Final Fantasy XIII

Japanese Role-Playing-Games, or JRPGs for short, may be appropriately popular in Japan, where this latest instalment of Square’s flagship series sold over a million copies in its first 24 hours on sale, but in the West they remain something of an acquired taste. There are several reasons for this.

For one, JRPGs may be action-packed, but it’s a very different type of action to popular games such as, say, Call of Duty. There is no precision aiming or button-bashing, and most often no visceral gore either. And while many of the most popular games in the West are multiplayer, playing JRPGs is, with very few exceptions, a solo experience with no co-operative, let alone online multiplayer, options.

The plots tend to be somewhat predictable, with cardboard cut-out characters representing simple moral dilemmas (characters questioning the ethics of inaction being a particular favourite) and when translated into English the dialogue tends to clunk rather than sparkle.

The games also require a huge investment of time to play properly, as most span over 80 hours of gameplay, and then there are the numbers: traditional JRPGs require you to command a battery of hit points, attack points, magic points, levels and the like – and that’s ignoring the hundreds of inventory items and skill combinations.

It’s fair to say that Final Fantasy XII, released on the Playstation 2 in 2006, took these attributes about as far as they could go. It required up to 100 hours to finish, was set in a truly enormous game world with some deeply annoying characters (including, yes, a giant rabbit-woman) and introduced a battle system so complicated that it was, in respects, more like a programming language than a game. Ultimately, FFXII was, depending on your view of JRPGs, either a triumph or slightly less fun than pulling teeth.

And so, with that done, what next? The obvious response would be to do it all again, with bigger levels, more statistics and of course flashier high-definition graphics. And, had Square Enix pulled this off, the game would no doubt have sold by the million in Japan, with a fair few copies following for fans in the US and Europe. Interestingly, though, the company chose to do something rather different. Final Fantasy XIII certainly contains the high-definition flashiness you would expect from the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, but the game itself has been radically redesigned with simplicity in mind.

The biggest change is the game environment. FFXII included huge areas to explore – whole deserts, towns and cities, with homes that you could wander inside and inhabitants you could chat to – but XIII is, particularly for the first 20 hours or so, almost entirely linear, guiding you down a set path through each environment.

This is likely to annoy experienced JRPG players, although it does avoid that familiar moment where, baffled by the incomprehensible plot of some other games, you are left wondering where on earth you are supposed to go.

The combat system has also been stripped down and revamped. All the gambits and controls from FFXII are gone, replaced with a system in which you can only ever control the one lead character. The Active Time Battle system gives your character a gauge that recharges over time – as it charges up you can queue up actions that are then unleashed, in sequence, once it is full.

You cannot directly control any other characters fighting with you, but the computer controls them with a degree of intelligence. If you use the Libra technique to determine an enemy’s weakness, for example, they will use that information in picking attacks. The Paradigm Shift system allows you to shift the characters in your team between several roles, allowing you to provide an all-out onslaught with attacking and casting characters when possible, and then fall back to a strategy with one or more medics when needed.

All in all, the Active Time Battle system works well: it’s slightly tedious at the beginning of the game, where you will be queuing up the 'attack' command over and over, but later on it offers the same satisfying sense of control or peril, depending on the encounter and your skills, as in previous games.

Outside of battle, the changes are even greater. You don't need to worry about health, so even if characters are knocked down during a fight they will be resuscitated and will start the next one with their health gauge full.

Character levels and skills are also gone; winning battles now grants your characters CP (that’s Crystogen Points, if you must know) which can be spent to advance you characters skills in the various roles available to them. The whole system feels very odd for the first few minutes, as you reflexively check the status of the team after each battle, but after that it’s simple and interesting to use.

The other changes are perhaps more predictable. The gap between the visual quality of the cutscenes and the gameplay itself is now smaller than ever and this really compounds the effect of battle. The satisfaction from getting control over previously terrifying opponents is compounded by the incredible on-screen pyrotechnics as you whip them up into the air and burn, freeze, zap, drown or simply bludgeon them to their fate.

The various futuristic environments are beautifully modelled, and the character designs betray almost ludicrous attention to detail – somewhere deep in Japan, Square Enix clearly has a dedicated “make characters’ hair move realistically” department.

The score ranges nicely across various genres, with the orchestral pieces slightly better than their electronic counterparts. In an unusual step the game’s Japanese theme song has not been removed or made instrumental. Instead, it has been replaced in the UK and US versions by a song by Leona Lewis – interestingly this tie-in is more prominent on the game’s advertising than it is in the game itself.

Speaking of localisation, it’s worth noting that the English dub of the game is fairly good. Although it’s always annoying that, as with foreign-language films, game studios evidently feel that English-speaking gamers cannot read subtitles, so the original audio track is missing.

Some characters do grate – the lunkheaded bandana-toting male ‘hero’ Snow is an annoyance every time he opens his mouth and the ludicrously-named Vanille suffers from squeaky-voiced-annoying-child-character-syndrome – but they are compensated for by the excellent lead character, Lightning.

Only the third female lead of the 13 key games in the series, Lightning’s deadliness is matched only by her grumpiness, and her willingness to occasionally smack Snow around the head will endear her to all players who dislike his clichéd hero script.

The science-fiction plot is made more confusing than it needs to be by the fact that several key factions have similar sounding names, but it shapes the game nicely and does provide the illusion of a real, fleshed-out world even in the absence of the non-player interaction of previous games.

We particularly liked the way that the exposition is broken up into shorter flashbacks, plunging you into the heart of the action immediately then filling in the backstory over the first 15 hours or so.

With so many changes made to a long-established formula, there was perhaps a very good chance that Final Fantasy XIII would be a disaster – an incredibly pretty disaster with high-definition graphics, but a disaster nonetheless. Impressively, though, Square Enix seems to have managed something remarkable in making huge changes to the game mechanics without taking away too much: the plot, characters and battles are still powerful enough to grab your attention and carry it through at least 50 hours of play.

It still won’t appeal to everyone – one member of Computeractive’s staff tried the game and lasted just thirteen minutes – but there is enough here to enthrall both dedicated JRPG fans and, judging by the sales figures so far, some newcomers alike, and in this genre that is some achievement.