I dropped by the Final Fantasy XIII party bus this morning with my fellow 1UP cronies in order to check out the English version of the game for the first time ever. Having powered through a fair chunk of the import, the trailer that hit the web this morning piqued my interest in the upcoming RPG all over again. This, despite Leona Lewis! I've seen a lot of "meh" responses to the trailer, which I can understand -- for anyone without real context for the dialogue, it's pretty much completely opaque. For me, though, it was a chance to confirm my vague suspicions about the story and get a feel for how these characters I already kind of know will play out in English.
Anyway, the point is, my ten minutes of play time with the English demo were pretty satisfying. I specifically chose to play on one of the Xbox 360 demo kiosks to see if that version of the game feels like a second-rate port; as anyone who paid cash money for Bayonetta on PS3 knows, there's danger in choosing a game on its secondary platform. And I'm sorry to say this to all the 360 fans in the audience, but PS3 has always been FFXIII's primary platform. Up until E3 2008, no one even knew it was going to be a multiplatform game -- and so far as Japanese audiences are concerned, it isn't multiplatform. The Xbox 360 port was developed in parallel with the English localization, specifically for international audiences. That sort of situation almost always amounts to compromised ports and lackluster technical performance.
It was therefore a pleasant surprise when I discovered FFXIII runs just as smoothly on 360 as it does on PS3. It's a brisk, action-packed RPG with tons happening on the screen at any given time (and the series' requisite flashy visuals cranked up to full throttle), yet I didn't see a hint of slowdown or choppiness or screen tearing or any of the other visual hiccups that serve as hallmarks of a sloppy port. Admittedly, I didn't see the two versions running side-by-side -- the bus set them apart with a looping trailer dividing the kiosks -- but I honestly saw no tangible difference from my time with the PS3 version.
Of course, the 360 edition of the game comes on multiple discs thanks to the system's lack of Blu-ray support, but I survived the PlayStation era and its ghastly four-disc games and never particularly cared that I had to swap discs once every 15 hours of game time. I can't imagine it'll make a difference in 2010, either. Given all the time eaten up on modern consoles for installations and updates and patches, 30 seconds to insert a separate disc is utterly trivial, and honestly I feel sort of embarrassed for people who think it's a genuine issue.
Now, the PS3 version will still probably have some advantages over its 360 counterpart, such as uncompressed audio. Gamers with a high-end rig will probably gravitate toward the PS3 edition as a result. For my own setup -- which is decent enough, but hardly a home theatre to be envied -- the 360 version will be just fine. FFXIII plays exactly the same on both systems, all the way down to the control interface: confirm and cancel map to X / O and A / B, respectively, and the all-important Paradigm Shift command works with PS3's L1 and 360's left bumper.
I suppose we'll see if the game holds up under real-world circumstances, but my experience strikes me as a definite win for Square's Crystal Tools. The whole thing has taken years to get off the ground, but now that FFXIII is up and running on two different consoles it really does seem to make good on the promise of seamless multiplatform development. One supposes that a PC port would be a snap as well! And let's not forget that Crystal Tools also supports Wii. Yeah. I'm impressed by the 360 version, but I won't be truly amazed until they get FFXIII running on Wii.
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