Views on XIII now that time has passed?

[Madame Adequate]

I never got around to playing XIII-2 and we picked up that and LR a few days ago, but I'm replaying XIII itself before I go into them.

I'm surprised to find I'm liking XIII more than I remembered and more than I expected. It's got the same basic flaws and strengths that I recall, but it's overall a pretty decent game in my eyes, and I'm really having fun replaying it.

What do you guys think of XIII if you have replayed it some time after the game came out? I'm sure I'll never regard it as a classic like VI, VII, or X, but it's not got much to be ashamed of.

[Slothy]

I haven't played it since my initial play through so I have to stand by my original assessment: it's one of, if not the, worst RPG of this past console generation. Possibly of just about any generation.

This game, along with an entertaining episode of Mythbusters, teaches us you can polish a turd. But no matter how shiny you get it it's still a piece of trout.

[Ayen]

I haven't played XIII since my initial playthrough either, and I never played the sequels. If they ever go on sale on Steam and I have the extra cash, I'll go ahead and get the trilogy for review sake. I've seen people who hated the first one enjoy the sequels so it seems like a better gamble than my buying RE 5 and 6 dirt cheap and used from GameStop.

[Colonel Angus]

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

[Loony BoB]

There are a couple of people in these forums who will try to tell you that everything was bad about this game, Angus. xD

I liked the game when I played it the first time and I like it when I watch Danielle play it these days. I'm pretty sure I'd like to play it again, someday.

I can acknowledge it's flaws a lot more easily than I could in the past, particularly surrounding the "world plot" and the antagonist, Barthy (who I have always felt was really poorly done). Hope has marginally grown on me, although he's still my least favourite character. Fang, however, has grown on me notably. I didn't like her when I played the first game, but after Lightning Returns I actually think she's pretty cool now.

Snow grows on me more over time. He's overtaken both Sazh and Vanille as my favourite character in this game, although I still have a lot of time for those two, they're both great characters in my opinion, and probably have the most enjoyable inter-character relationship in the game. Lightning I view exactly the same as I always did - a pretty cool, badass character... but not a personal favourite.

So yeah, I can look back at it now with a lot less "omg new FF game" bias that I had when I first played it (although it should be noted not all FF's have enjoyed that from me - see FFX for an example of me not liking a new FF game).

I think you enjoy it more the second time around because you know what to expect, and can just focus on things you enjoy. It's not as bad a game as a few vocal people make it out to be, and I think it's unfortunate that a lot of people didn't even play the game based on such opinions. I actually felt there was some kind of weird internet peer pressure to dislike the game when it came out, like ragging on FFXIII was the cool thing to do. In the end, going by the reviews and ratings by users, more people liked the game than disliked it.

For XIII-2 and LR, it's massive on gameplay, weak on story - at least, in my opinion that's how it is. But XIII-2 in particular for me was a really, really enjoyable game. LR has it's moments, too, but doesn't remain in my mind as much as others have.

[Slothy]

Pretty much everything aside from a few tracks from the soundtrack. I've stated my opinions in detail many times over the years, but here's the gist of it:

Gameplay: the Crystarium is bulltrout right off the bat. They basically decided to take the worst aspect of the original sphere grid, it's linearity, and crank it up to 11. There's no actual choice for the player there until extremely late in the game.

Which is actually one of the bigger problems with the game as a whole. Everything is held back far longer than it should be. You don't even start getting exposed to leveling up and the different roles until 5+ hours in. Which might not be so bad if the characters had a decent variety of abilities before that but, of course, they don't.

And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

Story: pretty awful overall. First up we have reading the in game dictionary to learn information essential to understanding the story. That's just plain bad and there's no justification for it. Then you've got the fact that the plot doesn't really go anywhere for the first several chapters. There's no real goal or plan other than run and/or fight back. Very little actually happens, and it's only made worse by the characters motivations and development over that time.

Hope wants to kill Snow for getting his mother killed, even though that's not actually what happened and Hope was there to see the whole damn thing. Lightning encourages him to get revenge, then as soon as he's committed to the idea of killing him she's suddenly shifted into "holy trout you want to kill him?" mode and tries to talk him out of it. This shift in her attitude comes out of nowhere of course because the developers just decided she suddenly needed to feel that way. And for 90% of the game Vanille knows pretty much everything that's going on, but hey, why bother telling anyone. This is probably the biggest group of morons assembled in an RPG in a long time. Only Sazh actually makes sense throughout the game.

Graphics: it doesn't do anything interesting on a technical level, but that's not a huge problem. Not every game actually needs to push the limits of modern tech. But what's unforgivable is how awful the enemy and level designs are. The enemies are almost entirely a visual mess. Making out what they're supposed to be is difficult most of the time, and I have to question the skills of the artists that actually made them. They basically suffer from the same problems as Nomura's Batman. There's lines and details added that don't actually add anything to them other than clutter making the designs visually confusing and just plain ugly.

Cocoon isn't a lot better since most of the environments make little actual sense (I still don't know how all of those different parts exist inside a sphere in the sky) and it's all extremely linear and most of the interesting stuff you see are just skyboxes you'll never interact with.

I could probably keep going, but class starts in five minutes.

[fat_moogle]

Since XIII launched I've played and completed it twice. I enjoyed it both times. The game received so much hate, some of which I can understand (no mini games, no back tracking, basically no exploration and quests).

However I thought that the story, characters and battle system were all good and didn't deserve so much flack. The only thing I will say about the story is that it relied too much on the datalog to get information across to the player, rather than explaining it properly throughout the course of the game. Also there were a few other missed opportunities - Jihl Nabaat, for one. She would have made a good boss fight.

XIII-2 improved in some areas, but took a hit in others. The story started getting unnecessarily convoluted ("Where did these clothes come from?" PARADOX!) but the game was a lot more open and there was much more to do. I can't say I was as big on the battle system though, as I didn't like the monster recruiting. I still enjoyed the game overall, though. And the Yeul / Caius stuff was pretty interesting. But that ending..."to be continued"...I was like WHAT?! It should have ended with XIII, let alone having third game. Due to this I didn't actually buy Lightning Returns as I didn't want to support Square Enix anymore in regards to the XIII franchise. But I did watch the ending on youtube which surprised me! Didn't see that coming.

[Pumpkin]

I've played it at least 3 times (maybe 4?) and while I agree it is a weak FF game, I still enjoy it.

I actually really enjoy the paradigm system. I like Fang, Sazh, and Vanille, and Fang and Vanille's relationship is adorable. The story I found to be interesting but I don't think it lived up to its potential. It gets really hard towards the end and it is incredibly linear in more than one way.

But overall I still have fun playing it

[Madame Adequate]

Pretty much everything aside from a few tracks from the soundtrack. I've stated my opinions in detail many times over the years, but here's the gist of it:

I was going to ask why you hate it so much, but you went ahead and posted just that

Gameplay: the Crystarium is bulltrout right off the bat. They basically decided to take the worst aspect of the original sphere grid, it's linearity, and crank it up to 11. There's no actual choice for the player there until extremely late in the game.

I can't disagree that the Crystarium is a pretty mediocre system, but on the other hand it's not like most JRPGs have that much in the way of non-linear character progression. I mean, in most games you gain a level, you get stronger. VIII allowed much more but was fundamentally broken, X and XII did have much less linear progression (X only in the Advanced SG though).

Which is actually one of the bigger problems with the game as a whole. Everything is held back far longer than it should be. You don't even start getting exposed to leveling up and the different roles until 5+ hours in. Which might not be so bad if the characters had a decent variety of abilities before that but, of course, they don't.

I do agree with this part entirely, it takes way too long for most of the systems like leveling (!) and weapon upgrading to be introduced.

And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

I'm not convinced by this at all. First, yes, most fights can be won without too much trouble, but that's true of essentially every JRPG ever made. In the main, only boss fights, bonus fights, and the first couple levels of a D&D based system like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale are ever actually difficult in games. In this game, there are definitely some fights that are tough and need to be approached correctly, and you might power through if you just have an attacker and a medic, but it's far from optimal play. If you actually had to use every paradigm in every fight and constantly rotate between everything, I guarantee people would complain that ordinary fights were way too difficult, and I'd make that complaint myself. Complaining about auto-battle is also silly, it's just the same as hitting attack or casting heal, and nobody ever complains about how all you do with Cloud is either select Attack and then the enemy or select Magic -> Cure and then yourself, but it is literally the exact same thing.

Story: pretty awful overall. First up we have reading the in game dictionary to learn information essential to understanding the story. That's just plain bad and there's no justification for it.

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did. However;

Hope wants to kill Snow for getting his mother killed, even though that's not actually what happened and Hope was there to see the whole damn thing.

You say that's not what actually happened, but that's exactly what happened. Snow asked for Volunteers, gave Nora a gun, and she ended up getting killed in the fighting. Hope's not mad because Snow let go of her wrist, he's mad that Snow put her in danger in the first place.

Graphics: it doesn't do anything interesting on a technical level, but that's not a huge problem. Not every game actually needs to push the limits of modern tech. But what's unforgivable is how awful the enemy and level designs are. The enemies are almost entirely a visual mess. Making out what they're supposed to be is difficult most of the time, and I have to question the skills of the artists that actually made them. They basically suffer from the same problems as Nomura's Batman. There's lines and details added that don't actually add anything to them other than clutter making the designs visually confusing and just plain ugly.

Cocoon isn't a lot better since most of the environments make little actual sense (I still don't know how all of those different parts exist inside a sphere in the sky) and it's all extremely linear and most of the interesting stuff you see are just skyboxes you'll never interact with.

Uh, you've never heard of a Dyson Sphere? That part's easily explained; Fal'cie are magic gods. I do wish you could explore more, but that is FFXIII.txt. And I couldn't disagree more about enemy design and stuff, one thing I've been struck by throughout this playthrough is how brilliant the enemy designs are, how they put so much work into making what would otherwise be palette swaps look different, and how you can really see why a particular enemy would be intimidating.

[Loony BoB]

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did.

Wait, isn't there a full bestiary and aren't there DataLogs for the bad guys? I'm pretty sure there are...

[krissy]

for sure in 2 and lr, dont remember if xiii has it

[Shauna]

This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did.

Wait, isn't there a full bestiary and aren't there DataLogs for the bad guys? I'm pretty sure there are...

There is a bestiary, but I'm not sure if the one for FFXII was more in-depth than just a picture and the affinities/etc of the enemies a la FFXIII.

And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.

I'm not convinced by this at all. First, yes, most fights can be won without too much trouble, but that's true of essentially every JRPG ever made. In the main, only boss fights, bonus fights, and the first couple levels of a D&D based system like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale are ever actually difficult in games. In this game, there are definitely some fights that are tough and need to be approached correctly, and you might power through if you just have an attacker and a medic, but it's far from optimal play. If you actually had to use every paradigm in every fight and constantly rotate between everything, I guarantee people would complain that ordinary fights were way too difficult, and I'd make that complaint myself. Complaining about auto-battle is also silly, it's just the same as hitting attack or casting heal, and nobody ever complains about how all you do with Cloud is either select Attack and then the enemy or select Magic -> Cure and then yourself, but it is literally the exact same thing.

Press X to win is only okay under certain circumstances, of course.

Even then, as I say erry time this conversation comes up, there are times in FFXIII when I actually have to put some thought into what I am actually doing with the paradigms and battle set-up (and still got my ass handed to me despite all that). Which, again, is more than I can say about my recent venture through FFVII in which I could have fallen asleep holding down X during battles and still ended up fine.
I think what probably takes away from the fact that I died a lot in FFXIII was the fact that I respawned just outside the battle, ready to try again. The single time I Game Over'd in FF7 I had to do like half a dungeon again, which makes mistakes more brutal. I am mixed on my feelings here, because having death be a punishment is one thing, but on the other hand... if I had to re-do the section preceding Hecatoncheir the 20 times I failed to beat him, I probably would have not been a happy chappy.

And the other thing people whine about... Yes, you cannot directly control what your party members do, but that is true of many games - Setting AI in other RPGs to "Focus on healing!" or "All out attack" or "Stay defensive!" as their battle style is essentially what you're doing in this battle system. But, this is a cardinal sin in FFXIII for... reasons. And, I am sure I'll get some excellently worded walls of text explaining these reasons.

(I agree on many other points about the bad things about FFXIII, but the battle system is just something I'll never understand. Perhaps it may just not be to some people's tastes, but to say that it is somehow infinitely worse compared to other RPG battle systems? I just can't get behind that line of thinking. xD)


I first played FFXIII... when XIII-2 had come out. So I knew all about the hate it got, and I had all that to muse upon while I also had the experience of watching Matt play it briefly - in which I didn't think it looked terrible. When I played it, I enjoyed it. Yep, it had massive flaws with the story and all that, but I enjoyed myself well enough when I played. I may even go back to it again one day!

[metagloria]

It's aight.

...is that an okay opinion to have?

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I enjoyed XIII the first time around. I had that "NEW FF GAME!" hype, and I let myself be in awe as I played the game. Even despite that hype, there were things that bothered me. For one, it took way too long for the leveling system to come into play. They give you all those battles before they even introduce the leveling up thing, and you don't get any crystarium points or anything before it's introduced. With the linear, skinny hallway design I found myself getting involved in a number of battles, and I just had no incentive and it frustrated me. The music was also not appreciated at first. I missed the style of Nobou, and certain things grated on me (like the music that plays after you finish a battle). It grew on me and I came to like the music. I also wasn't a fan of the monster design. It's true that they avoided palette swaps and such for much of the game, but the designs weren't doing it for me. The overall plot was meh, but I cared enough about the characters to enjoy their interactions and wanting to see their story play out. Barty was a terrible antagonist.

Second time around, the game was unplayable. I knew at that point for sure that the battles at the beginning did nothing for me, and I was just annoyed with it all. There was also nothing new to discover in my second play through. Yes, all FF games are linear in terms of storytelling, but XIII lacked towns and NPCs and a world map. Those all do a lot for world building, and it's just fun on subsequent playthroughs to run into things that you never noticed before. Some characters grew on me (like Snow) while others became weaker in my eyes (like Lightning). In any case, I knew everything that would happen in the game and already wasn't really in love with it, so I just found myself bored.

XIII-2 was pure fun. I was addicted to monster collecting, and I even considered trying to platinum the game for a time. I didn't, but it's probably the closest I've gotten to platinuming a game. Caius made for a much better villain than Barty from the first game. Not only did he have more presence, but it was easy to sympathize with why he was doing the things he did. This game was where the lore and mythology really started to kick into gear, and it's great. Yes, the "To be continued" is dumb. Yes, the plot is a bit convoluted. Yes, it would have been nice to have more focus on characters like Sazh. Yes, relegating some important plot points to DLC was dumb (also Sazh's DLC was awful). Despite all that, it's my favorite of the XIII trilogy, and I find myself wanting to play it again pretty regularly. I also think the overall story in this one is quite excellent. I liked some of the risks they were trying to make with it (outside of the To Be Continued), and I actually liked the ending. I'm crazy and one of the few who did though. Music was fantastic too.

Lightning Returns had a lot of great pieces to make a great game. It fell a bit short for me, though. I liked the adult Hope of XIII-2 (in design and just his personality), so seeing kid Hope again was a step back. But he was just a shell of his character anyways in regards to his emotions and whatnot for story reasons. Lightning talked about being void of emotions all the time like it was some new thing, but she happened to show more emotion throughout this game than in any of the other series I felt. It was nice to see her character fleshed out more, but I still find her a boring character. The world in LR was pretty well done. There were a lot of interesting things like the guitar playing guy that just added life to the world, and it was cool to see NPCs and all these people about. I liked the darker tone to everything as well. I still am not a huge fan of the combat though. Lightning moves so slow in battle that certain mechanics promised (hitting different parts of enemies to find weaknesses for staggering) just didn't work as well as I envisioned. There was a lot of customization though, and that was cool. It was cool seeing all sorts of different people, but then the random nature of people wearing ridiculous accessories often pulled me out of the game and left me shaking my head. The plot was interesting, and it was cool to see how all the characters were coping with what was happening around them. It still felt a bit weak to me though, and I found myself more interested in working out the mythology behind the game than the story itself. I didn't really have an interest in playing it again afterwards.

[Mirage]

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

Lack of exploration: Everything you see around you in the world is either your next destination, or something/somewhere you will never ever be able to go explore. This changes a bit later in the game, but it's too little, too late. To add to this, the game simply throws away all the exciting-looking areas once you're done wicth them. You can never revisit areas or find out new things about them later.

Poor presentation of the plot/story/lore: It is written in a way that makes it appear a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of the interesting stuff about the world is simply put in a dry and boring text-log, instead of being talked about in the game by either the playable characters or NPCs. When you come across new things in the world, you almost never see the characters react to them, even if it is certainly the first time in their lives they have seen the things

No towns: By that, I mean no NPCs to talk to in order to find out new things about the world you live in, and that world's society and history. Nothing that makes you feel like the world around you actually exists outside of being just stage backdrops for the overblown plot to play out in front of. It makes the world feel dead and uninteresting.

Boring character progression system.

Mostly uninteresting characters. I liked Sazh. Lightning was acceptable but I only really liked her when she was mean to the character I hated the most in the game, namely Snow. I found Fang sort of interesting, but she didn't get nearly as much screen time and development as I would have preferred she got.

Was the game playable? Yeah, sure. I've played worse, but I expect more from a game that has had so much money and time spent on it, and from a developer I know is capable of much better things.

I enjoyed the combat, even if the game held my hand for 10 hours before actually letting me experiment with the combat system. I also greatly enjoyed the music. While the technical quality of the graphics weren't all that, some areas were pretty visually impressive.

Now, many other games, Final Fantasy games even, have some of these flaws as well, but usually not as many in a single game as I think FF13 has.