Final Fantasy in shackles.

Got that? Neither did I. In fact, I spent the first twenty hours trying to decipher what had happened in the first hour or two of the game. Rather than have a character explain the situation or the background of something or someone, the Player is given the option of just simply reading about it in the "Datalog" which is occasionally updated, and usually explains thing by referencing other things you may not know. This is equally cryptic early on, and I grew so frustrated with it that I swore it off after the first hour or two. Perhaps this would have helped me to understand the great "why" that seems to have been assumed by the story, but damned if I'm going to read a novel just to understand the game. The same is done with the characters, coming to grandiose revelations and changes in personality before any notable character development takes place.

However, even RPGs with a convoluted story can still soar to great heights through the gameplay. Square Enix must be congratulated on their refusal to become stagnant. Each Final Fantasy game brings something new to the table, redesigning some significant portion of the battle system. FFVII added Materia to the weapons, for example, and FFX introduced the Sphere Grid and the ability to switch out characters on the fly to maximize their effectiveness during battle. FFXIII is no different in its attempt to be original. The problem is, rarely are the things that work well maintained for later games. Here is where FFXIII really stands out: the combat system is completely redesigned so that the Player has control over only one character of their three-person party: the party leader. Each character develops in classes, such as a Commando (Fighter), Ravager (Attacking Mage), Sentinel (Damage Sponge), or Medic (Medic). In the main menu, the Player is able to arrange these classes into sets, called "Paradigms," and is able to switch Paradigms as often as they like within battle.  These classes can be developed individually with Crystogen Points (CP, essentially EXP) you gain from each battle after the first chapter. Each class has a distinct set of moves that can be learned and are assigned to that class alone (with characters more suited to being, say, a Ravager, learning more moves under their Ravager class). Developing one class will also allow you to obtain universal character upgrades, such as HP, strength, or magic (which are the only attributes, and thus upgrades, of a character this time around).

Another addition put into this game is the idea of the Chain Gauge which is complicated in explanation but simple in practice. Every enemy in the game has a gauge apart from their life bar (yes, there's no magic bar or points, and no virtually no penalty for casting) called the Chain Gauge. Each attack works this gauge up a little, with magic attacks forcing it up higher than regular attacks, but also causing it to recede faster and fall back to the start. As it increases, your attacks do more damage. If you can work the gauge all the way up, the enemy will become "staggered", which often lowers their defenses or stops them from attacking. Now you can raise the chain gauge even faster, which multiplies the damage of your attacks at ludicrous levels, up to 999% of their original power. During a "Stagger" period, you can't affect the height of the gauge, but you can increase the percentage of damage they take, and really lay into your enemy. These are well integrated, causing the enemy to sometimes act differently during and/or after a "Stagger", sometimes progressing into a new phase of the battle. You need to balance magic and physical attacks to get a high chain gauge that slowly depletes, allowing you ample time to push it higher and higher. 

Don't worry if everything so far sounds rather complex, as the game's tutorial will walk you through it all step by step, and give you enough time to practice everything.

While all this seems intriguing and rather strategical, it rarely works out that way. If I had to point to a single failing, it would be the Paradigm system. While this seems like a neat shortcut to switching classes mid-battle, it's completely mandatory to change all classes at once. Let me paint an example. While working on a boss's chain gauge, my main character was hit quite hard and needed to heal. As there are no longer healing items stronger than a potion in any of the available shops or the game, I was forced to attempt to cast Cure, the only way to raise your HP. In order to do so, you first need to switch to a Paradigm consisting of a character who is a healer. So rather than just casting Cure, a spell which my party leader (the character I'm in control of) knows, I need to get another character to do it, since I don't have a paradigm with my party leader as a Medic. So I switch to one where one of my characters is a Medic - except now I have to fight differently because all three of my characters' classes are chained together: altering one alters all three. For some bosses, there's only one way to attack them, and even if there's not, I'm now forced into fighting outside my chosen strategy, which does make a drastic difference. Perhaps it's my fault for not planning my paradigms well enough? Maybe, but I only have space for six paradigms, and that was my first time fighting this boss. My only choice is to press start and select "Retry", quitting the battle completely. If I continue, maybe this allows the boss's chain gauge to fully deplete, forcing me to essentially start over, as very few enemies in the game can be killed in a reasonable time without staggering them.

As a quick side-note, each battle has a target time that the game expects you to finish the battle within. A star rating is assigned based on this (hitting the target time will net you just a mere 2 or 3 stars, of a possible 5) which refills your Technique Points (TP) gauge. You have a handful of technique points that your party shares, and only you have access to your own party leader's techniques, whether or not they're required to get through a difficult point in a battle. And since you only have direct control of one character, if you need another party member to use a technique only he or she has, you're out of luck. You have to quit the battle, move that person to party leader (which completely changes the battle), and then use it. This also means that another character learning some of these moves is essentially useless, unless you take control of them. This includes your healers. Good luck.

What's worse, since you can't give anything more than suggestions to your other two party members in the form of changing their class, you simply need to wait for your Synergist (positive status buffs) or your Saboteur (negative status buffs) to cast the status-changing spell you want - here's hoping they automatically target the boss and not his underlings, cause you can't change that. If you want to start the battle with some status ailments or improvements, you can have one of each of these classes, and just wait it out. Not only is one of your sets in your Paradigm deck now eaten up, but you can't switch the party leader's class between what is inevitably the third choice: Medic, Ravager, and Commando (assuming you use Lightning, clearly the most consistently useful character throughout the game), all of which only seem to work when paired with one another.

The upgrading system is also a streamlined version of FFX's Sphere Grid. One of the greatest pleasures of the Sphere Grid was getting a character so far advanced in one particular strength that they broke into another character's portion of the sphere grid, and started doubling their abilities. You could also sit and visually plan out where you wanted each character to go in their development. In FFXIII's Crystarium, you go through levels of classes, with optional side spheres (HP, Strength, Magic, Abilities, or an occasional additional Accessory slot) you can get for extra CP. These merely extend upwards, and not into others' territory. Some things can be ignored, but it largely makes no difference outside of Abilities which are class-dependent, and which only seem to matter near the end of the game. Once again, it seems like a great feature that's been completely shackled to the floor, just like using the auto-battle which operates on more information and with greater consideration than I usually can be expected to. The game doesn't provide the player with much involvement in your characters' development. Perhaps the worst aspect of this is that different levels of the Crystarium are unlocked as you progress through events in the story. This means that if you grind for hours, you will only get to develop your characters so far until you progress further through the game anyway. This is a restriction on perhaps the biggest variable on how people prefer to play this genre, and is completely inexcusable. Once again, the Player is forced to play in a specific way, regardless of what they want to do. What could have possibly been the problem with having the entire thing open at the outset? If people developed one character too far in one class while ignoring another, shouldn't that be their decision? Aren't there five other characters to resort to? 

There's no need to have characters encroach on each others' developmental territory, as every character shares CP, whether they're in your party, dead at the end of a battle, or ignored for as much of the game as possible (as I did with Sazh and eventually Vanille and Snow). On the one hand, when forced to use one character for some story twist, they're not spectacularly outclassed, which is a nice addition, and I found myself pleased that I didn't have to go grind experience. However, the other side of it is that you can't have a character that becomes your little pet project, one of my favorite aspects of choosing who to fight with in an RPG. The only way to do that is investing in upgrading weapons and accessories, which I'll get to in a moment. 

Finally, everything you've read so far but the combat system only applies to the second half of the game. For the first half, you are forced into parties of two with small breaks for three, and the makeup of your party is a slave to the events of the story (which seem chosen at random) up to a certain point; I hit that point at about 20 hours into the game, with the entire game lasting 46 hours for me. The story makes no sense, I didn't know where I was going except down the next hall, and the characters and boss fights were thoroughly tedious and uninteresting. What's worse, you are completely unable to select your party leader, the person you have control of, and upon whom the success of the battle ultimately depends. Be warned, the game will force you to play as your healer on a few occasions for hours at a time, which, for me, is less than the ideal way to handle battling. You'll also be forced into the role of your Sentinel more than once - their job is to provoke people and stand still, protecting others from being attacked (this is also the closest you get to a guard option in the game, which I missed). In some cases, when you first enter one of these stretches as a Sentinel, if you don't quit or fail the battle, your only paradigms will be those involving you as a Sentinel. This means that you're stuck standing still, taking all the damage you can while the computer controlled players fight the battle for you, healing you so you can stand still longer. You can switch to a better paradigm, but you'll sacrifice strategic advantages, something I found myself increasingly willing to do as I was increasingly bored. 

You also won't be given the option to change your equipment or weapon before being surprised with these battles, but that largely doesn't matter. There's a set of basic weapons that are only slightly different from each other unless you heavily invest yourself into them, with the game purposefully keeping secret what they linearly evolve into. You can also do this for your accessories, but the benefits appear largely limited unless you experiment heavily, and I just ended up ignoring this for the entire game, traipsing into the final boss battle with a lot of level 1 weapons and equipment, and ultimately being successful.

There are also some small original changes that have been made to the general structure of the game. For one, random battles have been done away with and you can see the enemies you are about to face, which seemed long overdue to me, and I can't speak enough to how great a decision this was. There's also a mechanic of sneaking up behind them as they prowl around to get a pre-emptive strike, putting them tantalizingly few attacks from a stagger, but little can be said for this besides that it doesn't work, and enemies can see you through the backs of their heads a couple frames before the battle begins. It's possible to run between some groups, however, and escape battles I greatly preferred to avoid. Shops have been completely ripped out of the game, as well as towns and, with the exception of Chapter 11 of 13, any exploring of the world you're trying to save. This seems extremely ironic as the main discouragement to exploration, random battles, had finally been removed. I personally feel the lack of exploration helps destroy the engrossment the Player may get as they play further into the story.

It's such a shame to see this game chained down for some reason, especially when such slight touches were very intentionally included. For example, the things the characters say in battle to each other reflects how they feel about each other at that point in the story. The music is also superb at almost every turn, and the graphics are really a step up from almost anything I've seen thus far, both in and out of battles. Storming the Palamecia airship really immersed me in the story, and first setting foot on the Archylte Steppe is a moment that was pulled off just the way I wanted it, while botched in countless other games. The game even has its own alphabet. I was hoping to really get into Final Fantasy XIII, but its best battle was fighting off my interest, involvement, enjoyment, and strategy. Poor voice acting (including misusing words and bad Aussie accents), being one-shotted after finally just barely surviving through most of a boss battle after hours of attempts with no hints, and having to shoot myself in the foot by switching to a paradigm with two unnecessary classes, and then just restarting the boss battle simply served to remind me of how much ambition this game looks like it had, and how far it had to go. I know good RPGs and this is not one of them. This is like Final Fantasy in shackles, and if you could skip the first 20 hours or so, it would almost be worth playing to see how far the series has fallen.