XIII: The Flaw thread

[finaloblivion]

i agree with you, boko. bashing enemy HP levels in XIII doesn't really hold too much water because A) your characters reach MUCH higher degrees of stats in XIII and B) thus your damage output is much greater on average, even when the enemy isn't staggered. even enemies in chapter 13 that don't rank in the "SUPER HARD POST GAME" range of monsters only take me about 1.5 to 3.5 minutes to beat, an 3.5 is pushing it. and that's also without a preemptive strike. using a COM to maintain a chain gauge then switching to tri-disaster or even mystic tower then bumps up chain gauges extremely fast, then after a stagger thats really all she wrote. XII relies on completely different systems and stats than XIII, as the battle systems are extremely different. in my opinion, comparing the two in any other respect other than that XIII follows XII in the numbered entries is just kinda weird. like i said, totally different systems, totally different games.

[Cloudane]

Regarding XII it was "technically good" - very open and explorable, clever gambit system etc. But the story and characters sucked and it wasn't all that exciting to look at. In XIII it's the other way around. I think the story and characters are more important, but I'd settle for something in the middle!

Because hitting x on hundreds of components individually to see what they're worth in weapon exp is just sooooo much fun. Almost as much fun as buying 99 HEALs in FF1.

Is that irony?

It's sarcasm. Irony would be if I'd posted it 99 times or something

[Slothy]

I don't see how you could defend gambits and bash auto-battle. Double standard much?

There's a big difference between an AI system that you set up and maintain yourself allowing you to control the overall strategy of your party, yet still requires regular input in battles because of how varied and challenging a lot of enemies can be, and a system that gives you almost no say in what your characters do, encourages not making choices with the one character you do control, and let's you make a choice between a handful of overall party strategies. One has a surprising amount of depth even when you let the game make most of the decisions for you, the other isn't much better than a game of rock paper scissors in that you have about three or four real choices of strategy in any battle and the best choice is always obvious and usually the same one you've made in every other battle.

And the most damning part of the whole thing is that when it comes right down to it, if you don't like using the AI in XII, you could do the smart thing and choose not to so you feel more involved (for example, I always kept one character totally gambit free, and regularly gave commands to the other two in harder battles). If you don't like how mind numbingly boring and automated the battle system is in XIII though you're screwed. There is no option to turn it off and control your characters. All you get is a strategically shallow battle system that does everything it can to have the player make as few decisions as possible.

[ShinGundam]

a system that gives you almost no say in what your characters do, encourages not making choices with the one character you do control

I don't understand what you mean by this sentence ? it seems to me you are describing the gambit system, comparing between FF12 and FF13 is meaningless because FF13 don't use MP points which encourage me to use different Classes,Paradigms and abilities while FF12 , it takes too long to unlock the most basic commands. It takes at least two hours just to unlock the ability to automatically attack enemies that attack you and there are some commands that you can miss entirely should you fail to find a hidden treasure chest or slay the right monster. FF12 only encourage players to grind from very beginning rather than progressing. Maybe i am wrong or over exaggerating .

One has a surprising amount of depth even when you let the game make most of the decisions for you, the other isn't much better than a game of rock paper scissors in that you have about three or four real choices of strategy in any battle and the best choice is always obvious and usually the same one you've made in every other battle.

No one is denying that FF12 offers more freedom and choices on micromanagement level but your average player spends his time to find right way to control partners commands, also you have unlimited time to slowly refine a macro system while the other one forces you have to make decisions during battles while time is running. I think FF13 sacrificed freedom and micromanagement for sake balance for all classes, IMO, FF13 is interesting because of the value of each classes combination, for example what is the value of com/com/rav vs a rav/rav/com ?

All you get is a strategically shallow battle system that does everything it can to have the player make as few decisions as possible.

All you get from FF12 a poor pacing battles without gambits, if you turn off the gambit system, the battles become REALLY boring. The gambit system is pretty much the only thing that makes FF12's battle system unique or interesting - everything else is just the most basic, vanilla turn-based combat imaginable. If FF13 is shallow then what is FF12 ?

[Flying Arrow]

^ The gambit system - a complete overhaul of what FF battles had been up to that point - is the only thing that separates XII's from other battle systems?

If XIII is shallow (and it pretty much is), then XII is much deeper. In XII, the player has complete control of the companion AI via the gambit menu; XIII uses auto-battle in every situation, and often not particularly efficiently. The mix-n-matching of roles (RAVRAVCOM or SYNSABRAV, etc) is fun during the action, but the control of two-thirds of every battle goes to the computer's estimate of what the best choice is, not a conscious decision on the player's part to think "I want my SYN to cast Protect at the beginning of battle" - which, I want to clarify, is different than thinking "I want my SYN to cast Protect at the beginning of battle along with all of the other unnecessary buffs it automatically tosses out."

And if you turn off the gambit system, you're turning off a huge chunk of XII's gameplay, so I don't think it's fair to compare XII and XIII while dismissing one of the main things that makes XII so unique from the rest of the series. Turning off a gambit like Vivi22 is one thing, but turning it off because you dislike it is different completely, and is more a reason why one would dislike a game rather than a criticism of how it stacks up to XIII's systems.

[Raistlin]

I will say that XII > XIII. Perhaps only marginally overall, but XII was at least a step in the right direction plot-wise, whereas XIII was a disappointing reversion to lazy story telling and immature, overly-simplified plots and villains.

XII did have its own problems though (the biggest one simply being pacing), and I can't picture myself playing either game again, at least not anytime soon.

[Madame Adequate]

I found XIII to be a successful attempt at what XII had tried, and failed, to do. Whereas XII just had a programming minigame at its heart, in XIII you set the overall tactical direction of your party, which I found a hell of a lot more fast-paced, more rewarding, and downright more fun than I ever found XII to be.

[ShinGundam]

@Flying Arrow
Because the order of cast buffs depends on how much information you have on the enemies your fighting in the Bestiary (which you gain both by simply? fighting them and discovering it manually, and by forcing it out with Libra). The thing is, they go for buffs directly related to the enemy before the more generic buffs (Haste, Protect, etc.). I didn't have a problem with Prioritize the magics because the Bestiary information is accessible at any time in the battle or after battle via datalog and all magic are costless, Now you aren't responding to specific situations, but more that you are switching your tactics depending on the changing tide of battle.

Turning off a gambit like Vivi22 is one thing, but turning it off because you dislike it is different completely, and is more a reason why one would dislike a game rather than a criticism of how it stacks up to XIII's systems.

I don't dislike it, in fact I love it but I think the battles without it are boring, In FF13 i can't survive without Paradigms which is totally different thing.

Ultimately, I refuse to compare both system because they are totally
different (:

[Shin Gouken]

I found XIII to be a successful attempt at what XII had tried, and failed, to do. Whereas XII just had a programming minigame at its heart, in XIII you set the overall tactical direction of your party, which I found a hell of a lot more fast-paced, more rewarding, and downright more fun than I ever found XII to be.

XII didn't fail at what it tried to achieve, it gave you complete contol over the AI of your team so you didn't have to babysit characters you were too lazy to control. XIII gives you a number of set strategies to choose from and forces you to constantly shift them. But shifting paradigms is all you do.

As for the AI in FFXIII, it's completley flawed, as AI is in most games.

Here are some examples.

Medics will heal you out of critical but no further until debuffs have been removed. Fail. Some debuffs would be better suited removing as priority. But more than this, if you are expecting an enemy to ready his bigboy attack, you wont survive while medics simply remove negative status ailments.

Synergists will continue to cast the same buff on a character who is having that buff removed every turn. A tank will have protect recast on them every turn as the enemy auto dispels it with every attack, therefore making a synergist useless.

Commandos will attack random targets. If i fight a Long Gui and stagger one of the legs and bring out three commandos, two of them only have a 1 in 3 chance of attacking the staggered leg.

The list goes on. The fact is, AI is not perfect and having a system which is dependant on it fails.

Before the FFXII counter arguements start, i would like to remind people that FFXII is not reliant on Gambits. Even if it was, you can change Gambits at a moments notice. You can also overwrite gambits with manual commands on ALL THREE characters.

FFXII gives you the freedom to simulate a paradigm shift system. Character set ups can be changed whenever you want. Characters can be equipped as Sentinals, Medics, Synergists, Sabatours, commandos or ravagers and switched at a moments notice. The gambits can be tweaked to prioritize whichever buffs you want. Whichever way you look at it, XII is a superior system to XIII.

[Slothy]

a system that gives you almost no say in what your characters do, encourages not making choices with the one character you do control

I don't understand what you mean by this sentence ?

Hmm, it should have read more like this: "a system that gives you almost no say in what your party members do, and encourages not even making choices with the one character you do control." Basically, FFXIII gives you almost no say in what your two AI teammates do beyond controlling what role they're in, which is little more than telling them to spam magic, spam healing, spam physical attacks, etc. On top of that, the fact that auto-battle is not only pretty much required, but will make the same decisions you would 99% of the time means you aren't even selecting abilities for the one character you do control.

The only decisions a player makes in 99.9% of battles is what paradigm to use, and you can fly through the game using the same three or four tops. Most battles are literally the player sitting there mashing X which is about as far from interesting as I could imagine any game getting.

while FF12 , it takes too long to unlock the most basic commands. It takes at least two hours just to unlock the ability to automatically attack enemies that attack you and there are some commands that you can miss entirely should you fail to find a hidden treasure chest or slay the right monster. FF12 only encourage players to grind from very beginning rather than progressing. Maybe i am wrong or over exaggerating .

I don't recall missing any major gambits or abilities while playing through FFXII and I didn't use a guide. And you can't really argue that it takes too long for FFXII to give you gambits because it takes all of two hours, when up until that point you really had no need for them, and I was almost 5 hours in before FFXIII even gave my characters distinct roles. The first five hours literally had no strategy beyond attack and use the occasional potion. And I was more than 14 hours in before my characters had even learned enough abilities to warrant varying my strategies and paradigms much at all. FFXIII is possibly one of the slowest games I've seen when it comes to letting you actually play with the battle system a bit; pretty ironic given that the battle system is the entire game.

while the other one forces you have to make decisions during battles while time is running. I think FF13 sacrificed freedom and micromanagement for sake balance for all classes, IMO, FF13 is interesting because of the value of each classes combination, for example what is the value of com/com/rav vs a rav/rav/com ?

I'm pretty sure I've been clear on my thoughts on this, but FFXIII doesn't really have the player making fast paced decisions (if you want fast paced decisions, try giving commands in some of XII's harder battles with the system set to active rather than wait). In between mashing auto-battle you'll alternate between three or four decisions tops. And despite all of the flashy camera angles and characters attacking at the same time, you have plenty of time to react to things because most of your time is literally spent sitting there doing nothing.

As for valuing the classes, comparing a combination such as com/com/rav and rav/rav/com has little value. The latter will stagger enemies more quickly while the former will stagger enemies more slowly, and actually splits your efforts between multiple enemies since the other com won't attack only the party leaders target.

All you get from FF12 a poor pacing battles without gambits, if you turn off the gambit system, the battles become REALLY boring. The gambit system is pretty much the only thing that makes FF12's battle system unique or interesting - everything else is just the most basic, vanilla turn-based combat imaginable. If FF13 is shallow then what is FF12 ?

I wasn't advocating turning off Gambits in XII. But sadly, so many people wrongly state that the game plays itself. It will do that, but only if you set it up to, and I get sick of people who blame the game for it. If you don't like all three characters having Gambits then the simple solution is to turn them off on at least one character, but many neglect this. Even more puzzling is that these same people will argue that FFXIII is more fun and involving when it has the player making fewer decisions both in and out of battle.

As for Gambits being the only thing that makes XII interesting, I have to disagree entirely. What makes it interesting is the sheer number of viable ability, and equipment combination's that can completely change the way your party plays, as well as challenging battles that require the use of strategy and good tactics to be successful. XII has a tremendous amount of depth in it's various gameplay systems which let the player explore and have fun within the limits of the system for dozens of hours. XIII has you choose between six roles, but if you don't include a little of everything in your paradigms you'll likely find yourself screwed which pretty heavily limits your viable options for most of the game.

EDIT: I have to agree with everything Shin Gouken said about XIII's Ai as well. I knew I was in for a fun ride fairly early on when I had a synergist casting a thunder resistance buff against an enemy with no thunder attacks despite my having scanned it and fought it numerous times already. They actually refused to cast more useful buffs like protect until they finished that.

[Goldenboko]

I found XIII to be a successful attempt at what XII had tried, and failed, to do. Whereas XII just had a programming minigame at its heart, in XIII you set the overall tactical direction of your party, which I found a hell of a lot more fast-paced, more rewarding, and downright more fun than I ever found XII to be.

XII didn't fail at what it tried to achieve, it gave you complete contol over the AI of your team so you didn't have to babysit characters you were too lazy to control. XIII gives you a number of set strategies to choose from and forces you to constantly shift them. But shifting paradigms is all you do.

As for the AI in FFXIII, it's completley flawed, as AI is in most games.

Here are some examples.

Medics will heal you out of critical but no further until debuffs have been removed. Fail. Some debuffs would be better suited removing as priority. But more than this, if you are expecting an enemy to ready his bigboy attack, you wont survive while medics simply remove negative status ailments.

Synergists will continue to cast the same buff on a character who is having that buff removed every turn. A tank will have protect recast on them every turn as the enemy auto dispels it with every attack, therefore making a synergist useless.

Commandos will attack random targets. If i fight a Long Gui and stagger one of the legs and bring out three commandos, two of them only have a 1 in 3 chance of attacking the staggered leg.

The list goes on. The fact is, AI is not perfect and having a system which is dependant on it fails.

Before the FFXII counter arguements start, i would like to remind people that FFXII is not reliant on Gambits. Even if it was, you can change Gambits at a moments notice. You can also overwrite gambits with manual commands on ALL THREE characters.

FFXII gives you the freedom to simulate a paradigm shift system. Character set ups can be changed whenever you want. Characters can be equipped as Sentinals, Medics, Synergists, Sabatours, commandos or ravagers and switched at a moments notice. The gambits can be tweaked to prioritize whichever buffs you want. Whichever way you look at it, XII is a superior system to XIII.

I can go over all sorts of things wrong with this. "The Commando attacking randomly fails because it's out of my control", this is in your control, the control of knowing when to use what Paradigm. You're looking at the entire thing on a microscopic level, which the game isn't meant for, it's meant for a macroscopic, don't use Cerberus when there are multiple enemies, instead, Cerberus will shine when you get that adamantoise on the GROUND (lol reference), instead, focus on group based paradigms until then, like Relentless Assault, Smart Bomb, and Delta Attack.

As for valuing the classes, comparing a combination such as com/com/rav and rav/rav/com has little value. The latter will stagger enemies more quickly while the former will stagger enemies more slowly, and actually splits your efforts between multiple enemies since the other com won't attack only the party leaders target.

...it doesn't seem like you don't know the battle system in and out. Each role strengths different parts of your team. Having more COM's out increases the damage EVERY CHARACTER does based off multiplier that depends on your role level and number of COM's. Having Sentinels decreases damage taken by a percentage depending on the number of Sentinels and their role levels. RAV's will increase the rate you bring up the stagger bar, not just because their attacks bring it up more, but because each Ravager increases the ENTIRE PARTY'S overall effectiveness at bringing up the stagger bar.

I don't understand how anyone can say there is no strategy involved, situations in the game are very... situational. Hordes of small enemies make me break out COM's because the damage output needs to be beefed up, but spread out, more difficult hordes, require Multi-Sentinel and Medic backups, to be able to save suddenly near-dead party members. However, 2 medium strength enemies will make me want to have COM/RAV/RAV setups with buffs and debuffs to be able to focus on individual enemies. High HP and damage output monsters like the turtle families (lulz), benefit from, ironically enough, party's similar to the small hordes, because the COM's will be grouping up now, however, 999% stagger is necessary to make best use of the full COM'd party, switching to leading Light or Sazh is often done before battle.

[seiferalmasy2]

I don't know why people are arguing which system is better in XII and XIII, they were both awful. XIII being the very worst. Short of taking the controller away from you I don't know how they plan to go one better.

In XII you shifted a few programming terms about a few slots, and I spent most of the game with 2 gambits, attack and cure. With XIII they have taken as much away as possible.

No need to argue which is better than the other when you are comparing a rotton fart with a festering turd.

[Goldenboko]

I don't know why people are arguing which system is better in XII and XIII, they were both awful. XIII being the very worst. Short of taking the controller away from you I don't know how they plan to go one better.

No.

[Imperfectionist]

I'm not very happy about the fact that when you buy stuff it's stupidly expensive, but then to sell it back you get peanuts! It wouldn't even be that bad if Gil was easier to get in the game but it really isn't.

I've got loads of Scarletite and I thought, 'oh nice, this usually costs 100,000 Gil it must sell for loads' but it only sells for 7000 Gil!

What an outrage.

[NeoCracker]

The biggest issue in combat is it's not a wide appealing thing they went with. In all reality, the battle isn't even fought in the battle screen. The battle is fought almost entirely before hand in setting up the paradigms, while all the actually combat is just picking between them.

I enjoyed doing this honestly, but the appeal, as i said, is kind of short range.