Last week's Shoen Jump has spilled the beans on the new Crystalium System in Final Fantasy XIII. This new system ditches the traditional Leveling structure for a system similar to the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X.

Instead of earning EXP points after each battle, each character will earn Crystalium Points (CP). These points can be spent on raising your characters stats, such as HP, MP, Attack, Defense, etc. or can be used to buy spells like Fire, Thunder, and Blizzard. CP will also allow you to upgrade your character's Optima Classes (Blaster, Defender, and Attacker).

From the small fragments of information I have gathered, this seems to be quite a nice idea. I hope this works as well as it did in Final Fantasy X and clears up some of the speculation about Optima Changes. More information is sure to come later this week.