Final Fantasy XIII : Press 'A', the Game

I'm now about 3 hours into FF13, and so far I think I've hit nothing except the A button in every single combat. I also, after 3 hours, have actually found what appears to be "the game" itself. Hopefully, I'll hit a few more buttons now.

I suppose for the people who haven't played FF13 or read anything about it (which also would have fit me a week ago), I should explain the newest combat and upgrading systems. Final Fantasy has pretty much overhauled everything in every game after 2, but since FF7 I think it's been a pretty major change each iteration of the system. In FF12, the game changed to a real-time combat system where you controlled one person and the rest of your team worked on pre-defined commands (that you defined) so that, for example, your healer would heal whoever was at 50% health automatically. It took me a little bit of getting used to, but I loved it. FF12 was also a wide-open game that reminded me of an MMO as far as the maps went.

FF13 returns back to FF10, so it's a series of tunnels with an involved story, and you fight in them. I have heard that the map opens back up, but right now it's very much a series of tunnels. The combat system is... possibly interesting, but probably terrible. You still only control 1 person out of your party, but instead of being a real-time free-moving open world combat thing like FF12 was, it's the standard JRPG combat scenario-- you get into combat and are sent to a separate screen where your team is shown on one section, and enemies on the other. But it's still sort of in real time, so if you don't act fast enough your main character will do nothing and get hit while the rest of your party does (from what I can tell) whatever they feel like.

To make the combat smoother (I guess), you can either pick each action like a standard RPG, or you can just hit A and it will automatically pick the best option for you. So... I just hit A a lot, and I won every fight. Not only that, on each fight you get a score based on completion time, from 1 star (bad) to 5 stars (awesome). I got 5 stars on every single fight so far after the first fight where I chose each command myself and fooled around-- and even on that fight I got 4 stars.

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be fun, but so far it's an interactive movie with a story that also might be interesting, but is more likely to be convoluted and awful. Still, something is driving me to play through it, and I'm not willing to admit it might just be that it looks pretty and interesting. Not yet at least.

There is no way I'll finish Final Fantasy XIII in a week though, so I'm also focusing on a game that I should finish by the end of the upcoming weekend. I'm back to playing Cave Story+, a classic style sidescroller. I'm now currently shooting around a labyrinth that I was sent to as a curse, and the difficulty has definately increased from the beginning. It's nice to play a game that is this unforgiving, since so far FF13 might not even qualify as a game.