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.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
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.
1999 was full of jaw dropping stuff. well atleast one. it had the birth of EoFF ofcourse!Originally Posted by Loony BoB
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote