Are the Final Fantasy XIII games actually any good?

[Ranorak]

Some enemies have instakill moves.
I'm alright with that.

Those moves hit a random party member.
I'm alright with that.

If your main character dies, you lose the battle. For some reason your party members can't ress (like in every other FF before)
I'm NOT alright with this.

This made some battles just a matter of chance.

And yes, there was a tank "class" but that never seemed to stop some bosses from doing this.

Another point I disliked was the constant idea that I was being hunted. That's because I was.
But this left me tired.
In older FF games, towns were a moment of rest, a little pit-stop. Not here, no way.

And, I hate to say this, as Yathzee said, Hope is this scared boy at first. And justly so, he was a normal kid that just saw some aweful things happen.
But as soon as he's a playable character, he literally pulls a boomerang out of his ass, and fights just as well as the others. Right after that, he's back to being a scared child again.

I wanted to like it, I really did, but there was one point I just said "No, no more, I will not take this bullshit on top of everything else."
That was the point where the game probably thought I wasn't fast enough in killing some boss, and gave me a doom counter on my characters.
No, this was not a summon battle, this was a boss fight, and for no reason it just casted doom on me. Giving me a time limit on a boss. WHY!?

 

[47_Ronin]

I didn't like any FF since IX. I tried the demo for FF XII-2 or some such nonsense and was like: "wha... what is going on here! Stop with the colors and epileptic seizures already". But to be honest I'm getting ready to scream at kids to get off my lawn, age wise, so it might be just that.

 

[Andy Shandy]

Well I enjoyed both of them anyway. I mean, there are better JRPGs out there, but I didn't find them nearly as terrible as everyone makes them out to be.

 

[fishy42]

Loved 'em - cleaned out the achievements for both.
FFXIII - Don't let anyone discourage you with "mash x/a" battle system comments: that's complete trash in regards to any remotely significant fight. The 70+ side mission hunts will test your skill with the system and force you to adapt. Anyone here can try to button mash the final side mission and see how far they get.

Anyway...the next big issue (maybe) is the linearity, which personally I didn't have a problem with. I mean what difference would a few towns full of non-interactive npcs really make anyway? I would see that as poor attempts to stretch out gameplay. Better to just get on with what's important - the story, like in all FF games. Speaking of which I know the story is convoluted and complicated etc but it's very interesting as well. The game builds emotion steadily, much in thanks to Sazh's story as others have pointed out. The rest of the cast..yeah I can see why people might find them irritating but bloody hell did Vanille grow on me. Hope too eventually.

FFXIII-2 - Quite different to the first game. All I will say about 2 is I hope you like Pokemon
Hope you decide to get these games man.

 

[FFP2]

FF13 and 13-2 are good games. Not the best Final Fantasy games but still really good.

FF13 is a technological masterpiece and the music was really good. The initial linearity may put you off though. It does get better after around 20 hours or so. The characters are awful though, Snow and Hope being the main offenders. The gameplay is really fast (and good!) and anyone that says it's just "press A to win" is crazy. The game did begin to wear on me near the end though.

13-2's story is a bit messy but it does make sense within it's context. The music is great but Square don't get points for that anymore. The dynamic between Noel and Serah was really good and it also had one of the best villains in all of the FF games- Caius. He wasn't even intentionally evil, just extremeley motivated. They fleshed out all the main characters and Hope finally stops being a whiny *****. It has like 13 different endings. 13-2 also has Pokemon built into it so there's that

I played 13-2 before 13 but I only slightly enjoyed 13-2 more. They're both around 60 hours long. They're not 60$ anymore so they're definitely worth the price.

Now to dismiss a few things:

Don't listen to anyone that even mentions FF 7, 9 or 12. Fianl Fantasy has always tried new things and is different with each iteration. Deal with it.
The only reason 13-2 has DLC is because dumbasses complained that 13 didn't have any.
It's not press A to win.
A lot of the people that hate 13 are westerners; Japanese peeps love the FNC games. Look at Japanese reviewers for Japanese games eg. Fasimitsu
The Westerners that you see so often on the internet yapping about FF13 are a small minority with really loud voices.

 

[Terramax]

FF13 should've been an action game. The turn based battles were completely at odds with everything else about the game.

The story was inconsistent. Some good ideas, but was too confusing, badly told, and some of the characters, particularly the main character, Lightning, and that blonde kid, were some of the worst characters in any video game I've played.

Honestly, I wouldn't go out of your way to play the original. And the second game I couldn't even be bothered to play the demo to the end.

 

[Gizmo1990]

I found XIII to be beyond bad in every way except for visuals. The story was bad, the music was mediocre at best and that is such a shame due to the high quality of music the FF series has had in the past but then Nobuo Uematsu stoped composing for the series after X so that is the reason for the drop and the characters, dear god the characters.

Lightning was dull, Hope was beyond inoying (I have never wanted a kid to die in a game before XIII), Vanille should have had her mouth taped shut after the first time she opened it and Snow, what can I say about Snow?

Snow was the biggest douche whoever did douche in douche land. He is a super douche. He was such a douche that all the other douches made him king douche. If you took all the douches both real and fictional and combined them to create an ultamate, mega, super god douche, Snow would still be the bigger douche.

Due to these problems I never finished it. I stopped at Grand pulse and looking back I have no idea how I forced myself to get that far. I never bothered to try XIII-2 as I did not enjoy the world the games were set in.

But there is no right answer to this question. It is all a matter of opinion.

And having talked about this kangaroo piss of a game I now want to play something good so I am off to play Final Fantasy IX.

 

[DrunkenMonkey]

You know what man just play the game yourself and make your own opinion because on the internet FF13 has gotten some undue hate just because its more linear than past jrpgs. Yes that's more linear and that's probably its only real fault everything else is people just blowing out of proportion and nitpicking every single little thing to make it sound like that game is some sort of unplayable mess. When it clearly isn't the case its an average to above average jrpg that is well worth the 15-20 dollar asking price right now. Haven't played part 2 so can't comment on that.

edit: It's also a victim of its own hype

 

[Sunrider]

Most people I've talked to hate them, but I like them. You've been given plenty of reasons to try or not to try them already, so I guess my post is kinda pointless. =(

 

[aaronobst]

The series was pretty darn good up until X-2.

I just think it's become this ridiculous behemoth of flash, shit I don't know

 

[debtcollector]

Hey, I liked 'em. People complain about the linearity but I think it's a fair price to pay for the story and battle system. Of course, for XIII-2 it's just the battle system you're playing for cuz the story is assballs.

 

[DocMcCray]

After the long and obligatory FFXIII tutorial, I did enjoy it. Not 60$ worth of fun, but definitely 20-30$ worth.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

Final Fantasy XIII is one of the most awfully designed and mind-numbingly boring games I have played in a long while. The only thing you basically do is following a straight path and battling the same monsters over and over again, occasionally being interrupted by a cutscene advancing a not particularly interesting story.

While the battle system is not that bad in principle, the fact that your HP is restored after each battle and that most places are filled with the same monsters results in you constantly replicating the exact same battles. Furthermore, there is barely any interesting form of variation in the gameplay. At one point, after many hours of wasted time, you end up in a more open field where you have the option of doing missions that also solely consist of battling monsters that are pointed out on the mini-map, which is really just as boring as the rest of the game.

Note that I have nothing against 'linear' games (linear games can be done well if they remain challenging and/or interesting: games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Half-life 2 are pretty linear but still incredibly fun), JRPG's (Sturgeon's law definitely applies to this genre, but there are still some fantastic JRPG's out there: some examples are Tales of Symphonia, Chrono Trigger, Mother 3 and Paper Mario) or the Final Fantasy franchise (I really like parts VI, VII and IX).

Final Fantasy XIII, however, has somehow manage to filter out all the good aspects of the Final Fantasy series and amplify the bad stuff. This results in a plainly awful and especially boring game.

 

[shrekfan246]

But they're not good Final Fantasy games, and it's actually pretty interesting why that's so, considering XIII is basically an amalgam of VII-X.

Not really...

for a start, X didn't pelt you with AN ENTIRE CAST of stupid, depressing characters. Seriously, having to play as Hope and Lightning, two of the mopiest characters in XIII was so painful. At least in X you only ever played as Tidus and Wakka, or Yuna and Lulu at any point in time. And if there was mopiness? It was kept short and concentrated into one predicament in the game. It wasn't dragged out stupidly long like Hope's hatred for Snow because he couldn't save her from falling off a bridge. Even when Tidus bitched about Jecht it was quickly resolved, hell one section where he complains the game even turns it into a minigame so you can learn the Jecht Shot.

Also, VII-X had combat that involved the player. You were able to switch out party members at will and actually choose what attacks they used. You didn't just sit there and spam quick casting while occasionally changing paradigms.

Also, VII-X actually rewarded you for exploration, there were puzzles and rewards for taking different routes, and it wasn't just reduced to "run from here to here, if you see a little indent on the minimap there's an item there".

Well, see, that's why I said it was an amalgam, and it's interesting why it turned out so badly.

It took the worlds of VII, X, and XII - a game I didn't even initially mention - but straight as an arrow; character archetypes from all of them (Lightning was Cloud, Vanille was Selphie, Sazh was 'the black guy', Hope was Vaan but singularly focused on his past trauma instead of playing it off and being cocky, and Snow was Squall + Balthier); leveling from X but without the choices; story locations/progression/pacing from VII, IX, and XII; and a combat system that tried to mix together VII, IX, and X-2, and managed to fail completely because of the Auto-Battle button.