Final Fantasy XIII’s Combat Makes Me Tingly
Although I played the entirety of Final Fantasy XII, I loathed the combat. It’s faux-MMORPG-style fighting — which forced players to buy every single action for their characters at a goddamn shop, such as “heal, then fight” — made the old-school “Active Time Battle” combat seem reasonable and realistic. I don’t even like MMORPGs, so I sure as hell didn’t like that gibberish. And I muttered this to myself, over and over, as I played about 100 or so hours of the game
This video of the FFXIII demo from Gamescom does show off the combat, which looks like a happy step back to more traditional RPG fare. There are monsters on the world map, but when you encounter them you switch to ATB combat. It appears that you can program your other characters to fight much like in FFXII, but I’m betting you have the option to control them all if you want (maybe not, but otherwise, there’s not much difference between 12 and 13‘s combat, and I’d prefer not to think about that). Overall, FFXIII is making me squishy in a way I haven’t felt about a videogame since FFX.
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.