Views on XIII now that time has passed?

[Madame Adequate]

I never got around to playing XIII-2 and we picked up that and LR a few days ago, but I'm replaying XIII itself before I go into them.

I'm surprised to find I'm liking XIII more than I remembered and more than I expected. It's got the same basic flaws and strengths that I recall, but it's overall a pretty decent game in my eyes, and I'm really having fun replaying it.

What do you guys think of XIII if you have replayed it some time after the game came out? I'm sure I'll never regard it as a classic like VI, VII, or X, but it's not got much to be ashamed of.

[Slothy]

I haven't played it since my initial play through so I have to stand by my original assessment: it's one of, if not the, worst RPG of this past console generation. Possibly of just about any generation.

This game, along with an entertaining episode of Mythbusters, teaches us you can polish a turd. But no matter how shiny you get it it's still a piece of shit.

[Ayen]

I haven't played XIII since my initial playthrough either, and I never played the sequels. If they ever go on sale on Steam and I have the extra cash, I'll go ahead and get the trilogy for review sake. I've seen people who hated the first one enjoy the sequels so it seems like a better gamble than my buying RE 5 and 6 dirt cheap and used from GameStop.

[Colonel Angus]

I hear a lot of people on here say they hate this game. What exactly do you guys hate about it?

[Loony BoB]

There are a couple of people in these forums who will try to tell you that everything was bad about this game, Angus. xD

I liked the game when I played it the first time and I like it when I watch Danielle play it these days. I'm pretty sure I'd like to play it again, someday.

I can acknowledge it's flaws a lot more easily than I could in the past, particularly surrounding the "world plot" and the antagonist, Barthy (who I have always felt was really poorly done). Hope has marginally grown on me, although he's still my least favourite character. Fang, however, has grown on me notably. I didn't like her when I played the first game, but after Lightning Returns I actually think she's pretty cool now.

Snow grows on me more over time. He's overtaken both Sazh and Vanille as my favourite character in this game, although I still have a lot of time for those two, they're both great characters in my opinion, and probably have the most enjoyable inter-character relationship in the game. Lightning I view exactly the same as I always did - a pretty cool, badass character... but not a personal favourite.

So yeah, I can look back at it now with a lot less "omg new FF game" bias that I had when I first played it (although it should be noted not all FF's have enjoyed that from me - see FFX for an example of me not liking a new FF game).

I think you enjoy it more the second time around because you know what to expect, and can just focus on things you enjoy. It's not as bad a game as a few vocal people make it out to be, and I think it's unfortunate that a lot of people didn't even play the game based on such opinions. I actually felt there was some kind of weird internet peer pressure to dislike the game when it came out, like ragging on FFXIII was the cool thing to do. In the end, going by the reviews and ratings by users, more people liked the game than disliked it.

For XIII-2 and LR, it's massive on gameplay, weak on story - at least, in my opinion that's how it is. But XIII-2 in particular for me was a really, really enjoyable game. LR has it's moments, too, but doesn't remain in my mind as much as others have.

[Slothy]

Pretty much everything aside from a few tracks from the soundtrack. I've stated my opinions in detail many times over the years, but here's the gist of it:

Gameplay: the Crystarium is bullshit right off the bat. They basically decided to take the worst aspect of the original sphere grid, it's linearity, and crank it up to 11. There's no actual choice for the player there until extremely late in the game.

Which is actually one of the bigger problems with the game as a whole. Everything is held back far longer than it should be. You don't even start getting exposed to leveling up and the different roles until 5+ hours in. Which might not be so bad if the characters had a decent variety of abilities before that but, of course, they don't.

And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

Story: pretty awful overall. First up we have reading the in game dictionary to learn information essential to understanding the story. That's just plain bad and there's no justification for it. Then you've got the fact that the plot doesn't really go anywhere for the first several chapters. There's no real goal or plan other than run and/or fight back. Very little actually happens, and it's only made worse by the characters motivations and development over that time.

Hope wants to kill Snow for getting his mother killed, even though that's not actually what happened and Hope was there to see the whole damn thing. Lightning encourages him to get revenge, then as soon as he's committed to the idea of killing him she's suddenly shifted into "holy shit you want to kill him?" mode and tries to talk him out of it. This shift in her attitude comes out of nowhere of course because the developers just decided she suddenly needed to feel that way. And for 90% of the game Vanille knows pretty much everything that's going on, but hey, why bother telling anyone. This is probably the biggest group of morons assembled in an RPG in a long time. Only Sazh actually makes sense throughout the game.

Graphics: it doesn't do anything interesting on a technical level, but that's not a huge problem. Not every game actually needs to push the limits of modern tech. But what's unforgivable is how awful the enemy and level designs are. The enemies are almost entirely a visual mess. Making out what they're supposed to be is difficult most of the time, and I have to question the skills of the artists that actually made them. They basically suffer from the same problems as Nomura's Batman. There's lines and details added that don't actually add anything to them other than clutter making the designs visually confusing and just plain ugly.

Cocoon isn't a lot better since most of the environments make little actual sense (I still don't know how all of those different parts exist inside a sphere in the sky) and it's all extremely linear and most of the interesting stuff you see are just skyboxes you'll never interact with.

I could probably keep going, but class starts in five minutes.

[fat_moogle]

Since XIII launched I've played and completed it twice. I enjoyed it both times. The game received so much hate, some of which I can understand (no mini games, no back tracking, basically no exploration and quests).

However I thought that the story, characters and battle system were all good and didn't deserve so much flack. The only thing I will say about the story is that it relied too much on the datalog to get information across to the player, rather than explaining it properly throughout the course of the game. Also there were a few other missed opportunities - Jihl Nabaat, for one. She would have made a good boss fight.

XIII-2 improved in some areas, but took a hit in others. The story started getting unnecessarily convoluted ("Where did these clothes come from?" PARADOX!) but the game was a lot more open and there was much more to do. I can't say I was as big on the battle system though, as I didn't like the monster recruiting. I still enjoyed the game overall, though. And the Yeul / Caius stuff was pretty interesting. But that ending..."to be continued"...I was like WHAT?! It should have ended with XIII, let alone having third game. Due to this I didn't actually buy Lightning Returns as I didn't want to support Square Enix anymore in regards to the XIII franchise. But I did watch the ending on youtube which surprised me! Didn't see that coming.

[Pumpkin]

I've played it at least 3 times (maybe 4?) and while I agree it is a weak FF game, I still enjoy it.

I actually really enjoy the paradigm system. I like Fang, Sazh, and Vanille, and Fang and Vanille's relationship is adorable. The story I found to be interesting but I don't think it lived up to its potential. It gets really hard towards the end and it is incredibly linear in more than one way.

But overall I still have fun playing it

[Madame Adequate]

Pretty much everything aside from a few tracks from the soundtrack. I've stated my opinions in detail many times over the years, but here's the gist of it:

I was going to ask why you hate it so much, but you went ahead and posted just that :p


Gameplay: the Crystarium is bullshit right off the bat. They basically decided to take the worst aspect of the original sphere grid, it's linearity, and crank it up to 11. There's no actual choice for the player there until extremely late in the game.

I can't disagree that the Crystarium is a pretty mediocre system, but on the other hand it's not like most JRPGs have that much in the way of non-linear character progression. I mean, in most games you gain a level, you get stronger. VIII allowed much more but was fundamentally broken, X and XII did have much less linear progression (X only in the Advanced SG though).


Which is actually one of the bigger problems with the game as a whole. Everything is held back far longer than it should be. You don't even start getting exposed to leveling up and the different roles until 5+ hours in. Which might not be so bad if the characters had a decent variety of abilities before that but, of course, they don't.

I do agree with this part entirely, it takes way too long for most of the systems like leveling (!) and weapon upgrading to be introduced.


And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

I'm not convinced by this at all. First, yes, most fights can be won without too much trouble, but that's true of essentially every JRPG ever made. In the main, only boss fights, bonus fights, and the first couple levels of a D&D based system like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale are ever actually difficult in games. In this game, there are definitely some fights that are tough and need to be approached correctly, and you might power through if you just have an attacker and a medic, but it's far from optimal play. If you actually had to use every paradigm in every fight and constantly rotate between everything, I guarantee people would complain that ordinary fights were way too difficult, and I'd make that complaint myself. Complaining about auto-battle is also silly, it's just the same as hitting attack or casting heal, and nobody ever complains about how all you do with Cloud is either select Attack and then the enemy or select Magic -> Cure and then yourself, but it is literally the exact same thing.


Story: pretty awful overall. First up we have reading the in game dictionary to learn information essential to understanding the story. That's just plain bad and there's no justification for it.

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did. However;


Hope wants to kill Snow for getting his mother killed, even though that's not actually what happened and Hope was there to see the whole damn thing.

You say that's not what actually happened, but that's exactly what happened. Snow asked for Volunteers, gave Nora a gun, and she ended up getting killed in the fighting. Hope's not mad because Snow let go of her wrist, he's mad that Snow put her in danger in the first place.


Graphics: it doesn't do anything interesting on a technical level, but that's not a huge problem. Not every game actually needs to push the limits of modern tech. But what's unforgivable is how awful the enemy and level designs are. The enemies are almost entirely a visual mess. Making out what they're supposed to be is difficult most of the time, and I have to question the skills of the artists that actually made them. They basically suffer from the same problems as Nomura's Batman. There's lines and details added that don't actually add anything to them other than clutter making the designs visually confusing and just plain ugly.

Cocoon isn't a lot better since most of the environments make little actual sense (I still don't know how all of those different parts exist inside a sphere in the sky) and it's all extremely linear and most of the interesting stuff you see are just skyboxes you'll never interact with.

Uh, you've never heard of a Dyson Sphere? That part's easily explained; Fal'cie are magic gods. I do wish you could explore more, but that is FFXIII.txt. And I couldn't disagree more about enemy design and stuff, one thing I've been struck by throughout this playthrough is how brilliant the enemy designs are, how they put so much work into making what would otherwise be palette swaps look different, and how you can really see why a particular enemy would be intimidating.

[Loony BoB]

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did.
Wait, isn't there a full bestiary and aren't there DataLogs for the bad guys? I'm pretty sure there are...

[krissy]

for sure in 2 and lr, dont remember if xiii has it

[Shauna]

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did.
Wait, isn't there a full bestiary and aren't there DataLogs for the bad guys? I'm pretty sure there are...

There is a bestiary, but I'm not sure if the one for FFXII was more in-depth than just a picture and the affinities/etc of the enemies a la FFXIII.



And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

I'm not convinced by this at all. First, yes, most fights can be won without too much trouble, but that's true of essentially every JRPG ever made. In the main, only boss fights, bonus fights, and the first couple levels of a D&D based system like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale are ever actually difficult in games. In this game, there are definitely some fights that are tough and need to be approached correctly, and you might power through if you just have an attacker and a medic, but it's far from optimal play. If you actually had to use every paradigm in every fight and constantly rotate between everything, I guarantee people would complain that ordinary fights were way too difficult, and I'd make that complaint myself. Complaining about auto-battle is also silly, it's just the same as hitting attack or casting heal, and nobody ever complains about how all you do with Cloud is either select Attack and then the enemy or select Magic -> Cure and then yourself, but it is literally the exact same thing.

Press X to win is only okay under certain circumstances, of course.

Even then, as I say erry time this conversation comes up, there are times in FFXIII when I actually have to put some thought into what I am actually doing with the paradigms and battle set-up (and still got my ass handed to me despite all that). Which, again, is more than I can say about my recent venture through FFVII in which I could have fallen asleep holding down X during battles and still ended up fine.
I think what probably takes away from the fact that I died a lot in FFXIII was the fact that I respawned just outside the battle, ready to try again. The single time I Game Over'd in FF7 I had to do like half a dungeon again, which makes mistakes more brutal. I am mixed on my feelings here, because having death be a punishment is one thing, but on the other hand... if I had to re-do the section preceding Hecatoncheir the 20 times I failed to beat him, I probably would have not been a happy chappy.

And the other thing people whine about... Yes, you cannot directly control what your party members do, but that is true of many games - Setting AI in other RPGs to "Focus on healing!" or "All out attack" or "Stay defensive!" as their battle style is essentially what you're doing in this battle system. But, this is a cardinal sin in FFXIII for... reasons. And, I am sure I'll get some excellently worded walls of text explaining these reasons. ;)

(I agree on many other points about the bad things about FFXIII, but the battle system is just something I'll never understand. Perhaps it may just not be to some people's tastes, but to say that it is somehow infinitely worse compared to other RPG battle systems? I just can't get behind that line of thinking. xD)


I first played FFXIII... when XIII-2 had come out. So I knew all about the hate it got, and I had all that to muse upon while I also had the experience of watching Matt play it briefly - in which I didn't think it looked terrible. When I played it, I enjoyed it. Yep, it had massive flaws with the story and all that, but I enjoyed myself well enough when I played. I may even go back to it again one day!

[metagloria]

It's aight.

...is that an okay opinion to have? :shobon:

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I enjoyed XIII the first time around. I had that "NEW FF GAME!" hype, and I let myself be in awe as I played the game. Even despite that hype, there were things that bothered me. For one, it took way too long for the leveling system to come into play. They give you all those battles before they even introduce the leveling up thing, and you don't get any crystarium points or anything before it's introduced. With the linear, skinny hallway design I found myself getting involved in a number of battles, and I just had no incentive and it frustrated me. The music was also not appreciated at first. I missed the style of Nobou, and certain things grated on me (like the music that plays after you finish a battle). It grew on me and I came to like the music. I also wasn't a fan of the monster design. It's true that they avoided palette swaps and such for much of the game, but the designs weren't doing it for me. The overall plot was meh, but I cared enough about the characters to enjoy their interactions and wanting to see their story play out. Barty was a terrible antagonist.

Second time around, the game was unplayable. I knew at that point for sure that the battles at the beginning did nothing for me, and I was just annoyed with it all. There was also nothing new to discover in my second play through. Yes, all FF games are linear in terms of storytelling, but XIII lacked towns and NPCs and a world map. Those all do a lot for world building, and it's just fun on subsequent playthroughs to run into things that you never noticed before. Some characters grew on me (like Snow) while others became weaker in my eyes (like Lightning). In any case, I knew everything that would happen in the game and already wasn't really in love with it, so I just found myself bored.

XIII-2 was pure fun. I was addicted to monster collecting, and I even considered trying to platinum the game for a time. I didn't, but it's probably the closest I've gotten to platinuming a game. Caius made for a much better villain than Barty from the first game. Not only did he have more presence, but it was easy to sympathize with why he was doing the things he did. This game was where the lore and mythology really started to kick into gear, and it's great. Yes, the "To be continued" is dumb. Yes, the plot is a bit convoluted. Yes, it would have been nice to have more focus on characters like Sazh. Yes, relegating some important plot points to DLC was dumb (also Sazh's DLC was awful). Despite all that, it's my favorite of the XIII trilogy, and I find myself wanting to play it again pretty regularly. I also think the overall story in this one is quite excellent. I liked some of the risks they were trying to make with it (outside of the To Be Continued), and I actually liked the ending. I'm crazy and one of the few who did though. Music was fantastic too.

Lightning Returns had a lot of great pieces to make a great game. It fell a bit short for me, though. I liked the adult Hope of XIII-2 (in design and just his personality), so seeing kid Hope again was a step back. But he was just a shell of his character anyways in regards to his emotions and whatnot for story reasons. Lightning talked about being void of emotions all the time like it was some new thing, but she happened to show more emotion throughout this game than in any of the other series I felt. It was nice to see her character fleshed out more, but I still find her a boring character. The world in LR was pretty well done. There were a lot of interesting things like the guitar playing guy that just added life to the world, and it was cool to see NPCs and all these people about. I liked the darker tone to everything as well. I still am not a huge fan of the combat though. Lightning moves so slow in battle that certain mechanics promised (hitting different parts of enemies to find weaknesses for staggering) just didn't work as well as I envisioned. There was a lot of customization though, and that was cool. It was cool seeing all sorts of different people, but then the random nature of people wearing ridiculous accessories often pulled me out of the game and left me shaking my head. The plot was interesting, and it was cool to see how all the characters were coping with what was happening around them. It still felt a bit weak to me though, and I found myself more interested in working out the mythology behind the game than the story itself. I didn't really have an interest in playing it again afterwards.

[Mirage]

I hear a lot of people on here say they hate this game. What exactly do you guys hate about it?

Lack of exploration: Everything you see around you in the world is either your next destination, or something/somewhere you will never ever be able to go explore. This changes a bit later in the game, but it's too little, too late. To add to this, the game simply throws away all the exciting-looking areas once you're done wicth them. You can never revisit areas or find out new things about them later.

Poor presentation of the plot/story/lore: It is written in a way that makes it appear a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of the interesting stuff about the world is simply put in a dry and boring text-log, instead of being talked about in the game by either the playable characters or NPCs. When you come across new things in the world, you almost never see the characters react to them, even if it is certainly the first time in their lives they have seen the things

No towns: By that, I mean no NPCs to talk to in order to find out new things about the world you live in, and that world's society and history. Nothing that makes you feel like the world around you actually exists outside of being just stage backdrops for the overblown plot to play out in front of. It makes the world feel dead and uninteresting.

Boring character progression system.

Mostly uninteresting characters. I liked Sazh. Lightning was acceptable but I only really liked her when she was mean to the character I hated the most in the game, namely Snow. I found Fang sort of interesting, but she didn't get nearly as much screen time and development as I would have preferred she got.

Was the game playable? Yeah, sure. I've played worse, but I expect more from a game that has had so much money and time spent on it, and from a developer I know is capable of much better things.

I enjoyed the combat, even if the game held my hand for 10 hours before actually letting me experiment with the combat system. I also greatly enjoyed the music. While the technical quality of the graphics weren't all that, some areas were pretty visually impressive.

Now, many other games, Final Fantasy games even, have some of these flaws as well, but usually not as many in a single game as I think FF13 has.

[Sephiroth]

http://home.eyesonff.com/showthread.php/159082-Review-Fabula-Nova-Crystallis-Final-Fantasy-XIII-Trilogy

XIII-2 would have been better with not every anomaly being called a paradox though that is just a semantical problem but also actual paradoxes causing things that wouldn't happen because of causality that could only be ignored by omnipotence - but well - it just is supposed to be this way. Several explanations also don't make too much sense and I don't really like the use of words like "God" and "almighty" in the third installment when he is just a simple creator and not almighty at al but that is more my problem of thinking too much than a no go that really messes up stories for me and makes me hate them. I actually very much love it, especially the ending.

[Madame Adequate]

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did.
Wait, isn't there a full bestiary and aren't there DataLogs for the bad guys? I'm pretty sure there are...

Oh, yeah I can see what I tried to say was unclear. XIII has a full datalog of enemies in that it has HP, weaknesses, and that kind of thing. What I want is much more spergy: I want a big wall of text for every freaking enemy explaining what it is and where it came from.

[Bolivar]

I'm surprised to find I'm liking XIII more than I remembered and more than I expected. It's got the same basic flaws and strengths that I recall, but it's overall a pretty decent game in my eyes, and I'm really having fun replaying it.


These were my thoughts on my first playthrough - I didn't like what I heard of the changes but I found the haters over-magnified the faults of what was in general a decent enough and fun game. You have to understand that members on this forum wanted to hate the game. They hated it when the concept art was unveiled, they hated it when the debut trailer went live, and, somewhere deep in the forums, we have the posts to prove it.

Every video game ever made has faults. I recognized XIII's well enough: the combat was an atrocious marriage of X and XII's gameplay - a watered-down Gambit system and a watered-down Sphere Grid. The monsters were all HD blobs as Vivi pointed out. The "puzzles" were meaningless with a mapmarker and the game certainly dragged towards the end. It committed the cardinal sin of all cinematic games - it did not allow the player to interact with the environment. The ending also made no sense with them "breaking fate" by doing what Barthandelus wanted all along and killed Orphan.

That said, no one can deny that the game had incredible music and gorgeous graphics, both of which were superbly polished for HDTVs and Dolby Digital/DTS surround sound. Square still reigned supreme in terms of imaginative, high-fidelity cutscenes and even the in-game animations are without peer. The combat wasn't as deep as I'd have liked but it was fine enough and enjoyable on its own unless you're actively committing energy towards hating it. And I loved the story. The acting and rendering of the characters far surpassed anything the series had previously accomplished as far as bringing characters to life; you may not like those characters but they were on another level in terms of being lively and animated. I loved how the first half of the game paired them up into smaller story arcs, in which the characters are often acting with cross purposes, even lying to eachother, despite relying on one another to survive. I really liked Lightning as a strong female lead who could be stubborn, committed, spiteful, and accepting all at the right times. And I enjoyed reading the lore entries when loading up a save or taking a break, before diving back into this colorful world. I have to give Square credit: in an era where games are getting smaller with increasingly recycled assets, Square managed to make a 50+ hour game where every captivating environment was different from the last. And that's an achievement all on its own.

But more than anything this game felt like a Final Fantasy and that was something we hadn't had in over 10 years at the time it was released.

[Pete for President]

I for one liked the creature designs. The music brings a lot of vibe.

The dialogue between duo's helped bringing the characters to life, but I remember that to die down quick.

It's mostly the environments that feel empty and dull, and the gameplay lacks variety. The battle system only shines in boss fights while the normal fights are downright no-brainers for the vast majority of the game. Combine this with the lack of variety and slow pacing and the game becomes a chore.

RPG's that I love all tend to break things up. Dark Souls: explore, spend time in safe zones, upgrade/shop, repeat. FFX: dungeon, explore town, puzzle, repeat. Vagrant Story: dungeon, craft, dungeon, puzzle, repeat. FFXIII does only one thing and puts that on repeat. I remember that part on Pulse where you come across the mech and I thought: "finally we get to do something else!" And then that mech appears to be broken and the whole thing was a let down :cry:

The Fal'cie are poorly explained/designed with very questionable motivations. Character motivations are there but are rarely credible.

How anyone could like a negativitron like Lightning is beyond me. Sazh was the only credible character imo, and I'll give them props for trying something quirky with Vanille.

I loved the concept of Cocoon. Sazh, Snow and Vanille had potential as characters. Shame none of it was executed to the full potential it had.

[chionos]

I'm a hater. I hate the game. Even now. And no, I didn't want to hate it. I still don't. That's just silly. I wanted to love the game as I have loved every single previous Final Fantasy.

I was excited by the early art. I was excited by that very first early demo of lightning. I was excited putting the disc in and booting the game. I was excited by the loading screen. I was excited right up to the point I actually started playing the game, and it was one disappointment after another from there on out.

It's not that everything about the game is bad. It's that all the bad things take away from any good.

Graphically, the game is beautiful. But the beauty is far off, untouchable. Shitty camera work and linearity make whatever beauty the environments might have simple background adornment, too far away to really even appreciate. There's nothing compelling about the progression from one area to the next. Also, the pacing is just completely shitty.

The battle system is repetitive and boring. Battle should as much be an opportunity to show off the characters' personalities as the dialogue and movement between battles are.

The advancement system is 95% linear. That's a bad thing. If you're going to be that lazy about developing the system, why bother with it at all? Why fancy up your lame ass linear progression with a big shiny crystal? I mean, you're not fooling anyone. Oh look I unlocked a new level, I get to go up, I wonder what new...same things as before I'll get to hate.

I hate the way the summons are implemented into the story. I hate how bloody random everything is.

The weapon/armor upgrade system is okay, but horribly implemented.

The monsters are generally either so gaudy as to be practically parodies of monsters, or so impersonal as to be non-entities.

The writing is deplorably, abominably, despicably bad. I think we can all agree on that at least, yes?

While some characters have grown on me, the cast mostly sucks. Lightning is boring and nonsensical. Hope is annoying. Snow sucks. The rest are somewhere a bit above mediocre. 'Cept for Fang and Vanille, those two characters have grown on me quite a bit. I think if these had been games about Fang, then my overall opinion might be quite a bit improved. Final Fantasy XIII: Vanille and Fang Go Shopping would have been a better game.

Saying FFXIII was the first game that felt like a Final Fantasy in over ten years seems a bit farfetched. I mean, I understand that this is your opinion, so if that's what you really think that's what you really think. But I have a hard time believing that anyone could possibly truly think that Final Fantasy XIII is more Final Fantasy-like than FFXII, FFXI, and FFX.

First of all, FFXI is probably the most "Final Fantasy" that any game has ever been. It is. I don't care if you like MMOs or not. That's beside the point. Final Fantasy XI DEFINITELY feels like a Final Fantasy.

On the other hand, I can sort of understand why you might want to exclude FFXII as it does have a different vibe, a different aesthetic than most of the mainline FF series. So no real argument there. I mean, I love the game, and for me it fits the FF progression, but I do understand that my perspective is unique in this.

But then FFX, too? While FFX isn't my favorite FF--I wish FF in general would go back to the castles and swords and dragons motif of the early games--it still feels way more like a Final Fantasy than FFXIII. It's a world in which you, the character, get to adventure. Adventure, the heroic epic quest, involving foreign lands, alien and monstrous and magical creatures, lost treasures and hidden mysteries, an evolving world, new and differing locales--this was the foundation of early FF games. And FFXIII is so far from being anything at all like that it's baffling. Except for maybe the creatures.

And in any case, going a long time without getting the Final Fantasy you want is no excuse to accept a pile of garbage prettied up with a FF bow on it.

I guess the best thing I can say about the game, which is sad, is that the music isn't terrible. It's not magical like a FF ST should be, but it didn't turn me off either. Actually, if the music had been better, had been at the level of previous games, it probably would have been upsetting, to have wasted such good music on such a bad game.

[Fynn]

I find it amusing how one side's opinions are interpreted by the other as not allowing them to like/hate the game. Seriously? Since when are people here so defensive?

Also, Bolivar - lol? Do you really think people would go and buy a game with the intention of hating it just to spite other people who might enjoy it? Seriously?

I really thought people in this forum above this. But now people list arguments for disliking a game and that's seen as them forbidding others to like it, and vice versa. I have yet to play this game myself, but I can already tell it will be a gut-wrenching experience for me, seeing that no matter what opinion I have on it once I beat it, I will be eaten alive by the other side just for voicing that opinion.

[Fox]

XIII is one of those weird games that actually gets better with age, where all the other games in the series become more and more obviously dated (although they do of course remain brilliant).

And I think the reason it gets better with age is because it was disappointing, everybody hates on it so much! They hate and hate and hate until they're blue in the face, and the perception of the game gets worse and worse and worse. But then you play it again (or at least I do) and go: "Huh. Well this isn't anywhere near as bad as I had got into my head!"

So it kinda goes from being a disappointment to being a pleasant surprise. An odd one.

[Loony BoB]

I find it amusing how one side's opinions are interpreted by the other as not allowing them to like/hate the game. Seriously? Since when are people here so defensive?
You must be new to FFXIII - people have been like this since day one. xD As I say, it's divisive. The main issue people have is that this game has been the "latest single player game" in the main FF series for such a long time, that people use it as the prime example of Where Square Enix Are Today and What Is Wrong (or Right) With Square Enix. Thus, the debate about Whether Square Enix Are Doing The Right Thing has always fallen back to FFXIII, and thus people get quite heated over it because they feel that someone's opinion of FFXIII is the justification of What Will Come Next From Square Enix. xD

Also, Bolivar - lol? Do you really think people would go and buy a game with the intention of hating it just to spite other people who might enjoy it? Seriously?
I don't agree with Bolivar regarding this being a notable thing, but I do agree that some people do get a game not with the intention of disliking it, but definitely with the expectation that they will not like it and a lack of an open mind regarding it. But then, the same goes for every game out there. It's just a part of the gaming culture. I've probably been guilty of this at some point - playing a game after it was hyped like mad and expecting it to be not as good as the hype, and then being set in my view from the start. Perhaps that's what affected my opinion of FFVI? Hard to say. I think I gave it a fair go, though.

In the end, despite my massive disagreement with the likes of WK and Veev regarding this game, I consider each of them great people. I don't think people themselves are getting torn apart in this debate... it's just people having a big disagreement over the current state / future of the franchise with this game being the big go-to game for any reference on this matter.

I respect that some people don't like FFXIII, just like I respect that some people like FFII. The only difference is what I've mentioned above - people are heated about it because it's the most recent single player game.

[Taiga]

I played XIII two or three times and still regard it as one of my favorites. I liked it from the start and I'm not ashamed to say so.
First of all, I was highly disappointed in FF XII, so it didn't take much for XIII to please me. I recognize the weak points of this game, like its being linear and its confusing way the story was told, but what's most important to me when playing a game is the gameplay. If I don't enjoy the gameplay, I don't care much about a good story or great characters, so in return an enjoyable gameplay and battle system can save a weak story for me. I liked XIII's gameplay and didn't mind the linearity much, and its battle system was something new and interesting to me. It also made fighting ridiculously easy, but I'm not the kind of gamer who seeks hard challenges, so I didn't mind.
I'm well aware of the fact that XIII isn't one of the strongest entries in the series, yet it's one of my personal favorites (though it's my least favorite out of my favorites, ha). I understand why many people dislike the game, but it's all a matter of personal taste, anyway, so to each their own. :) Also, if every game was the same, it would be terribly boring. I think it's okay for game developers to experiment, even if they end up producing failures (such as XIII-2 and LR - at least in my opinion these games were totally unnecessary).

[Mirage]

Well if you don't like difficulty gameplay, you might be in for a rough ride with type 0 :p

[Taiga]

I didn't say that I have a problem with more challenging gameplay, but that I don't seek for challenges in particular. E.g. I'm neither a trophy nor a superboss hunter, I just don't care much about that kind of stuff.
And I already played and finished Type-0. ; )

[Fynn]

I find it amusing how one side's opinions are interpreted by the other as not allowing them to like/hate the game. Seriously? Since when are people here so defensive?
You must be new to FFXIII - people have been like this since day one. xD As I say, it's divisive. The main issue people have is that this game has been the "latest single player game" in the main FF series for such a long time, that people use it as the prime example of Where Square Enix Are Today and What Is Wrong (or Right) With Square Enix. Thus, the debate about Whether Square Enix Are Doing The Right Thing has always fallen back to FFXIII, and thus people get quite heated over it because they feel that someone's opinion of FFXIII is the justification of What Will Come Next From Square Enix. xD

Also, Bolivar - lol? Do you really think people would go and buy a game with the intention of hating it just to spite other people who might enjoy it? Seriously?
I don't agree with Bolivar regarding this being a notable thing, but I do agree that some people do get a game not with the intention of disliking it, but definitely with the expectation that they will not like it and a lack of an open mind regarding it. But then, the same goes for every game out there. It's just a part of the gaming culture. I've probably been guilty of this at some point - playing a game after it was hyped like mad and expecting it to be not as good as the hype, and then being set in my view from the start. Perhaps that's what affected my opinion of FFVI? Hard to say. I think I gave it a fair go, though.

In the end, despite my massive disagreement with the likes of WK and Veev regarding this game, I consider each of them great people. I don't think people themselves are getting torn apart in this debate... it's just people having a big disagreement over the current state / future of the franchise with this game being the big go-to game for any reference on this matter.

I respect that some people don't like FFXIII, just like I respect that some people like FFII. The only difference is what I've mentioned above - people are heated about it because it's the most recent single player game.

I haven't played it yet, but I've seen the debates, so that's not new to me. What's new to me is the swarm of people yelling "why am I not allowed to like/dislike this game?!" People are getting their panties in a serious twist. They're getting so defensive and every opinion other than their own seems to be a personal offense to them.

And I don't think it's just about. It being a recent single player entry. I was there when XII came out. People loved and hated it (I was and still am in camp love), but no one got personally offended when someone listed the games faults and why they disliked it. It's getting toxic now, is what I'm getting at.

[Loony BoB]

I haven't played it yet, but I've seen the debates, so that's not new to me. What's new to me is the swarm of people yelling "why am I not allowed to like/dislike this game?!" People are getting their panties in a serious twist. They're getting so defensive and every opinion other than their own seems to be a personal offense to them.

And I don't think it's just about. It being a recent single player entry. I was there when XII came out. People loved and hated it (I was and still am in camp love), but no one got personally offended when someone listed the games faults and why they disliked it. It's getting toxic now, is what I'm getting at.
While I do agree to some extent, I think it is mostly what I mentioned - how many games have been used as the latest (single player) game in the series for this long, and how many games have divided opinion as much? I think there might be some that get close to the latter, but no FF game has been dissected for as long as this one, and the people who dislike the game seem much more viscious in their dislike it than I have seen since FFX and FFXI were released/announced (respectively). But yeah, sadly, this is a thing that happens. I don't think it's toxic so long as you deal with it with a level head and a respect that people can have opposing opinions. I do agree that trying to change someone else's opinion is generally futile, but the main reason I "do my bit" to defend FFXIII as a game is because I feel that it deserves a chance, and a lot of people are put off even trying the game based on the opinions of others which is a real shame.

I'm not sure exactly which posts you're getting the "not allowed to like or dislike the game" kind of thing, mind you.

[Del Murder]

FFXIII was a fun game to play once, but unlike every other FF I've played before it, I have no desire to play it again. I had fun while playing it, and the sequel was fun too, but after that I was pretty much done with it. It was good, not great.

[Psychotic]

Both XIII-2 and Lightning Returns were improvements on XIII so my view of it hasn't really improved after seeing how it could've been better.

[Night Fury]

My biggest gripe with Final Fantasy XIII was that I just had no idea what the heck was happening from the moment it started, and I still don't. What is Cocoon? What is Pulse? WHAT IS GOING ON I DON'T KNOW.

I do love Vanille though :D

13-2 had fun gameplay but still suffered from getting overly complicated really quickly. Haven't played Lightning Returns.

[Mirage]

Pulse is the world. Cocoon is the artificial planet floating in the sky, where most (all?) humans live.

[Dat Matt]

I really enjoyed it and XIII-2

I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoyed XII, I just enjoyed the gameplay. Battle system was good. music was good. Pretty much everything else was lackluster. I didn't play XII for the plot though I played it for the marks and weapon/armour collection. The story only lasted about 10 hours but I racked up about 120 hours.

FFXIII was pretty much the same.

[Raistlin]

I was actually ok with the battle system, and definitely enjoyed it more than most of the "haters" out there. XII's was better, but I was still entertained by XIII's, and some of the tougher battles were memorable. But I would still consider myself on the hater side, as the rest of FFXIII was pretty terrible. The game was very sloppily put together after all the time spent on graphics, and some aspects seem like complete after-thoughts (weapons upgrades, and hell, even the entire gil system. IIRC, there's literally one grindspot to get any significant amount of gil until the end of chapter 11, when you can get a shitton from a chest). The Crystarium was bland, the linearity reached almost parody levels, and the story after chapter 9 was brutally bad. "Oops, we forgot to figure out how the story unfolds after we got everyone together... well, let's just have the bad guy tell us everything like a bad action movie." I also did my best to block the entire chapter 10 from my memory.

Unlike the haters, I thought it was ok to play through once. The beginning of chapter 11 was actually enjoyable, for instance. But like the haters, I can't imagine voluntarily playing through it again.

[Laddy]

I don't hate it.

It's a beautiful game. The visuals, music, and designs were pretty. The combat and advancement system were well-conceived but failed to offer much nuance or tactical variety. The story played with cool concepts but never realized. The characters felt very identifiable in some ways but were never explored enough to where you cared much about them. It's just a vanilla experience. Not offensive, just underwhelming and failing to deliver on intriguing concepts.

[Markus. D]

I still am not at all a fan of XIII. I love XIII-2, and though LR killed what i loved about the characters i grew fond of in XIII-2. they NAILED the ost, and the battle system plays how i imagined Valkyrie Profile 3: Hrist would have.

[Wolf Kanno]

I'm breaking my rule about posting in forums of games I don't like. Obviously that in a nutshell will tell you where I stand though most forum members know my feeling about this game and wish I would shut up about it.

In a nutshell, it's a bad game, partly because it was poorly executed and partly because it really didn't have to be. When I read the interviews revealing the game had no cohesive vision until the demo was made, the whole experience made sense to me because the game did feel like something that was a whole lot of interesting ideas haphazardly slapped together to make a product released on time. The characters seem interesting but only a few I felt got real good character development and even then I kind of felt the writers chose to go for cheap emotional tugging over writing a gripping character that stays with you. The locations are interesting but feel utterly disconnected from the player since all the interesting stuff is in the background and you the player are trapped on the rails of the ride through Cocoon. The battle system, while not the worst I've played in an RPG, feels like a huge step down from previous entries and again; I felt like there was a sense of disconnect between the player and the action going on the screen since you are offered so little control of how things unfold. I have nothing good to say about the plot beyond the initial premise had potential.

The problem with XIII was that it was an obvious rush job, but sadly one that had a lot of potential to be something greater than it turned out to be.

[Ayen]

I hear a lot of people on here say they hate this game. What exactly do you guys hate about it?

I didn't hate it per se. I just found it boring, which to me is the worst thing a game can do since it's supposed to be a source of entertainment. I liked Lightning and Sazh okay, but since I only played up to the first boss that fondness doesn't go beyond a basic first impression.

Snow irritated me to no end. I'm indifferent to Vanille, Hope, and Serah. I never made it to Fang. I wasn't that impressed by the voice acting, which nowadays I blame on directing since the VA cast is solid. Going from monster, to monster, with a battle system I didn't care for, and switching to other characters I didn't care about didn't help either.

[Freya]

After the fact now, I appreciate it more. I still am not the biggest fan but I don't think it deserves the flack it gets of downright being the worst game ever. It had its highlights too

[Del Murder]

I don't think anyone says it was the worst game ever. The worst FF? You might have an argument there.

[Bolivar]

Also, Bolivar - lol? Do you really think people would go and buy a game with the intention of hating it just to spite other people who might enjoy it? Seriously?


No, I think a lot of people people bought it because they are fans of the series willing to give it a shot, hoping at least they'd get a decent ride and genuinely came away disappointed.

Yet I remember members on this forum who denounced the reveal trailer, ridiculed every nugget of information, and generally wrote off the game throughout its development only to buy it at full price at launch. Why? I think thats just as silly as those who (yes, Del) declare it by far the worst game they've ever played, while somehow putting in the 50-60 hours required to complete the story.

Nowhere in my post did I suggest others are disallowing anyone from enjoying the game, I'm just advocating we take a more nuanced approach than the black & white partisanship that accompanies internet discussions, especially about games. I've always been up front about my XIII criticisms, so I tend to call people out when they categorically reject all all of it as bad, as one post on the front page demonstrates. Thankfully, that mentality seems to be going away on EoFF, so I can see how my post may have seemed a little carried away.

[Rowan]

My biggest issue with FFXIII besides the crappy character development (both personality and gameplay wise) was the cringe-worthy melodramatic scenes. The only scene I purely enjoyed was with snow and serah on the hoverbike thing with the fireworks. But it could have been so much more meaningful if i gave a rats ass about either of those characters. Those kind of moments are for when the viewer (player) has a connection with the characters at some far point in the storym, not right at the start. Trying to force empathy for these characters when just having met them is just really lame melodramatic storytelling and I have absolutley no respect for it. The love story between Squall and Rinoa was beautiful because it stems from someone who doesn't believe he can be loved by anyone, seeing his character change over the course of the story and its events, to them in a warm embrace on the ragnarok and for the first time ever, Squall showing compassion for another person. That was beautiful.

FFXIII has none of that. Shallow characters, melodramatics, linear as anything ive ever played, bad character development system and a bad story.

Having said that, I completed XIII and XIII-2. It makes me pine for the days where square had to put effort into gameplay/characters/story because the graphics wern't as shiny.

[Marionette Cherry]

Few things I hated

Corridors as far as the eye can see
Can only move so many places on the cystarium grid before the game lets you level up anything else
Side missions, you get to fight things, which is what you've been doing the entire game already
Vanille, be quiet, please
Look at this big open field it took you 20 hours to get to, now run around for an hour and get bored because there's nothing to actually do in it.
Auto battle, you don't have to use it, but it's there.
http://i.imgur.com/vM6Omse.jpg
^
Don't want to get lost now.
Fill the stagger bar to win

Game was just bad, XIII-2 was alright but I never finished it, got bored, am going to get LR, might be better.
The recent PC release had dual audio which made Vanille likable, that's one good thing out of like 8 bad things I didn't like, there's no saving XIII.

[Loony BoB]

My biggest issue with FFXIII besides the crappy character development (both personality and gameplay wise) was the cringe-worthy melodramatic scenes. The only scene I purely enjoyed was with snow and serah on the hoverbike thing with the fireworks. But it could have been so much more meaningful if i gave a rats ass about either of those characters. Those kind of moments are for when the viewer (player) has a connection with the characters at some far point in the storym, not right at the start. Trying to force empathy for these characters when just having met them is just really lame melodramatic storytelling and I have absolutley no respect for it. The love story between Squall and Rinoa was beautiful because it stems from someone who doesn't believe he can be loved by anyone, seeing his character change over the course of the story and its events, to them in a warm embrace on the ragnarok and for the first time ever, Squall showing compassion for another person. That was beautiful.

FFXIII has none of that. Shallow characters, melodramatics, linear as anything ive ever played, bad character development system and a bad story.

Having said that, I completed XIII and XIII-2. It makes me pine for the days where square had to put effort into gameplay/characters/story because the graphics wern't as shiny.
I actually really liked the characters, and really liked that for once SE decided "You know what? Not everyone should be single 20 year old orphans with no children." Sure, most of them still were roughly fitting that kind of description, but there were family members and spouses involved and I really liked that they had more backstory than "I was an orphan, now I'm a person who fights monsters" which can be used to describe the majority of the FFVIII crew. I don't think VIII showed much more character development than XIII did at all. Sure, you can compare the most developed character in VIII with the least developed character in XIII and make it look like a good argument, but you could do the opposite just as easily.

The graphics in VIII were amazing for their time! :D

[Mirage]

They were amazing for their platform, you mean. A 50 mhz cpu with 8 MB ram :p

[Loony BoB]

I'd say they held their own against other platforms. 1999 wasn't an age of incredible jaw dropping stuff, and the cutscenes in VIII were great. Dunno if they were the best (hard to say as I wasn't a huge game owner back then), but they were certainly up there.

[Egami]

The first time I played XIII when I got it, I basically forced myself to get to the end of Chapter 12 and eventually lost interest and stopped playing it (it was also a time when I got my hands on Demon's Souls, then Dark Souls and then Skyrim and I was hooked to those games). A few years later, I picked XIII up again and finished it but like with the first time, I was basically forcing myself to play it just to finish it. I did finish it this time around but frankly by chapter 9 or so I was already sick of the game.

The first 20 or so hours of this game play like a tedious yet compulsory tutorial, as the game introduces you to and opens up it's mechanics at a lethargic pace while also jumping you from party members to party members dictating who you play as at any given moment in a wholly arbitrary manner. This setup could be made to work in some contexts, if there was something to support and complement it, like NPCs to talk to, towns to visit, areas to explore, side quests to do and more importantly if there was a solid narrative driving the events of the game. But there truly is nothing of the sort in this game, nothing to complement or break from the running down straight hallways to the tune of a never ending string of battles and cutscenes. That is very much what this game boils down to, you'll be doing an excessive amount of fighting and in some areas (like in the Arc and in Orphans's cradle) for such a prolonged time that you eventually start screaming for something...anything...to happen that gives you a respite from it. It is like the game thinks that it can compensate for the lack of NPCs, towns and overall things to do other then fighting with...well...more fighting. It is this barebones nature and battle, battle and then cutscene cycle that makes XIII a chore to play through.

One would expect that for a game that wants to focus so much on the combat that things would be well designed and implemented on this front but such is not the case. For a start, the combat very much mirrors the monotony and linearity of the game itself and further reinforces it so that it eventually sticks out like a sore thumb. The Crystarium is a very dumbed down version of the Sphere Grid which allows your character to progress in a single linear path in any given role without any real possibility of customisation. The game also places level caps on your characters so that you can't progress further in the Crystarium unless you defeat a particular boss at some point of the story. Then you get the message "Crystarium expanded" at which point you can progress another level.

I found the paradigm system to be quite flawed and huge step backwards from what we had in X, X-2 and XII. In particular because of the inability to do any sort of micromanaging of your characters. Not only are you limited to controlling the party leader (who if she dies it is game over for some reason even if there is a medic with Raise learned standing), but if you want to use a particular ability of a given character which is in a role other than the one she is in, you have to change the roles of the whole part in order to do so. And that's assuming it is an ability of your party leader, otherwise you have to hope for the AI to use the ability you want at the time you want or need it. The paradigm switching is also always followed by the three characters doing some animation to announce the change during which your characters keep getting hit by the enemies and the game hides the health/info bars. It is rather disorienting specially with the way the camera moves. In X-2 you could switch the dressphere of any of the girls individually at any time to use any of their abilities and the animation of their change paused the battle.

The battles themselves are very repetitive and nearly always follow the same formula: use a paradigm to quickly raise the stagger bar (ie. RAV/RAV/COM), switch to another paradigm if healing is needed (ie. RAV/COM/MED) and once the enemy is staggered switch to your max damage paradigm (ie. RAV/COM/COM) in order to finish it. That's basically it, most of the regular enemies if you haven't been running from too many battles you can handle with the Diversity paradigm (ie. RAV/COM/MED) and you could just Autobattle nearly everything to death. Some boss battles are only harder in the sense that you usually have to go through a buff/debuff phase before you begin the attack but they too boil down to raising the stagger meter and then switching to the max damage paradigm once the boss is staggered. Rinse repeat.

There is no real diversity in the way the battles play out just as there is no diversity in the gameplay of the overall game. The only glimmer of that, in the game actually changing things up a bit in the way you interact with it, was early in the game when Hope rides the Juggernaut and you control it to run pass some guards. Other than that it all the same: run down a hallway fighting enemies, watch a cutscene, fight a boss...repeat.

A common claim about this game is that it "opens up" by chapter 11 but in reality all it does is drop you in a big sandbox with barely an NPC in sight where you can do monster hunt quests (more fighting) while the story (which already suffered from poor pacing) comes to a complete halt. The game doesn't really opens in any way as you can't go back to any of the previous areas and when you decide to continue towards the ever present map marker to progress the story, you are once again thrown into the straight hallways and same string of battles and cutscenes that you emerged from.

The way the story is told is also quite problematic. The different characters throw nebulous terms and unknown concepts left and right without explanation. For the characters it makes sense to have a background so that these things are known and common to them but such is not the case for the player and hiding crucial details in the Datalog instead of actually fleshing these details out in game as opposed to giving us yet another pointless cutscene of Hope's existential crisis is a terrible design choice.

Previous games had a way to introduce and immerse the player into the world and it's mythos usually by means of the character you play as who in the story happens to be new to the setting the game starts in. VII for example has Cloud joining a rebel group and the leader (Barret) explains key concepts and important details as the first mission progresses and about 10 or so minutes in you already have a good idea about things. X did something similar with Wakka, who explained a lot of the concepts, how's and why's to Tidus early on. This setup works because it helps ground and immerse the player in the world of the game in a very natural way and also helps them better relate to the characters and appreciate the story. XIII has none of that and without any NPCs to talk to (who usually serve to fill in a lot of detail and background about the story and locations) you are left with having to stop actually playing the game in order to read a Datalog to be able to known about and appreciate things that are crucial to the story.

In any case, this is getting quite long and I could write and probably will write more later on (quite late here) but suffice it to say I really didn't like this game and it is my least favorite FF title (and yes I played Mystiq Quest). For me nothing really worked in this game. It looks graphically good, that is for sure and that is something SE always excel at, but everything else? Not quite.

[Galuf]

I'd say they held their own against other platforms. 1999 wasn't an age of incredible jaw dropping stuff, and the cutscenes in VIII were great. Dunno if they were the best (hard to say as I wasn't a huge game owner back then), but they were certainly up there.

1999 was full of jaw dropping stuff. well atleast one. it had the birth of EoFF ofcourse!