Commander's Log 13.60.2010 (Final Fantasy XIII Discussion)

I'm approaching the end of Final Fantasy XIII and taking the entire game in there are things to discuss.

As stated many places, the game is very linear. And while that is true, I can't say I dislike it. In many other FF games, I found myself following the story and trying to do the side quests, but usually ended up missing some of them because they weren't very obvious to find. XIII tells you how many Cieth stone missions there are, and shows you the location of them on the map. There are a couple extra side missions, but for the most part seem to be well integrated into the story or will inevitably get accomplished through the missions.

The character development is refreshing in a way. I like the concept of the roles and paradigms and being able to actively switch them mid-battle. I do think that the character attributes system was lacking. I'm all for making things simple so new gamers can get into the game. But only Strength and Magic? Why not defensive attributes that can be increased as well? But overall it's nice to be able to choose (to an extent) how your characters develop.

The crafting system is nice, but I feel there are too many weapons in the game. I've only used one weapon for each character for almost the entire game. If my current weapon gives +100 Str and +98 Mag, why should I start using a weapon that only gives bonuses of +8 and +10? It's not like using the weapon increases it's abilities - just crafting items with it does. I do like how some items will increase the bonus applied to items when enough are used - it gives a bit more thought to how to use the items.

Finally, the battle system. At first I was dismayed that I could only control one of my characters at a time. I soon realized that I couldn't possibly control multiple characters at the pace of battle. In the end, I was okay with it as the AI for the other PCs seemed very intuitive and followed, for the most part, my desired behavior for them. The auto-healing after battle is okay; it makes inventory management much less important. While the die-hard RPGer in me doesn't like that, the rest of me is willing to give it up to try something new.

Overall, it's a good game and I've enjoyed playing it. I don't know that I'll replay it - so many other games to play among other things going on - but it will definitely get recommended to people.