Xyttik's Blogs

Today, when I went to work, there was a package sitting on the desk for me.

It was the Advent Children complete + Final Fantasy XIII demo I had ordered from Playasia.com

When I arrived home from work, the first thing I did was pop the demo in my PS3.

Straight away I was wowed by the stunning visuals, and although I couldn't understand any of what was going on (the Japanese was too fast for me),
I still thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough.

The opening sequence becomes very familiar very quickly.
You're on a train, and your party are in disguise, but are caught by the security checkpoints.

After some very quick action sequences, you enter your first battle as Lightning, accompanied by Sahz, against a
robotic scorpion like creature.
There is a quick tutorial (which I could only just read) and then you are thrown straight into the action.

The battle system in Final Fantasy XIII's trial is very different to any other Final Fantasy game, because it is "active turn based".
You have an action gauge, which has 3 segments in it, and each different command takes up a different amount of segments,
ie attack = 1 segment, firaga (fire magic which targets all enemies) = 3.

When you have selected the amount of actions you want to do, you then press triangle to execute them.
The enemy runs on the same system too, so they are often attacking you while you're trying to pick commands, so if you're not quick,
or forget to press triangle, you're in for trouble.

Once your commands have been executed, you are free to enter more commands, but you must wait for your action gauge to refill again before you can use them.
Commands can also be cancelled at any time before you execute them, so you're not locked into picking something you didn't want to.

I found the targetting system to be a bit annoying, because you had to select a command type, then select a target, then input the commands you want to use (ie white magic > Lightning > Cure),
and you couldn't switch targets unless you went right back to the root, and couldn't select multiple targets, so I'm glad to hear that will be one of many things
they remedy in the final release.

After spending a little bit of time with Lightning, you're introduced to Snow, who is in another part of the city that
you're in, and you get to try him out for a while, and while story wise, quite a bit happens, as far as the gameplay,
nothing new is introduced before the demo ends.

As I sat there, amazed at how well the game played, I went online and found an article about things in the retail version that will be different to the demo.
My first thought was that the demo felt great anyway, and reading the improvements they're putting in, I was thoroughly impressed, and am now eagerly anticipating this game.
The changes that will be most noticeable are:

*If the first hit of a chain kills an enemy in the demo, your character continues attacking air for the rest of the combo, but in the final they will not.
*The full game will have a level system.
*The demo only allows you to control one character at a time, but the full game will have a new system for managing other party members in battle.
*And of course, the command selection mess that I mentioned earlier.

Overall, the demo was highly enjoyable, amazing to look at, and if the rest of the game plays the way this demo did, then Squeenix may just have redeemed themselves.

The one thing that worries me however, is the 360 version.

The demo was just over an hour long, and that was just with me getting used to all the commands being in Japanese etc.
The demo has been sized at 4GB.
360 games are on Dvds, which are 4.7GB.

So does that mean 360 owners of the game will have to be changing discs every hour? Or will they suffer major downscaling and compression so the game can fit on a reasonable number of discs?

I guess we'll find out when the game is released...