Final Fantasy XIII Battle System Details Revealed

The August issue of Playstation: The Official Magazine is out, with a feature article on Final Fantasy XIII by Teresa Dun. Here are a few of the highlights of the new, upgraded battle system.

Segmented ATB Gauge

There's no more MP! Instead, there's a bar measuring how much ATB you have. In the screenshots, it's out of four. So each action you do (attack, magic, item, &c.) requires a number of segments to be filled. You can either attack this round with something that requires less ATB, or wait a few turns and unleash a more powerful linked attacks.

Command List

This is where you access all of your skills. From here, you can Attack normally, use a spell like Thunder or Firaga, and Steal.

"Paradigm Shift

Not just a Liquid Tension Experiment song, but apparently there is an option called this. There's only speculation about what it does, but it might have something to do with shifting characters. In FFXIII, you can only directly control one character at a time. This seems to be the built-in option that gives you more control as to what your other characters are doing.

Chain/Break bar

This new, cool feature makes the turn-based system gives the game a feature that makes it feel more like an action game. The best thing about slashing at an opponent is attacking it rapidly in succession before it can counter and weakening it greatly. With the new chain attacks, you can have all the characters in your party target one enemy until he "breaks." In break mode, he'll be weaker, and you can do cool stuff like toss him into the air. Woo!

TP

Some sort of points you have to store in order to use really cool moves and special summon attacks. There has been no word on what it actually stands for, but RPG players will recognize that it's typical an acronym for Technical Points, a semi-equivalent to magic or ability points.

This seems a lot like what they're implementing in the recently leaked DS game Final Fantasy Gaiden. but with AP instead.

Enemies and Worlds

Since there are two worlds in FFXIII, Cocoon and Pulse, each enemy has two different incarnations you can face. Each reflects the world you're in. Pulse is an uninhabited planet and Cocoon is an artificial satellite orbiting Pulse. The creatures on Pulse are wilder and live in natural environments. For example, Pulse features an open plain teeming with prehistoric wildlife travelling in swarms. On the other hand, Cocoon has a more man-made and mechanized feel to it, in both its enemies and its environment. A Cocoon enemy is more mechanical. And while the satellite has a lot of different environments, even its jungles feel unnatural and are more linear than Pulse.

From developer Motomu Toriyama: “You see, different fal'Cie [Crystal representatives, or deities] exist within different environments and there's this Crystal in the center that affects what type of monsters are in each environment. This isn't something that's overtly explained in the game, but in some areas, monsters will have a certain design that's affected by one type of Crystal, and in other areas, they'll be designed a different way. A specific example is the behemoth, who's a regular in the series. Depending on the type of area he appears in, he has different designs affected by the different fal'Cie that exists in those environments. So there's a Type A and Type B behemoth. There's a Pulse version and a Cocoon version. The one in Pulse is a little bit more wild. He's in nature. And the Cocoon behemoth is a little bit more mech-oriented.”

Summons

And here's where the story gets really good.
It's already been revealed that Odin and Shiva are going to be summons in this game. But the way summons work in this game is definitely a surprise. Part of the system is old news – in FFXII, we already had summons replace the other members of your party and fight alongside your summoner until either she or it ran out of HP. But now, instead assigning summons with the FFXII License Board, each I'Cie has its own summon that's related to the summoner's power. Lightning, the protagonist, has Odin as her pet summon and Snow has Shiva as his summon. Characters that aren't I'Cie, the destined individuals that get their power from the fal'Cie, won't be getting summons. Additionally, these characters won't be getting their pet summons until they have enough experience and the plot has called for it to happen.

From Toriyama: “Being able to call a Summon is one of the abilities of the I'Cie, but there's an evolution the characters have to go through story-wise first. It's not until their level as an I'Cie advances that they'll be able to call a Summon. Once activated, the Summons stay until they take a certain amount of damage. If you work around that and strategically fight in a way for them to receive the least amount of damage, they'll fight alongside you for a longer amount of time.”

Turns out the character names actually do mean something. The really crazy bit is that aside from FFXII-style turn-based fighting with your summon, there's now a secondary mode. When Snow summons the Shiva sisters, they can combine and transform into a motorcycle. In this mode, you do press a series of buttons before the timer ends in order to punch in combinations that attack the enemy. This makes me think of FF6 Sabin's Blitz Moves, or if you're too young to get that reference, Auron's Overdrive. But that's not what's terribly exciting. It's the fact that summons now have more than meets the eye – they're Transformers! Each summon transforms into some kind of ride. Not sure what about Shiva screams “motorcycle,” but I'm dying to find out what the rest of our summons turn into, as I try to list different types of rides in my head (boat, plane, train, zeppelin, horse, car, hot air balloon, wheelbarrow, segway, scooter, skateboard, bicycle, moped, your mother). Each summon's secondary mode takes a good amount of TP, to the point where it can't be used every battle.

So if you want to get a good look at some screenshots of FFXIII, or find out more details about what the summon scenes and worlds look like, take a look at Dun's feature story in Playstation: The Official Magazine. Look out for this game in Spring of 2010, or later this year if you happen to be in Japan.