly good movie in terms of proper film making, but if you like the thought of turning your brain off for one hundred minutes a mildly enjoyable time can be had with Advent Children. Square-Enix was oh so kind to offer up a demo of their upcoming game Final Fantasy 13. So I figured, why not play it, eh? I kinda like Final Fantasy games once in a while.
Final Fantasy is back, baby.
Let’s get one thing straight, though. Square-Enix had no intent on showing very much with this demo. That is fairly odd as a FF game is not the type of game that you wouldn’t buy because you got all your fun out of the demo. It’s a shame they didn’t give us menus to play around with or any of the customization options, but that said I still had a good time with the demo.
Assuming a customization system no worse than the license board system, we have fun battles ahead. The game operates on an active time bar that has three segments to it. As a segment fills up you can use an action. You input up to three commands and then hit the activate button, which of course only works if you have as many bars filled as actions you have selected. Knocking enemies up in the air and then hitting them with magic and then an attack was fun. -ga spells1 hitting multiple targets was nice to see. The damage of the -ga spells seemed to be less if I spammed 3 regulars at an enemy, but then again the -ga spells hit multiple enemies and tended to knock them over, which means more time for your bars to fill up and you get a new attack in.
Now, why would you ever put in less than three commands? Why not wait for the bars to fill up and get a full combo going? Well, you can’t chain healing actions with attack actions, it seems. With the basic Cure you can’t even set up multiple Cures at once, you have to keep starting new action chains. But as you are doing that Cure, your other bars are filling up so that you can input that next Cure or Attack quickly. At first I was whiffing attacks after the first killed the enemy, but judging how much damage you will do, you can only use up one bar to finish off an enemy and then use your remaining on another one. Do this efficiently and you have speedy battles. There was a rank given at the end and a notifier of how much TP you received2 which would probably be tied with the time spent on the battle, how large of an attack combo you achieved and the number of times you get “breaks” on the enemy. Does this mean efficient battlers can obtain more TP and advance their characters faster? Would be interesting if this was the case.
As far as how the battles work, the characters and enemies tend to mingle around each other until they are ready to attack. Now I want to say that positioning matters and it doesn’t. Timing may be a more apt thing to concern yourself with as you can’t move the characters around. I had Lightning interrupt an enemy that was attacking Sazh one time. I also had an enemy interrupt Snow’s Launch, but he got his Blizzard and Attack to go through. I also had Snow set to attack an enemy that was standing behind another, and the enemy got in the way and my attacks whiffed.
You only controlled one character but there was a flag showing who you were controlling. Perhaps it will be like FF12 where there is a leader select? Sazh’s HP was showing so he’ll be a permanent (or as to say, customizable) character, whereas Snow’s two buddies whose names escape my memory at the moment had ??? listed for their HP. I’m really hoping they will have a leader change option, but if not I don’t see that offending me too much as long as my customization is there.
Chests only contained money. Is this telling us there will be no items? There sure is no item command in battle, but again, what are they holding from us? Mind you, I have read nothing about this game. Only watched the trailer released a bit back and played this demo. I plan on keeping the ignorance from now on, although I will probably play through the demo a few more times to see if I can see things I missed prior.
But the main point of this demo is to tease you. There is no doubt about it. But it was a fun tease. I’m sold.
Guess I’ll watch Advent Children now.
Is the battle at all like the systems used in Xenosaga? That’s what it always sounds like to me: you can use weaker attacks *now* or save up and chain two or three stronger attacks. Now this “knocking them up in the air” thing makes it sounds even more like Xenosaga.
I’m not saying FFXIII is copying Xenosaga, but, as someone who has used both battle systems, do you notice a similarity?
It never really crossed my mind, but almost in a sense. No zones, though and the battles aren’t turn based. Some people made a Valkyrie Profile comparison with the idea of trying to time attacks together. I can see a bit of a comparison though as you definitely want to try to break the enemy to get more damage in. Someone told me enemies begin to flash gold/yellow when they can be broken, but I didn’t notice. Will have to pop the demo in again tonight and see if I can dig more into that.