Replaying FFXIII

[Wolf Kanno]

Yes, we both dislike Hope, but enjoy Sahz.

I'll do a major write-up when I finish where I'll discuss more of what I mean about brainless combat, and what I feel would have made the game more fun and interesting. I will say, my biggest beef with the combat and the heart of my issues is with Break mechanics in RPGs. It is a style of gameplay I get no enjoyment from, and I feel it makes games into a formulaic mess when they try to implement them. I didn't like it Xenosaga Episode 2, hated in XIII, and didn't like it in VII Remake. I just hope that XVI doesn't have a form of it, because it will likely sink my enjoyment of the gameplay considerably.

[Loony BoB]

I will say I don't care much about the Break mechanic in RPGs either, when it becomes something that is effectively a required thing. But when it comes to "oh, you just have to hold X to win" which people often say regarding FFXIII, it baffles me because I feel like that sums up the previous games even more than FFXIII.

Looking forward to the write-up, dude! You're definitely doing something I'd never do, replaying them all. I still need to finish FFIII (final dungeon reached) and still need to re-start FFIV because I've basically forgotten everything. But even if I finished them I don't think I'd ever bring myself to replay FFI-III. The first three games just don't grab me like the rest of the series do.

I feel like since Yoshi-P ran FFXIV, he'll have more variation in how fights play out. Hopefully, anyway. Because FFXIV fights can vary a lot.

[Wolf Kanno]

I wouldn't say it's "hold X to win" but I would say it's not exactly a battle system that requires much thinking either. It's very formulaic, and once you know the formula, every battle feels the same. It has the old school FF issue of being more challenging in the first half of the game than the second half.

I am the opposite of you, though, I think I'm looking forward to the 8-bit entries the most for this play through. I'm less looking forward to the XIII sequels, but I am looking forward to FFXII next. I need to start XI again soon as well.

[Wolf Kanno]

Finished. Orphan was even more of a joke than I remember. I think the boss just before Barthandelus was tougher. I didn't even use Poison or Death, just curb stomped him with Fang, Lightning, and Hope. Hell, it was embarrassing to sit through the gushy ten-minute cutscene between his first and second phase, only to wipe his second phase out in a little over a minute afterward. Still think the whole final sequence is more gnarm than charm. Still feel the message of the game is undermined by Etro's involvement. I'll do the write up later when I have a moment to gather my thoughts.

[Loony BoB]

Orphan is one of my most disliked final bosses. It should be my most disliked, but Final Fantasy as a series has an absolutely awful habit of going "psych! you thought the main boss was the one we were showing all along, but it is not! it is this enemy! haha! bet you didn't expect that!" I absolutely hate this choice in every game I play. The reason we all got such satisfaction beating Sephiroth is because he was in our faces the entire time. Same with Kefka. We got to grow a hatred for the character. Orphan? What? Am I supposed to feel angry at this thing? This is dumb. So it's equal with all the other bosses that are like this. It might even still be the worst in the series because at least some of the other "surprise!" ones mock us a little or something. This felt like fighting an object.

[Wolf Kanno]

Well, for anyone thinking a fresh replay of XIII would soften my stance on it, I'm here to douse those flames of hope. XIII is still my least favorite mainline game. I feel the replay simply reinforced most of the issues I had with it. I think the only real change I got from it was softening my stance on a few characters, but otherwise, I don't feel the replay changed much of my first impression with it either.

One of the biggest things I got from replaying the game is how obvious it feels half finished. This is a hill I am going to die on, but XIII was a game that needed another two years at least to get its ideas into a better working order. The difference between it and say FFXII or XV is that those games feel like titles where the devs were trying to cram everything in up until the last minute, and even after the fact in XV's case. XIII feels like a game where the development phase was cut short by a year and then in the middle of just making sure everything worked, they were told they had to get the game out in six months, so they chose to stop finishing anything and just polished whatever they had actually gotten done. Everything from game mechanics, to level design, to the plot, to character arcs feels either half finished or feels like it was just a first draft attempt. Granted, XIII had a terrible development history. SE made the awful mistake of trying to build a game and a new engine for it at the same time, which any game dev will tell you is a terrible mistake.

Story wise, I feel XIII is confused about what it's message is, and what it wanted to do. Like, you can see where the devs were trying to go, but XIII never gives it enough time to develop properly. You can tell the priority was for the personal story arcs of the characters than the main plot, which many fans would argue was the better choice, but so much of the main plot kind of undermines these elements because the personal arcs finish halfway through the game. It feels like the reverse of FFVI's design, where the main plot pretty much ends halfway through because it simply boiled down to "go kill Kefka" and so the second half of the game is dedicated more towards tying up all the characters personal arcs. The problem is that XIII probably should have ended at Chapter 9. Nothing after that chapter has any bearings on the plot. Even all the stuff with Cid, who is easily one of the weakest in the series for me, he's on the same playing field as OG Cid from FFII in terms of how much I feel he matters to the story and how tragic his death was for me. This is one of the issues with the story is how poorly utilized the secondary characters are. Only Dahj and Serah manage to escape this because their presence still remains throughout the game due to dialogue, but even they are both fairly flat characters who only serve to spur the actual main cast forward. Rosch's revelations in Chapter 12 would feel more impactful if we were given more time with him. Instead, it feels like a last minute attempt to give him some characterization and make you feel bad for him, but it falls flat because the audience isn't given enough time with them to grow attach. Guy is an utter douche for three of the four times you encounter him, and his only redeeming traits are inferred from the Datalogs. The issue this really causes is that these tertiary characters are really the ones needed to sell the main narrative for us. Characters like Rosch, the Calvary, Cid, and Jihl could have helped us understand the greater picture here, and the complicated nuance of the cast's terrible Focus. If you want to know the telltale sign of the story's unfinished nature, then I simply point to the Datalogs, which often tell a far more gripping tale than what is presented on screen. The Datalogs often give the player far more insight into what's going on as well.

The other aspect that frustrating is how much the game downplays Etro's involvement. Granted, her existence in the plot sort of undermines the themes of the game about fighting fate, and humanity's unlimited potential; but hindsight does make it very obvious that she's acting behind the scenes, being responsible for the end of the War of Transgression, and being responsible for all the Deus ex Machina happening during the ending. The other issue at hand for me is that I still feel like Barthandelus' plan is too contrived. I get that his plan initially failed with the War of Transgression, but I feel like the story should have made it obvious that it has failed more than that. There should have been a reference to Barty having predecessor l'Cie who opted to kill themselves or go Ceith rather than the plan. I also don't necessarily understand why the Pulse fal'Cie would even give a trout about Barty's plan enough to go along with destroying Cocoon. The fal'Cie as a whole are such a non-entity within the story, that it gets confusing whether the Pulse fal'Cie are in on Barty's plan, or if they are simply an accessory to his manipulation. I feel the main evidence for why I don't feel they care about the plan is due to their treatment to Pulsian humans after the War of Transgression. You would think that after failing, they would have kept them around and kept attempting to destroy Cocoon with them. Instead, they just wiped them all out by either making the planet too harsh to live, or by turning everyone into low rank l'Cie with dumb tasks. And here's the main problem with Barty's plan and the whole plot, there are too many contingencies that could have made this whole thing blow up in their face. If the party had simply chosen death, he and Orphan would have been screwed. And that's part of the reason why the story is kind of dumb, the plan isn't well-thought-out, and while it opens up for some drama, a little logic undermines all of it. The sad thing is that there are tools within the plot that could have made it work, but they are never utilized beyond their face value.

The gameplay is easily the biggest point of contention I have with people who like XIII. The battle system is too simple, and the secondary elements are all poorly thought out and utilized. Which, again, reinforced my belief that the game was rushed out the door too quickly. I touched on this earlier, but, the battle system is boring. Mainly because the break mechanic focus of the game makes it too formulaic. Battles blend in, and it's rare for me to remember any of the bosses of the game because so few of them have any features that make them stand out, because battles all devolve into "buff party, stagger enemy, do lots of damage, repeat until dead" with the occasional heal and debuff thrown in where needed. Hell, I ended up using the same five paradigms for most of the game, barring when a Sentinel wasn't available in the early chapters. The game is also not hard, it's cheap, but not necessarily difficult. Difficult would be like trying to beat Mt. Gulug in FFI, it's a long dungeon, with damage floors, high encounter rates, and enemies that can do AoE attacks. It's a grind that requires proper preparation and resource management. An example of cheap difficulty, the boss of the Ice Cavern from the same game, which is a group of enemies that like to spam Death, which you have no defense against. So your success is completely contingent on RNG. XIII doesn't really have the former, it has plenty of the latter. It's hard to agree the game is hard when the majority of your deaths are the times the party forces the character with the lowest HP as your party leader, in a game where the enemy A.I. tends to either go after the character with the lowest HP or the Party leader exclusively. And then give the player no real method of controlling aggro. The majority of my deaths in this game were largely when Hope or Vanille was forced as my party leader.

The party leader equals death, rule is dumb in this game. I know most players would say it's always a dumb rule, but seeing how they likely stole this idea from SMT, I would point out SMT is smarter about it. First, there is usually a story reason behind it. I mean, you're usually a dude with demons you bribed to help you, they are not going to stick around when their benefactor is eating dirt. Secondly, SMT usually balances this out by giving the leader character perks that usually guarantees they will be the last person standing in most battles. XIII doesn't do either of these. Which just makes the rule frustrating.

Another problem with the battle mechanics is the Battle Score system. Just to get it out of the way, I don't usually like scoring systems like these, mainly because speed ends up being the only element that really matters. Now logically speaking, one would argue that having mastery of the battle mechanics would mean playing efficiently enough to always finish the sequence quickly, which is not wrong; but this also means you can play recklessly as hell and compensate for other deficiencies in your strategy by taking advantage of a bad scoring system tha is mainly contingent on one factor. I shouldn't be getting S ranks in a stealth game by going Rambo in every mission. Likewise, I shouldn't get a five start rating for beating a tough boss that killed two of my party members and I have an inch of my life left. That doesn't seem like "mastery" to me. Even worse is the terrible rewards for bothering. Some argue that doing poorly is better because Shrouds are way more useful as an item in the game, which isn't wrong, but more importantly the rewards for getting a five-star rating are not any better. All it does it net you a bit more TP, which is not a useful resource, and it raises the drop rate of rare items by 5x. Which sounds great, and is extremely important in the post-game, but is mostly useless in the main game proper. I would also point out it only raises the probabaility it doesn't guarantee you'll get a drop. I got rare items from fights I got one star in, so really a little tedious grind is going to happen either way.

Most items worth getting from enemies tend to be 100% drops from bosses. The stuff from regular enemies may seem useful, but due to the awful economic systems in place in this game, are utterly worthless in the long run. The only thing worth getting drops from are items that can be converted into cash, because you need to buy the other stuff in bulk if you want to bother making any use of it. Most items enemies drop don't offer any real value unless you have a lot of them, and even trying to grind for them is inefficient because you'll need up to 30 to 50 of an organic item to get that X multiplyer for XP, and most of the XP items are terrible except for a few you need to purchase for an exhorbitant amout of gil. Even worst, the sell price of most items, outside of the main ones designed for this specific purpose, are awful. This greatly hinders oen of the game's secondary game mechanics which is leveling up equipment. This mechanic is one of the main factors that determines how easy of a time you'll have with XIII. If you bother to keep your gear leveled, you'll often find the game is easy breezy, lemon squeezy. In my first playthrough, half of my player deaths was due to just ignoring this mechanic because it was too tedious to bother with, but in this playthrough I had little problem because I kept up with the upkeep.This may largely explain why the devs made it so difficult to do so for most of the game as well, because you get disprapotionate returns on your investment, which wouldn't happen if the game had been balanced properly. Instead the game actively discourages you from using its mechanics, stifling any enjoyment it should bring.

The Synthesis mechanics are another missed opportunity, I actually enjoy stuff like this, and it's a feature I love in Suikoden. Basically, certain weapon/accessory combinations will confer special bonuses, extending the life of certain items and expanding on customization options. The issue with XIII is that it never explains this to you, the synthesis abilities available whip lash between useless Wall skills that delete a total of 5hp of damage from certain attacks, to overpowered end game shenanigans like total immunity to physical or magical attacks. The main problem is that their is no real middle ground. The wall skills are neat at first but don't scale well with the ludicrous math involved in calculating damage. The end game stuff is neat, but largely stuck in post-game nonsense and involves dealing with item leveling which is difficult to do until endgame. So it's easil a feature that most players probably never noticed unless they were using a guide. It also factors into what you should bother making into an ultimate weaponbecause the ultimate weapons trade better stats and an extra bar segment for the ATB gauge for sacrificing the Synthesis class. The ones that make you immune to certain types of damage? Gone. Likewise some synthese skills can be broken, like Lightnign has one with one of her weaker weapons that gives her an insane speed advantage if you build her right. She has another that gives her weapon a passive drain effect as well. The synthesis system is the only thing that offers some interesting customization, and yet the game does everything in its power to undermine it. Again, proving my point this game was likely shipped out before things were thought through. I imagine it was meant to be a bigger deal in the initial development phase and was largely downplayed when the team lost their chance to do a thorough play test. Hence the lopsided nature of what we do see.

I feel I've talked enough, and I'm not going to regurgitate the major talking points we've all heard to death about linear design, the underwhelming Crystarium system, and some of the more questionable story moments. Overall, I feel XIII is a halfbaked endeavor polished to a fine sheen to create the illusion of depth and quality that it is lacking. It's a flash in the pan type of game that I don't feel measures up very well on subsequent playthroughs or deeper analysis of its mechanics and story. It is still my least favorite FF by a large margin.

[Loony BoB]

From the perspective of someone who may not dislike this game, but definitely has played games he didn't enjoy: I'm glad you've finished it.

[Fynn]

Sequel time