This Game Is Like FFXIII

[Fynn]

Well, see, this is just my point - you and I fundamentally disagree on this matter. Which is exactly why I made a post saying you and I have completely different standards and I won't convince you XIII is super not strategic.

I think XIII is dumb and is the least fun I've had in decades, and requires as much strategy as preparing my morning muesli. I;ve had more fun and challenge in the games that I mentioned because I could combine the grinding and strategizing in any way I want to make it fun, which is something that can NEVER, EVER be said about XIII.

So if you were looking for a way to objectively prove XIII is more strategic or challenging than those, well, you failed, because there is nothing objective about how each of us experiences video games. And I'm honestly tired of having to explain myself to people. It's just my opinion, yours is just yours. And that's that. Nothing else to it

[Loony BoB]

I'm trying to fathom what exactly it is that you enjoy. Do you enjoy level grinding? Do you feel over-leveling until you can simply destroy the opposition is a strategy? Do you feel that picking out the right gambits so you can basically let the game play for you is an enjoyable strategy?

Like, I'm no battle junkie, don't get me wrong, and I love Final Fantasy games despite how blatantly simple they are to beat with damned near zero strategy. But I really enjoyed XIII for actually making me think (outside of hold x until cure, cast haste, repeat) during battles. I enjoy that I couldn't hold x to win these fights, that I had to come up with the best paradigm sets for each fight, things like that. In other single player FF games, I enjoyed being ridiculously overpowered, but I never felt it was strategy at all, just... being overpowered.

[Fynn]

I enjoy freedom. Freedom to enjoy the game at my own pace and figure out how to beat a boss.

FFXIII made me do the opposite of what to think. Once you see what the game wants you to do exactly, which is just repeat all the same paradigms over and over, there really is nothing else to it, especially since the game chooses commands for you way more quickly and accurately than you ever could.

And yes, FFXIII plays itself much more than XIII becausw of the simple fact that you had to set up how it plays. If you set it up so that it actually played itself - well, that's awesome because you created a reliable AI script all on your own!

So the freedom to actually play how you want is what's missing thanks to the lack of grinding. And ots not that I'm some compulsive grinder - it's just that getting progressively stronger is one of the most satisfying elements of an RPG. XIII completely took away that feeling by imposing some incredibly stupid barrier, killing any incentive to actually go out there and battle. I see it as only a means to mask how hollow the system is underneath. Because you'd still struggle in FFXII if you were overleveled and you didn't thing. If they let you overleveled in XIII, everything would fall apart because the game is super easy as it is. So in order to obscure that design flaw, to create the illusion that you can't press X to win, they have us level caps, making sure we don't disobey the game's benevolent creators. We can't have that now, can we. That's the essence of fake difficulty which I stand by and I will defend my right to use the term to the death.

[Madame Adequate]

Okay putting ASIDE that none of you know what the word "strategic" means, I can totally see where FL is coming from with the OP - XIII is far from the first to split your party up for an extended period. IX did it of course, but so did VI and, perhaps the most of any FF, IV. I'm not entirely sure how much it factors into a game as such though, it's going to heavily depend on the characters in question, both in terms of utility and in terms of how much you like them. I love Sazh and Vanille both, so having a whole chapter with just them is fine with me. Lightning decking Snow repeatedly is hilarious and I'm always okay with them bickering. OTOH, I adore Freya and like Steiner a great deal, so taking them away from me for extended periods was annoying as hell. And I can't believe anyone would think a party that didn't include Palom and Porom is viable, let alone required.

But JRPGs have an inherent structure that has been set in stone since they first emerged, and it has never changed much; you go on a long, linear adventure for the first 50 hours, then the game opens up and you get access to bonus dungeons, can pursue sidequests, and collect the best gear, before you head to the final dungeon and finish up. There are certainly exceptions, but more or less the only variable is the number of hours to hit endgame. Some games it's 20, some it's 70+, most are in between.

This is inherently limiting compared to many games in the western canon, like the TES series, where you can break the entire world in half at level 1 and kill a god with a lockpick if you take enough drugs. A JRPG has pretty good knowledge about what level you'll be when you get to, say, Icicle Inn, and what equipment and spells you'll have. The game is tailored to those expectations. A game like Gothic would just let you wander across Icicle Inn and get smurfing murdered by Elena so hard your game uninstalls itself. They just don't operate on the same assumptions. And that's okay! It's okay to have different approaches and give the player different things, I enjoy both subgenres a huge amount personally. But it does mean you kind of have to know what you're getting into, and that there are certain conventions which most games won't break out of. I mean, as much variation as there is between IX and XIII in battle systems, they're both still vastly closer to each other and all other single-player FFs than they are to TES, or to Baldur's Gate, etc..

[Sefie1999AD]

Final Fantasy III: limited phoenix downs, job proficiencies, and super beefed up enemies with multiple turns meant you had to plan every move and grinding took forever, so not only was it difficult to overpower the bosses, but even if you were overleveled, you could easily get wiped in a turn or two

I still don't think FFIII is hard, it's just very grindy. I never noticed limited Phoenix Downs, as the battles are easy enough during the early parts of the game, and later you have Life spells, and I rarely had knocked out characters anyway. The random battles were also very short throughout the game, even the mobs in the final dungeon were over in 1-2 turns. Meanwhile, FFXIII's battle system meant you never had to worry about saving MP, but you could go all-out in every fight (and usually you had to, as even normal battles can kill you quickly in XIII), and near the end of the game, every battle was essentially a 5-minute mini-boss.

While FFIX is my favorite game in the series, and XIII is... well, nowhere in the Top 5, I still have to give credit to those things XIII did right. If you had trouble staying awake during the battles of FFXIII, how in the glorious grounds of grieving Gaia did you stay awake in FFIX, where battles have a 30-second camera pan intro, ATB is extremely slow even on the fastest speed and the animations are just very slow?

Final Fantasy XII: again, buffs and debuffs are incredibly important, and you had to really plan your gambits ahead if you wanted to utilize the party effectively. And you moved around on the map, so you can't tell me all you had to do to win here was press X. And don't get me started on gambits playing for you or just hacing everyone use attack and cure - over here, it's your choice to utilize both and you havre complete freedom to figure out your own strategies against anything. It's really so much more complex and strategic than XIII it's not even funny

My favorite approach, at least in FFXII: IZJS, is to set up gambits properly, then fight all the mobs by enabling fast-forward, and then rotate the left analog stick to win. I admit it's rare for me to use manual commands in FFXIII, at least until the postgame, but it's not like mashing only X for Auto-Battle wins you many battles. Part of the challenge comes from party member and paradigm planning, and the battles are about reacting to the events quickly and switching to another paradigm that fits better to the situation. I also remember fine-tuning the paradigm setups all the time, because different mobs in different areas require different job setup approaches.