Final Fantasy XIII

[Kaden]

I kept telling you you shouldn't hate.

The story so far is fine (some of their ex machina are straight-up laughable) but the story telling is phenomenal. I'm greatly enjoying all the cut-scenes and dialogue and extra "datalog" entries.

Combat is pretty straight forward. You'll mostly use an all-encompassing "Auto-Battle" command that queues up actions for you based on the situation. It sounds awkward and easily worthless, but the game does an amazing job of knowing what you'd want to use when. Even better, once you've scanned an enemy, it'll automatically queue things that are extra effective and leave out anything that's not. You can also trigger effects early if you don't want to launch the whole queue (there's rarely ever a reason to do it, but... y'know... impatience).

The big new mechanic for combat is the "Paradigm Shift" system. There are a hand-full of classes (attack warrior, defend warrior, white mage, black mage, buffer mage, debuffer mage) and each character has access to a few of them (they're also different, mostly, from character to character, so you'll have one buffer mage who does defense-related buffs and another that does offense stuff). A "Paradigm" refers to the current class selections of your party. The "Relentless Assault" Paradigm (they have names for all the different combinations of classes) for example is an attacking warrior and two black mages. You can have, I think, six different Paradigms in your "Paradigm Deck" and you can flip through them freely during battle, changing the classes of your entire party (that's what a Paradigm Shift is).

The only drawback is that, when you're working with a party of three people (the max size, it looks like) it's pretty easy to go "oh yeah, I forgot to have a Paradigm where Hope is a Ravager" when you look through your Deck in the middle of combat. You have to set all of the Paradigms before entering combat. It makes for a little more work getting things set the way you like them (which is only irritating in the beginning because you're constantly having your party members changed on you) but it definitely makes combat more interesting.