I’m entitled to not like people who don’t like Final Fantasy. So YOU are the hater! Actually, I think that would make us BOTH haters.
I was reading the preview of it on 1up earlier, they said that they took out the quasi real time combat of 12 which I enjoyed. For the importers, do you still fight enemies on the field or is it you touch them and you get taken into a fight, also any comments on the combat system would be great.
Re: Kingdom Hearts 2, if I remember right wasn’t it a 3 hour tutorial if you watch the cut scenes, 45 minutes if you skip them all?
Yeah, SE really loves to feed you new skills at a snail’s pace. The game doesn’t explain how to upgrade your weapons until you’re 5 hours into the game and I STILL can’t choose which character I control…which is a big deal since all of the other party members are controlled by the AI :(
Dislike does not necessitate hatred.
And I find the notion of playing seven hours worth of tutorial rather quite disenchanting if not down right disturbing. Which raises queries as to the nature and quality of the game’s design.
While I’m all for granting player freedom, choice and options, I believe it to be fundamental for the design to be good to elegantly alleviate the player from the tutorial onto the main game at some point, which would not surpass couple dozen minutes at most.
If the player remained within the tutorial for an extended and extensive period of time, amounting up to several hours, then something must have gone terribly awry at the very core of the developed experience.
Even if we were to refer to newbie area/zone rather than tutorial, even perhaps one which extends to several “worlds”, it would still indicate a severe design deficiency for the player to spend further than a hour or couple at most within it.
Either the level is a looped maze, rendering finding the exit too difficult, so to speak or too thoroughly well made and allows the player just enough (too much) taste of the actual game while still keeping him in his comfort zone. It may also lack proper incentives to continue forth or that it is actually providing a better experience than the rest of/main game (fatal error).
To be fair, 6.5 hours of the 7 hour tutorial is cut-scenes, so you aren’t really playing per se.
I’m at a loss as to whether this is supposed to reassure or cause distress.
All of the enemies are on the field and it’s possible to avoid battles/surprise the enemies for a preemptive strike, etc.
As for the battle system, it’s like they took the AI behaviors in 12 and mapped it to FF’s job system to end up with the Optima system.
Basically, each of your party members have access to certain roles (jobs in FF13 lingo) and all skills are mapped according to the role. So you can only cast healing spells if you’re currently a Healer, cast defensive skills if you’re an Enhancer…and Fight if you’re an attacker.
You can change the roles of each party member real-time during battle so this also acts as a way to control AI behavior, so a typical battle might have you changing your Healer to an Enhancer for a while to cast defensive spells -> Healer to heal up -> Blaster to cast offensive spells at the enemy. You don’t have access to ANY offensive commands while in a support role so (not even Fight) so the game forces the player to juggle the roles of the party pretty actively during the battle.
Some other stuff…
[ul]
[li]You can only control one character during battles (I think you can eventually switch the active character but I haven’t unlocked this yet)[/li][li]They got rid the concept of MP (except for the super spells like the summons) so the only cost for casting spells is the time gauge[/li][li]All party members are fully healed post-battle.[/li][/ul]
As for the tutorial / 7 hour remark I made, I’m referring to how long it takes for the story to progress past the initial areas and you finally get access to all the portions of the battle system. The game spoon feeds you new commands at such a slow pace that it’s very frustrating at times.
Typical numbers I’ve heard for the KHII “Roxas” portion, which a lot of people considered pure tutorial, was about five hours. If you skip cutscenes and optional events/battles, you can whittle it down to three or so.
my copy is coming from play-asia. probably will get it on monday.
This is my favourite thing about the game so far.
Also, the art & manual is nice.
FFXII was like that as well. It took a very long time to get enough gambits and slots for the system to really bloom.
I haven’t played FFXIII, so this question is more out of academic interest than anything else.
But if the combat system is complex, and there are tons of new features, how long would be ideal in introducing all the systems in game-play that 1> wouldn’t be overwhelming to new players unfamiliar with any FF, 2> wouldn’t be full and boring to experienced players who grok things so much easier. Are you guys generally in favor of opening up the majority of the game system earlier and lets players figure it out on their own, while doling out tutorials at the same time. Or do you prefer to have the tutorials unlock various parts of the game play as a reward/progress scenario?
It seems like one of those solutions that will be hard to please anybody, even with enough play-testing and QA.
It doesn’t have to be right off the bat, but you literally can’t make good use of the Gambit system in FFXII until about 15 hours into the game. It’s quite frustrating, as is the requirement to buy conditions and commands from vendors. The combat just isn’t interesting until they start to take the training wheels off and that took way too long in XII.
They fixed this in the international version. You get every gambit from the start (though you still have the buy them, they’re at least all available in the store).
Some of us learn better by front loading the WTF and then allowing the player to go back and work through those things. I’m just not a fan of unskippable introductory portions that are gimped, whether on a large scale like what FF13 sounds like or the “endless moderately interactive cutscene” of Half-Lives and Arkham Asylum. The tutorial part is almost secondary to that.
Wait was that review a joke? Do you really shop at Verizon and summon Transformers in this game?
For all I know everything in my blind review could be true. But I can’t say for certain one way or another, not having played it.
Oh. Oh ho ho. It was a joke.
Jesus is my opinion of JRPGs that low that I believed that review? It is.
about 6 hours in, and finally unlock weapon customization.
the combat is a lot more engaging compare to older version of FF especially during boss fights where role/class switching is real important.
I get the feeling though you won’t be able to control more than 1 character in combat, you might be able to switch out the leading character, but I doubt you can switch character during combat.