The Basics of Gameplay

We thought it might be helpful if we answered some of the basic questions you might run into while you play FFXIII. So here it is!

Battle

You only get to control your main character in battle. The rest of your party will automatically attack and/or heal, depending on your Paradigms. You lose a battle when your Main Character dies, so keep them alive even at the cost of the rest of your party.

After Battle Star Rating

The Star Rating effects how much loot you recieve after battle. It also effects how fast your TP (Technical Points) recharge. TP is used for Summoning - so if possible, try to score five stars.

The Crystarium

You first gain access to the Crystarium in Chapter 3. This is FFXIII’s system of leveling your characters, and is very similar to the Sphere Grid in FFX. In order to proceed from one node to the next, and thus unlock a new ability or stat increase, you must have sufficient CP (Crystogen Points), which you gain from battling enemies. The amount of CP gained is proportional first to the difficulty of the monster and secondly to the number of monsters defeated in a given battle.

While grinding for CP will become important later in the game, the pittance that the lower level monsters yield makes much grinding before Chapter 11 not much more than a waste of time. For a good spot to grind during Chapter 11, visit the Walkthrough.

One very nice thing about the way CP is given out in FFXIII is that all your characters will receive CP for a battle regardless of whether or not they were dead, in the party, or even with you at the time (there will be several times where your party splits up; during these times all party members will still receive any CP you gain). This also means you don’t have to keep subbing in your less favorite characters to make sure they keep pace, simply wait until you need them then level them up with the accumulated wealth of CP you’ve acquired throughout the game to that point.

The approach we took (and recommend) was to take your 3 main characters (we chose Hope, Lightening, and Snow) and level them in their specialties, saving the CP of your lesser 3 characters until the end, then leveling them very high in one discipline. For the first few Crystarium Levels (the first few chapters) you’ll have no problem keeping your 3 main characters fully upgraded in all their fields, however this will quickly change. Soon, it will be all you can do to keep up with two of your areas, neglecting the third. Eventually, if you don’t do a bit of grinding, you won’t be able to keep up with even 2. You will, however, want to have a character in the max level of all your Paradigms, so by not spending the CP of your lesser characters, you will, at the end, have the chance to pour all their CP into one Paradigm.

You should be warned, however, that you can only have 999,999 CP in storage at a time, so if any of your characters get close to that number, spend some quickly so you don’t waste it.