how can anybody likes this game?

[dylamug]

i've played a few hours of FF XIII and i'm really confused.
how is it possible that this game got such good reviews?

the background and world seem pretty interesting. however except for the battles which are not bad, the only thing that makes this game a game (as opposed to a movie) is that you get to walk around a bit between cut-scenes.

and it's always the same thing, you get some bad dialogue followed by "oh no! a monster robot thingy!" followed by a battle and repeat.

please tell me that as someone who liked the FF 7-10 i can look forward to FF XIII-2 :(

[Roto13]

The farther you get, the better the battle system gets, until it's the best battle system in the series. That's basically the game's redeeming quality. That, and the world suddenly opens up and becomes explorable near the end of the game.

The fact that you have to invest so much time to get to the good parts is why this game is just good, and not great like other Final Fantasies.

[Alpha2099]

I haven't played 13, but I watched someone else play it. I get where you're coming from about it feeling more like a movie than a game. It still seemed cool to me, though I have little interest in going out to get it. I'm still jaded from the disappointment of 12 so I stick to the older games.

[Roto13]

If you were disappointed in the masterpiece that was XII, XIII should be just your thing, because the bad things about it are the opposite of what made XII great.

[Sheepy]

XIII really comes into its stride when you unlock the ability to access any class with any character. It's a bit hand holdy for the first few hours, which can be really off-putting, but honestly the battle system is a lot of fun. Then again, I was a fan of X's system, so take that for what it is.

[VeloZer0]

FF13 was an attempt to distill the whole JRPG experience into fighting battles and observing a story. If you want more out of a game you will be left wanting, and if you don't love the two pillars the game is built upon you won't find anything worth playing. Should you love the way both were approached in this game then it will be a home run for you.

[Flying Arrow]

The farther you get, the better the battle system gets, until it's the best battle system in the series. That's basically the game's redeeming quality. That, and the world suddenly opens up and becomes explorable near the end of the game.



To be fair, the world opening up is just a big wide isolated area the characters get to. There's no way to re-explore the already established areas in the game.

The battle system is really smooth and the game has some really great encounters though. It's "tight" in that the leveling system and such make it the least grind-heavy game in the whole series (unless you want it to be). The fact that you can see enemies and avoid them is an improvement over X, IMO.

I found it leaving a little bit to be desired ultimately, but that's really because the game is a battle system and nothing else. I like most of what the battle system does, but I just wish there more to the game than a mostly hands-off battle system.

[Jinx]

XIII really comes into its stride when you unlock the ability to access any class with any character. It's a bit hand holdy for the first few hours, which can be really off-putting, but honestly the battle system is a lot of fun. Then again, I was a fan of X's system, so take that for what it is.

I personally think X had the best battle system in the series, followed by X-2. X's battle system gave you the ability to be strategic and still have control of all of your characters. It wasn't just like "OH HEY LET ME PRESS X JUST ATTACK ALL THE TIME AND SOMETIMES CURE"

[Jessweeee♪]

One of my favorite things about FFX is how it's practical to use magic in random encounters.

Anyway to get back to the topic, FFXIII is one of my favorites in the series! The battle system was super fun, I loved the characters, the story I thought was pretty interesting, and the music was just fantastic. FFXIII-2 is pretty fun too, but the story is kind of silly. If you were okay with hopping to FFX-2 after FFX, you'll probably be okay with FFXIII-2.

Jessweeee♪, double posting is bad! ~ Love, J♪

[Roto13]

Double post.

Ban plz.

[Alpha2099]

Double post.

Ban plz.
Put him in the stocks first. Public ridicule is a good motivator for change. :tongue:

[Sword]

I love XIII even more with each play through. I understand the story now and it just jives well with me and I get why characters behave the way they do. Character development is great especially regarding Hope and the relationship between Sazh and Vanille. The ending makes perfect sense despite what people say and the lore is as great as it was in FF12.

Battle system is among the best in the series and playing FFXIII-2 made XIII even more enjoyable since there are certain things I learned about the system in the sequel which you can also use in the original.

[Sylvie]

One of my favorite things about FFX is how it's practical to use magic in random encounters.

I felt like I was being spoken to like a retarded 5 year-old the entire time I was playing Final Fantasy X. And then I felt like I was observing a group of retarded adults, and a gothic statue of delicious boobs. It stung me in the side a little. Got a thorn in my grip.

[Jessweeee♪]

"Magic?! Element?!"

Anyway, what I mean by that is, Lulu has a large enough MP pool that she's not useless until you come to a boss fight. Other entries have you saving your MP and hoarding ethers :(

[Roto13]

"Magic?! Element?!"

Anyway, what I mean by that is, Lulu has a large enough MP pool that she's not useless until you come to a boss fight. Other entries have you saving your MP and hoarding ethers :(

Her MP pool plus the abundance of MP-restoring save points make magic a lot more practical in X than it was before that. Once you start unlocking quickenings in XII, it's kind of a similar deal (especially with abilities that restore your MP when it gets low, and regenerating MP when you walk.) And of course in XIII spells are free to cast. I like this direction. There's not much point in having spells if you're never going to use them except for during boss fights.

Of course once you get weapons that cut MP cost down to one in X, the game kind of breaks because you can just spam ultima or holy forever. :P

[Sylvie]

Or once you get Quick Hit, Auto-Haste, and Break Damage limit, spells are so fucking inferior.

[dylamug]

ok that's it.
i tried to press on, but this has got to be the most boring game in the world.
the interesting battle system doesn't make up for the flaws in the game (i.e. everything else).
the dialogue is as cheesy as is humanly possible.
the gameplay is boring.
also, notice how elements such as puzzles, riddles, exploration or even having to think about what to do next are non-existant in this game?

ff-xiii serves as a proof of the superficiality of the modern gamer.
if it wasn't for the beautful visuals, nobody would have a given such a mindless gaming experience a second glance.

[Sylvie]

Welcome to post FFIX (depending on the person you ask, could range from FFVII) Final Fantasy.

[Jiro]

While the plotline of Final Fantasy XIII makes abso-fucking-lutely no sense to me at all, I thought the characters themselves were very well constructed. The main ones, at least. Watching their behaviour and interactions change as they encountered challenge after challenge was nice, and I found a little bit of kinship with them as they too seem to have no fucking idea what the plot was doing.

While a far departure from the established tropes of the series, I don't think that Final Fantasy XIII was - by any stretch - a bad game. It was enjoyable and provided me with 120 hours of entertainment before the last achievement dinged and I was glad to be rid of those fucking turtles forever.

[Roogle]

The main problem that I have with the game is that it begins in media res, or in the middle of things, with the goal of getting the player interested in the world and playing to find out more.

Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people, including myself, tend to lose interest in it rather than want to figure out more simply because the game continues on without explaining the most basic of concepts, leaving supplementary reading to the player. Not many people delve that far into the menu and miss out on a lot of the content in the game because of that.

[Del Murder]

Yeah, the datalogs were pretty freaking lazy.

[Shiny]

i likes it just fine.

[Rodney]

Me, too. All who don't like it are, AFAIC, FF traitors. And morons.

[dandy da oak]

I really like it too! It's a good game and it has really good graphics! I liked the story too, y'know!

[Sylvie]

Me, too. All who don't like it are, AFAIC, FF traitors. And morons.
Don't call me those names.

[ReloadPsi]

Yeah, the datalogs were pretty freaking lazy.

I have a feeling Square-Enix got the idea from the more recent Star Ocean games, given that they published them. The problem is that I think Square-Enix saw that Star Ocean had a datalog explaining half the stuff that hadn't been put into the regular narrative in any detail, but they didn't know why it was there.

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time's glossary or whatever it was called was there to provide information on the three games that came before it in case you hadn't played them (and odds are Second Story was the only one you had played back when you first played TTEOT, if any, due to SO1 and Blue Sphere not being released outside Japan at that point) so while it was never essential that you read it to understand the story, it was nice to have to keep you informed if you cared to put in the time. It enriched the game.

FFXIII's datalog is an excuse to not put as much exposition into the cutscenes. The first thing I noticed is that there didn't seem to be a character to project yourself onto. At first I thought it might be Sazh, but he was just as savvy about what was going on in the game world as everyone else, and within fifteen minutes he too was saying things that made me feel excluded from the events of the game. Every so often the game would then say "right, now you can stop playing and find out what any of this is about, because these characters aren't going to show you; this is a tell-don't-show game." What this also meant was that the cutscenes were practically a complete waste of time. Sure they presented the characters' personalities somewhat, but every single game before that one has manage to give us insight into personality and enlighten the audience to the plot. Heck, there were even times where the datalog contradicted what I'd just seen. Hope follows Vanille somewhat reluctantly to chase after Snow, umming and ahhing all the way, and the datalog calls this a "blind rage." I laughed pretty hard at that one.

The only defence I ever see people provide for this is "...well I like it." Well that's just it. I freakin' don't.

And as for the notion that it gets better so many hours in: that argument's only any good when you're working with something that allows you to skip the bad parts, such as a TV series, or films. Other than downloading someone else's save, or cheating, there isn't a way to skip the bad parts in a video game; you have to play all of it and I'm not going to slog through however many hours of the bad parts (I hear it being anything between fifteen and thirty hours from different people... hell with that!) when I could play an entirely different game that's fun at the very beginning.

Because fun is what games are about. Not work. I've already been working so I can get the money to buy my games and have fun with them.


Having said that, I wish there had been a datalog for Beauty and Warrior, because I barely had a clue what was going on in that film.

[Roto13]

And as for the notion that it gets better so many hours in: that argument's only any good when you're working with something that allows you to skip the bad parts, such as a TV series, or films.

Don't play many video games, I guess? Especially RPGs? Because the vast majority of RPGs start slow. Final Fantasy XIII's slow part is longer than most, but very few JRPGs are fun for the first few hours.

If you can't play a game with a slow start, you can't play many RPGs. (Also, the intro is nowhere near 30 hours unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time pointlessly grinding.)

[Mirage]

Me, too. All who don't like it are, AFAIC, FF traitors. And morons.

All who like FF13 are crap drinking goat fuckers. How does it feel to be a goat smurfer, rodney?!

[ReloadPsi]

And as for the notion that it gets better so many hours in: that argument's only any good when you're working with something that allows you to skip the bad parts, such as a TV series, or films.

Don't play many video games, I guess? Especially RPGs? Because the vast majority of RPGs start slow. Final Fantasy XIII's slow part is longer than most, but very few JRPGs are fun for the first few hours.

If you can't play a game with a slow start, you can't play many RPGs. (Also, the intro is nowhere near 30 hours unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time pointlessly grinding.)

Oh I do play a lot of games. (Good to see your conclusion-jumping smart-assery got unbanned, welcome back.) I've never known one to start as slowly as this gameplay-wise though. Most RPGs have a way of snagging my interest a couple of hours in, but granted they're not the main genre of games that I play. I think I'm allowed to expect a faster start roughly than one entire Earth day, though. None of the Star Ocean games took that long, heck, by the time you've played that many hours in a Star Ocean game you've likely abused most of the ability system to hell and back. And FFXII, the game right before this, let you begin to ignore the main plot and go do your own thing almost immediately.

Since you're suggesting it's right that JRPGs should get slower and slower then maybe I should leave the genre behind.


All who like FF13 are crap drinking goat smurfers. How does it feel to be a goat smurfer, rodney?!
GHOTHTBUTHERTH!

[Jiro]

Name calling's a bit beyond us, isn't it folks? We're judging a game here, not each other. Anyway, people are obviously going to have different standards or thresholds on how "slow" the game can be before it's just not worth it. While yeah, the datalogs were lazy and the plot made no sense whatsoever, the actual gameplay was entertaining enough and I liked that I had to constantly reevaluate my tactics as I got new skills or party members. Once you hit end game and everybody can be anything, there were still characters better suited to different things. They weren't carbon copies, which I thought was rather impressive. Not many previous FFs have managed to have characters so diverse at end game, I feel.

[BG-57]

It's the biggest case of delayed gratification in any FF I've played. The game handicaps your abilities and choices and gradualy loosens them as the game progresses. I didn't really start enjoying the game until the party got to Pulse.

[Rodney]

Name calling's a bit beyond us, isn't it folks? We're judging a game here, not each other.
Not beyond me. And I'm certainly judging others. In fact, I'm gonna keep it up.

[ReloadPsi]

Name calling's a bit beyond us, isn't it folks? We're judging a game here, not each other.
Not beyond me. And I'm certainly judging others. In fact, I'm gonna keep it up.

Have fun with your inevitable ban. People are a bit less tolerant of being gratuitously dickish to one-another in these parts.

The more I played this the more I thought "FFX-2." The battle system, with its whole "everyone can act at once but still ATB" thing going on, reminded me of it so much. It just got turned up to eleven when it introduced the garment gri- I mean paradigm system. Except FFX-2 gave you more options, and much earlier on, so not only was I playing a blatant imitation of something from a black sheep spin-off title (black sheep in the west anyway; the Japanese loved it) it wasn't even a good imitation. Take one of the most open-ended systems in the entire series and simplify it for a newer game? Sod off.

And no I'm not "giving it another chance." I've disliked far more than I've liked out of Square-Enix in the last decade; I don't have nearly the dumbass* fanboy loyalty to their brand I used to, so I don't consider the game worth my time when I can give my time to something that is. Hell, I don't even own a PS3 or 360 of my own, so I couldn't even go back to it if I wanted to. Which I don't. I've played through plenty of games I didn't like because I was accused of not giving them a chance (namely FFX and Mario 64) only to have others turn around and say "well then you did like it because you played it" because the idea of proving one's point is lost on them... don't like something, it's "didn't give it a chance" and then you give it a chance and "oh you do like it." No I fucking don't! I've done my time; if a game doesn't grab me early enough now then I don't give a damn. Next please.

*I'm not saying loyalty to Square-Enix' brand makes you a dumbass. I'm saying I was loyal to the point of being a dumbass about it.

[Mirage]

Don't worry, ReloadPsi, I'll say it for you.

If there's anything that's a sure sign of someone being a retard, it's mindless brand loyality.

[Shiny]

Rodney & Mirage: Knock it off.

It's a matter of differences in taste. People don't like the direction FFXIII is going in and I can see why. It's not like the same play style as with older generation. Leaves you without alot less time to decide what you're going to do in battle. There is also lack towns and random ass NPCs in towns that are funny. I miss that part of FF, but still like XIII so far.

[Kaspian69]

I have yet to muster the patience to play all the way through FFXIII (only made it about 5 hours in so far), and I think it's largely because of how I'm pretty much forced down a corridor early on in the game. Granted a lot of RPGs can be pretty linear, but they at least give the illusion that I can explore at least a little. With FFXIII when I look at the mini map I just see a straight line making it obvious where I need to go. It's just not my cup of tea. I like wandering around, possibly going to areas I shouldn't and getting my party wiped. It's all part of the fun for me, but I haven't come across this in FFXIII from the time I've played with it, and I just got bored and stopped.

[ReloadPsi]

Now I didn't really elaborate on this because it's one hell of a long elaboration. But here goes.

The other thing that just got on my damn nerves with this game is not that it started slow, but that it started badly. It managed to annoy me several times in the three hours I played, all of which I videotaped by the way; I only played it because one of my friends knew I would react very negatively and insisted we record my reaction all the way, as I had already decided, based on my not really liking much of anything Square-Enix had put out in the last decade (aside from maybe XII which I'm still very undecided on) that I wasn't even interested in playing this game, but a friend of mine had played it, hated it, and thought it deserved to be hurt back. Now I've always been all about second chances, but this was like their ninth or tenth chance for me so I already had a "meh" attitude... how could I possibly be disappointed?

So after a very pretty opening scene that I couldn't get emotionally invested in due to watching characters spit cryptic and alien plot points for ten minutes, the first battle begins and gives you a tutorial on how to control a battle... that consists of "select the Autobattle command. Well done! Two attack commands were placed in your queue! You can now select a target, but you only face one target this time, so your choice is simple." How about telling us how to manually select said commands and pitting us against two weaker soldiers to teach us how to target, letting us know that there IS an Autobattle option if we get lazy, and then testing what we've learned by having the fight between the hermaphrodite and her African-American stereotype friend, and the robot scorpion that's totally not an FF7 reference, a couple of minutes later? I couldn't believe that the very first tutorial in the game was telling me to let the game complete the tutorial for me. I also found it funny that my these two characters, whose names I did not yet know, but had been watching for the last ten minutes, finally revealed their names by entering a battle and letting me read their names next to their HP meters, rather than using the story to accomplish this. (Subtitles were off by default, and I didn't turn them on until some time after this battle.)

I already ranted on the datalog in an earlier post, so I won't go into that much further, but my immediate thoughts on seeing it explain totally alien plot points that the other characters had already thrown at me were that Squenix, having also published it, played Star Ocean: TTEOT and didn't actually understand the purpose of its glossary; they just thought it was a good idea and used it. Also if the story (and, from what I saw, lots of character motivation) was going to be mostly told in the glossary instead, then why bother showing any cutscenes at all, other than to deliberately waste my time? There was a lot of action but I couldn't get emotionally invested in it because I'm not a dumb kid with ADD and as such appreciate some bloody context. What, am I supposed to read the datalog afterwards and reminisce on what an epic scene it was in hindsight?

One of the other things that got right on my nerves was when I started fighting Cie'th or whatever the hell they were called... and some of them seemed to have higher evade and as such Sazh appeared to have an easier time hitting them with his funky pistol dancing than Lightning did with her sword. Too bad I couldn't tell him to do it, so I had to just wait for him to have a change of heart while I attacked the grounded foes instead. I like being allowed to micromanage my party. It's my goddamn party. At least Star Ocean, which they evidently thought they were somehow imitating, let you switch characters at whim; I've won many a battle in those games while my level was too low thanks to some clever micromanagement.

What really took the piss with the party AI though was when I was fighting Anima, and Snow was standing in the middle punching it while its two appendage thingies wailed on him. I got pretty tired of him dying all the time, as well as him not STANDING BACK A BIT AND THROWING HAND GRENADES INSTEAD AS THERE WERE MULTIPLE TARGETS AND THE NET DAMAGE DONE TO THEM ALL WOULD'VE PROBABLY BEEN MORE THAN WHAT HE WAS DOING TO ONE TARGET WITH HIS ATTACK NOT TO MENTION KEEPING HIM ALIVE. This was another instance where I was screaming at the screen (admittedly playing it up a bit because we were, like I said, crudely filming me playing it) but bloody monkey christ, I was amazed at how stupid my AI allies were being.

Oh yeah, hey, you know Square-Enix love their visuals? So much so that they've released two hundred-minute FMVs as stand-alone movies? You know how they once made this pompous statement of how the amount of time and effort they put into their special attack animations means we shouldn't be able to skip them because it would disrespect their work or whatever, which I admit I can't actually find and as such can't prove that they actually said? Okay, cool, so bear with me on this one. In either 2010 or 2011 this game took a Guinness World Record for the highest headcount of staff members working on a single video game: somewhere in the region of three hundred. So there's this scene where Hope and Vanille commandeer one of those airbike things, and crash it. Offscreen, with just sound effects. I know it seems like a minor point until you consider that three hundred people worked on this game, and that this figure was a world record. Three hundred people. And they couldn't be bothered to animate a brief crash sequence because it was harder than having people stand around and talk I guess.

I didn't play around with the paradigm system very much as I was running out of tape, but from what I could see it was very similar to the garment grid from FFX-2, only now it changed the entire party at once and there was less stuff to choose from. Immediately I started experimenting with it as I noticed that in my first fight I was taking a bit of a pounding, so I pushed L1 (was it L1?) and switched to Solidarity. Five seconds later, the game interrupted me and suggested I try switching to Solidarity. Apparently it thought I was a frakkin' idiot. I then made a paradigm named "Diversity" and pretended my team were now that kickass dance troupe from that one series of Britain's Got Talent. Bitchin'.

So as I said... there's a difference between a slow start and a f***ing offensive start. For me to find this bloody much to bitch about in just three hours... I worry. I have never so vehemently detested a game that I already walked into with no high expectations of which to speak, and in such a short amount of time. If it gets better... I don't care. Eat a dick. I've played through quite a few games I didn't like only to shut people up because I was accused of not giving them a chance, and in fact played so far through some of them that I was now giving advice on those damn games to the people who said I didn't give it enough time because I now knew the game better than they did purely because I played it to prove I could give a game a chance... and so got accused of liking it even though I did not; I got through it because I was good at video games. More so than they, apparently. Catch 22 innit. Point is I've done my time.

"Gets better later" isn't a good enough excuse for me any more, because I could just as well pick up a game that gets better immediately. Some other games may start a bit dull, but dull and slow aren't necessarily bad. My favourite film of all time, Alien, has an extremely slow start, but it isn't a horribly annoying start. If I shot you in the kneecap, murdered your mother and burned down your house, but then started bringing you a plate of freshly baked cookies every day, would you like me?

Edit a month later: looks like I closed this debate. None of you gonna defend any of that horrible BS?

[Trumpet Thief]

There seems to be a very heated debate going on in this thread :p

Just to throw in my two cents, I played about 4/5 hours of this game while borrowing it off of a friend. I honestly tried to like it, lowering my expectations and trying to pick out every individual thing that I liked.

I actually enjoyed the battle system, for starters. It was a bit different, and the loss of control was kind of a downer (I understand that it gets better as the game goes), but for the most part, I've never been completely dissatisfied with a battle system before (FFVII and VIII were probably the worst offenders for me, and those two rank among my favorites).

That said, the story just felt so... forced. I wish I could think up another word, but it just didn't feel authentic. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but I didn't find it endearing at all. Even with the other ridiculous Final Fantasy stories, they somehow always had me hooked from the getgo. Coming from a lover of character interaction and cutscenes, the story and the various events just weren't doing all that much for me. I couldn't relate to or enjoy any character (besides Sazh, who was just awesome), and it honestly didn't feel like a Final Fantasy game to me.

But then again, I played it nearly two years ago. I'm open to giving it another shot, but could a genuine fan of the game describe some of the redeeming factors of the game? I don't think that I gave it a fair shot, but I'd like to hear some testimony from people that really enjoyed it.

[Spooniest]

I didn't give Final Fantasy XIII a chance. I played past the first battle and was immediately turned off.

I do remember watching a few of the cutscenes as my nephew was playing through it, and remember them being atrocious, on the level of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Just horrible. "Worst birthday ever" is the line that comes to mind, spoken by Lightning.

First of all.

"LIGHTNING?"

It's stupid. It's the kind of character name that wouldn't have even flown in the 80's, when characters has names like Lion-O or Voltron.

Lightning is a stupid name. Strike one.

Secondly, from the minute she opened her mouth, nothing but the most ridiculous caricature of the "Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy" came out. The stupid name, I could perhaps forgive, if the character engaged me. But there's no soul in her acting, her facial expressions. I could smell it a mile away...

Lightning is a flat character. Strike two.

And finally...

The nail in the coffin for me was that the music (or, incidentally, the lack of music) was just annoying the living crap out of me.

And suddenly, like a massive wave, it hit me:

Everything I liked about Final Fantasy, the interesting characters, the snappy music...

It was gone. I didn't feel like I was playing a Final Fantasy game at all.

So go ahead and tell me "you didn't give it a chance." I know my tastes, and whoever this game appeals to, it didn't appeal to me. I felt betrayed. I felt used. I felt depressed.

Then I got over it and played Final Fantasy 6 again. :D

[Mahad]

It's not the best game in the series, but I don't think it's as a bad a game as some people make it out to be. No I not a giant fan of it either, I got the game, I played through it and I tried to like it and at the end I can say that I did like it, not a lot, but it wasn't that bad.

For starters I have to say that I just don't like the plot of the story. A god takes a nap and the kids want him up? I'm not saying it's a bad plot, I think you can work something interesting out of that, but it's not what happened with FFXIII. I think the characters needed more depth, both villians and heroes. Also the game is too linear, with almost zero exploration because although you do get to move around in a huge area, it feels more like you're in a zoo putting down creatures in a simple 'go from point A to point B' fashion.

I did like the visuals, the cut scenes, and the battle system (I'm disappointed on how the summons were implemented, they feel more like a safety line than a real battle option). That's just my opinion.

[ReloadPsi]

it feels more like you're in a zoo putting down creatures in a simple 'go from point A to point B' fashion.

This is the best description I've ever heard for any game that's linear and packed with throwaway battles. It is absolutely hilarious :D