One thing I particularly like about FFXIII is how much other people hate it. It has given me a good chance to reflect on why I like the game itself, the Final Fantasy series and role playing games as a whole. I probably would have saved much gnashing of the teeth had everyone else happened to realize how awesome the game is, but in this case I just got to delve deeper into my own feelings.
Cool, huh?
So I was playing FFXIII-2 this morning and I started thinking of Last Remnant. There’s another game a lot of people hated. It is almost as if hated games and I are a thing.
But what I was thinking about had less to do with hate and more to do with the flow of battles.
Last Remnant had a giant bar on the top of the screen during every fight and it showed which side was ahead. The side who was ahead also got bonuses if I remember correctly, so the more ahead you were the harder it would be for your foes to come back. And painfully vice versa.
Last Remnant also did not let you control your individual characters. You ordered issues to groups as a whole, and you in general controlled around three or four groups.
The key point here is that the individual attacks did matter but not to the extent that you the player needed to select them. Ordering attacks, healing or magic was enough to let the characters figure out what to do so you could focus on having the whole team of yours push the tide of battle towards victory1.
So what the heck does this have to do with Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2?
Starting in FFIV with the introduction of the ATB timing began to matter. It was not just about what attacks to use but when to use them. Many bosses had points in which certain attacks would be ineffective or even trigger devastating counter attacks. One of my favorite things become finding the groove to get into to successfully finish the battle.
FFXIII for better or worse made every fight like this. Find out how to best break an enemy and eliminate them. Battles became tougher, but thanks to being able to continue right before a fight in case of defeat, progress was never lost.
What struck me about this importance of battle flow was while playing XIII-2 this morning I fought what is probably the first real boss of the game. The game recommended switching the characters jobs to Defender when a big attack was about to strike. Here, I wasn’t choosing my specific command based on the situation, but rather my set of commands.
And that is what I really enjoy about the XIII/XIII-2 battle system. The specific commands themselves do not so much control the flow of the battle rather than the job that you select for the character at the time. It is controlling the flow by ordering what subset of commands the character can currently select from.
- Of course, being AI it didn’t always work perfectly. [↩]
Sounds like Mystic Quest :P