FFXIII

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The effectiveness of the storytelling is well beyond previous Final Fantasies. The characters are brought together via some powerful motivations and some more capricious twists of fate, but they are split apart and you're allowed to spend time with each set of characters as you learn about their back stories and about how they are more connected than it may first appear. The characters have real reasons for their actions and behaviors and we sometimes learn things about them that color previous interactions in an entirely new light.

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You can hardly see a screenshot or video of this game and not appreciate the attention that was paid to how nice this game looks. It's arguably the best looking game to come out for the PS3 to date. Because of this, I feel it's fair to be appropriately harsh on the aspect of the game where I have one of my few criticisms. The environments and backgrounds while beautiful seem sometimes a bit sparse and not always up to the quality of the character models or of other levels.

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A 5 star system let's you know how well you did at the end of a battle and you will see your battles go from always 5 stars down to 4, 3 and sometimes 0 if you don't finish a battle quickly enough. This forces you adapt fast and learn the most efficient ways to eliminate various types of enemies. In later battles the fast pace can mean a quick death if you aren't careful though you can start the battle right over again from your last location with almost no penalty.

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During battle you only control one character, the leader. For this character you can chose what abilities they use based on their current role (more on that later). So let's say the enemy is weak against fire and water. If you're only controlling one character how do you get your party members to use fire and water? The answer is simple; you don't. Use Libra, you find out the enemies weaknesses and automatically your party members who have those abilities will start using them against that enemy.

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In FFXIII you don't spend a lot of time exploring, you don't get lost, and you understand where you need to go with only a glance at the map. If there is a side branch along the way it's short; you know there are optional enemies and treasure there. If you want to get them you only need to go down the short branch first, if not you keep going on the long branch. You don't wonder where to go, nor do you worry that you are missing anything.

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I'm going to get this over with right now; I've played over 20hrs of FFXIII and there are no towns and the boards are highly linear. Ok I said it. Are you still with me? Good. There are naysayers out there saying "What kind of Final Fantasy game has no towns?" Well, it's called FFXIII and you're probably still going to play it. Let me explain why.