Final Fantasy XIII

So, the game that we’re bored to death of watching in trailer form and researching based on poorly translated interviews finally has a release date. Well, a prospective US one, at any rate – don’t trust Square Enix to keep its word, but at least we know that it’s aiming to have it out during the first half of next year, meaning that a European drop shouldn’t be far behind.

Wonderfully, two of these screens are from the 360 version of the game (we’ve labelled them as such), which reassures us that the port is coming along nicely. A few months ago, we sampled the PS3 demo of the game that irritatingly shipped with the Japanese Blu-ray version of Advent Children – not worth the £50 to import – revealing the game’s currency-based combat system and the multiple-perspective basis of the story.

Both these features are new to the series. The combat seems to nix the traditional MP system: the might of your attacks depends on how long you’re willing to wait for the action bar to fill up. For example, if the bar is a third full, a character can use one basic attack; if all three portions of the bar are full, they can either perform a three-attack combo or one all-attacking magic spell. It all depends on how willing you are to wait.
We imagine that progression in the game will give the characters – four of which we’re now aware of: acrobat Lightning, blond Snow, Chocobo-bearing Sazh and gleeful redhead Oerba – extra action bars to play around with, while pulling off the game’s traditional big spells, like Ultima and Holy, will demand patience while the characters recharge.

The balance between patience and instinct incorporates depth that real-time JRPG combat should have had years ago, so we’re big fans of it. While it’s hard to fathom now, the Active Time Battle system in XIII is as crucial to the series as VATS is to Fallout 3. It instigates a change that the series, having swerved off-course, in our opinion, with the Westernised and visually bland XII, absolutely demanded.

We think it’s premature to deem it a return to form, but what we can say is it’s a stylistic revisiting of the games that its die-hard, emo-ish fans hold in high esteem: VII, VIII and X all share XIII’s garish visual direction and that, even though it’s not overly friendly to the more straight-faced Western RPG faithful, is what its millions of fans want to see again. Who else matters?