I really liked the battle system. Again, you should let people make up their minds about such things themselves.
But then, I suppose if they are making threads like this then they clearly aren't interested in finding out if they will enjoy it, but rather if other people do.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
Other than a small span of development where medics are temporarily retarded, I was pretty happy with the AI. This usually happens around the time that Lightning starts falling behind as a medic. To get through this I recommend using Medic Lightning only as a back up, and always keep a Sentinel handy. You should be able to choose your party at this point, so you may prefer to take control of your medic. What happens is, when everyone is in green, Esuna takes priority over Cure. Once a medic starts with Esuna, they don't stop until all ailments are cured. If someone falls into yellow before Esuna starts, then you're fine, but if Esuna has started, the medic won't interrupt it until that character falls into red, putting you in a dangerous situation. It's especially devastating when your medic doesn't even know Curasa. Should you notice your medic is doing this, you may want to switch to a Paradigm with a Sentinel. Steelguard combined with Fringeward works wonders! Having a Synergist cast Veil also greatly helps to avoid the situation in the first place.
Sometimes Libra or Librascope is necessary for Synergists and Saboteurs to act most efficiently. Otherwise a Synergist won't know to use Barwater instead of Shell, leaving you vulnerable.
The one thing about this game that I can say I don't like is the Flanitor. I smurfing hate Flanitors. They are the most annoying enemies in the series.
:/ you don't have control over the characters in battle? Wtfbbqsauce?
Blah
my brain is hurting now.
But oi! I didn't realise my brother is going to India for 2 weeks, maybe I can be super sneaky and take his PS3 while he's overseas *smooth criminal*
there's no I in team, but there is in pie, as in meat pie, and meat is an anogram of team
You only control your party leader, the battle system is mainly about switching between different AIs for your other characters and hoping they'll do whatever you'd do if you could control them. It's basically the gambit system from FFXII being forced down your throat, except it's more retarded and doesn't allow you any control about the AI at all.
This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...
"doesn't allow you any control about the AI at all" - the words "at all" can be replaced with "except the purpose you want them to have, for example you can make them into healers, buffers, debuffers, attacking with magic, attacking with weapons, and I think that might be close to all options. Either way, I've never really had a problem with them outside of the way they move around the battlefield. They've always served their purpose pretty well.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
The only problem I have with the AI is that they tend to group together and you have no way of moving them apart. Other than that, the way you can switch from a defensive stance to buffs and then an all out attack is pretty fun and makes the fights pretty interesting.
I'm currently playing through it and I'm still on the fence about the combat system. I'll have to agree with Bob. Steal the ps3 while your brother is gone, and try it for yourself. If you have the game and the time, it's the obvious choice.
Nobody is going to agree on this one. Some love the game, some hate it, and a minority are somewhere in between.
I think it's worth it. It's not an FF7 or FF10 level of "worth-it-ness" by a long shot in my opinion but it's still worth it.
It's also a good introduction to FF for people who have typically avoided it because it's too much of an open world and they don't like not knowing where to go. My friend loved it (the first FF he's bothered to play all the way through) and hailed its linear nature as a breakthrough. (Yes it's been pretty linear since X but it took the linearity of 13 to convert him)
Combat for me was actually the best part of the game. Though as stated above, it has it's problems. I felt my biggest issues with combat was that:
a) it didn't turn out to be as expansive as I thought it would be. In the end it's pretty simple and doesn't have as much weight as other entries but this can be a good thing for some people. What I mean by this, is despite letting you input some commands, if you are not playing something like Ravager or Synergist, you won't be doing much. Many of the roles really don't have complex move sets and often times I found myself saving time by hitting auto battle cause mashing X got too tedious for me.
b) I often found myself feeling I could make better versions of all the paradigm roles with XII's combat system. The A.I. is competent but not by much. All of the mage type roles have some annoying A.I. glitches that will become more apparent as you get to later parts of the game. From healing prioritizing over removing more harmful status effects, Synergist have a hierarchy of priority with the buffs they cast which oftn means if you need just Haste/Protect/Bravery on a character, you have to wait until Veil, Shell, and Faith are added as well, wasting time. Even worse is when the enemy can remove buffs, the Synergist will keep wasting time trying to add back buffs to the one who has been dispelled instead of just trying to get the full set up on everyone else, this gets really annoying with a Sentinel set-up.
Sentinels are extremely useful unless your enemy has AoE abilities. Having them there, raises the parties defense but since the A.I. loves sticking close together, often times, the Sentinel ends up drawing more damage to fragile party members cause the player can't directly control the Sentinels movement. This is especially annoying against a specific boss called Barthandelus who uses chain cast spells yet the room is so large that many of these spells only hit a certain area and could actually be avoided if the Sentinel could actually be moved away from the rest of the party.
It's competent but it's hardly efficient. The other downside comes from the equip/weapon system which takes forever to unlock, and is terribly time consuming and requires ample amounts of time for farming for specific materials. You win items off monsters that can be fed to the weapons and accessories to raise their levels and their abilities. Once they max out, some of them (all weapons actually) can be given a special rare item to transform them into a more powerful item but its level is partially reset yet at the same time the new levels will make it stronger as you level it.
The problem is, despite the whole XP bonus system that organic items give to items, the amount of items that give substantial XP are very few and incredibly rare from treasures and monster drops. Even with a 3x bonus, most of the games items will barely give you 100xp and even those items will be few since monsters and treasure rarely give you more than 2 or 7 of them at a time. Luckily there are shops you can purchase the best XP giving items but they are terribly expensive. Monsters don't drop gil, you have to sell the items you feed your weapons to get gil and much like XP they give terrible small amounts of gil, so then you need to farm monsters for one of the rare items that's only purpose is to be sold for gil... So no matter what, expect to be farming a lot in the final chapters.
I still consider this to be less annoying than the main cast and storyline, which had a lot of potential but falls short on so many levels.![]()
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...
The items that give you little XP are there to boost your multiplier. Items that give you a lot of XP generally drop it. You're supposed to build up your multiplier with the small items and then use as many of the big items as you can at one time.
My only problems with the AI are that 1) I use Sazh, Hope, and Vanille, so they're always standing right next to each other, which is great for healing but not so great for avoiding strong spells, and 2) my Synergists insist on casting En-element on characters that never physically attack.
I won't bother quoting your whole post, but I will not only agree with the issues you raised there, but say outright that they weren't just a problem for me but made this the worst battle system I've seen in any FF title. And there have been some stinkers in the past. I have honestly never felt so disconnected from a game before and even when I was actively participating, I felt my options were so limited that I wasn't really making a decision. Even when it came to building the characters outside of battle there was really only one obvious way to go and you always got enough points to max out their main roles each chapter.
Considering this is a series where you can beat half of the games by mashing attack and throwing out the occasional Cure spell, I think that says a lot about just how utterly unengaging XIII was for me.
This game is all about restricting your options early on and giving you more control and freedom much later. If you can get past that, you will enjoy it.
this game worked verry nice for me.. i rlly loved it
:O though for an unknown reason i havent finished it yet. im almost near the end, i can feel that ^^, and i havent played in atleast 2-3 months..
though i gotta admit that sometimes there are such a long walks between 'storyparts'
wich gets anoying at some time!!
But rlly.. BUY IT!! =D