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XIII is not an unlucky number for Final Fantasy.

The wait has been longer than I can ever remember. Nearly four years after the last major title in the Final Fantasy series, and the first on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, we finally get a chance to play entry number XIII. As a fan of the series, it was hard to take a lot of the early news and impressions from interviews and Japanese players late last year. The combat system in XII was a big change in the wrong direction for me personally, and it seemed like things were getting worse in XIII. This was certainly a case of having to play for yourself before forming an opinion. A lesson I learned a long time ago.

The story is unlike any other in the series, and truly unlike many others in the genre. It's so easy for an RPG to come out with the typical bad guy wants to take over the world and good saves the world scenario. XIII introduces a mostly mature mix of protagonists living on the world of Cocoon, an inhabitable satellite above the hellishly dangerous planet of Pulse. They deal with issues of different species co-existing, genocide, and religion. It's a nice setup and really delivers for the bulk of the adventure. There are lulls in the story, and after a while it does tend to just repeat the same information. The ending was also a classic deus ex machina.

The concepts of the game are introduced to you agonizingly slow. The game begins like most RPGs, with very little at your disposal, a couple of characters and an attack command. You can't do much more than that through the first few hours of the game, but there are other things to concentrate on. The story carries the game through this section quite nicely, and it allows you to come to grips with the new super fast combat system. The bulk of your decisions through this period though amount to whether to use area of effect attacks instead of single target attacks and when to use items.

The level design is decidedly linear, not that it's much of a departure for the series. It's not a big deal for me, since being a gamer on a time budget, I'd rather be pulled into a well created story (and not miss anything) than create my own adventure. This streamlining also bled over into the loss of traditional towns. All shops are now located online at every save spot, and since you fully recover after each fight, inns are a thing of the past. Again, aside from aesthetics and nostalgia, no big loss for me. I hated raiding poor villager's homes looking for items, always fearing if I didn't I'd miss something really important.

Characters are assigned a role in combat, choices being Commando (physical attacks), Ravager (magic attacks), Sentinel (defender), Medic (healer), Synergist (buffs), Saboteur (debuffs). You set up a Paradigm deck outside of combat, which lets you choose six combinations of jobs to bring to a fight. Once in battle, these Paradigms can be changed at any time. Each role fulfills a certain purpose, grants a particular bonus to the character and group, and has a selection of skills only available role. If you want to cast Cura, you have to switch to a Paradigm that includes at least one Medic.

The purpose of these Paradigms is two fold. First and foremost, you want to survive, but secondly, you also want to thrive. Combat takes place with you in control of the lead party member and your other two teammates AI controlled. The ATB bar, a long running Final Fantasy tradition, increases very quickly. In order to survive, you need to make smart choices about which Paradigms to fight in and when to switch. This could mean doing serious party buffing, enemy debuffing but could also lead to a long fight. In order to thrive, you've got to kill fast.

Speed may be king, but that does not bring along a sacrifice in strategy, only a different approach. It took me a little while to come to grips with the new concepts introduced. I'm so used to Final Fantasy games and other RPGs that emphasize making the most of each turn in order to kill the enemy while preserving your resources (health, mana, and items). Full healing usually only took place around save spots or towns. In XIII, each battle is like a game within a game. All health is fully restored after each fight, any fight can be restarted, and death puts you right back at the beginning of the fight again. Fights between bosses aren't all pushovers and filler now. This means that you may allow your health to dip down into the final hit points if it means a chance to finish your foe with a better time. There are numerous fights in the game in regular dungeons that can take a minute or more to complete. This is a change that I can wholeheartedly support, and it really give a feel closer to that of an SRPG.

That's not to say I'm completely on board with the combat system. I do enjoy it, very much so, but I can't help but feel like it would have still been better with more control over the party and more time to take actions. There seems to be a growing trend with RPGs leaning more towards action and twitch gameplay versus more thoughtful turn-based gameplay. I'm a big opponent of AI controlling pieces of my party and taking their actions at the same time as the lead character. It was the MMO-like combat system of XII that really put me off that game. At least in XIII, changing your party's Paradigm is really close to telling them what skill to use. If you need a Cure, switch someone to Medic and the Cure will come. The order and frequency of which skills will be used do follow some rules, and you must plan your strategy accordingly.

To emphasize this point, the game presents the user (the party leader) with an Auto command. Pressing it once auto fills your ATB gauge with whatever the AI discerns is the best groups of skills for the current situation. It pays attention things like enemy weakness, strength, and susceptibility. It's good, almost necessary in certain time crunch situations, but it's not perfect. Let's say on an enemy weak to fire and a player with more strength than magic, it will choose Fire, Fira, and Firestrike abilities to put on the ATB gauge when it's easy to figure out that filling it with only Firestrike will do more damage and raise the stagger gauge just as much. A potential downer if you look at it that way. There's lots of freedom in filling a potential six ATB slots with skills, but most of the time I filled them with the same ability in each slot.

I just briefly mentioned the stagger gauge, but therein lies another huge portion of combat system. Every enemy in the game has a health bar and a stagger bar. When the health is gone, the enemy is dead. The problem is, many of the foes in the game have such incredibly high hit point totals that beating on them at 100% damage would lend to fights lasting far too long for a good rating. Chaining together attacks on that same enemy, specifically magic, raises the stagger gauge to an enemy specific break point, let's say 150%. Once staggered, the percentage doubles, 300% in this case, and continues to rise until the stagger gauge empties once more. Staggering an opponent also opens them up to be launched, and while in the air being juggled, they cannot take action.

Around the 25 hour mark, the game world really opens up. Party configuration is possible and a missions system is established that closely resembles the mark hunting from FFXII. There are 64 missions in all, only a few of which are mandated by the story. Hunting the marks adds a considerable amount of playtime to the end of the game. Speaking of which, the FFXIII kind of expects that you'll complete much of the optional stuff after the story is complete and kindly gives you a save point and some warp holes to go back to past areas. This even allows you to make a run through and beat the final boss again if you so choose (something you'll probably need to do in order to get all the trophies).

There's also a lot of time that can be spent raising your party to the highest levels of the Crystarium, as well as upgrading the weapons that you accrue throughout the game. The weapon upgrade system is a simple in theory and a bit complicated to manage efficiently. I'd say look up a FAQ for the finer details of the system. Suffice to say, it can be a money and resource sink and was really the only thing I spent gil on the entire game. My biggest problem with the weapon upgrade system was that it trivialized the acquisition of new weapons since your upgraded weapon would be better than any new (level 1) weapon you can find or buy in the game. Each weapon serves a different purpose and spending time upgrading many of them will pay off when the power of choice plays a big part of preparing for difficult mission battles.

It probably goes without saying that this is one of the most gorgeous games to grace a video game console. FFXIII's in-game graphics look like other games' cutscenes. Its cutscenes look like other games' full motion video, and its full motion video looks like a Hollywood blockbuster. There's just a polish on Final Fantasy that you can't find on many other games, and I think we pay for it by waiting years at a time.

I thoroughly enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII from start to finish. I was completely engaged while playing it. It's the kind of game you think about and talk about when you're not actively experiencing it. It's a game that will likely/hopefully draw more interest back into genre again and spark more developers to follow in its footsteps. For me, one of the best games of the generation.