Final Fantasy XIII Import Impressions: Character Progression

Final Fantasy XIII will see its Western debut in less than three months and so it's time for fans to get excited! We're here to aid that excitement with another in-depth preview to wet your appetites.

For our third and final impression before the big review I’d like to give you all a detailed explanation of the character development system in Final Fantasy XIII. Remember you can check out Part One and Part Two of our impressions as well as our article on how FF13 was Built for the West!

With all the talk of linearity so far in our previews we haven't yet touched on another facet with added linearity, the Crystarium System.

Each character has six individual straight lines through the system to develop. Technically they're actually not straight lines, but the game encourages you to stay on the traditional pathways for each character at least to begin with, much as Final Fantasy X did with the placement of characters initially on the sphere grid.

There are six jobs or roles (which I'll detail fully in the review) that the cast have available to them. Until the very late game you'll only focus on three of the six roles for each character - the ones they're best at.

As detailed in our gameplay impressions, you'll be switching between the jobs - known as Optimas in Japan and Paradigms in the West - on the fly in battle. Every character has areas that they excel at, lending them to natural roles in battles, be it as a melee fighter, ranged attacker, supporting role or as a healer - all these roles in battle are based off the jobs.

There's six jobs total in the game and each character is better at some than others lending them to naturally be better at certain roles in battle. As I said earlier, you'll spend most of the game focusing on developing the jobs that each character excels at.

By developing each role further down its 'path' in the Crystarium system you'll unlock abilities, commands and base stat and status increases that will improve their clout on the battlefield.

Each path is fairly specific. The 'Healer' Optima path will have spells like Cure, while the 'Attacker' path will unlock increases to physical attack power and so on.

Being a grid there's of course the ability to break out of the set jobs and head into previously uncharted areas of the board - but this is more difficult and more restricted than it was in FFX's Sphere Grid or License Board, and the rewards for starting on a 'weaker' path for a character are so few that it won't be worth suffering with a character developing an Optima that doesn't suit them early on.

When you defeat an enemy in battle you'll gain no experience but you'll instead receive CP (Crystal Points) to spend in the Crystarium.

The advantage here is that you won't have to grind with individual party members as everyone receives equal CP at the end of a battle even if they're not currently in the party. This is a massive relief considering the difficulty of the game's battles.

However, you'll have to level each character's roles separately in order to increase their stats and upgrade characters which literally takes millions of CP to accomplish. Most battles will net you on average 5000 CP.

Some battles are particularly rewarding, but these battles are few and far between and some of the more difficult battles will reward you with disappointing amounts of CP. Like any RPG there's a handy item to help - the accessory 'grow egg' will increase the amount of CP your party receives once you track it down. Even then the gains from that are meager in perspective of how much upgrades can cost.

My point here is that it'll likely be very difficult for anyone to beat the game with just the level ups provided by the Crystarium System. I think Crystarium was intended more for improving the base statistics of a character such as their Attack, Defense, Speed, and Luck and so on.

It's clear then that we need something else to boost our battle effectiveness, and Square Enix has provided us with another in the form of a level-up system for weapons and accessories. Use of both Crystarium and Item upgrades will be crucial to success in battles.

You can customize and power-up weapons and accessories by synthesizing them with various artifacts and items. Each item gives your weapon or accessory of choice experience points. They'll level up like a character and each increase in level also brings an increase in abilities and strengths.

The abilities you can get off the weapon and accessory power-up system are impressive, ranging from 800+ HP bonuses to an ability that will make your ATB bar recover more quickly like a passive version of Haste.

While I felt the Crystarium System was nothing special - if anything a glorified, prettier but more restrictive version of FF10's Sphere Grid - the weapon and accessory growth system really impressed me.

It's a system that sends you on an endless scavenger hunt for the right items in order to make your characters as powerful and as unbeatable as possible - and in that respect that system more closely resembles a traditional JRPG more than any other aspect of FF13's gameplay.

This element of character growth made me reminisce about a game I'm quite passionate about - Vagrant Story. You see, Vagrant Story has a similar system in both complexity and method and it served as motivation to endure the endless grind of battles just to procure the right items to improve your characters. This was a system that garnered a lot of positive response back in the year 2000 and I'm certain it will foster the same positivity in 2010.

Finally I'd like to speak about the level caps that I'm sure a lot of you have heard so much about. As with anything on a highly anticipated title like this it's been over dramatized by the internet, but let me explain how it works.

Each role or job has ten levels in total in the Crystarium. You unlock these levels by progressing along with the story (completing a chapter). In reality you're only capped from increasing your base statistics and you probably won't max out all of your character's roles before you reach the end of any given chapter.

Even then, you retain the ability throughout the game to increase your party's status by synthesizing your weapons and accessories, so progression isn't entirely locked out.

The caps disappear entirely in the late game, and they clearly only exist early on to stop power-leveling which would deflate FF13's action-packed gameplay in an instant. It really isn't anything major, and I'd say the people complaining about level caps are just being babies.

Check out the video below for some more in-your-face action as well as a quick glimpse of the Crystarium. And remember ladies and gentlemen - our super-sized review is coming very soon, so be sure to sign up to our RSS and Follow us on Twitter to be updated when it arrives!