Wow, things just got complicated… I’ve finally unlocked the ability to select my own “Battle Team” and it occurred to me that I have A LOT of choices right now… Sure, you’ve got 6 players and 6 classes to choose from, but amongst those 6 classes there are clear specialization.. I will offer the example of the Saboteur, first, Saboteurs essentially debuff the baddies, Fang has the ability to “Slow”, and “Curse”, while Vanille has the ability to “Deprotect”, and “Deshell”, clearly one is better at tearing down enemies with strong defenses and the other is more utilitarian. This complicates further in that the other classes that are available to each of them are very different, Fang can go Sentinel and Commando, while Vanille has Synergist and Ravager… These are very very different class sets… Similarly the Synergists are specialized to; Hope is more about strengthening your defenses, and Sahz is about exploiting the enemies weaknesses… sure you can say there are 6 classes, but that doesn’t tell the whole story at all.

Based on this, it’s clear that the challenge is preparation for the fight ahead, the problem is you don’t know what the fight ahead is and what classes you’ll need… I see a lot of death in my future based solely on the fact that I don’t know what the enemies ahead are. This is going to get very interesting, and 5 star victories more rare I imagine.

The areas are starting to open up a bit more although there is still one very clear path for progress. The character development choices are starting to come into play more too as … I’m starting to feel like this was a training processes, not unlike what you might experience playing an MMO, you spend an exorbitant amount of time getting to the maximum level, only to find out the game is just starting as you start into end-game content, focuses change, and you spend just as much time there as you did getting to the max level. Very clever Square-Enix I like it…

Despite a power outage last night that cut my game time short last night I feel like I’ve been enlightened as to what Square-Exix is doing (either intentionally or otherwise) with Final Fantasy 13… They’re pulling some David Copperfield-esque illusions and misdirection. At least to this point.

As I mentioned, the environments are very linear, and narrow, essentially corridors… but they are designed in such a way that you feel like you are in this large beautiful world…

Same applies for character development, the crystalium system is also linear, sure, you get a branch every here and there, but its not really customization, you end up getting all the nodes anyway… the only choice you have is in which order you get them. In the case of the early parts of the game where you are given select members, their roles are indirectly forced on you so its easy to discern the priorities.

The paradigm system is pretty relentless… it’s hard to explain, I simply hit auto-battle all the time… but I’ve been shifting paradigms so frequently that I simply don’t have time to be dealing with specific commands anyway… the expertise seems to come from knowing when to shift, when to trigger your attacks before the ATB is full, watching health meters, buffs and debuffs, and knowing when to wait for enemies to get into position for an area of effect attack. It’s elegant, unique, interesting and fun.

The story is picking up, but I still haven’t seen the end goal yet, all and all, I’m still having a good time.

There isn’t a whole lot to add, except I played for 7 more hours… consecutively… and I didn’t really want to put it down but clearly it was time.

I spent a good 30-40 minutes trying to figure out how to beat Odin, he was totally wrecking me… had to resort to some cheap (but totally within the rules) tactics to get through it.

The story is interesting enough at this point, the combat is challenging enough for me to go ahead and say this is a good game… I’m really missing not being able to control my teammates though, especially the saboteurs and the synergists… sometimes I’d rather have protection on everyone instead of casting 3 spells on each guy, I’m looking at you frocobo…

I haven’t ~really~ got into upgrading the weapons, I feel like I should do some research first but I didn’t want to step away from the game to do it… I know, its kinda sad but meh!

Tip:
Paradigm shift a lot, in 2 member parties it makes a lot of sense to use a Dual Casting (ravager/ravager) paradigm, and immediate shift to Slash and Burn (commando/ravager) paradigm, this will decrease the rate the chain meter decreases, and when the ATB meter is full again, go back to Dual Casting… in a lot of cases this will stagger the baddie… switch back to Slash and Burn so that the stagger lasts longer, doing this should keep the 5 star ratings coming in through the split sections where you only have 2 members. I only figured this out towards the end of my session last night so I didn’t get a ton of use out of it unfortunately for me, hope it serves you better.