Square-Enix Magazine - News on battle system, story, characters, gameplay, etc.

Oh, WK, I don't think we'll ever agree on anything to do with XIII. [img]http://home.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/heart.gif[/img] But I must concede, for some reason I love debating the game with you! It's addictive. xD

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

Name one long fight in the older games that isn't an optional boss creature. Barthandelus is just a ridiculously long fight, all three of them.

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Perhaps I was underleveled by comparison to you in games or perhaps you use much faster strategies, but I've had numerous fights with numerous bosses that have taken me forever. The many end bosses (and it should be noted Barthy is exactly that). But, in all honesty, I don't remember boss names or fights that well because I don't replay many Final Fantasy games over and over. Sephiroth took me forever, for a start, though. Ultimecia likewise, even though I was invincible, I had to wait for her stupid speech throughout the battle.

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Except I could also choose to pelt it with magic or the whole group

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...and you can in XIII, too.

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I could steal from it

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Okay, I'll give you that. But I hardly ever use Steal, so I guess that's just my battle style.

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I could use a special technique that sometimes required additional special inputs

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Fair play, I missed limit breaks, but you could do those when using Eidolons. Which brings me to...

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I could use a Summon for quick damage

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There are Eidolons. But as for summons doing quick damage, I can't remember the last summon that I used that felt like quick damage. With all the cinematics involved with summons, I find them a complete waste of my time these days and have avoided them altogether for many years. In the time it takes for them to arrive, I could often have already despatched my enemies. The damage they do doesn't feel like it's worth the time. "But you're not getting damaged!" some might cry, but they haven't considered how impatient I am. I'd rather have my characters level up a little more and get a little hurt but still be able to win it themselves. Summons, for me, have not been 'quick damage' for a long time. They are 'slow damage'.

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switch out a party member

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In one of the other games, yes, you can do this.

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change some of my characters equipment

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People actually changed equipment during battles? I have never, ever done this.

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draw magic from it

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In one of the other games, yes, you can do this.

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actually play a real defensive role for my party

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...Sentinel, hi.

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haste my whole party with one spell cast

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I am fairly certain that in the time it takes to wait for the ATB bar to fill up and then haste everyone and then do any other protect style buffs or whatever, Sahz could have everyone with every one of your party with haste, protect, shell, enfrost or something.

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hell, in wait mode of FFX, I could blankly stare at the screen and thing about the meaning of life between trying to remember if I did my laundry and what I want for breakfast in the morning.

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...can't you pause in FFXIII? I swear you can... maybe I'm remembering things wrong. But then I hated Wait mode. :p

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In XIII, I just hit auto battle cause 9 out of 10 times the computer chooses exactly what I want to do

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That's your choice. You could do the same in FFXII. But it's a choice, and I chose to be more specific and plan my attacks on many occasions.

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playing sentinel/medic/buffer is incredibly boring

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That's why I've mentioned that I'd like to be able to change leader, but Sentinel at the very least provides a touch of tactics and further increases the need to take control as the computer won't always choose the right decision. Still, I'll agree with you there.

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and in some fights, I watch my A.I. party wipe the enemy before I even choose my third command for Ravager.

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In some fights in previous games, I just held down a button. I still do this in FFVI at the moment. Oh, monsters. Hold down X. Fight is over. Carry on.

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My only role is to babysit the A.I. and make sure it goes into a defensive paradigm shift when they get beat up too much. Even in XII, I was at least given full control of my party's A.I. script, not just canned A.I.:p

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Yeah, it would have been nice to have control of the AI script for some people, but personally I hated having to babysit my characters when it comes to what they do. It was incredibly frustrating that the gambits were so limited in number. I shouldn't have to write out a complete code as to what each character should be doing at the start of each battle, and often my choices screwed me over and I simply could not get it to work the way I wanted. Why should I spend three hours of my playthrough on setting up gambits when the computer can do it automatically? I'd just be making the gambits work the same way as they inevitably did in XIII anyhow, so battles would not be changed in any way whatsoever.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

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As for getting bored with combat, I did, just because every fight was virtually the same. Chain break the enemy juggle him to death. Until later when you fight the big things and it becomes: Make Vanille the lead, summon, spam death. I rarely found myself doing anything differently and watching my party juggle enemies just reminded me of Star Ocean 2 where juggling is pretty much your guaranteed strategy for victory, or the fact this combat system is pretty much Xenosaga Episode 2's combat system (though in X2 you can also smash enemies into the ground and combo additional smashes) so its not like I can't get this fix from other games that predate it, sometimes almost by ten years, but with the added bonus of having control over my party. I'm not even going to get into how much this game recycles enemy types. Juggling Behemoths does lose its luster when they are regular mooks that show up every other dungeon.

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Doing this when you have other enemies out there that are still alive can end badly depending on the enemy, but oh well. You're right, I suppose, that it is a strategy that works well for most enemies. But then, if you look at almost every other FF, there is a familiar strategy that works on all enemies, too. For me, it went like this: Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, Attack, victory. :p

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I'm with BoB on that one. Though I will admit, FFX was more like Attack, Attack, Attack, Magic attack exposing enemy's elemental weakness because there's actually enough MP to make my black mage useful in random battles, Attack, Attack, Attack, Heal, Attack. Really Final Fantasy is not that big on strategy, and FFXIII had the most, if still not much.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

Oh, WK, I don't think we'll ever agree on anything to do with XIII. [img]http://home.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/heart.gif[/img] But I must concede, for some reason I love debating the game with you! It's addictive. xD

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We can probably agree on Sahz. :D

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Perhaps I was underleveled by comparison to you in games or perhaps you use much faster strategies, but I've had numerous fights with numerous bosses that have taken me forever. The many end bosses (and it should be noted Barthy is exactly that). But, in all honesty, I don't remember boss names or fights that well because I don't replay many Final Fantasy games over and over. Sephiroth took me forever, for a start, though. Ultimecia likewise, even though I was invincible, I had to wait for her stupid speech throughout the battle.

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Final Boss fights do tend to be long, but you fight Barthy 3 times at different intervals in the game, and he's not even the real final boss who is also a pretty long fight but that's was expected. All three are exceptionally long bouts, lasting 10+ minutes which is pretty extreme for FF, not counting super bosses, and multi-tier bosses. Course their is also that boss in Chapter 3 who basically kills Hope five minutes in and then its a a painful choice of trying to revive him so he can die again or just chip away at the boss with just Lightning.

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Except I could also choose to pelt it with magic or the whole group

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...and you can in XIII, too.

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With just one character, and even then, said single target spells are the weaker versions whereas the -aga spells are auto-all hit. In older games, you had to worry about Reflect status, but in XIII the A.I. automatically knows if an enemy has elemental immunity and each character is always set-up to have at least one element that the enemy isn't immune to, this all ultimately leaves the mage role as much of a no-brainer for the player cause its all set-up for the player not to fail. Its like being permanently on training wheels.

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I could steal from it

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Okay, I'll give you that. But I hardly ever use Steal, so I guess that's just my battle style.

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I always found it amusing when XII haters mention how XII sucks cause it takes away certain ability staples like Jump or Dual-Wield (often times forgetting these skills are largely absent from several installments in the series, yet flock to XIII which even removes standard abilities like Steal. For me, Command skills are the spice of life and are ultimately the reason I don't find the older games as boring. Cause if I know my party going all out can destroy an enemy, I can simply downplay the battle by trying to steal some loot, use elaborate skills like Jump or Bushido, or even weaken enemy groups with Kick or Coin Toss.

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I could use a special technique that sometimes required additional special inputs

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Fair play, I missed limit breaks, but you could do those when using Eidolons. Which brings me to...

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I could use a Summon for quick damage

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There are Eidolons. But as for summons doing quick damage, I can't remember the last summon that I used that felt like quick damage. With all the cinematics involved with summons, I find them a complete waste of my time these days and have avoided them altogether for many years. In the time it takes for them to arrive, I could often have already despatched my enemies. The damage they do doesn't feel like it's worth the time. "But you're not getting damaged!" some might cry, but they haven't considered how impatient I am. I'd rather have my characters level up a little more and get a little hurt but still be able to win it themselves. Summons, for me, have not been 'quick damage' for a long time. They are 'slow damage'.

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They haven't been quick damage since IX, still, even in FFX they were useful, in fact I felt they were borderline unfair and game breaking, but that's a discussion for another time. While I myself have never had much love for the summons (glorified black mage is more like it) I kind of feel that XIII sort of dropped the ball, not only are they useless as DD for the party much like XII, but they are completely inept for even working with the battle system. If they didn't have cheap freebie skills like auto-knockdown against the Toise enemies and worked like a Megalixer in battle, I don't think anyone would ever use them cause they suck so bad. My issue here is that XIII does nothing to remedy the issue of the summons that has plagued them since the jump to PS2.

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switch out a party member

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In one of the other games, yes, you can do this.

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Two actually, you can do this in XII as well. In fact, XII lets it so a battle party wipe doesn't = game over, which is a nice improvement over FFX that only let you switch out living members for some silly reason.

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change some of my characters equipment

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People actually changed equipment during battles? I have never, ever done this.

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If you steal a really good weapon in the fight and decide to use it then, its useful, if you walked into a fight where an enemy is using certain elemental spells, you can switch out your shields to one that gives you an advantage. Or the times you have an elemental weapon that is ineffective against the enemies like using the Brotherhood sword in the underwater segments in FFX. Hell, in XII you can switch out your entire parties equipment and Gambit set-up mid battle. I made pretty good use of this perk, maybe this is why I never found the battle long... :p

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draw magic from it

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In one of the other games, yes, you can do this.

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My point is that it gave me something else to do, cause this goes back to the Command skill section above, the thing to consider is that Draw actually added some more weight to random encounters whereas XIII wants you to end it as fast as possible or utterly fail at it.

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actually play a real defensive role for my party

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...Sentinel, hi.

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Which is very limited... In older games, I also had access to abilities like Reflect, Vanish, and Blink which expanded my defensive options and actually gave me a way to deal with magic. Going back to how XII did it better, in XII, I could physically control my character and move him away from my party so they don't have to deal with splash damage. Whereas in XIII, Sentinels are useless against mage type enemies cause they do nothing but draw their AoE spells to your party since they love to bunch up. Sure Snow is taking little damage, but he inadvertently killed Hope cause he couldn't be arsed to move a few feet from him and now I'm going to have to waste time reviving a character my sentinel was suppose to protect...

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haste my whole party with one spell cast

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I am fairly certain that in the time it takes to wait for the ATB bar to fill up and then haste everyone and then do any other protect style buffs or whatever, Sahz could have everyone with every one of your party with haste, protect, shell, enfrost or something.

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Nope, he couldn't cause each of those spells are single target and with the exception of Protect and Shell, the other two spells mentioned require a mostly full AT Gauge to cast, even with Haste effect, Sahz would only be getting one character buffed in the time it took a normal time/blue mage to buff everyone at the same time. While XIII's system is fairly faster than say XII or X. IX and under have more exploitative means of buffing the party quickly. The other issue here, is that maybe I don't want Sahz to waste time with Protect cause the enemy is magic based, maybe I need that enfrost spell first. The A.I. doesn't care, cause its already set-up with a list of what is important and the players will be damned.

This gets really annoying when certain enemies can exploit this. Say you are using a Sentinel to protect your party while your Synergist buffs everyone, wait, does the enemy have a status inflicting attack? Oh yeah... now your going to watch in disbelief as your Synergist wastes turns trying to buff a sentinel who is getting his status buffs removed with negative ones. While your Synergist keeps this endless struggle of trying to haste your Sentinel, the protective buffs he gave to your other party members is piddling away. This is much more common than you think in the second half of the game. The lack of control allows annoyances like these to continue and its only made more aggravating cause its predecessor allowed you to easily remedy this issue.

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hell, in wait mode of FFX, I could blankly stare at the screen and thing about the meaning of life between trying to remember if I did my laundry and what I want for breakfast in the morning.

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...can't you pause in FFXIII? I swear you can... maybe I'm remembering things wrong. But then I hated Wait mode. :p

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I do too, but FFX actually is permanent wait mode, since actions are completely Turn base. You can pause in the other games as well though. Course I'm just joking with that one. ;)

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In XIII, I just hit auto battle cause 9 out of 10 times the computer chooses exactly what I want to do

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That's your choice. You could do the same in FFXII. But it's a choice, and I chose to be more specific and plan my attacks on many occasions.

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What's to plan? If you are not a mage role, you're mostly just choosing attack or guard. If you are not healing or buffing then your just spamming magic to raise the chain gauge, a quick auto battle pick after Libra will automatically tell you what is most effective to the enemy, and then you just choose that command over and over again until its broken and then use a commando role. There is really no more strategy than this. Its strategic components only exist cause the game built them in. You can't win unless you break them. We made battles a two step process, aren't we great? I'm not even going to go into how Synergist and Saboteur are useless outside of boss type battles making them as effective as the old school variants.

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and in some fights, I watch my A.I. party wipe the enemy before I even choose my third command for Ravager.

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In some fights in previous games, I just held down a button. I still do this in FFVI at the moment. Oh, monsters. Hold down X. Fight is over. Carry on.

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Yes, the middle to recent titles dropped the ball with difficulty in order to become more mass appeal cause the modern RPG gamer is a total wimp who is here for the story only. But try that stunt in FFIV... You can win with this strategy, but it will take a few rounds and you'll probably take more unnecessary hits than you needed. This issue is a downward spiral that affect the second half of the series, and even then, I still had the option to choose to see something different by choosing the AutoCrossbow, Mug, Limit Break, or Coin Toss. I could add some real variety whereas Commando has Blitz, Ruin and Attack, which every character has. Ravager only has the elemental spells unique to my character and even then you'll mostly be using one of them, and you won't really see much of a difference from Fire and Fira in terms of animation, especially when the battles are just acrobatic/pyrotechnic messes that makes watching individual commands rather a moot point, and eventually makes you care less about the spectacle cause its not as impressive 40 hours in as it was four hours in.

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My only role is to babysit the A.I. and make sure it goes into a defensive paradigm shift when they get beat up too much. Even in XII, I was at least given full control of my party's A.I. script, not just canned A.I.:p

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Yeah, it would have been nice to have control of the AI script for some people, but personally I hated having to babysit my characters when it comes to what they do. It was incredibly frustrating that the gambits were so limited in number. I shouldn't have to write out a complete code as to what each character should be doing at the start of each battle, and often my choices screwed me over and I simply could not get it to work the way I wanted. Why should I spend three hours of my playthrough on setting up gambits when the computer can do it automatically? I'd just be making the gambits work the same way as they inevitably did in XIII anyhow, so battles would not be changed in any way whatsoever.

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Sounds to me like you're just a lousy strategist :p I kid, but in terms of being limited in scope with Gambits, I didn't mind cause it gave me something to do. In XIII my only option was to Paradigm Shift and input a rather limited set of commands for one character. In XII, I could change how my entire party approached the battle and even change how my melee and mages did things with some equipment adjustments. If the game allowed for something like If/Else statements, then the A.I. would give the player nothing to do. There is a reason why Command Skills don't work with the Gambit system, cause you the player are meant to be playing that role. My Vaan is a great thief, but its not because of the Gambits, cause attaching Steal to a Gambit just makes it, Vaan's only action and its wasteful, but because I am either choosing the command for him or actively switching off or changing his Gambits to suit the needs of the battle. I can even shut off all the Gambits and play it old school. My point is that I am still playing a rather active and more importantly, useful role to the battle system.

In the old games, I played the individual role of each member in my party. In XII, I'm the platoon leader, while I trust my party to do things on their own, I can still give out individual commands, like telling my healer to prioritize certain conditions more than others, or switching out ineffective weapons for more useful ones, or telling my mage to use certain spells over another. In XIII, I'm a general who really has little control over my parties individual actions, instead changing things by telling them to switch stock A.I. sets, you start healing, you start buffing, you start nuking. I don't care how you do it (except I do) but as long as you do the broad action I want, your fine. I just have to hope the A.I. and I are on the same page, if not, then hey, the game isn't so difficult you can't win if the A.I. is a little retarded. You only lose when the game cheap shots you are happens to be on the ball in one of those rare instances that predominately happens when Hope or Vanille are the leaders.

My issue here is that I don't have fun with everything being left to the computers decision, I'm being forced to play more of a spectator role in the game. Yes, I may have just spammed attack in the old days, but at least I was still participating. I may be able to create a horribly effective random enemy killing squad in XII, but at least its because of how I set up the A.I. and the parties equipment. In XIII, I honestly don't feel like there is anything I can do the A.I. can't do better, barring of course some of the stupid A.I. patterns with Sentinel and Synergist, but those roles are not as important as you would think. If the game gave you an option to let the A.I. control Paradigm shifting as well, there is really nothing for the player to do in battle but sit back and watch.

Not going to quote everything because the same points are being reiterated.

I agree with WK in saying that the player in XIII is more of a general than anything else, ordering broad direction without worrying about the specifics behind it.
However, I feel that there is a lot of strategy involved in that. Deciding when to shift from an attacking position, to a heal, to buffing, etc, is what you basically do in every FF. You may control the specifics, but the specifics can be lumped into individual groups.
Therefore, XIII maintains the basic strategic elements of a FF, but makes battles a lot quicker and, stylistically at least, more exciting.

As for the dependance on the computer's A.I, there are pros and cons. As BoB said, the majority of my battles in the former FFs used attack. I reckon 70-80% of my FF battle time has been spent selecting attack and an enemy. In areas where enemies have an elemental weakness, or bosses have an elemental weakness, my options have been to use strongest elemental weakness spell.
In XIII, I do not have to spam the same command continuously. In Commander, attack is often used, and in Ravager, the elemental weaknesses are found and then exploited. For me, this is a GOOD thing.

The whole knockdown and build-up bar is also something that most of the XIII haters forget about, because it adds another element of strategy. For most of the high-level enemies, a knockdown is required to deal the damage to beat them. But, to build up that damage requires a degree of strategy, because you have to balance the use of Ravager and Commando in maintaining that bar along with ensuring that the party maintains health and buffs. This is quite a nice addition to gameplay (although it may be over-used).

So, in these cases, the automation of XIII works well. However, I agree with WK on other points.

Positioning of battle members frustrates me endlessly. If you are the sentinel and there is splash damage, please go somewhere not near Hope, who is as weak as a mouse. That was a stupid fail by Squenix.

Inability to swap out party members. This is silly but there is also problems with the different paradigm sets that are allowed by the game. Swapping out one character with another who has different roles will obviously mess up the paradigms. On that note, why they couldn't save historical paradigms is another frustration.

Useless weapon/armour system. If you are going to include it, make it useful.

Lack of wait mode/micromanagement. This is where WK is right. The automation of XIII does make a lot of grinding and spam commands a lot more bearable. However, sometimes you want to be more specific in what you are doing. The balance in XII, where you can set-up gambits to automate repetitive tasks, but can also specify every single command given, would have been welcome in XIII. I often made Sazh my party leader because as a Saboteur/Synergist (I think), I could give some needed direction to the order of buffs and anti-buffs applied.

For me, I think the battle system succeeded much more than it failed. Although the intricacy of gameplay mechanics in IX is fantastic for boss battles, I am not in a boss battle most the time, and I would rather have XIII's ridiculously OTT battle animations, speed and auto-battle over a 3 minute battle that the simplest battle in IX ended up being. It's an opinion though.

Personally, I thought X's battle system promoted the greatest strategy and X-2 probably the most interesting.

'General' is a great way to put it. And of course there is a lot of strategy in playing the general. I will certainly concede that FFXIII's battles are strategic, more so than some other FF games. But you are playing the general, not the soldier, affecting the general flow of battle without imputting specific actions. I didn't like that. Other SE battle systems have been 'strategic' without sacrificing control: see FFX and FF Tactics and hell even FFX-2 which I still maintain is the best battle system of the post-PS1 era and probably second only to Tactics. And even in FFXII where you must rely on AI to a degree, you at least have full customization of that AI and can switch to those characters at any time for full control.

The battles in FFXIII were just too fast. Most of the time it isn't economically feasible to input commands on your own since a) you sacrifice speed in a game where lack of speed (i.e., constant paradigm shifts) will get you killed quickly in most battles and also affects your star rating, and b) most of the time auto-battle will do exactly what you were going to do only 5 times faster. The only time I didn't rely on auto-battle exclusively was when I had Lightning spam Army of One in late game. For some reason the AI never selected it, and since it was a 5 block skill, it didn't take much time to do.

Last point that bugs me about lack of control. You never learn enemy weakness on your own. For new enemies, your team spams any spell to see what sticks. Eventually, as the bestiary of that foe becomes complete, they start to target weaknesses. You can speed this up by casting Libra but that's about it. That's something we usually had to learn on our own, but in FFXIII it was all automated. And sometimes the AI sucked at it, casting fire spells on a bomb for instance.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

SQUARE ENIX MAGAZINE

Battle System
- You will have the ability fight alongside befriended monsters.
- You can pick and mix several different monsters in preparation for a battle.
- Monsters will have special abilities which will be similar to that of the Eidolons in FFXIII.
- The battle system will retain paradigm shifts.
- The battle system will be even faster and more dynamic than that of FFXIII.

Gameplay
- Gameplay will feature puzzle-solving elements.
- While FFXIII was 'story-driven', this game will be 'player-driven' with elements of interaction and choice.
- There will be a new game progression system which encourages the player to explore the world and various challenges on offer.

Characters / Storyline
- Noel will act as protagonist in the game.
- FFXIII's characters will all feature in FFXIII-2, and "every one of them will have some involvement in the story - albeit in an unexpected fashion."
- The game will have a 'darker' tone.
- The player detailed alongside Lightning in the logo is still being kept secret by SE for now, but they have stated he shares a relationship with Noel Kreiss.
- Noel grew up in Gran Pulse in a very different environment to that of Vanille & Fang, and was ignorant of life on Cocoon. He has survived in harsh conditions where you have to fight monsters to survive, and is burdened by a heavy destiny.
- Lightning will go into battle at the very beginning of the game wearing the armour featured in FFXIII-2 trailers.
- While FFXIII featured the gods Lindzei and Pulse, it will be Etro who will feature strongly in FFXIII-2. Feathers floating around Lightning in trailers symbolise Etro.

It also mentions enhanced graphics - which is crazy, as FFXIII's graphics were already good enough. xD

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Why am i not impressed at all :aimmeh: ?

I don't care what they do with the game, I just want some interaction with the world this time. Make this like you actually remember how to make FF games please!