Views on XIII now that time has passed?

[Night Fury]

My biggest gripe with Final Fantasy XIII was that I just had no idea what the heck was happening from the moment it started, and I still don't. What is Cocoon? What is Pulse? WHAT IS GOING ON I DON'T KNOW.

I do love Vanille though

13-2 had fun gameplay but still suffered from getting overly complicated really quickly. Haven't played Lightning Returns.

[Mirage]

Pulse is the world. Cocoon is the artificial planet floating in the sky, where most (all?) humans live.

[Dat Matt]

I really enjoyed it and XIII-2

I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoyed XII, I just enjoyed the gameplay. Battle system was good. music was good. Pretty much everything else was lackluster. I didn't play XII for the plot though I played it for the marks and weapon/armour collection. The story only lasted about 10 hours but I racked up about 120 hours.

FFXIII was pretty much the same.

[Raistlin]

I was actually ok with the battle system, and definitely enjoyed it more than most of the "haters" out there. XII's was better, but I was still entertained by XIII's, and some of the tougher battles were memorable. But I would still consider myself on the hater side, as the rest of FFXIII was pretty terrible. The game was very sloppily put together after all the time spent on graphics, and some aspects seem like complete after-thoughts (weapons upgrades, and hell, even the entire gil system. IIRC, there's literally one grindspot to get any significant amount of gil until the end of chapter 11, when you can get a troutton from a chest). The Crystarium was bland, the linearity reached almost parody levels, and the story after chapter 9 was brutally bad. "Oops, we forgot to figure out how the story unfolds after we got everyone together... well, let's just have the bad guy tell us everything like a bad action movie." I also did my best to block the entire chapter 10 from my memory.

Unlike the haters, I thought it was ok to play through once. The beginning of chapter 11 was actually enjoyable, for instance. But like the haters, I can't imagine voluntarily playing through it again.

[Laddy]

I don't hate it.

It's a beautiful game. The visuals, music, and designs were pretty. The combat and advancement system were well-conceived but failed to offer much nuance or tactical variety. The story played with cool concepts but never realized. The characters felt very identifiable in some ways but were never explored enough to where you cared much about them. It's just a vanilla experience. Not offensive, just underwhelming and failing to deliver on intriguing concepts.

[Markus. D]

I still am not at all a fan of XIII. I love XIII-2, and though LR killed what i loved about the characters i grew fond of in XIII-2. they NAILED the ost, and the battle system plays how i imagined Valkyrie Profile 3: Hrist would have.

[Wolf Kanno]

I'm breaking my rule about posting in forums of games I don't like. Obviously that in a nutshell will tell you where I stand though most forum members know my feeling about this game and wish I would shut up about it.

In a nutshell, it's a bad game, partly because it was poorly executed and partly because it really didn't have to be. When I read the interviews revealing the game had no cohesive vision until the demo was made, the whole experience made sense to me because the game did feel like something that was a whole lot of interesting ideas haphazardly slapped together to make a product released on time. The characters seem interesting but only a few I felt got real good character development and even then I kind of felt the writers chose to go for cheap emotional tugging over writing a gripping character that stays with you. The locations are interesting but feel utterly disconnected from the player since all the interesting stuff is in the background and you the player are trapped on the rails of the ride through Cocoon. The battle system, while not the worst I've played in an RPG, feels like a huge step down from previous entries and again; I felt like there was a sense of disconnect between the player and the action going on the screen since you are offered so little control of how things unfold. I have nothing good to say about the plot beyond the initial premise had potential.

The problem with XIII was that it was an obvious rush job, but sadly one that had a lot of potential to be something greater than it turned out to be.

[Ayen]

I hear a lot of people on here say they hate this game. What exactly do you guys hate about it?

I didn't hate it per se. I just found it boring, which to me is the worst thing a game can do since it's supposed to be a source of entertainment. I liked Lightning and Sazh okay, but since I only played up to the first boss that fondness doesn't go beyond a basic first impression.

Snow irritated me to no end. I'm indifferent to Vanille, Hope, and Serah. I never made it to Fang. I wasn't that impressed by the voice acting, which nowadays I blame on directing since the VA cast is solid. Going from monster, to monster, with a battle system I didn't care for, and switching to other characters I didn't care about didn't help either.

[Freya]

After the fact now, I appreciate it more. I still am not the biggest fan but I don't think it deserves the flack it gets of downright being the worst game ever. It had its highlights too

[Del Murder]

I don't think anyone says it was the worst game ever. The worst FF? You might have an argument there.

[Bolivar]

Also, Bolivar - lol? Do you really think people would go and buy a game with the intention of hating it just to spite other people who might enjoy it? Seriously?

No, I think a lot of people people bought it because they are fans of the series willing to give it a shot, hoping at least they'd get a decent ride and genuinely came away disappointed.

Yet I remember members on this forum who denounced the reveal trailer, ridiculed every nugget of information, and generally wrote off the game throughout its development only to buy it at full price at launch. Why? I think thats just as silly as those who (yes, Del) declare it by far the worst game they've ever played, while somehow putting in the 50-60 hours required to complete the story.

Nowhere in my post did I suggest others are disallowing anyone from enjoying the game, I'm just advocating we take a more nuanced approach than the black & white partisanship that accompanies internet discussions, especially about games. I've always been up front about my XIII criticisms, so I tend to call people out when they categorically reject all all of it as bad, as one post on the front page demonstrates. Thankfully, that mentality seems to be going away on EoFF, so I can see how my post may have seemed a little carried away.

[Rowan]

My biggest issue with FFXIII besides the crappy character development (both personality and gameplay wise) was the cringe-worthy melodramatic scenes. The only scene I purely enjoyed was with snow and serah on the hoverbike thing with the fireworks. But it could have been so much more meaningful if i gave a rats ass about either of those characters. Those kind of moments are for when the viewer (player) has a connection with the characters at some far point in the storym, not right at the start. Trying to force empathy for these characters when just having met them is just really lame melodramatic storytelling and I have absolutley no respect for it. The love story between Squall and Rinoa was beautiful because it stems from someone who doesn't believe he can be loved by anyone, seeing his character change over the course of the story and its events, to them in a warm embrace on the ragnarok and for the first time ever, Squall showing compassion for another person. That was beautiful.

FFXIII has none of that. Shallow characters, melodramatics, linear as anything ive ever played, bad character development system and a bad story.

Having said that, I completed XIII and XIII-2. It makes me pine for the days where square had to put effort into gameplay/characters/story because the graphics wern't as shiny.

[Marionette Cherry]

Few things I hated

Corridors as far as the eye can see
Can only move so many places on the cystarium grid before the game lets you level up anything else
Side missions, you get to fight things, which is what you've been doing the entire game already
Vanille, be quiet, please
Look at this big open field it took you 20 hours to get to, now run around for an hour and get bored because there's nothing to actually do in it.
Auto battle, you don't have to use it, but it's there.
(SPOILER)
^
Don't want to get lost now.
Fill the stagger bar to win

Game was just bad, XIII-2 was alright but I never finished it, got bored, am going to get LR, might be better.
The recent PC release had dual audio which made Vanille likable, that's one good thing out of like 8 bad things I didn't like, there's no saving XIII.

[Loony BoB]

My biggest issue with FFXIII besides the crappy character development (both personality and gameplay wise) was the cringe-worthy melodramatic scenes. The only scene I purely enjoyed was with snow and serah on the hoverbike thing with the fireworks. But it could have been so much more meaningful if i gave a rats ass about either of those characters. Those kind of moments are for when the viewer (player) has a connection with the characters at some far point in the storym, not right at the start. Trying to force empathy for these characters when just having met them is just really lame melodramatic storytelling and I have absolutley no respect for it. The love story between Squall and Rinoa was beautiful because it stems from someone who doesn't believe he can be loved by anyone, seeing his character change over the course of the story and its events, to them in a warm embrace on the ragnarok and for the first time ever, Squall showing compassion for another person. That was beautiful.

FFXIII has none of that. Shallow characters, melodramatics, linear as anything ive ever played, bad character development system and a bad story.

Having said that, I completed XIII and XIII-2. It makes me pine for the days where square had to put effort into gameplay/characters/story because the graphics wern't as shiny.

I actually really liked the characters, and really liked that for once SE decided "You know what? Not everyone should be single 20 year old orphans with no children." Sure, most of them still were roughly fitting that kind of description, but there were family members and spouses involved and I really liked that they had more backstory than "I was an orphan, now I'm a person who fights monsters" which can be used to describe the majority of the FFVIII crew. I don't think VIII showed much more character development than XIII did at all. Sure, you can compare the most developed character in VIII with the least developed character in XIII and make it look like a good argument, but you could do the opposite just as easily.

The graphics in VIII were amazing for their time!

[Mirage]

They were amazing for their platform, you mean. A 50 mhz cpu with 8 MB ram