[PS3] Final Fantasy 13 Analysis

Square Enix’s most excellent RPG franchise, released this year (2010) for both X360 and PS3, contains a high level of refinement on the battle system, a very high emphasis on the audio-visual experience on the cuts cenes, a normal/cliche story but which is directed by very well developed characters and has a great technology behind the scenes. Read the entire analysis and get the ins and outs about how these wonderful features make the uniqueness of the Final Fantasy experience!

Battle System

This is the primary focus of the game. The battle flow is very smooth and character movements are well polished. You have an Action Turn-Based mechanics, in which you have a bar with cells (sections of it) that you use to do the attacks/ability usages (each one have a cost of cells and after executing the commands, you need to wait the bar to recharge). You control only the leader of the party, whereas the others do everything automatically.

The paradigm shift (optima change in the japanese version) lets you change the behavior of the characters, so each paradigm suggest a specific strategy: Assault for pure damage, Solidarity for a defensive approach, and so on.

There are roles, that work in the same way as classes: medic emphasizing healing, commando as a soldier, saboteur doing poison, slow, etc. You can configure different roles for your characters in a specific paradigm you are using. Although this sounds very hardcore, that level of customization lets every RPG die-hard fan make their best character builds and plan the best strategies for battles, also because all of this is well balanced to the ultimate level.

In FF13, there is no level: you get only crystal points that you spend in order to up your statuses and get new skills in the skill tree (called Crystarium) of each role of your characters.

All of these options make the RPG gameplay a lot more smooth and comfortable. It is is really the evolution of the genre. No specific jobs, no specific skills, no specific commands, everything is flexible.

The boss battles, on contrary to the most traditional RPGs, does not require grinding (fighting over and over to improve and be able to win boss fights). Training is not obligatory: all you have to do is to use the best combinations and the best timing you can and the fight is yours (this means changing paradigms accordingly to the context of the battle, choosing the right commands and being smart on the usage of items). This of course made the gameplay less tiring to advance and more challenging to beat.

Different from the demo, you can (if being very attentive on timing) avoid fights, since enemies are not random (you see them walking). The problem is that you only start improving your characters after the first boss, so you will find yourself wanting to avoid every single battle until there. But if you have no choice, at least try to touch enemies on their back in order to get a first strike.

In-Between Gameplay

The designers did put so much emphasis on the battle system that the in-between gameplay (things you do while not fighting/watching cinematics) is very poor. The paths are very linear and if you get in a dead-end you rarely find item boxes to compensate the walking. You have nothing to do more than getting items and walking: no fast-simple puzzles, only basic lever triggers and examinating objects (which only gives you more cinematics to watch). All the fun is centered on the battles, so you won’t find the in-between experience so rich. But that is what makes Final Fantasy, right? Yes, no fan claims about that, but for people who are not fans, this has impact on the gameplay experience as a whole.

Cut scenes and Storyline

They are totally well polished and detailed to the ultimate level of refinement. Character expressions are very natural and real, animations and visual effects are outstanding and scenarios are very inspiring and pixel-perfected. Also, the transition between cut scene graphics and in-gameplay graphics is almost unnoticeable in quality terms.

The narrative content, as expected of a Japanese RPG (JRPG), is centered on the thoughts and feelings of the characters instead of telling the core story of the world and its dynamics. By understanding the differences between the characters, their opinions, goals and focus you get to learn what you are after in the game’s progression and the philosophical messages they want to pass to you. Also, the story also focus on what the characters learn about each other: their weaknesses, the cooperation, the trust, and so on.

Lightning is very invidualist and do not want anyone on her way, Snow wants to protect everyone but forget the level of responsability needed to achieve it, Hope does not understand the scenario he is in and question the importance of fighting and saving each other. With time, everyone gets to understand themselves better and find a conclusion that will change their world vision and in turn, transform the player’s vision. That is how JRPG stories are told.

The Technology of Square Enix

Final Fantasy 13 (as well as Versus and FF14) uses Crystal Tools: an in-house game engine that focus on character animations, graphics transition between cut scenes and in-gameplay, Real-time physics calculations and advanced audio processing.

Square’s technical director said that, even though they licensed Unreal Engine for games like The Last Remnant, only Crystal Tools would make the development of a new Final Fantasy title possible, since Crystal Tools is made of all the algorithms and components that the programmers perfected for years in Final Fantasy development, and the features of the engine focus exactly on what FF titles need in order to improve and perform well technologically and aesthetically speaking.

How Japan deals with technology in game development?

Final Fantasy did not use a licensed engine such as Unreal Engine or Crytek Engine as many ocidental studios use to do. In fact, Japan does not use that methodology so well. Capcom developed the MT Framework (Multi-thread and Multi-target), Nintendo has NintendoWare and Square Enix developed Crystal Tools. The thing is: japanese do not make all-in-one solutions to sell for others like in the ocident, they spend time perfecting their own technology in order to make their games and their production processes better, exclusively for the company they are working for . On one hand you get a smooth development process and a high achievement of quality on the games, on the other hand no one helps each other, which is bad for the industry. Recently, many japanese producers desired that a “japanese epic games” existed, to provide excellent tools that can be used by everyone, but this is still just a dream. Japanese is not behind on technology advances, but they still cannot share what they make.

[NDS] Keroro Gunsou - Dragon Warriors Review

Keroro Gunsou is a very popular franchise in Japan who invaded the world of animes, mangas and has a huge merchandising around the country. It received a game for Nintendo DS (which was released in 2009) by Namco Bandai Games. It is a platform/action game featuring all the main characters of the show on a very exciting level design!

Basic Gameplay

The game let the player choose from 5 characters to play throughout the level, each one with its exclusive abilities:

- Keroro: the green frog, who can catch and throw objects with a ray, which remember the game Klonoa a lot.

- Kururu: the yellow frog, who can glide after jumping, paralyze enemies and (this is very cool!) confuse enemies and control them with the directional.

- Tamama: the gray frog, who resembles a lot the alex-kid gameplay (with punches, destroying everything). He can also break the ground and punch enemies up.

- Giroro: the red frog, who uses a double shoot pistol and grenades (the gameplay feels like metal slug).

- Dororo: the blue frog, who can hang in the walls and (this is also cool!) clone himself in 2 shadows (one on the left and other on the right).

Each one has its own special power, activated by using a badge that is a collectable item, but you will never use it (laughs). There are levels that may require a single character, others that let you choose between 2 or 3, and others that are suited for all the characters. The layout of the world map let you get cutscenes/optional sub-boss fights and extra levels in a very flexible/non-linear way.

Level Design

This game is a lot fast-paced: there are loads of short goals that are very simple and fast to accomplish, you are always busy with something fun and it is difficult to stop playing! Consider this example: you are walking, then you are asked to kill 3 enemies, after that a door opens, you jump through the platforms and press two switches at the same time, this will unveil a flag, you get that flag, then you see a box, get it and drop it to reach the higher platform in which you attach your flag in the slot. You never stop, and you urge to get to the next level, what feels very good. The main goal of the level is to catch all the flags and put them on the indicated slots.

The levels not only make great use of the character abilities but also include a good amount of item interactions, which are trivial to the genre but necessary to keep the flow nice (boxes, switches, bombs and everything else you already know). The designers also did a great job on the level metrics: distances, item positioning and challenge positioning are very well balanced. These challenges are most about timing (e.g.: a platform is moving around thunder rays, you have to press the switch to power it off before you get a shock).

The annoying thing is the enemy respawn timing. After you kill an enemy , it will respawn in a matter of 4-5 seconds, which can be totally irritating when trying to climb platforms full of enemies (you jump, get a hit, and fall so that you have to restart). But it is a necessary mechanics since keroro needs to use them to get impulse on jump and so on. There are more than 100 levels, and 30% of them takes more than 10 minutes to finish, so you have a great life span there.

Mini-games

There are some tricky and fun mini-games like shooting enemies to make them step back and not reach your base and a traditional space shooter game involving both screens. They add good value to the game, but unfortunately they do not appear so often.

Bosses

The sub-boss fights are easy and fast, which is good to take a break from the levels' freakness. But they can become very repetitive as well. Boss fights involve a good use of timing and infiltration strategies that are very fun to deal with.

They also provide a good number of intuitive visual feedbacks so that you can react accordingly and have more control over the fight (yes, the game let you give your best).

Graphics

Great in-game animations, great pixel-art in the cutscenes (loyal to the anime) and well-done visual effects (mainly during boss fights).

Final Words

For platform/action game lovers it is a must-have. There are lots of short and long levels (so you can play in the bus and at home, respectivelly), very rewarding and non-stop gameplay. You will get angry sometimes but it is worth the perseverance. Sometimes you will get tired of the levels, but they get more varied with time as well.

[NDS] Final Fantasy XII - Revenant Wings (Game Design Analysis)

This game is an RPG developed for Nintendo DS by Square Enix in 2007. The purpose of the game was to provide an RTS (Real-time strategy) gameplay in which you control your main characters and also their summons. It is also one of the games with the most high-quality cut scenes and gameplay graphics considering the DS specs. I won't cover the story details, instead I will focus on describing and criticizing gameplay elements and design, the usage of assets and techniques.

1 - Gameplay

1.1 - Controls

The RTS gameplay really works with stylus (just make a selection square or click the unities, its pretty much smooth). A bad thing, however, is that as soon as you defined an action for your troop/character (move or attack), their selection will be canceled, making battles a bit uncomfortable and repetitive mechanically speaking. The characters are also too slow (only Vaan and some summons can move in a good speed), so you need to be a very patient gamer during larger levels.

1.2 - Goals and Tasks

The level goals are very well varied: from the traditional "defeat all enemies", to "protect an ally" or just "reach the X point in the map", the game's level design progression is difficult to get bored of.

While achieving these goals, the player will defeat monster mobs, open chests, find and press switches to open doors and many other traditional features. Beyond that, you can extract materials from certain sources in the map. Those materials help you to create weapons in the shop. Although it sounds interesting, many of the weapons you make won't be as useful or strong as the ones you could buy on the normal shop (also the recipes to make stronger weapons takes time to be enabled and that time frame might not follow your character needs, mainly when you are training a lot to level up).

1.3 - Training and Progression

Leveling up, different from other Final Fantasy games, is an easy and not much time-consuming task: when replaying a mission, you continue to receive good amounts of both experience and gils (gold), so training is very smooth. If you find small missions (with few monsters and a small map metrics), you can get a lot of experience and money in little time (I could level up from level 20 to 30 in a matter of 25 minutes, because I found "that small mission" that took only 2 minutes to accomplish). And there are enough experience for all your 5-6 characters.

It is also a RPG in which leveling really matteqrs: not only your character stats get improved, but also your summons’ default level will increase. Summing all your unities, you get a lot of additional damage and HP by leveling up.

Other than that, the missions are very well balanced in terms of field metrics, enemy settings and treasure boxes / material sources positioning.

2 - Gameplay Features/Systems

2.1 - Skills

The main characters have a set of skills and the famous Gamble mode (a skill can be set to be used automatically as soon as it is recharged). The skills do not consume MP - instead it has a reloading time to be used again, which is a better design choice for the RTS dynamics implemented. As expected, new skills are enabled when reaching a specific level.

2.2 - Behaviors

The AI of the characters can be poor on path finding from time to time (being stuck), but in terms of prioritizing targets, they are pretty good. Also, sometimes if you do not go fight some enemies, they start following your troops.

2.3 - Summons

You make your army by assigning summons to follow your main characters (by using a portal in some missions you can make new ones, but in the beginning of the level you already get a good amount of them summoned by default). To unlock new summons you have a tree progression in which you spend points to unlock the different summons, and these ones will enable a new slot to be unlocked in the future. They are divided in 4 categories: warrior/tank (hp and resistance), magician, healer and flying unit, so if you unlock a flying unit type A, the type B will only be available after unlocking another warrior/magician type before. There are also different elements for them: water, fire, shock, earth and so on. This way, a significant amount of strategic elements are available for the hardcore player who wants to be perfectly aligned with the mission's challenge.

3 - UI Design

As many of the recent Final Fantasy titles, the UI design is very appealing. The mini-maps are beautiful and location icons are easy to understand: It points out the next mission's location in the world map, and during the combat you can know what units are monsters and which ones are real challenges (like a subboss). The click sounds are great and blend well with the artwork and actions involved. It is fast to access your options, change equips, see stats and so on (you can really operate in high speed). Although in the combat your selections are cancelled after setting an action for a troop, all the rest of the functionalities are simply smooth and blend perfectly with the combat mechanics and mainly with the configuration stages (for summons, shop panels and so on). It also does not require much management on inventory/skills since these are very automatic (skills are enabled by level, stats are automatically distributed, making weapons is very straightforward and so on). However, selling loot can be a bit boring because there is no quantity configuration for identical items.

Large narrative scenes are no longer scary: the game always ask you to save after a long narrative part or cut scene segments, so if you lose the mission, you do not have to rewatch anything. It is a very must-have design element if you cannot skip cut scenes, but that was absent in games like The World Ends with You, which involved lots of cut scene rewatching after dying.

4 - Cut Scenes and Storytelling

Square Enix's CG planners/designers used the 2 screens of the DS to create a new camera technique: in a scene where Vaan's airship is flying, you can see the airship in the lower screen with the beautiful sky and clouds surrounding it in the lower screen while also seeing the characters' faces and gestures zoomed in the upper screen.







This means you can experience detailed character emotions in the upper screen and also feel the environment they are in the lower screen, at the same time, which is an exclusive experience on the DS.

The cut scenes do not have voices: there are only character gestures and action movements of vehicles and environments. They are also very small in time length (from 10 to 20 seconds), but that is not related to the cartridge’s space limitations.

The idea was to use the CG's for beautiful enemy appearing scenes or location discoveries instead of including heavy narrative (dialogues and so on). And that narrative is made of gameplay assets: although the characters are pixelled, they are very expressive and animated, making the narrative fun and interesting without needing voices or 3d character meshes. In general, the dialogue sequences are not too text heavy as other FF titles and include scripted actions that are in great sync with the scene. You can notice that the scenes and narrative content were checked rigorously from start to finish.

5 - Graphics and Asset Specs

The cut scenes follow the notable Square Enix's CG quality standards on all areas: models, textures, motion design, animation and scene sequencing. You can even thrill thinking: "Is this for real? it is only a DS!", but remember that it is only a recorded video that is easy to reproduce with DS' video codecs from the market (like Act Imagine), so the sky is the limit when pushing boundaries on beauty. The color schemes are very harmonious and lively as well (both on cut scenes and on level environments).

A lot of pixel art assets were developed for the rich expressions of characters during cut scenes. The environmental elements are very well polished and well texturized. The sprite scaling of the camera is well executed and make the 2d assets feel in sync with the 3D environment while the camera moves.

6 - Music and Sounds

The soundtrack was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who was in charge of music for Final Fantasy Tactics for PS1 and DS, among others in the FF series. Revenant Wings uses the same themes from FFXII PS2, but in my opinion the DS version of arrangements are worse in comparison to the PS2 version (not meaning the quality, but the sound schemes used and the new rhythms are not as nice as in the original versions).

The sounds for UI interaction are fun to hear, the battle sounds and boss screams are well made and they really give meaningful feedback when the screen is full of sprite overlapping (due to the high number of units fighting each other).

Conclusion

Even for people who are not addicted to the FF series but enjoy a direct and rich RTS experience on the DS will enjoy this game to the fullest. The sum of its wonderful features compensate its small failures, and every single experience is well executed and in place with the rest of the design elements. Well balanced mechanics, engaging boss battles and involving storyline makes gameplay a lot comfortable for both hardcore players who seek challenge and for those who just want to concentrate on the journey.