Quote Originally Posted by Rowan View Post
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!