So far I'm liking it pretty well, more so than I did XII.
In combat, you only ever control one party member (which you eventually have a choice in picking). The others are controlled by the AI, although you get to influence how they act with the Paradigm Shift system. One annoyance, for me, is the whole thing where if the player-controlled character dies, it's automatic Game Over, even if the other two members are still alive. If you've played Persona 3 at all, then the combat is kind of like that, except using Square's Active Time system from previous FF games rather than being fully turn-based.
Another thing that's different from previous games is that there are no towns to speak of. So far, it's basically just been "10 Travel through a battlefield 20 Cutscene 30 Goto 10" all the time. Even in the "towns," which so far have just been town-like battlefields. That's where the linearity comes in. The only remotely town-like area that wasn't a battlefield (at least for a little while) was Nautilus.
All shopping and upgrades and such are done at the save points. That said, I'm up to what I'm guessing is near the end of chapter 10 (of, I'm guessing, 13 total) now, and I have yet to buy any items or do any weapon upgrading at all, and haven't felt a real need to do it either. Although I've seen some haters on forums and such saying that chapter 11 is around the "half-way point" and is where the game "finally opens up and becomes an actual game". Not sure what that means, exactly, though I might have a bit of an idea, but won't say anything here because spoilers.
That may not make it sound all that good, actually, but even so, I think it all comes together and works. The story is good, and I actually care about the characters (unlike XII, which got boring to me after a while with all the political machinations and such, especially since Vaan, the main player controlled character in XII, seemed to just fade into the background about a third of the way through the game).
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Date: 2010-03-16 04:30 pm (UTC)From:In combat, you only ever control one party member (which you eventually have a choice in picking). The others are controlled by the AI, although you get to influence how they act with the Paradigm Shift system. One annoyance, for me, is the whole thing where if the player-controlled character dies, it's automatic Game Over, even if the other two members are still alive. If you've played Persona 3 at all, then the combat is kind of like that, except using Square's Active Time system from previous FF games rather than being fully turn-based.
Another thing that's different from previous games is that there are no towns to speak of. So far, it's basically just been "10 Travel through a battlefield 20 Cutscene 30 Goto 10" all the time. Even in the "towns," which so far have just been town-like battlefields. That's where the linearity comes in. The only remotely town-like area that wasn't a battlefield (at least for a little while) was Nautilus.
All shopping and upgrades and such are done at the save points. That said, I'm up to what I'm guessing is near the end of chapter 10 (of, I'm guessing, 13 total) now, and I have yet to buy any items or do any weapon upgrading at all, and haven't felt a real need to do it either. Although I've seen some haters on forums and such saying that chapter 11 is around the "half-way point" and is where the game "finally opens up and becomes an actual game". Not sure what that means, exactly, though I might have a bit of an idea, but won't say anything here because spoilers.
That may not make it sound all that good, actually, but even so, I think it all comes together and works. The story is good, and I actually care about the characters (unlike XII, which got boring to me after a while with all the political machinations and such, especially since Vaan, the main player controlled character in XII, seemed to just fade into the background about a third of the way through the game).