My Journey Through FFXIII - No Rest Stops in Sight

[Forsaken Lover]

So I have FF13 for the 360.

I'm on Chapter 4. Sazh and Vanille are taking a much deserved rest after a hard day of fighting OCP and then being turned into l'Cie.

So far...the game isn't that bad. Story is mildly intriguing with a few mysteries like how Lightning managed to opent hat door thing by talking to it, as well as who the party was befor eall this crap went down..

Gameplay is interesting too now that it's finally opening up.

If I have any complaints about the game thus far it is these two things:

1. Lightning. Worst character in the game by several PMS'ing galaxies.

All I ever heard was "wah wh wah wah Snow is st00pid!" LEast he has some goddam motivation. Least he has endearing character traits like determination to save the woman he loves.

Lightning? She has BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH.

Give me Snow back please. I cared about him even with that ridiculous hat.

2. Storytelling. It's nto very good.

Action, cutscene, more action, another cutscene, MOAR ACTION.

It's like they were trying to fix FFXII's pacing problems but they went way overboard and made something even worse. You could have the best story in JRPG history and it wouldn't be as appealing with this formula. I would just like some time to relax and digest everything.

There's also the neverending and contrived party splits but that's a less significant problem than the other two.

I really don't dislike this game at the moment. It just has some pretty evident flaws. (which, admittedly, all FFs do)

[Jessweeee♪]

You're going to love that hat when you crack into FFXIII-2.

[krissy]

she's cold right now but you'll warm up to light

[Forsaken Lover]

she's cold right now but you'll warm up to light

Yeah she's softened up a lot since I posted. I don't much like her yet but I don't dislike her anymore.

Right now I'm far more interested in our newest party member. She's had almost no screentime and I've been playing this game for well over 10+ hours but I've been informed Fang is the real main character.

I'm genuinely at a loss for what to say. It's...unexpected to say the least.

She has a nice look and a very attractive voice so I guess it's an improvement. But man Lightning is like a thousand times worse than Vaan when it comes to '"fooled you into thinking I'm the main protagonist".

In other good news Snow is back. I gotta try and get the hang of using Sentinel though since it is apparently necessary for certain enemies later on.

On a final note for now, I'm liking this guy who is trying to have us all killed at the moment. I think he might be the head of PSICOM? I hope he sticks around for at least a little while.

Oh and the Sunleth Waterscape was the best area so far by leaps and bounds. Gorgeous scenery and wonderful music.

Then the areas got boring again. But it was a nice change of pace.

[krissy]

the thing about this game is that it's pretty restrictive for a long time and then once it opens up, it really friggin opens up and lets go of your hand.

i always played with lightning as the main so it made it feel like she's the main character, but now that you mention it that may not be the case for this story overall.

i agree about sunleth, it was definitely a breath of fresh air at that point in the game.

[Jessweeee♪]

It's kind of a FFVI deal. There's no one main character. FFXIII does a good job of making it about all of your party members equally.

[Loony BoB]

Yeah, I never considered Fang to be the main character. I agree that it's an even split thing much like in FFVI. I would personally put the main character down as either Lightning or Vanille, but that's only because Lightning is the "face" of the game and Vanille is the narrator. I think. It's been a while!

[Forsaken Lover]

So I'm on The Palamecia now.

It's nice that the apparent main villain of the game is finally getting screentime. Unfortunately I'm not exactly feeling threatened what with the stupid Code Color gag going on. Is the game trying to kill its own suspense?

Primarch whatever his name is also suffers from sharing screentime with that chick in the glasses.Jihl is it? She's a total waste of space. How do you screw up evil chicks with glasses so badly that I not only find them unattractive but boring in the extreme?

The area itself is pretty awesome due to the amount of enemies. It almost feels like a final dungeon and I'm storming a stronghold to fight the entire Sanctum military. But it is dragging on and the color nonsense doesn't help.

I sure hope "Code White" is something interesting or impressive.

Going back a bit, I was stuck for quite a long time on Sazh's fire eidolon. I forever hate the epople at Gamefaqs now. Not only do they insult FFXII a bunch, they also suggested that I start off with Syn/Sab combo.

I tried that. And died. A dozen+ times.

I start thinking at this point maybe there's a weak link somewhere... What if I just start witH Vanille as a Ravager?

And I succeeded with two attempts.

At this point I no longer really hate Lightning. I'm more indifferent. Snow is still probably my favorite playable character.

[Loony BoB]

Don't pay attention to the colours, they're just taking the piss out of all the colour coding things you see in the real world.

I enjoyed the Palamecia to some extent, mostly for the lines that come out around the time your characters meet up. :D Unfortunately the next chapter, if I remember rightly, is crap. :(

[Jessweeee♪]

My favorite boss fight is coming up!

[Forsaken Lover]

So I'm in Chapter 10 and the gameplay is now finally fully open.

That and the last boss fight urge me to speak on something that has bugged me for a long time now.

The "target time" and starring system are awful. I've never played a Final Fantasy that actually insults you for playing a certain way.

I've gotten through over half of the games in the series with a very simple two-way approach. I prefer a strong offense but if that fails I switch it up to a lot of defense. Perhaps it is excessive but fuck, if i die two or three times, constantly healing and defending makes perfect sense.

FFXIII doesn't like that. It alone of every FF game I've played decides to judge me for playing how I like to play.

Granted I did screw up in the Barthandalus fight. i let his chain gauge go down too much during his absurdly long charge time for his special move but fuck me if I'm going to risk doing it all over again just to get some stupid game's approval.

I guess what I'm saying is I know I'm not good at video games but I don't much care for the game itself shoving ti in my face.

[Loony BoB]

Don't worry. You only need to five-star the battles if you want to get trophies/achievements, and even then you only need to five-star the Cie'th stones and the final boss battle. Everything else is just to give you different odds at getting different items, and in a non-repeatable boss battle I don't think they're going to give you anything important ONLY if you five-star it.

[krissy]

i actually LIKED the rating system. it was a very small feedback for doing a battle by thinking through it and not just grinding. every enemy combination can be taken down very fast with the proper paradigm decisions. the battles are more like puzzles, but the game doesn't actually penalize you for not figuring out how a certain enemy functions other than the star rating and maybe the time taken to defeat it.

anyway, that boss battle was the hardest battle in the game for me. i had no idea he took more stagger while he was charging up for like two days so i just kept trying to do it without being sneaky liek on his chain gauge. fortisol etc at the beginning help out a lot.

i dont think anyone five stars barth on that one on their first go... im pretty sure i had 1 star when i did legit beat him. the first time i stayed alive, the battle went on for half hour and the game took pity on my by auto casting death on my lead. at that point i knew i was doing something wrong, and the game wasn't gonna let me suffer much longer for it... it gives you a chance to figure things out, but if you're totally stuck it goes 'RE-EVALUATE YOUR LIFE MATE' and kicks your face.

[Forsaken Lover]

I suppose you're right.

I did five star the final boss though.

Funny thing about that is, Orphan kicked my ass the first few times I fought it. My entire party attacking it for several long, agonizing minutes managed to get off about 20% of its health. Then it killed us all because of Poison.

Two can play a that game Orphan. FF Wiki told me Poison and Imperil work on it so, I switch control over to Vanille and now the battle is a cakewalk. A few minutes of casual healing and constantly debuffing him while Snow attacks again and again and the fight is won.

I won't lie, by the time I reached Orphan's Cradle I was feeling very burnt out. I just had no incentive to finish the game since I didn't think the ending would be that interesting.

I was totally right in that regard.

I'll post my thoughts on the game as a whole later after I get some sleep but I will ay this.

Barthandalus wasn't that great of a villain for me but he had by far the best boss fights in the game. His look and the epic music helped make sure I'll remember him for a long while.

[krissy]

Barthandalus wasn't that great of a villain for me but he had by far the best boss fights in the game. His look and the epic music helped make sure I'll remember him for a long while.

i agree
that song sticks with you
especially if you have to listen to it for two hours the first time around ;)
just feels epic

[Forsaken Lover]

So my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII.

Firstly, let me start off with the positive because I don't want people to think I'm an unreasonable hater.

i liked the party in this game. In fact I liked them more than the party in FFXII even though I consider XII a much bette game. The first half of XIII that focuses mainly on establishing and developing the characters ended up being my favorite part of the game.

My favorite character was Snow. He acted goofy but he was easily the most relatable character for me. I would do anything for the woman I love after all.

Sure he said some dumb stuff but people are forgetting this is Final Fantasy.A s long as he didn't hand the villain the tools to becoming all-powerful or destroying the world, he did better than most.

My other favorite characters were Hope and Vanille. Vanille's development from your typical giggly all-happy character was nice. Same with Hope's manning up after moping for so long. I'd be lying if I said his constant waffling about avenging his mother wasn't tiresome but he got a lot better in my opinion.

Sazh was easily the "coolest" character. he had the funniest lines and definitely came off as the sanest guy in the group.

Lightning was alright. i initially hated her due but she grew out of her bitchiness so I was okay with her.

Fang never did anything for me. She looks good but as a character...not really anything.

Now to the negative... This game's pacing is atrocious. Especially towards the beginning with it's a nonstop cycle of little cutscenes and then a bunch of action. I get the feeling they were trying to make up for FFXII's open-endednes with the extreme linearity but the levels were so bland and stretched out that the effect was largely the same ie. losing track of the story in all the gameplay.

Speaking of the story, I never cared about it. The fal'Cie and the mythology/world held no interest for me. I played the game just for the characters.

The game's pacing also left me feeling fatigued much of the time. I just wanted a break to explore... That's probably a big reason why I didn't care for the actual world of FFXIII. You see almost none of it.

On the brighter side I thought the Sunleth Waterscape was gorgeous. In terms of atmosphere and setting I think Eden Under Siege was the peak of the game's levels. I know I liked it the most of anything in the game.

Now back to the negatives. I mentioned I liked this game's party more than FFXII's. The reason I love FFXII to begin wtih is not because of the playable cast. it's because of the side-characters and villains. FFXII gives us many scenes of the Archadians just talking to one another. It's nice having villains who are still interesting characters in their own right.

FFXIII had three real villains. (I don't count Cid):

-Jihl was absolute garbage. Worst character in the game and her un-mourned two second death was well-deserved.

-Barthandalus provided probably the best boss fights in the game but as a character...I never really felt anything. For one thing there was no real threat from him since he had no interest in harming the party. He may have wanted to destroy Cocoon but for most of the game he made no steps towards that end. In fact, we see almost zero from Bart for something like 25+ hours and th characters don't mention him either. This really hurt any presence he may have established.

I get the game was going for a more tragic "death seeker" approach. Being a fal'Cie is a horrible, unending existence. But it doesn't touch on that enough. Bart just comes off as very unoriginal mwahahahahaha godlike being type.

-Yaag Rosch was the best villain in the game for me. His motivations are established in his very first scene. He is a man doing his duty even though it is a lamentable one. He comes across as...well, human. Something Jihl never did. I rather liked the party's final confrontations with him. (even though his death scene was pretty dumb.)

The ending of the game was pretty bland and reeks of plot devices. Fang and Vanille doing what they did was totally random. I did think it was sweet to see everyone reunited though.

Now for gameplay. This is where the game really killed me adn why I probably will never play it again. There probably are a lot of valid criticisms to throw out here but honestly, I just didn't like it. That's all I can say. It had me interested for a while but towards the end, everything just got repetitive and dull.

Although I will say the Crysterium is way too linear. You might as well just have levels and learn abilities as you level up.

I also hated the Eidolons in this game. They're arguably even more useless than in XII. (only they don't come with great music in XIII) The stupid "Gestalt" thing was a huge pain in the ass. It's the reason I got stuck on Sazh's eidolon for an incredibly long time.

And now for music. This game's score was quite good. I'll list the tracks that stand out most for me:

1.
Final Fantasy XIII - Barthandelus Battle Music [HD] - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH5QcBC0G28)

2.
Final Fantasy XIII Soundtrack - Serah's Theme *English* - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDfqCNgeHTU)

3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfu0XBf8kmk

4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2CVzn-ymr8

5.
Final Fantasy XIII Original Soundtrack - 3.22 - Will to Fight - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIuOeJ5gGsc)

Also I had no problem with "My Hands" once I actually rally listened to it.

So my thoughts on the game? Decent. I probably won't ever play it again.

Although I am fickle. Give me a year or two and I may be back.

[Loony BoB]

Regarding your last statement - it's interesting. I actually really liked the game but felt there was no reason for me to play it again, it just doesn't have replay factor... especially since I got all the trophies, so I have no reason to go back for that, either. But now that I've played FFXIII-2 I can't help but want to play again.

...I probably won't anyway, I'm too busy with FFVI and I still have FFIX to beat, too, but yeah. If they do make an FFXIII-3 someday, I'll probably get that and then want to play FFXIII again. And if I don't have any other games to play at that point, then maybe I will. :p

EDIT: As for music, Snow's Theme was easily my favourite. :) I loved it every time it came on, and perhaps it's mostly down to how noticeable the music was compared to other background music that would play at various times. Still doesn't compare to Crazy Chocobo in FFXIII-2, though. ;)

[Raistlin]

I agree with you about Barthandelus, the ending, and really the writing overall after chapter 9 or so. It was just awful.