Final Fantasy XIII Updated Impressions

I'm a little over 10 hours into the game now, and I just found out that I'm doing it wrong.  Gripping desperately to the old idea of turn-based combat, I immediately switched the ATB gauge to Slow before starting the game.  I figured that was my only hope for a short breath during combat to figure out what I wanted to do next.  "It seems weird that I can't get many 5-star results even when my only choice is the default attack," I whispered to myself.  Well, it's not weird, it's intentional.  I gimped myself!  The target time is not readjusted by the game for a slow ATB gauge.  At least I figured that out now instead of when I might be fruitlessly farming for components later.

I couple of things I'm real happy about that I didn't mention yesterday are the Crystarium and the Datalog.  Granted, the Crystarium isn't much more than the Sphere Grid from FFX, which wasn't the greatest tool for character development, but in the Crystarium you've got basically six Sphere Grids per character.  So you not only have choices with a single branch, but also which branches to develop in which order.  Even though a character's alternate classes might be far weaker than the main, at least there's a choice to play that way (for the truly hardcore runs).

There are certain tertiary things that FFXIII does that should be standard in every RPG.  The first is the most basic, allow for cutscenes to be paused and skipped.  Pausing a cutscene is still overlooked by some games and is a must for people with family or friends.  The second is providing a detailed recap of the story.  FFXIII tucks this away in the Datalog along with a bunch of other great information, like the bestiary and information on races, people, and lore.  The entries for each chapter of the story serve both to better understand the sometimes confusing nature of the party's motives and dialog (I know, they wouldn't need this if the dialog itself provided a better understanding) and to give your brain a refresher when coming back to the game.  This is crucial when you pick up an unfinished game months later.  The only thing missing is the ability to replay scenes from the game, a la God of War, assuming that doesn't come later.

The pressure of the target time started to wear me down last night.  Even though 5-star ratings aren't necessarily important in every fight, and the components this early aren't that incredibly important anyway, I still feel like it's hanging over my head every fight.  I'm adjusting my mindset to it.  I realized that there's just as much strategy in this battle system as in past games, it's just a different goal.

Instead of strategizing to kill the enemy with the least amount resources used and damage to my party, the strategy now is to kill the enemy in the shortest amount of time.  It's almost like a puzzle with every new encounter.  Winning with barely any health left is an acceptable term in order to finish the fight a couple seconds quicker.  Things like, don't buff just to become invincible if that time would have been better spent attacking for a quicker kill. Time is always on the mind.  Switching gears has taken a little time, but I like it nonetheless.

I took a few battles and completely disregarded time so I could experiment with different Paradigms and the effect of skills on different enemies.  I noticed things like Sazh's Firestrike (physical) doing about the same damage as his Fire spell (magic) against a neutral enemy even though his magic stat was a dozen or so points higher than his strength.  I love understanding the calculations behind the scenes in games like this, so I was happy to find this Game Mechanics FAQ which explained that Firestrike has a built in 1.2x damage multiplier.

My only real gripe right now is that the game appears to dictate that you use the Auto command if you want to ensure the best ratings.  Unless you're fighting something for the 10th time in a row, the AI will always know the correct pattern of skills to put on the ATB and far faster than I can come up with it.  It can take me a second or two to evaluate whether an AoE attack would hit if I targeted a specific enemy (Will he move by the time it fires? Is he really close enough?), when the AI will know in microseconds.  I can certainly get 5-star ratings picking my own abilities, but it irks me to know that the computer is better at it than I am.

Quick edit:  I just remembered a couple of flaws in the partner AI that really bug me.  They never use a partial ATB gauge.  I often want them to throw a one bar heal on themselves and a one bar heal on me, but I have to wait for two full ATBs to get the same effect.  Also, it's painful to have a debuff on a character and watch them not use the counter buff to wipe it away.