Replaying FFXIII

[Wolf Kanno]

Why are we calling him Sahz?

Because that is how my brain wants to spell it. Sort of like my tendency to call it Midgard and not Midgar.

[Loony BoB]

Every time I spell his name I have to think about how to spell it, and my general go-to is to just scroll up to see the last mention of him, and I just trusted WK on this one xD

The issue I have is that normal battles just aren't engaging. Most of the time I'm just paying attention to the Stagger counter while occasionally glancing at the party health to see if I need to switch to a medic. So much is going on the screen, half the time it's hard to follow. XV has a similar issue where combat almost felt like you were watching one of those old cartoon fights where everything disappears into a giant dust cloud as fists and lightning zap out of it. So nothing is really happening during combat, but you have to pay attention in case the enemies decide to gang up on the party leader. So combat gets a bit more tedious and boring for me because it's not engaging enough to hold my interest, but I'm forced to pay attention anyway. Random Encounters feel like school work to me, and it is draining.

Were there random encounters in FFXIII?

Can you give examples in the Final Fantasy series where you don't have to spend all your time paying attention to bars? I know in FFXIV you have to pay attention to the enemy for tells on what it's going to do next, but FFVII Scorpion "attack while the tail is up" meme aside, I honestly struggle to remember much about that kind of thing. Especially outside of boss battles.

[Psychotic]

Why are we calling him Sahz?

Because that is how my brain wants to spell it. Sort of like my tendency to call it Midgard and not Midgar.

Fair enough! I thought I had missed a Bartz/Butz/Batz Lenna/Reina Terra/Tina type situation.

[Wolf Kanno]

Every time I spell his name I have to think about how to spell it, and my general go-to is to just scroll up to see the last mention of him, and I just trusted WK on this one xD

The issue I have is that normal battles just aren't engaging. Most of the time I'm just paying attention to the Stagger counter while occasionally glancing at the party health to see if I need to switch to a medic. So much is going on the screen, half the time it's hard to follow. XV has a similar issue where combat almost felt like you were watching one of those old cartoon fights where everything disappears into a giant dust cloud as fists and lightning zap out of it. So nothing is really happening during combat, but you have to pay attention in case the enemies decide to gang up on the party leader. So combat gets a bit more tedious and boring for me because it's not engaging enough to hold my interest, but I'm forced to pay attention anyway. Random Encounters feel like school work to me, and it is draining.

Were there random encounters in FFXIII?

Can you give examples in the Final Fantasy series where you don't have to spend all your time paying attention to bars? I know in FFXIV you have to pay attention to the enemy for tells on what it's going to do next, but FFVII Scorpion "attack while the tail is up" meme aside, I honestly struggle to remember much about that kind of thing. Especially outside of boss battles.

The first four entries if I'm playing OG. Oh, and I guess FFX and XV...

Honestly, most of them I don't spend too much time looking at the bars all the time since I'm likely more in a menu screen. But the action is usually slow enough to where I can enjoy the fighting animations at least. In XIII, it really depends on who is in the party and if I have a full party or not. With two characters it's easy, but I noticed that Vanille and Sazh have slower animations, so I can actually view it. Lightning and Hope, on the other hand, must be drinking Monster and Red Bull between battles, because they zip around like they're on drugs.

Even then, I would say XV is a bit worse since the focus is mostly on Noct, and if you're fighting an enemy that's pretty big, the camera has a fit.

Speaking of, I hate XIII's camera. It is not smooth at all, and you can tell the devs were originally going for more of a fixed camera type deal like in the Spira entries, but likely had to implement a free one based on feedback. But that camera really doesn't like being moved around. Almost reminds me of KH1's camera, but at least XIII doesn't have real platforming, nor is it an action-RPG.

****************************************************************************
In update news, I'm now in Chapter 5, which I distinctly remember being the chapter where what little shred of both Lightning and Hope's likability died for me. This is also the chapter where I feel like the Datalogs start to really do the heavy lifting of the story since they allow you to be privy to the parties internal thoughts more since only Vanille seems to be able to have internal monologues.

In the previous Chapter, I finished up what I generally find to be the last time the game will offer some form of interactivity in the game world that isn't the base battle system. At least until Chapter 11 I should say. Hope gets his quirky moment with the Dreadnought, while Sazh gets to do the simplest puzzle in an FF for a while. I did try to raise more equipment levels for everyone, but I don't have enough XP rate boosting materials because I'm mostly just fighting machines that drop the better XP items.

Even with 5-Star combat ratings, I find it annoying the game is stingy with item drops. In addition to raising but not guaranteeing a drop, you often only get one or two items at most. Fine for the pure XP materials, but it would have been nice to get more of the XP Rate ones. Treasures can sometimes offset this, but it is still few and far between. I really need to fight more human opponents who actually drop the items good for resale value, but I think I'm still a few chapters too early for that. There is a good leveling spot in the current chapter, so I may grind a bit to max out Lightning and Hope's Crystariums. Especially since I'm in one of the awful sections of the game where the story insists on making Hope the party leader. So cheap deaths abound. Likewise, the enemy group I can farm has XP Rate items, so that may help me out in the long run, since Team Silly's section in Chapter 4 had mostly enemies that drop XP items that I have plenty of.

[Loony BoB]

Ahhh, I get what you mean now! Yeah, I agree on that part then. There is a lot of fast stuff that you don't get much opportunity to really watch. Although having said that, I still remember pretty much all of their animations but that's probably just because of all the insane levels of equipment gear farming I did to platinum the game. FFXIII is simply a really fast battle system which has pros and cons to it for sure.

I definitely agree FFXV is worse on that front for the reasons you mention.

I can't remember much of FFXIII's camera in all honesty, but I will say that I find the cameras in around 50% of the games I play to be at least a little annoying, so it wouldn't shock me if it is indeed annoying and I've just tuned it out like I have with every other game. xD

I might be misremembering, but don't the buff items drop more often when you're playing poorly (1 star rating) rather than when you're playing well? I think it was some kind of handicap thing to help players who kinda suck. But again, might be misremembering. Perhaps it was for other kind of buffs than XP, too.

[Wolf Kanno]

I can't remember much of FFXIII's camera in all honesty, but I will say that I find the cameras in around 50% of the games I play to be at least a little annoying, so it wouldn't shock me if it is indeed annoying, and I've just tuned it out like I have with every other game. XD

I think part of my issue is that I'm jumping from XV, which had a fairly decent camera unless you were fighting something big on the screen. XIII's feels jerky in comparison, but it was likely because there wasn't much reason to make the camera free-form.

I might be misremembering, but don't the buff items drop more often when you're playing poorly (1-star rating) rather than when you're playing well? I think it was some kind of handicap thing to help players who kinda suck. But again, might be misremembering. Perhaps it was for other kind of buffs than XP, too.

Yes and no? I've heard the same thing, but I've honestly won them with 5-Star ratings as well. I'm guessing you always have a chance for them to drop, but the chance rises with a lower score, just as normal drops rise with a good score.

But I'm looking for biological materials that raise the XP potential of items. They're the items I wish would drop more. I get like maybe two from a battle if I'm lucky. I would prefer if they dropped in stacks of five tbh.

[Loony BoB]

Not sure this is what you're talking about or if it helps, but here's what the good book has to say, took the photos for ya just now.

Personally? I don't think I did much of the item upgrading until I was no longer level capped. Basically did just enough and not anything more. Honestly for a long time I'm pretty sure I just didn't understand it so left it alone.

[Wolf Kanno]

Oh, I understand how the mechanics work, my gripe is just the grinding for materials. What the guide fails to mention in the link you sent is that materials come in four forms.

Organic (XP Boosters) - Claws, teeth, pelts etc
Inorganic (Huge XP) Circuit Boards, Engine Cores, Metal Scrap etc.
Mineral (Item Catalyst for evolution)
Monetary (should be used for getting Gil) - Credits, Perfumes

So Organic materials give awful XP, but they can raise how much XP an item is worth by up to 3x. But you need to feed the item a lot of them to get this boost. With 3X XP, some low level Inorganic materials can raise an item by several levels with minimal cost. So like a Bomb Core that normally gives 525 XP will now give 1575 XP.

The problem I'm having is that Organic components are not easy to come by. Sazh's section mainly had him fighting machines, so I was earning no organic components. Even in the current chapter where I am fighting organic enemies, they drop one or two of their items at most with a 5-star rating in battle, but I need something like 10-20 of the item to get that 3x boost. I only get that much if I find a treasure sphere that contains it, which is rare and often not the best components, or if I buy them, of which I still haven't unlocked the shop that sells organic components.

So for the moment, in order to really delve into equipment, I have to grind a little excessively for my taste to earn enough items to make weapon crafting worth my time. Eventually, you do gain two shops that sell the best components from either classification, but these items are stupidly expensive. So endgame turns to you grinding monetary items to sell back for gil, so you can buy the best components, so you can raise the item levels more efficiently.

This also falls into my argument about how XIII is still an excessively grindy game.

[Loony BoB]

I agree it's grindy, but I still think that this isn't the right point of the game to be worrying about leveling up the equipment to max level. You can easily just breeze your way through to later chapters on existing gear, and then level it up then.

It's kind of like saying that FFVII is grindy because I want to be level 99 when I'm on disk one.

[Wolf Kanno]

I agree it's grindy, but I still think that this isn't the right point of the game to be worrying about leveling up the equipment to max level. You can easily just breeze your way through to later chapters on existing gear, and then level it up then.

It's kind of like saying that FFVII is grindy because I want to be level 99 when I'm on disk one.

It's not like I can evolve any gear. I've had one item and already used it to evolve an Iron Bangle into a Silver Bangle. But my goal is to explore the mechanics of the game more, and I'm desperate because there isn't much else to deal with. XIII's gameplay is too streamlined.

[Wolf Kanno]

Chapter 5 is finished and eh... Watched Lightning be a bad surrogate mother by poisoning a troubled youth with her toxicity. I love how the Datalog gives you the impression she's concerned about this, but her one actual spoken dialogue felt half-hearted at best.

Hope on the other hand is doing his best impression of an internet politician and jumping to any conclusion he can to pin the blame on Snow for everything that has gone wrong, even blaming him for Serah and Lightning getting involved in all this nonsense, when technically Serah (and Vanille) were the ones who started this whole mess. I'm betting, with enough time, he would eventually blame Snow for why the automated weather control of the fal'Cie is causing global warming on Cocoon, or how he's responsible for schools on Cocoon to teach kids about woke culture.

I'm also a little annoyed because they skipped over one of the Thirteen days segment showing how Snow and Lightning met. The read shows it was from Lightning's perspective, which means it's probably not a fair assessment. Likewise, the whole NORA/Nora thing still feels silly to me. Now I have the silly Martha scene from Batman v. Superman to compare it to.

On the bright side, I finally got the shop I needed to buy Organic materials, so now I simply need to farm gil supplying items. Unfortunately, I don't really remember those becoming plentiful before Chapter 9. We're moving back to Team Silly soon, so at least that's a relief.

[Wolf Kanno]

We're now onto Chapter 7? Yeah, finished Chapter 6, and it's a mix bad. On the game side of things, the stage overstays its welcome, it introduces tanky enemies that are annoying to fight, but at least make the Saboteur/Synergist roles no longer dead weight. Also, I think the theme of this stage is one of my least favorites from this game, and for some inexplicable reason, SE loves it and always features it in games utilizing XIII's music in some way.

On the other hand, we got some great character development from Sazh, and I'm reminded why he was my favorite character in this game. While trauma should never be a pissing match, in the case of XIII's cast, I feel Sazh has it the worst. If each character was given an emotional theme for their character arc, Sazh would easily be despair. The only real beef I have with the chapter is that it overstays it's welcome, and the weather changing mechanic is kind of a pointless mechanic that doesn't really add anything to the stage.

Chapter 7 is a wonderful example of the Datalogs telling the plot better than cutscenes. Up until Lightning has her epiphany (which is still an awkward and unintentionally funny scene for me) so much of the dramatic build up for her speech with Hope is really told through the Datalog, which is why the scene doesn't hit right. In fact, I find any scene where Lightning has to emote anything more than Stoic badass tend to fall flat with her, and Hope is no better. There always seems to be a disconnect with what the Datalog is saying is going on, and what's presented on screen. At least Sazh and Vanille are consistent.

At least I'll finally get Snow and Fang in this chapter. Of course, I should brace myself because Chapter 7 and 8 were the high points of the plot if memory serves me correctly. So I should probably savor this while I can. Also, the human opponents in this area drop money, so farming shall commence.

[Fynn]

Get ready for Sazh’s kid getting taken away from him or somehow lost in any way every single game

[Wolf Kanno]

Get ready for Sazh’s kid getting taken away from him or somehow lost in any way every single game

Yeah, the writers really don't know what to do with him. I kind of feel the sequels focused on characters based on the Japanese fanbase's taste more than others. I get the impression Sazh was more popular in the West than in Japan.

[Wolf Kanno]

Still working on Chapter 7, been farming a little bit for money drops. Also debating about what weapons to prioritize and build the characters around. It's a shame Synthesis Abilities are dropped for Ultimate Weapons. Synthesis Abilities are one of those weird mechanics where when you stumble onto something good, you love the mechanic, but most of the time, they're just garbage. Snow has been rocking this chapter because his starter weapon unlocks a nifty synthesis ability called High HP if he's equipped with two Iron Bangles. This skill gives him a boost to his power as long as he has full health, so he's been a beast in battle with Hope's spells. Sadly, most of the skills you get tend to be either Physical/Magical Wall, of which both skills subtract anywhere from 5 to 25 HP from physical or Magical attacks the character receives. Nifty four chapters ago, pretty smurfing useless now.

I am also annoyed that while Snow has been accumulating a butt ton of CP from all the chapters he's missing, Fang starts with a paltry amount. She feels weak in comparison, and it's weird because researching her build options, Fang is stupidly overpowered. Like, barring her specialty Commando, Fang is surprisingly good at all the other roles. I think her worst role looks to be Synergist.

I'll do a more thorough breakdown of the Chapter after I finish it.