That would've made it much better...

What extra features would you have loved to see in this game? Mainly gameplay-wise, you can complain about the story somewhere else...

Personally, I'd have loved the ability to switch out the character you're controlling during battle. Either that or being able to contol all fighting characters at the same time. Or being able to design your own AI for the characters. Any of them would've done.
Also, multiplayer would've been nice. 3 players each taking control of one character and together beating the sh*t out of a Long Gui would've been fun. And I would've loved to fight against another player as well.

What would've made this game better?
Umm....lol, you realize how much negativity this thread is gonna draw right? Well I really hoped, there'd be a better mission structure format (instead of those floating stones giving you a random quest without any real diversity in types of missions). Wanted a better story, more unique and deep characters. Sazh, Lightning, Snow & Fang are a step in the right direction, but Vanille and Hope drag everything back down again. Mabey a better ending (Ohh yeah they have XIII-2 in the pipeline) and of course please cut the linearity crap out. I like interactive NPCs and the illusion of big cities and towns!

Man, after I promised myself I would stop posting in FFXIII related threads you had to make this one...

Where to begin:

Better control of your party: Like Karifean mentioned, either give me the ability to switch between characters in battle or give me control over setting up the A.I. so it's less painful. Better yet, just do both. XII had the right idea about A.I. party members.

Better party diversity: For a game that tries so hard to make every character a specialist in at least one field, it does a lousy job. I feel the biggest issue to all this is that some characters are seriously not as useful as others. I never use Sahz as a party member despite being my fave character and the few times I try to use him, I always regret it. I like using Snow, but Fang outclasses him at almost everything, even Ravager which is not one of Fang's primary classes. Vanille is completely outclassed by Hope and only maintains some usability because the makers decided to give her the most broken ability in the game that makes most of the difficult Mark Hunts easy and farming Adamantoise' much more bearable, beyond that, she's a poor man's Hope. Lightning has main character syndrome, in which she's good at almost everything, sure she's a lousy medic, but she's better than the three who don't naturally get the Role and she's the second best Ravager in the game and debatable the second best Commando. Making her the perfect secondary character to Fang and Hope who are the best in their respective fields.

This leads to a party of Lightning, Hope, and Fang which funny enough, the game has a tendency to make your default party in several of the later chapters. It's like the creators wanted you to only really use this party. Even the weapon abilities don't add enough reason to ever use the others cause often times the main three have just as equally broken abilities that make them more useful than whatever skill makes the others characters less lackluster.

Main Character equals death: Normally, this doesn't bother me but when the game sends you into chapters with frail characters like Hope and Vanille (even Lightning is pretty damn flimsy tbh) and the customization system/battle system offers no real way to protect said character effectively, then it gets annoying. The Barthandelus fight is often said to be one of the hardest battles in the game but for me, what made it so difficult was the fact the boss eventually cast a un-removable death spell on your lead character that makes the battle one about speed. I could have beaten him the first time if it wasn't for this spell and rule, cause my party could hold their own against his other attacks. Its especially grating cause their is no damn good reason why your other party members can't save them.

I begrudginly accept this in Persona cause your main character is basically a one man army who really doesn't need the other pary members, and in normal SMT games, it makes logical sense cause your "party" are being that you summon, so wiping out the summoner ends the summons obligations to summoner. XIII neither has a story reason nor does it have an effective gameplay set-up to make it manageable. What makes this especially annoying is that the game isn't really all that hard so when you die, it always feels like you're just being cheap shot by the game instead of legitimately being overpowered or outflanked.

Better Equipment Set Up: I kind of like leveling equipment but the whole idea looks better on paper than in practice. Part of the issue is that you rarely need to improve any of it with the exception of the Barthandelus fight mentioned above, and improvements never feel meaningful cause when it really comes down to it, your characters stats matter more than their weapons in determining damage and how much damage you take. It feels like FFX all over again where beyond a few certain abilities, weapons all feel the same and ultimately its leveling the character that is more important in dealing damage. On the brightside, the skills are more useful, and the game isn't as piss poor easy as FFX so at least weapons feel more relevant if only for the innate abilities and the poorly explained equipment affinity bonuses.

The other issue is actually leveling said equipment, the games system is retarded cause it barely gives you enough material from drops to make any meaningful leveling. Beyond rare items that are used for evolving weapons and the few scant items meant only for leveling, nothing in the game gives you sufficient enough funds to buy the materials needed in bulk, and most of the items don't give great XP beyond a scant handful (that is expensive to buy) and even then you need to have a max modifier to do get that measly amount of XP.

The easiest ways to fix this is to either
A) Have enemies and treasures give you better bulk of said items.
B) Increase modifiers (up to 10x would be nice) or increase the amount of XP items give or lower the cost of upgrades.
C) Don't use a loot system to gain money and just let everything drop money like the old games so every battle can net you cash to buy materials more readily instead of farming the few enemies that drop high resalable items.

Make the game less Linear: While I have no problems with the open ended environments of XII and much prefer them (Which Looney BoB and VeloZer0 will both most likely chime in to say they didn't care for.) Just some options would have been nice, not a simple and short road that leads to a treasure chest occasionally spread out, or the illusion of non-linearity by making your characters have to auto-jump across some rocks or the path winding in a circle. I mean some actual multiple paths that take you way out of the way with some decent treasures to reward you for going off the beaten path, or two roads that lead to the same location just take you down different visual canvases. Hell, just making the dungeons not look like a road would be a good place to start.

How about adding some minor puzzle elements a bit more, we had some in the early Chapters (1-4), but they are all gone until the end parts of the game, leaving this monotonous middle section.

Don't be a hypocrite about :bou::bou::bou::bou::
By this I mean towns, don't say you didn't put towns into the game cause the plot makes it impossible and then halfway through the game have two characters walk into a town completely unnoticed and actually don't cause a stir until the military finally catches up with them much later in the chapter when the characters are wandering through an unpopulated part of the city. You could have put in old school style towns, you just didn't cause the project was managed poorly, said town wasn't even interesting...

Better Mini-games/Sidequests:
A) It didn't really have any, besides collecting wool that does nothing, chasing a frocobo that was poorly placed in the game and unnecessary, collecting a few items to restore a robot, and the Ci'eth Stones which are a poorly utilized version of XII's Mark Hunts, the game offers very little in alternative gameplay.

The Mark Hunts are especially disappointing as their backstories are all the same (I failed at killing a big monster that I have some connection with, either it terrorized my village, killed a love one, or is a love one) but after awhile they all look the same, it's made even worse when your realize a good 2/3rd of the Marks are just normal monsters you will fight a little later as you journey through the plot (you may even fight a few of said monsters on your way to kill the Mission version), and the few unique monsters are actually reused a few times as well. There are at least four different Missions that have you fight that flying monster that spams status spells and has a high Attack power. A little better variety is not asking too much I feel, X's arena and XII's marks used pallette swaps, but at least they were all unique from each other and had different fighting mechanics.

I also don't see why they had to be left purely for the last segment of the game. The beauty of the system in XII was that it was introduced in the beginning and was used to supplement the normal journey. Some of the early dungeons could have been more interesting if you had optional mini-bosses available that forced you to learn the system better and early. You can't tell me that Cocoon's fal'Cie didn't occasionally make a few l'Cie during the war against Pulse or that some Pulse l'Cie got changed to Cieth stones before finishing there missions in the war and were brought up to Cocoon when it tried to repair the damage caused by Ragnarok.

Nor can you convince me that Snow, Hope, and Vanille wouldn't convince Lightning, Sahz, and Fang to stop and help. The three practically wear their damn hearts on their sleeves and despite running for their lives, I don't feel it's out of character for them to want to help people who were trapped in their situation. Hell, there probably could have been a way to implement this partially without even using the Ci'eth stones at all, but leave it open for the players. A switch hit at the beginning of a stage releases a PSICOM experiement that is being caged for the moment or activates a special security droid that is optional.

Of course I would also re-haul the plot and cast but we're mostly talking about game mechanics so I'll leave it at that.

i think idd that switching characters during the battle would be nice.. but than every person should be able to switch role (medic, ravager, commando etc) individualy.

Multyplayer? hmm i dnno.. i think the game is too long and to free for that

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

Better party diversity: For a game that tries so hard to make every character a specialist in at least one field, it does a lousy job. I feel the biggest issue to all this is that some characters are seriously not as useful as others. I never use Sahz as a party member despite being my fave character and the few times I try to use him, I always regret it.

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I used him for a while and he was pretty awesome during a period of time. If you take direct control of him, anyway. If I began with him as a Synergist, I could buff more properly than the A.I. and follow up with a Commando for his unique Blitz. If he had Haste and a proper en[element] on, his Blitz destroyed the hell out of everything. Unfortunately, he really does drop off the map at a certain point. In the last part of the game, he doesn't hold up as well, though it is possible to still use him if you control him, I think.

Hmm, let's see. It's a common complaint, but the game truly does hold your hand too much for too long, right down to controlling your exact party leader and other members for almost 20-25 hours, rather there are more than 3 characters present or not. It wouldn't have been so hard to let me hit R2 or L2 and switch the person I control during battle, either. For a game that's already directing you straight forward, giving you an auto-battle option, and a leveling system that's fairly limited for a while, forcing firm control over you even in this simple aspect was a strange choice to me. I liked all the characters anyway (yes, even Vanille and Hope), so I had no problem being this person or that person, but I didn't necessarily want to be them for the whole stretch the game developer's decided. They acted like I needed a babysitter to fully understand their battle system.

Nitpick time! The longer animation the first time you change to a new Paradigm, oi. During fights that would be decently long or bosses, I would do it once immediately just to move it out of the way so they would change faster when I really needed them too. I hated trying to desperately change to Diversity only for everyone to strike a cool pose one by one and me be dead by the time my Medic tried to cure me.

More things to do sums up my 'wishlist'. Once things opened up... they didn't, really. I still could only really fight things. I just wanted more things I could do besides fight. I can only really think of chocobo digging.

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

Make the game less Linear: While I have no problems with the open ended environments of XII and much prefer them (Which Looney BoB and VeloZer0 will both most likely chime in to say they didn't care for.)

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Loony* :) Actually, I never had a problem with FFXII and how open it was. I enjoyed the game, I just felt that it was so open that I completely forgot the storyline. FFXII needed datalogs, or more focus on story.

Switching between my three active party members in battle would have been nice. Controlling all of them at once or being able to switch them out anytime like FFX and FFXII wouldn't have worked to well with what they have set up though, and I really love FFXIII's combat as it is. The long Paradigm animation the first time around could be annoying at times, but for the most part it wasn't a problem because I tended to start out COM/RAV/RAV and switch to RAV/RAV/RAV at the start of the battle.

More replay value. The game as it is gives me no reason to ever put the disc back into my PS3. A branching storyline would be cool, but that is unrealistic to ask for in a SE-RPG. I would therefore be satisfied if everything but the story was less linear.

More AI options, the ability to switch which character to control while in battle.

Branching paths in the crystarium or whatever it was called. It feels like a sphere grid with less than half of the complexity.

More side quests during the first 20 hours of the game (more than 0 can't be too hard to do).

Don't spoil your own game in the intro trailer. It shows Sash alive in a cutscene that hasn't yet happened at the point where you're lead to believe he kills himself.

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Originally Posted by Kyle

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

Better party diversity: For a game that tries so hard to make every character a specialist in at least one field, it does a lousy job. I feel the biggest issue to all this is that some characters are seriously not as useful as others. I never use Sahz as a party member despite being my fave character and the few times I try to use him, I always regret it.

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I used him for a while and he was pretty awesome during a period of time. If you take direct control of him, anyway. If I began with him as a Synergist, I could buff more properly than the A.I. and follow up with a Commando for his unique Blitz. If he had Haste and a proper en[element] on, his Blitz destroyed the hell out of everything. Unfortunately, he really does drop off the map at a certain point. In the last part of the game, he doesn't hold up as well, though it is possible to still use him if you control him, I think.

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Haha really? Sazh is the one character I continuously used post-game.

Seriously, Sazh + Good Weapon + Blitz + Any other well-equipped character attacking = dead everything.

To make the game better they could have:

- Added some minigames
- Added some side-quests that weren't mark hunting
- Added scattered optional side stuff that allowed a break in the monotony of the storyline pushing forward
- Added more to the map than a continuous straight line and an area for a treasure here and there (and Gran Pulse)
- Added attacks/stats that made the characters more unique from each other (am I the only one who really misses Limit Breaks/Overdrives?), yeah I know they all have that one attack that takes up the entire ATB gauge to use but that just wasn't enough for me
- Added some way to switch out characters during battle more in the vein of FFXII so that all the unique super attacks and summons weren't completely unusable unless you had that character as the lead (I always want to summon Alexander but can't because I refuse to become a masochist and use Hope as my lead)
- Added NPCs that served a purpose/said something worth while
- Added the classic victory fanfare, prelude and prologue pieces that have been in every other FF game (almost)

Aside of that I'm pretty happy with the game.

I don't see why you'd want to be able to switch your leader mid-battle... its kinda defeats the purpose of setting somebody as a leader in the first place

But when the leader dies it shouldn't be game over. It's not like the party doesn't know what the hell do to without the leader.

I wish there was some kind of manual movement in the battle system, where a lot of abilities have AoE effects. If buddy's going to use Aeroga or whatever on me, okay, we're flying in the air for five seconds. So my instinct would be to stay away from my Medic so he can heal us right away.

It's also annoying when two Commandos will never attack the same target if there's another one. Lightning and Fang, for me, are both better as COM, so if I'm fighitng some high-HP enemies and stagger one of them, I want to dish out the physical damage, but can't; I have to go to Relentless Assault or Diversity or whatever.

I didn't mind the linearity of the first two discs at all, but when I finally landed on Pulse I was like "YEAH let's aimlessly explore the huge world!" like it had indicated. But even then it's secretly linear; sure you can go to Yasstis whatever first and see a couple cutscenes that don't add anything, but the only way to go from the Steppe is to linear cave, to the linear water place, to the linear tower. You don't even get much story along the way to Oerba, pretty much just "oh yeah Vanille still needs a stupid Eidolon here's a half-assed scene of her in "emotional distress"."

Didn't care for the Eidolons either. We get Odin, Alexander, Shiva, and Bahamut - cool. We also get Ifrit whose name isn't Ifrit for no apparent reason, and whatever the hell Vanille's eidolon is. And is it just me, or is Odin not very strong (or is Bahamut just too damn strong? I haven't used anyone else more than once).

Side note: Not finished the game; only going to return to Cacoon next time I play.

Also, Barthandalus fights take way too damn long. The other bosses are fine in length but he just takes FOREVER.

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

But when the leader dies it shouldn't be game over. It's not like the party doesn't know what the hell do to without the leader.

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hey, yeah.. now that u mention it.. i agree on thats pro

.. its problably already mentioned, but i would like to see a better balance between story and `walking`..
it really annoyed me sometimes that u have to walk/fight for ages before you get to see the next part of the story.. so at the time u get there you really need to think back.

there was another thing i wanted to say, but i forgot atm...

I like the OP's idea of character switching in battle, and also the suggestion that there needed to be more character diversity. Maybe instead of having the characters switch roles, I'd have given each of the characters one role, and paradigms were which set of 3 characters you had switched in at the moment. Sounds kind of like 10, now that I write that down, but I liked that aspect of 10.

Something a little more original I would have liked is no separate battle screen. Remember the first couple fights of FF10, how perfectly smooth the transition was between cutscene/world mode and battle mode?

Optional multiplayer wouldn't have hurt the game. Since I could only control one of my characters, why not let a friend who might be over while I'm playing have a chance to take control of one of the other characters in battle? I think some of the older FF remakes on Playstation allowed for a second player to control certain party members if you wanted.

The biggest aid to FF13, IMO, would be New Game Plus. I have all achievements, the game totally completed, and actually liked the story. There's NO way I'm playing through the game again, because it's painfully grindy, and sometimes just the gameplay is painful. I'd love to play through again when I feel like just seeing the story, but really, other than the story there's just grinding and tedious battles, and I don't feel like it when I could just YouTube cutscenes instead.

The biggest change I would have wanted is the combat. It had a lot going for it, but there was so many things wrong at the same time.

The Stagger system was horrible. Good for this game, but not good for an RPG in general. Can you imagine how boring the Cloud vs. Rufus fight would have been on the roof of Shinra HQ if they had just pummeled each other senselessly until hitting the other's Stagger bar? Every shot, every slice, every spell meant something in that fight and the monotonous pummeling of the Stagger system makes the gameplay far more boring.

The combat control and Crystarium are a double edged sword - each borrowed from FFXII and X, respectively, but ended up taking the worst elements from each and having none of what made both those games so great:

1) Paradigms - awesome, a lot of strategy, but when FFXII allowed you to break those paradigms down into their constituent parts, rearrange those abilities/aspects however you wanted, and PROGRAM the AI yourself down to what the character does if an ally scratches her nose... it just really embarasses how streamlined FFXIII is. It was a huge problem not being able to custom tailor the AI, because it did A LOT of non-sensical things in situations when it really should have been doing something else, and it was painfully obvious.

2) Crystarium - like the story presentation itself, way too damn linear. The best FF games pride themselves on having a character development system in the background that really lets you get your hands dirty in messing around with what that character is and what they do. The biggest decision FFXIII presents you with is whether or not to go down a 2-3 node path, which isn't really a decision anyway, there's no reason not to do it because you can max out (or nearly max out) each of a character's default paradigm just by playing the main story and doing the Marks that popped up along the main path. It's mindbaffling because it literally IS the SAME as the Sphere Grid from FFX. But the Sphere Grid let you go down paths that were far off the trail, it let you unlock entire sections that brought a whole new dynamic to that character unless you decided to go down another one, or just finish that character's main trail. AND it let you completely say "F U" to what the game designed those characters to be, and take them down ANOTHER CHARACTER'S path. Oh, and by the way, you have a finite amount of resources in order to do this, so you better make those decisions count. The Sphere Grid was a great battle system; the Crystarium is exactly the same, on a next gen console, with absolutely nothing that made the Sphere Grid ingenious.

Side quests are a big problem as well. Like with FFXII, I think it's a big mistake to make Marks your only ongoing side quest option spanning the story. It's like they looked at MMOs and only borrowed one kind of questing objective: kill the boss. Why don't they mix it up with "kill this many minions and talk to me," "bring me _ items of this kind," "retrieve me this lost item," or everyone's favorite: "talk to my friend, deliver this message." In the big picture, it would make JRPGs more like WRPGs, but if you look at interviews with Yuji Horii on creating Dragon Quest and the JRPG genre in general, that's the point - to bring that complex, rewarding RPG experience in a more simplified, streamlined way. White Knight Chronicles actually does this very well with its multiplayer missions. Also, they should really try to sparse this out over the course of the story, not just when the game opens up and it's nearly over anyway. Hell, if you had done this throughout the game, there really would have been no need for towns because there would have been enough variety to make the pacing awesome anyway.

Overall, the point through all of this is that you want to give the gamer enough different things to do. FFVII was the master at this and it's probably why the game is as fondly remembered as it is: From Sector 1 to the Highway, the entire opening Midgar section is essentially a series of mini-games. When you splice that up with investigation, battles, dialogue, and *gasp* cutscenes, you have the formula for a classic game. Especially when your artists, composers, and writers are already some of the best in the business.

So overall I loved XIII, but I'm moreso hoping for HD versions of FFX and XII.