Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)

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Bikes and swords and guns and crystals - essential components in any FF game.

In this demo, Snow is wading in knocking lumps out of PSICOM Marauders – curious staff-wielding troops from Cocoon’s brutish army, and Garuda Interceptors. We catch a glance of his available commands – Ruinga sounds like a spell of some kind. There’s an “Overwhelm” option, too, something Toriyama describes as “top secret”. The word “Paradigm” displays next to it though, so our guess is that it changes the character’s play style in some way. At the top of the screen a percentage is displayed – as you perform chained attacks this gauge fills. At a certain point it will “Break”, and your character will enter into a state that facilitates more powerful attacks. This isn’t a “Limit Break”, however. When asked whether XIII will have something similar to VII’s iconic system, Kitase replied: “It will definitely have something similar, like the Limit Breaks, each character will have something like that, but we can’t disclose too much detail”. What a tease.

What was disclosed was Shiva, revealed during E309 as Snow’s summon. Shiva, as any FF fan will know, is a sexy ice queen. In XIII however, Shiva is very different. In XIII, Shiva is, in fact, two sisters. When summoned, monsters replace your party members and assist you in a back-up, albeit powerful, fashion. We see the Shiva sisters dishing out icy pain with melee and ranged attacks, selected from a standard command menu. However, there’s more to summons than meets the eye. By pressing the Square button (on the PS3 version) you can tell your summon to enter what’s called “Gestalt Mode”. In this case, the Shiva sisters combine to form a motorcycle, perhaps the most titillating motorcycle ever conceived. Snow literally rides them, with one sister gazing longingly into Snow’s eyes as the handlebars, the other facing his arse as the saddle. The game then allows you to directly control the bike with commands selected from a brand new menu, inflicting damage on groups of enemies willy nilly. We see Snow drive Shiva up an ice wave, for example. We could say something about a threesome, but we’re probably better off leaving it to your imaginations.

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Gestalt mode obviously raises a number of questions about the game. You won’t simply be able to spam Gestalt attacks, for example - in order to summon you need to fill the Tactical Points (TP) gauge. Kitase is keeping schtum on how you’ll build up TP – all he says is a “well-played out battle” will have an effect on it. By well played we assume he means defeating enemies quickly with big chains of unbroken attacks.

Gestalt mode won’t always be mechanistic, either. Again, Kitase keeps his cards close to his chest, but he does say “it’s not always going to be mecha, like Shiva turning into a bike”. “We’ve just introduced Odin, who is a lightning summon (for Lightning, funnily enough). If you know Odin you kind of know what Odin usually comes with, so you can imagine from there what Gestalt mode is going to be like.” Make of that what you will FF fans.

At the end of each battle a ranking screen pops up detailing your efforts. It’s out of five stars and determined by “how well you played the battle” – time and chain attacks, but what’s the motivation to get five stars? “It’ll have a positive effect on your character stance. It might give you more TP, or something that’ll benefit you in battle. Right now we’re still trying to balance that system out, since it just means that people who are better at playing the game will just keep getting more advantages.” Online leaderboads? “That’s TBD right now.” Bah.

Remind you of Tifa in Advent Children? So it should.

What’s clear is that XIII’s combat is incredibly free-flowing, and feels, in a word, faster. The team is trying to simulate the combat from animated flick Advent Children, with flurries of attacks rather than slow charged abilities the order of the day. From what we’ve seen it looks like Square Enix has spectacularly achieved this goal. For many, it’s the slow, pondering and clunky combat system that’s put them off the series in the past. Those are adjectives you simply can’t accuse XIII of. We’re not saying we didn’t love FF games gone by, but we know it’s time for a change. From what we’ve seen, the change Square Enix has gone for is one for the better.

Finally, then, we’re getting a sense of what Final Fantasy XIII will feel like to play. It seems pointless telling you that the game looks incredible, since main Final Fantasy games always do, but the game’s graphical quality really can’t be understated. It’s not photorealistic, but stylised in that unique Final Fantasy way, with the graphical fidelity set to stratospheric levels. It’s Final Fantasy “evolved”, not only in terms of its battle system (which looks adrenaline-pumping, by the way), but in terms of setting – this is a science fiction universe darker than any in the series, with a lead character stripped of the annoying characteristics of Tidus and co. But it’s still a Final Fantasy game at heart. It’s still a JRPG, with fantastical designs, a bonkers storyline and an obsession with crystals. Console fanboys will continue to argue the toss, of course. Us? We just can’t wait to play what has the potential to be the greatest RPG ever to come out of Japan.

Final Fantasy XIII is due out in North America for PS3 and Xbox 360 in spring 2010. A European release will follow.

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