Can Final Fantasy 13 be easier?

[faspxina]

really your finding that hard? get a dipping pelican thing to hit that A button for you saving you the effort of auto attack and you pretty much have it sussed. I stopped playing FF13 because it was too linear and easy for me and didnt feel like a challenge to me.

If you can play MH:Unite which actually takes skill especially at G rank level gameplay i cant see what your problem is with FF13, my girlfriend finished FF13 and the only other games she plays are Civilisation and guitar hero, and she had never played a FF game before.

Like i said i didnt play much more than 5 hours of the game as it felt poor to me, im glad your enjoying it but i cant say i thought it a hard game and neither did any of the 4 people i know who completed it all in less than 3 days and the other 20odd of my mates who bought it got about as far as me before trading it in for a better game.

Howerever welcome to JRPG's if you find the time, try one of the older FF games, preferably for the PS1 or Nintendo consoles(which all had remakes for the PS1 anyway).

If you only played for 5 hours, than you didn't really got to see how the combat really is.
The game is known for having a ridiculously slow start, I was like 10 hour into the game and I think I was still being taught about new mechanics. But suddenly you find yourself pondering ways to defeat an enemy and organizing paradigm combinations (tactics).

I found that the combat system isn't about choosing your character's actions at all. It's actually about managing the AI's behaviour.

Basically what you do during combat is telling whether or not character X should be attacking or healing his companions, while character Y uses buffs or serves as a tank, as character Z is shooting spells or removing the enemy defences, and then find the right timing for the right combination. It's very strategic, that's probably why your girlfriend finished it. (since she plays Civilization)

That's when I realized why there's an auto-attack button. Because you'll need it, you'll be so busy changing team tactics during combat that you'll appreciate the AI's help.

Ok il tell you that FF13 was very lucky i played 5 hours into it, i got to the snow area or something? before getting bored, normally if after 30 mins of a game i dont want to keep playing i wont, i will take it out of the xbox and never put it back in, only my love for the older FF games made me play that far into 13, i dont want to have to play 10 or 20 hours in as most people say for the game to get good.

I do wish that i had played more of 13, but i refuse to out of principle, i already made an exception to 13 for its history, if it had made me do that from the start and had been more tactical and less linear i might have continued playing.

Rather than easier i wish 13 was more gripping, now ff7 was hard, really hard at points, but so gripping i was compelled to beat ruby and emerald weapons for the cheer of doing so. Also giving bosses ridiculous ammount of health doesnt make them any harder, it just makes them boring, bosses IMO should be a 3-7 min fight for normal bosses, working up to 10-20 mins for the creme de la creme at the end of the game.

I guess my mind is still set into the older games, which is why in my mind, the last remnant serves as a much better FF game than 13 for me, because i had control of each party member on a complete scale, now that was fun from the start.

I'm just saying that Final Fantasy 13 isn't an easy game. Or at least not as easy as just hiring a dipping pelican to press the X button. xD

 

[faspxina]

I was able to successfully defeat a boss in that game by repeatedly pressing the x button with my big toe while reading a book. The combat in FF13 is essentially one long quick time event with only one button with an extremely large window of opportunity to press it. To make it easier would require making the whole process less arduous, by removing some of the unreasonably long health bars of the enemies or adding some more variety in your attacks, or not creating a feature called 'auto-battle'.

That was probably still the tutorial part. It's not that easy.

 

[Ace of Spades]

I was able to successfully defeat a boss in that game by repeatedly pressing the x button with my big toe while reading a book. The combat in FF13 is essentially one long quick time event with only one button with an extremely large window of opportunity to press it. To make it easier would require making the whole process less arduous, by removing some of the unreasonably long health bars of the enemies or adding some more variety in your attacks, or not creating a feature called 'auto-battle'.

That was probably still the tutorial part. It's not that easy.

Nope, I played for quite a while in the hope that I would start to enjoy myself, unless the tutorial extended for more than 6 hours.

 

[neonsword13-ops]

I found that the easiest way to beat stronger enemies is to grind until your hands are numb.

I sold the game after defeating that one king dude in the airship who transformed into this devilish beast. That was enough for me.

 

[faspxina]

I was able to successfully defeat a boss in that game by repeatedly pressing the x button with my big toe while reading a book. The combat in FF13 is essentially one long quick time event with only one button with an extremely large window of opportunity to press it. To make it easier would require making the whole process less arduous, by removing some of the unreasonably long health bars of the enemies or adding some more variety in your attacks, or not creating a feature called 'auto-battle'.

That was probably still the tutorial part. It's not that easy.

Nope, I played for quite a while in the hope that I would start to enjoy myself, unless the tutorial extended for more than 6 hours.

Sadly, it does.

 

[Ace of Spades]

I was able to successfully defeat a boss in that game by repeatedly pressing the x button with my big toe while reading a book. The combat in FF13 is essentially one long quick time event with only one button with an extremely large window of opportunity to press it. To make it easier would require making the whole process less arduous, by removing some of the unreasonably long health bars of the enemies or adding some more variety in your attacks, or not creating a feature called 'auto-battle'.

That was probably still the tutorial part. It's not that easy.

Nope, I played for quite a while in the hope that I would start to enjoy myself, unless the tutorial extended for more than 6 hours.

Sadly, it does.

Wow, in that case, I suppose I'm not equipped to analyze the difficulty.

 

[blizzaradragon]

I played FF13 after buying it for 30 bucks 3 times over a period of 10 hours. I didn't mind the odd way they revealed the story, since that is the nature of such a beast, so to speak.
But I'm an easy going gamer that always likes to play on easy on games the first time round to get a grip on the story and gameplay mechanics.
However, FF13 is pretty hard. I've never played this type of game before, but nearly every fight without surprising the enemy is slow, and boring, and can easily kill me.
Most hard games I have are like Godhand, Demon's Souls and Monster Hunter Unite, so it may be out of my element a little, but still.

But for an hour, I was genuinely having lots of fun. With me kicking ass, beating down enemies like an Irish farmers wife, and aweing at the marvelous spectacle. Then I fought a chameleon boss thing that took me 12 cum-gargling minutes to beat, since all I had was Hope healing me and Lightning's piss weak element attacks.

Basically, how do I make this game easier?

I'll give you some hints to help you out.

1) Utilize your paradigm shifts. If you get these down effectively you can start owning easily. Some big ones to remember are to A) NEVER underestimate how awesome a Synergist or a Sabatour is, especially in boss fights, and B) almost always have a Commando in your team so you can slow the stagger gauge down and you can keep up some damage Obviously there are some situations where the rules change, but in general you want to follow those two.

2) Upgrade your equipment and build each character to your liking. This is especially true of the weapons, as your weapons will skyrocket in effectiveness as you upgrade them whereas you can always find or buy better equipment. You also usually want to have a character focus on either attack or magic, with the only one who can really balance between the two is Lightning but even that's pushing it. Great examples: make sure Snow focuses on attack and make sure Hope and Vanille focus on magic. Sazh and Lightning can go either way, it depends on how you want to play.

3) Make sure to pay attention to an enemy's weaknesses and resistances. Every enemy is weak to something, be it a certain element, magic or physical attacks, or even just a debuff. Once you pick up on the weakness and start focusing on it fights will become a good amount shorter.

4) Take more direct control instead of letting the auto-battle do its thing. From the experience of me and most of my friends, the auto-battle likes to cock things up. The only real exception to this is when you know absolutely nothing about an enemy, cause then the auto-battle makes it a priority to figure out weaknesses and resistances. After that, start manually choosing abilities. This is especially true in enemy groups, cause auto-battle gets a bit too trigger happy with abilities like blitz or fira.

If you have any other questions, feel free to message me. I've played every single Final Fantasy game, so I can help you with any of them that you decide to play. Hope this helps!

 

[MostlyHarmless]

I understand. But at first, the game is piss easy. Once you get to midway, it gets more and more difficult. Plus grinding not as easy as it was in previous titles. Just keep your combos up and be sure to level up Hope's magic.

 

[blizzaradragon]

I played FF13 after buying it for 30 bucks 3 times over a period of 10 hours. I didn't mind the odd way they revealed the story, since that is the nature of such a beast, so to speak.
But I'm an easy going gamer that always likes to play on easy on games the first time round to get a grip on the story and gameplay mechanics.
However, FF13 is pretty hard. I've never played this type of game before, but nearly every fight without surprising the enemy is slow, and boring, and can easily kill me.
Most hard games I have are like Godhand, Demon's Souls and Monster Hunter Unite, so it may be out of my element a little, but still.

But for an hour, I was genuinely having lots of fun. With me kicking ass, beating down enemies like an Irish farmers wife, and aweing at the marvelous spectacle. Then I fought a chameleon boss thing that took me 12 cum-gargling minutes to beat, since all I had was Hope healing me and Lightning's piss weak element attacks.

Basically, how do I make this game easier?

You see that is the problem. You are supposed to have Lightning Heal/Commando and have Hope use his Element attacks.

The game is easy if you know the strategies as well as who is better at what. Lightning is a decent Commando and a pretty damn good Medic. Hope is a Black Mage. Vanille is a White Mage. Sasz is a Synergist/Buffer/Black Mage and once you get Fang you have the greatest Commando in the world. And that other fucker is tank. I hate him (At least playing him)

So... yea. I wish you could learn this as you play however it took me until the end of the story to understand. Which made the CIETH Stones easier.

You got this pretty much down, but I gotta add in something from my own experiences with the game: Hope is a better Synergist than Sazh and Vanille is easily better as a Sabatour than as a Medic. Also I find Fang to be an amazing Sentinel, maybe not as much as Snow when it comes to health and defense but definitely outshines him on offense. She was dodging and countering at least half the attacks that came at her, it was glorious.

 

[Stealthygamer]

the plant monster is a *****, just warning you. Just use your summons when you can, and keep up the attack, ALWAYS HAVE A COMMANDO OR RAVAGER!

 

[blizzaradragon]

I was able to successfully defeat a boss in that game by repeatedly pressing the x button with my big toe while reading a book. The combat in FF13 is essentially one long quick time event with only one button with an extremely large window of opportunity to press it. To make it easier would require making the whole process less arduous, by removing some of the unreasonably long health bars of the enemies or adding some more variety in your attacks, or not creating a feature called 'auto-battle'.

Most Final Fantasy games have an auto-battle system though, with FFIV jumping to my mind almost immediately. In the case of XIII though, the auto-battle is really only useful in two areas: the beginning of the game when you don't know what you're doing, or when you are trying to figure out an enemy's weaknesses and resistances. Otherwise it is a lot better to pick your own abilities and switch out your paradigms, and you'll have a lot more fun with the game. You can even change the set-up so it defaults you to abilities instead of auto-battle.

With regards to their health bars and variety, once each character gets their 3 paradigms you can get a ton of variety. Being able to switch them at the drop of a hat lets you change up your strategy mid battle, and lets you adapt to whatever you need to adapt to. With the health bars, throw in a Synergist to buff you and a Sabatour to debuff the enemies and the fights will go a good amount faster.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

Unknown to most people, Final Fantasy XIII actually requires a fair bit of tactics. I personally found it challenging, but quite easy.

The number one thing you want to do is get that chain counter up and get them staggered. I haven't played in a while, but from what I remember, magic does this the fastest.

Start a 'tough' battle by buffing your characters and debuffing the enemy. Then basically get that chain counter up and switch to Commando to deal the most damage. And keep your charcters healed. Once Sazh has Haste, the game becomes about twice as easy.

I've always felt getting the enemy to stagger was the main and challenging thing about the game. Most of the time you can get away with RAV/RAV/COM and the go all out when the stagger hits. And for the harder bosses you need a synergist and a saboteur to make life easier, and maybe a ravenger if you want to go there.

I agree about Sazh learning haste, that technique makes life a lot easier in the game and has saved me many times from being murdered.

 

[DexterNorgam]

Isn't the answer to difficulty in any JRPG to simply grind more?? There's no such thing as a difficult FF game, just one that takes more grinding to finish.

 

[Ice Car]

I remember dying a lot, despite manually choosing what to do all the time and using various strategies. If I used Autobattle, all it would seriously do is make it worse.

Have you tried using the Auto-battle now? I used to manually choose the actions, but then I just got sick at looking at the menu all the time, while all the cool stuff was happening. You should try, it basically does what you would (or should)'ve probably done, giving you more time to worry about paradigm shifts. Just remember to scan your enemies for weaknesses so that the AI knows what to do.

The computer does tend to do many stupid things for me, like alternating between the Elemental Strikes and Spells. Instead of using one or the other, which is 3 times faster, it alternates and takes at least double the time for no reason. Then there's the fact that multiple times, it had kept using Ruin and Spells against an enemy with extremely high resistance. Or other stupid things. Instead of using Physical attacks, which were supposed to be really effective, all it did was use spells and special attacks the whole time.

I stopped using it after I realized AI was a dumbass.

 

[faspxina]

I remember dying a lot, despite manually choosing what to do all the time and using various strategies. If I used Autobattle, all it would seriously do is make it worse.

Have you tried using the Auto-battle now? I used to manually choose the actions, but then I just got sick at looking at the menu all the time, while all the cool stuff was happening. You should try, it basically does what you would (or should)'ve probably done, giving you more time to worry about paradigm shifts. Just remember to scan your enemies for weaknesses so that the AI knows what to do.

The computer does tend to do many stupid things for me, like alternating between the Elemental Strikes and Spells. Instead of using one or the other, which is 3 times faster, it alternates and takes at least double the time for no reason. Then there's the fact that multiple times, it had kept using Ruin and Spells against an enemy with extremely high resistance. Or other stupid things. Instead of using Physical attacks, which were supposed to be really effective, all it did was use spells and special attacks the whole time.

I stopped using it after I realized AI was a dumbass.

They usually alternate between spell and strikes when the enemies have an equal resistance to both. But you're right, that's a bit pointless, specially when it takes more time. But other than that, from my experience, the AI usually doesn't screw up on those things, it might not be perfect though, so maybe it was bad luck at the time.

 

[F4LL3N]

It's been a while, but I think I went RAV/RAV/COM to stagger, then switch to RAV/COM/COM to deal lots of damage (kept one RAV because the stagger bar continues past 100%). Depending on how fast the stagger bar reduces, I occasionally kept RAV/RAV/COM to get the highest percentage I could, before switching to RAV/COM/COM. I'd also have a RAV/RAV/MED or RAV/COM/MED for healing, and finally some combination including SYN and SAB when needed. I believe I used RAV/RAV/RAV and COM/COM/COM occasionally too.

Lightning as RAV and COM. Hope as SYN and MED. Sazh as SYN and RAV. Snow as SEN. Vanille as SAB and MED. I forget what Fang was, perhaps COM. This is probably each characters best roles, from what I remember.

 

[ShadowKatt]

I have a better question: Could it POSSIBLY be harder?

I bought it, and I've quit it twice. The first time I ran into Cid I threw my controller across the room. Every god damn fight, he would transform, buff himself, debuff my team(all at the same time, mind you), and then proceed to spike my main character since if the party leader goes down then the whole game is lost. Over and over and over. I finally beat him out of sheer luck. I thought I'd gotten past the hardest part of the game.

Then I got a bit further and Bahamut came out. Finally, I get bahamut. Fight starts, he kills off the whole party with one unblockable AOE attack. No defense, no healing, no nothing. One attack, dead.

Fuck this game. I know that since you're healed now every enemy can be a BIT tougher, but Jesus Fucking Christ that bahamut fight is literally Impossible. Several thousand damage right off the bad before your bar can even charge. FF13 is a shitty game. It's a shitty story, it's a shitty concept, and it's a shitty design from the ground up. The fact that THIS game is getting a sequel is nothing less than a travesty and enough to make me quit Square-Enix if it weren't for the fact that they're going the route of EA and Activision and buying up every smaller developer and IP in sight.

 

[Quellist]

As people have said, its all about Paradigm shifts, either you like it or you dont. Personally I adored the combat, Imo they took the germ of the idea from FF X-2, which was the one thing that game got right, and made the best combat system FF has ever seen around it. No more junk fights to wear you down and difficulty was just right.

That said i think FF XIII was very Marmite, you either loved it or you couldnt understand why anyone would...