Okay, I'm done with FFXIII...

[WhiteStorm]

I've been playing this, this... thing for 20 hours and I can't believe I spent this much time doing it! The crystalum system is hideous and I seem to be working my a$$ off for nothing. I never understood how the HELL am I supposed to upgrade my weapons and accesories and so far I've been cool with my initial ones. I would like to upgrade everything like I've done for the rest of the series, but the best components are SO rare and expensive and, of course, I have little to no money. How do I get gil in this game aside from the item spheres????????

Am I the only one who's frustrated by this game?

[Jessweeee♪]

The only one? I see you must be very new to the FFXIII forum.

In case you aren't really done with FFXIII here are some tips:

Gil is hard to come by. The best you can do is farm PSICOM soldiers for Credit/Incentive Chips in areas that permit it. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until the end of the game to beat up some Adamantoise. Anything that says "can be sold for a premium" in the item description isn't really good for anything else.
You aren't meant to upgrade your weapons/accessories like crazy. Unless you're going for an achievement, focus on one or two weapons per character (weapons with an ability that's useful, like the Axis Blade). As for Accessories, I would wait until later in the game when you get the good ones. It's pretty pointless upgrading crap +100 HP bangles when you're going to have a +1500 HP bangle later on.

To go through the story, you don't need to upgrade at all, and you can get by easily on what little gil is given. You don't even need to grind (the caps and CP cost hikes are meant to discourage you from doing this). It's more about strategy than just overwhelming the enemy with force like you would with some previous entries.

[Mirage]

Just wait with all weapon upgrades until the endgame. You probably won't need them to beat the main story.

[Roogle]

The strangest thing about this game is that the linearity of it prevents full use of the customization system until the end of the game. You would think there would have been at least some freedom with it throughout the game since you were forced to use different combinations of parties. I wonder why they made it like this? Better yet, I wonder why there are only specific areas in the game where you can really make any money at all outside of the end of the game content.

[Wolf Kanno]

I've been playing this, this... thing for 20 hours and I can't believe I spent this much time doing it! The crystalum system is hideous and I seem to be working my a$$ off for nothing. I never understood how the HELL am I supposed to upgrade my weapons and accesories and so far I've been cool with my initial ones. I would like to upgrade everything like I've done for the rest of the series, but the best components are SO rare and expensive and, of course, I have little to no money. How do I get gil in this game aside from the item spheres????????

Am I the only one who's frustrated by this game?

No, no you are not. The games customization system is a mess. The fastest way to get Gil is to repeat the Mark hunts in Chapter 11, that drop high selling items like Bomb Cores, and simply stick to a small set of characters to use for upgrades. Like Jessweeee suggested, don't bother upgrading accessories until you get to Chapter 11 where you'll start getting some of the better accessories that upgrade into actually useful abilities instead of just being a poor armor substitute.

Afterwards, there is a great spot in Chapter 12 that nets you some Perfumes and after you beat Chapter 11, you'll get access to the last segment of the stat systems for story mode, and the characters token unique ability including Death, which will help you farm Adamantoise for the Rare upgrade materials for Ultimate weapons and Platinum Ingots to purchase real materials. Much like this teams usual efforts, the real customization is left to end game/ post game stuff.

I still can't fathom why it takes them to chapter 3 to introduce the item customization system. It would have been better to introduce it at the start so you actually had something to do for the first five hours before the Crystariam system is introduced.

[Del Murder]

Many of us were frustrated with the aspects you describe. I would suggest you beat it just for completeness sake. At least try to get to chapter 11 as the game really opens up at that point and Gran Pulse is pretty beautiful.

[Bolivar]

Welcome! Welcome to the cornerstone of FF game design and integrity that is FFXIII!!!

Mwahahahaha j/k. Yo, seriously, just play through the game. If you're worrying about game mechanics and weapon upgrading and customization... you're playing the wrong game, b. For real. You're REALLY playing the wrong game. FFXIII is like a modern FPS campaign - it's just a roller coaster ride. The point is to enjoy the roller coaster ride. Your allies make your decisions for you, the map shows you where to go and when to complete puzzles, everything's on a single path so you can't get lost. It's all about the ride, man.

Once you hit the last few chapters like 11, as others have said, then you can worry about some of that stuff, because you probably want to guarantee being able to beat the game with little to no difficulty. Other than that... yeah, don't worry about it haha.

[Wolf Kanno]

Roller Coaster ride my ass, more like a merry-go-round, going nowhere. To be a roller coaster it would have to illicit something that can be considered conscious thought or emotional feeling. XIII is the equivalent of a popcorn flick, leave yer brain at the door.

On a more serious note, have you also tried dismantling things to get some items you can sell for cash? Granted the Ultimate Weapons are the best deal for this bu that's obviously a pipe dream right now.

[Bolivar]

It was emotional! Seeing Light become vulnerable, Hope become cold, Snow become desperate, Sazh giving up, or Vanille being... well, Vanille!

As far as a story about a subservient population being used and deceived, it was no more shallow than Zeal in Chrono Trigger or Glabados in FFT. Plots like that don't really provoke a lot of thought from me, since I basically got a Bachelor of Science in oppression so I've kinda studied the real deal, and ironically, it's science and technology that oppress and deceive in the real world, not religion or politics.

[Timerk]

I like the game; I find that the plot is much more compelling than XII, and like Bolivar said, it's emotional.

[Wolf Kanno]

My god, it's good to see you back on the forums Timerk.

As for yer post Bolivar, I disagree. MAJOR XIII PLOT SPOILERSLightning's vulnerability was poorly paced and happened so suddenly after the fal'Cie revelation that it feels completely forced and imo, was more gnarm inducing than compelling. Lightning tries to pull off what Squall did in VIII, but VIII devoted most of the game to letting the player understand Squall and watch his shell finally crack, Lightning has less than 20 hours since it happens by Chapter 7.

As for Hope, his pacing is also awful with the player spending the first 5 chapters exasperated by how utterly spineless he is, Shinji Ikari did a better job showing off his animosity towards his SOB of a father than Hope did for Snow. So when he finally gets the burr up his ass (which lightning shoved in) to finally do something its completely ruined by Lightning having her sudden 180 personality change and how incredibly hard the game stacks up the coincidences to make Hope hate Snow, the whole handling of the scene is so amateurish that much like Lightning, its more darkly comical than actually emotionally stirring. The fact he also pulls a 180 on Snow and starts thinking of him like a big brother 10 minutes after he tried to resolve his issues also just comes off forced.

Snow's desperation is sad, but offset by his nearly indomitable optimism and irritating self-confidence, he gets pissy for one lousy chapter and a few words from Lightning and Hope and he's back to his A-Game, hardly worth mentioning. His better emotional moment was talking to Hope about his mother, and his guilt, but even that gets resolved 10 minutes later. The real issue with both of these characters stories is that it was just done better in Persona 3; and the more I compare the two, the more I realize that SE pretty much ripped off the whole story cause they actually have several levels of similarities that go beyond just the basic premise.

As for Sahz... well you've got me there, Chapter 8 is easily the high point of XIII and I really can't bad mouth the man cause it was powerful, but one moment really can't redeem the other 90% of awful you have to plow through to get to it. My only issue with Sahz's story is that its undermined by the knowledge that Squenix has never shown the guts to go there in the last ten years, so I pretty much knew Sahz wasn't dead. The sad thing, is that if he did kill himself, it might have actually propelled XIII beyond its major shortcomings among consumers, cause this would have actually provided something completely unpredictable and provocative, that would have been on par with Aerith's death.

Vanille is annoying and her character is basically just a walking plot device to explain why everything went to hell. Most of her biggest character revelations happen in the Datalogs and scene with the Eidolon is utterly stupid cause out of the whole cast, Fang strikes me as the last person who would care. Speaking of which, outside of being overly protective, Fang pretty much has no character development, even her final moments before the ending is filled with so much apathy cause the game never bothered to develop her beyond her initial appearance that the player is more disgusted by the torture in general than by who is being tortured.

The biggest issue with XIII's cast is the pacing, the game desperately tries to resolve everyone's personal issues before chapter 9 and it just makes it all come across forced, poorly scripted, and ultimately peak too soon. Beyond Chapter 8, you might as well be playing with Fighter, Black Mage, Thief, and Black Belt from FFI for all the actually meaningful character development that goes on beyond that point. The character development is dragged out too slowly in the first four chapters, involving some of the most tedious dungeon crawls I've ever had the misfortune to play through, and then its all smashed into yer face as the plot races to some arbitrary deadline in Chapter 9 when the actual plot decides to finally show up. Its hampered by a total mismanagement of the supporting cast, of whom you get so little out of them that you wonder why the game bothered to introduce them in the first place, and Serah herself has her biggest emotional scene in Chapter 2-3 but it goes over the players head cause the game doesn't bother to give the player some real context concerning her until the later Chapters when the game actually tosses you a flashback or two to finally understand who she is and why she is important.

The game throws you into the action so quickly and never lets up that the player is completely apathetic to the desires of the characters. Why should I give a damn about Cocoon, when all the story has provided to me is that its a technological wonderland run by crazy machines and brainwashed sheep who follow them unquestionably? The player has no emotional attachment to Cocoon, why should I care that the party has some moral qualm with their Focus to destroy it, all I've been exposed to is a bunch of assholes who want to kill me. How is Cocoon different from any other stereotypical RPG evil empire that the game pretty much tells you you should be wiping off the face of the map? Xenogears also presented a society that lived in the sky, conkrakened the world, and was filled with xenophobic assholes created by a fascist and manipulative government, but they actually get to play the role of a morality play in Xenogears, cause they are not spared in their plot, and while many innocents are killed the story plays on the ideals of a nation's collective sins, the errors of following a nationalist view, and the errors of a global power being self-absorbed about its own needs and not looking at the plights of people outside of the social group. Cocoon doesn't get this, its sin of innocence and ignorance is wave handed by the writers as justification that Cocoon is worth saving, they never stop to think that perhaps the plot could have gone deeper and become more meaningful like Xenogears did, made more excruciating cause the game teases this prospect in Chapter 7 when the party talks with Hope's dad.

The game just never had the guts to go beyond its initial premise, what could have been a great story about fate, group vs. the individual, nationalism, fate, loss, coming to terms with mortality, and whether life has purpose; basically got turned into a plot about a bunch of people who got screwed over by some machine gods, dick around for a few hours to find themselves, find out they are part of a conspiracy, dick around some more and then finally just give into what the bad guys want and hope for the best, and awarded through some of the worst Deus Ex Machina's I've seen in a modern game, let alone the FF franchise. I thought FFV had a pretty bad Deus Ex Machina ending but XIII's was so much worse.

[Crop]

It was emotional! Seeing Light become vulnerable, Hope become cold, Snow become desperate, Sazh giving up, or Vanille being... well, Vanille!

I think this was one of my main problems with the game. Every main character had a simple A to B problem that was the opposite of what the character acted like at the beginning. Even the plot was linear.

[Skyblade]

Wolf:

(SPOILER)How in the world did I miss the Snow/Shinjiro Aragaki + Hope/Ken Amada link? You're right, they did copy that entire mini-plot almost exactly. And what they changed, P3 did better. Man, I feel like an idiot for not realizing that. Especially with how much I've been playing P3P lately.

And, yeah, it's ridiculous that they try to milk any suspense out of Sazh's "suicide", when it was painfully obvious that they weren't going to go there. It's like the whole "OMG, Squall died" thing at the end of FFVIII Disc 1. No suspense whatsoever.

[Timerk]

My god, it's good to see you back on the forums Timerk.

As for yer post Bolivar, I disagree. MAJOR XIII PLOT SPOILERSLightning's vulnerability was poorly paced and happened so suddenly after the fal'Cie revelation that it feels completely forced and imo, was more gnarm inducing than compelling. Lightning tries to pull off what Squall did in VIII, but VIII devoted most of the game to letting the player understand Squall and watch his shell finally crack, Lightning has less than 20 hours since it happens by Chapter 7.

As for Hope, his pacing is also awful with the player spending the first 5 chapters exasperated by how utterly spineless he is, Shinji Ikari did a better job showing off his animosity towards his SOB of a father than Hope did for Snow. So when he finally gets the burr up his ass (which lightning shoved in) to finally do something its completely ruined by Lightning having her sudden 180 personality change and how incredibly hard the game stacks up the coincidences to make Hope hate Snow, the whole handling of the scene is so amateurish that much like Lightning, its more darkly comical than actually emotionally stirring. The fact he also pulls a 180 on Snow and starts thinking of him like a big brother 10 minutes after he tried to resolve his issues also just comes off forced.

Snow's desperation is sad, but offset by his nearly indomitable optimism and irritating self-confidence, he gets pissy for one lousy chapter and a few words from Lightning and Hope and he's back to his A-Game, hardly worth mentioning. His better emotional moment was talking to Hope about his mother, and his guilt, but even that gets resolved 10 minutes later. The real issue with both of these characters stories is that it was just done better in Persona 3; and the more I compare the two, the more I realize that SE pretty much ripped off the whole story cause they actually have several levels of similarities that go beyond just the basic premise.

As for Sahz... well you've got me there, Chapter 8 is easily the high point of XIII and I really can't bad mouth the man cause it was powerful, but one moment really can't redeem the other 90% of awful you have to plow through to get to it. My only issue with Sahz's story is that its undermined by the knowledge that Squenix has never shown the guts to go there in the last ten years, so I pretty much knew Sahz wasn't dead. The sad thing, is that if he did kill himself, it might have actually propelled XIII beyond its major shortcomings among consumers, cause this would have actually provided something completely unpredictable and provocative, that would have been on par with Aerith's death.

Vanille is annoying and her character is basically just a walking plot device to explain why everything went to hell. Most of her biggest character revelations happen in the Datalogs and scene with the Eidolon is utterly stupid cause out of the whole cast, Fang strikes me as the last person who would care. Speaking of which, outside of being overly protective, Fang pretty much has no character development, even her final moments before the ending is filled with so much apathy cause the game never bothered to develop her beyond her initial appearance that the player is more disgusted by the torture in general than by who is being tortured.

The biggest issue with XIII's cast is the pacing, the game desperately tries to resolve everyone's personal issues before chapter 9 and it just makes it all come across forced, poorly scripted, and ultimately peak too soon. Beyond Chapter 8, you might as well be playing with Fighter, Black Mage, Thief, and Black Belt from FFI for all the actually meaningful character development that goes on beyond that point. The character development is dragged out too slowly in the first four chapters, involving some of the most tedious dungeon crawls I've ever had the misfortune to play through, and then its all smashed into yer face as the plot races to some arbitrary deadline in Chapter 9 when the actual plot decides to finally show up. Its hampered by a total mismanagement of the supporting cast, of whom you get so little out of them that you wonder why the game bothered to introduce them in the first place, and Serah herself has her biggest emotional scene in Chapter 2-3 but it goes over the players head cause the game doesn't bother to give the player some real context concerning her until the later Chapters when the game actually tosses you a flashback or two to finally understand who she is and why she is important.

The game throws you into the action so quickly and never lets up that the player is completely apathetic to the desires of the characters. Why should I give a damn about Cocoon, when all the story has provided to me is that its a technological wonderland run by crazy machines and brainwashed sheep who follow them unquestionably? The player has no emotional attachment to Cocoon, why should I care that the party has some moral qualm with their Focus to destroy it, all I've been exposed to is a bunch of assholes who want to kill me. How is Cocoon different from any other stereotypical RPG evil empire that the game pretty much tells you you should be wiping off the face of the map? Xenogears also presented a society that lived in the sky, conkrakened the world, and was filled with xenophobic assholes created by a fascist and manipulative government, but they actually get to play the role of a morality play in Xenogears, cause they are not spared in their plot, and while many innocents are killed the story plays on the ideals of a nation's collective sins, the errors of following a nationalist view, and the errors of a global power being self-absorbed about its own needs and not looking at the plights of people outside of the social group. Cocoon doesn't get this, its sin of innocence and ignorance is wave handed by the writers as justification that Cocoon is worth saving, they never stop to think that perhaps the plot could have gone deeper and become more meaningful like Xenogears did, made more excruciating cause the game teases this prospect in Chapter 7 when the party talks with Hope's dad.

The game just never had the guts to go beyond its initial premise, what could have been a great story about fate, group vs. the individual, nationalism, fate, loss, coming to terms with mortality, and whether life has purpose; basically got turned into a plot about a bunch of people who got screwed over by some machine gods, dick around for a few hours to find themselves, find out they are part of a conspiracy, dick around some more and then finally just give into what the bad guys want and hope for the best, and awarded through some of the worst Deus Ex Machina's I've seen in a modern game, let alone the FF franchise. I thought FFV had a pretty bad Deus Ex Machina ending but XIII's was so much worse.

It is so cute to read this after re-visiting our back and forth over Final Fantasy XII a couple of years ago, have you come around to my side at last !

I agree with you about Sazh; Squenix knocked on the door of doing something really revolutionary and groundbreaking, but didn't have the stones to see it all the way through.

[Hollycat]

all I have to say about ffxiii is

(_!_)


BITE
MY
BUNS
DEVELOPERS

FF 13
IS
THE
BIGGEST
PIECE
OF
MR. HANKEY
SINCE
THE
SOUTHPARK
CHRISTMAS
SPECIAL
PLEASE
COME
UP
WITH
A
GOOD
BATTLE
SYSTEM!

I can literally repeatedly press the x button and look away and watch a tv show or do homework or both and still win every time