FF13 was the biggest pile of BALLS i have ever played, and i grew up as a huge fanboy of the series. In my opinion FF9 was the last good game in the series. And no, i didn't like 10. I found 10 to be as linear as 13 and im still confused as to why people cannot see it.
Did I miss something about FFXIII?
- Thread starter lordmardok
- Start date
Recommended Videos
I went for all the chests, and didn't miss an enemy or cutscene. :s My first play through ended at 55 hours as well(103 for platinum). Majority of my time was spent in chapters 9, 10 and 11 which are absurdly long compared to all the others.Heartcafe said:15 hours?did you skip all those cutscenes? My entire playthrough was 60 hours exactly (more or less) and I remember that conflict getting resolved pretty late in (Around when we reach Hope's house)
Eh, Most of the time is likely my obsession of completing the crystalliaum (or however you spell it) and maxing the crystals out before the level ended. It was surprisingly easy. (Oh the things I do during summer...)
IV is actually one of my exceptions, along with VI. The other earlier ones I sort of disagree with the story being groundbreaking, persuming you mean early as in pre-FF7 anyway. Then again, even post, FF7 the story is alright, the characters are alright, but I wouldn't say it was groundbreaking. FF8 had the whole orphanage debacle too, gargh.Heartcafe said:
I finished the game.
Aesthetically, fantastic. Music, fantastic. Story/characters, nothing particularly good or bad.
Gameplay-wise, not enjoyable for me. Little to no control over the development (statistically) of characters. I didn't feel like I had to do much for the majority of fights besides occasionally swap to a healing/buffing Paradigm.
I wouldn't have minded the linearity if not for the above issue, but together it got dull quite quickly.
Aesthetically, fantastic. Music, fantastic. Story/characters, nothing particularly good or bad.
Gameplay-wise, not enjoyable for me. Little to no control over the development (statistically) of characters. I didn't feel like I had to do much for the majority of fights besides occasionally swap to a healing/buffing Paradigm.
I wouldn't have minded the linearity if not for the above issue, but together it got dull quite quickly.
The combat, the story, the characters, and level design were all rather lackluster, so no, you didn't miss anything. it really is that bad.
As late as this post is to this party, I'd really like to know myself. I tried REALLY hard to enjoy this game, but I just couldn't. I tried on every level to find something to like, but the environments were lazy, the battle system was brainless, the cutscenes were amazingly poorly directed, and the characters were all irritating fuckwits. To this day whenever any one of these elements gets praised I want to ask what dear God anyone sees in them.
I SORT OF get the characters. Lightning Farron sort of deserves a better game, and Sazh is at least a little bit more relatable than the others. The designs are impressive, but I keep getting this impression that whatever the character designer intended didn't make it into the scriptwriters' heads, and each of them has their own special brand of obnoxious idiocy to make me want to shut the game off whenever they open their mouths. Snow and Hope are especially awful, the simpering tossers that they are.
I SORT OF get the battle system. It's presented in an exciting, fast-paced fashion.... aaaand that's about it. The reality of it is that the player is actually even more removed from this system than from other, more traditional turn-based systems. It always felt very artificial to me. The "staggering" system is very straightforward with no element of risk to make it all that interesting, just a routine that gets tired after about four or five battles and that you're meant to sit back and watch more than participate in.
The game all but trains you to auto-battle, with the interface switching in-and-out of sub-menus too slowly (gotta play the fancy animations!) to provide decent response time for playing manually. At the same time, it's amazingly obtuse just because you'd never actually think that a fight would work this way and would never think of how to successfully stagger something on your own without someone explaining how staggering works or experimenting, LOTS--and it's anything but pleasurable to do so. Until you do figure it out, you can't fight efficiently. After you figure it out, it's not a matter of clever strategy so much as an optimal play style where you switch paradigms at moments practically pre-defined by the game and signaled to you by obvious cues. It's all just a metagamey routine-change, with class logic ripped out of World of Warcraft (and notably condensed, I should add) rather than anything that the game can use to throw reasonable curve balls and actual strategy, which is a really hard sell for an RPG. The lack of flexibility is what kills me especially; there's almost nothing to play and experiment with past what you'll do to figure out how the stagger system works, because the stagger system overrides all other considerations.
I don't get the cutscenes, I don't get the story. I've heard people say "they should have just made a movie," but this wouldn't be passable as a film either. There's so many scenes that just waste the player's time, like that one just after the bridge collapses and Snow and what's-his-face with the mohawk fall down to a lower level of the streets. They get up, dust themselves off, Snow repeats shit we just saw happen five second ago, Mohawk Dude pretends to betray him for a second, then they both laugh and just leave. What the fuck? Other scenes supplant this with two characters getting in a philosophical argument as to the nature of their quest for about two minutes, failing to settle anything, bringing up two or three things that will never be mentioned again. They end abruptly on an awkward pause, and then they just walk off camera and the game continues, leaving me wondering what the point of this scene was in advancing the plot. And it's always that George Lucas-style "shot-reverse shot" crap from Attack of the Clones/Revenge of the Sith; the most boring way to display two characters conversing. SOMETIMES they manage to frame something so that it looks interesting, but mostly it's "shot-reverse shot" on the same map they use for random battles.
I don't get what people say about the visuals in general either. Apart from the character designs, this game is really jarring and inconsistent. Monsters are elaborate, which is par for the course for a Final Fantasy, but then you get shit like the Behemoth, with its two giant tassels floating behind it... and always behind it. It's meant to look like the wind is blowing them. So does the wind always localize its direction to "behind the Behemoth?" It's so weird and unnatural. Far be it for me to nitpick about visuals like this, but it stands out like a sore thumb every time I see it. The environments are the worst; for having spent four years allegedly making this game, these environments look barely a step above Playstation 2 launch games. The textures are higher resolution, but there's no detail and no effort put into making them believable locations.
After having gone through all that, I have a hard time figuring out what could've been a redeeming factor for someone else who played this game and actually enjoyed it. If anybody wants to rebut me, please feel free, but I want to note that by my watch these flaws all make it tooth-grindingly, unbearably awful and that the consolation that it "opens up" after 20 hours of boredom and pain doesn't do much to bide my patience.
I SORT OF get the characters. Lightning Farron sort of deserves a better game, and Sazh is at least a little bit more relatable than the others. The designs are impressive, but I keep getting this impression that whatever the character designer intended didn't make it into the scriptwriters' heads, and each of them has their own special brand of obnoxious idiocy to make me want to shut the game off whenever they open their mouths. Snow and Hope are especially awful, the simpering tossers that they are.
I SORT OF get the battle system. It's presented in an exciting, fast-paced fashion.... aaaand that's about it. The reality of it is that the player is actually even more removed from this system than from other, more traditional turn-based systems. It always felt very artificial to me. The "staggering" system is very straightforward with no element of risk to make it all that interesting, just a routine that gets tired after about four or five battles and that you're meant to sit back and watch more than participate in.
The game all but trains you to auto-battle, with the interface switching in-and-out of sub-menus too slowly (gotta play the fancy animations!) to provide decent response time for playing manually. At the same time, it's amazingly obtuse just because you'd never actually think that a fight would work this way and would never think of how to successfully stagger something on your own without someone explaining how staggering works or experimenting, LOTS--and it's anything but pleasurable to do so. Until you do figure it out, you can't fight efficiently. After you figure it out, it's not a matter of clever strategy so much as an optimal play style where you switch paradigms at moments practically pre-defined by the game and signaled to you by obvious cues. It's all just a metagamey routine-change, with class logic ripped out of World of Warcraft (and notably condensed, I should add) rather than anything that the game can use to throw reasonable curve balls and actual strategy, which is a really hard sell for an RPG. The lack of flexibility is what kills me especially; there's almost nothing to play and experiment with past what you'll do to figure out how the stagger system works, because the stagger system overrides all other considerations.
I don't get the cutscenes, I don't get the story. I've heard people say "they should have just made a movie," but this wouldn't be passable as a film either. There's so many scenes that just waste the player's time, like that one just after the bridge collapses and Snow and what's-his-face with the mohawk fall down to a lower level of the streets. They get up, dust themselves off, Snow repeats shit we just saw happen five second ago, Mohawk Dude pretends to betray him for a second, then they both laugh and just leave. What the fuck? Other scenes supplant this with two characters getting in a philosophical argument as to the nature of their quest for about two minutes, failing to settle anything, bringing up two or three things that will never be mentioned again. They end abruptly on an awkward pause, and then they just walk off camera and the game continues, leaving me wondering what the point of this scene was in advancing the plot. And it's always that George Lucas-style "shot-reverse shot" crap from Attack of the Clones/Revenge of the Sith; the most boring way to display two characters conversing. SOMETIMES they manage to frame something so that it looks interesting, but mostly it's "shot-reverse shot" on the same map they use for random battles.
I don't get what people say about the visuals in general either. Apart from the character designs, this game is really jarring and inconsistent. Monsters are elaborate, which is par for the course for a Final Fantasy, but then you get shit like the Behemoth, with its two giant tassels floating behind it... and always behind it. It's meant to look like the wind is blowing them. So does the wind always localize its direction to "behind the Behemoth?" It's so weird and unnatural. Far be it for me to nitpick about visuals like this, but it stands out like a sore thumb every time I see it. The environments are the worst; for having spent four years allegedly making this game, these environments look barely a step above Playstation 2 launch games. The textures are higher resolution, but there's no detail and no effort put into making them believable locations.
After having gone through all that, I have a hard time figuring out what could've been a redeeming factor for someone else who played this game and actually enjoyed it. If anybody wants to rebut me, please feel free, but I want to note that by my watch these flaws all make it tooth-grindingly, unbearably awful and that the consolation that it "opens up" after 20 hours of boredom and pain doesn't do much to bide my patience.
Final Fantasy XIII does NOT have a solid fanbase. And there's a good reason for that. The gameplay is incredibly boring, the plot is outright recycled, as are the characters. The music is amazing though.
In Mass Effect 2, the main character only dies at the very end, and if they die, then that save cannot be used in ME3. The game of ME3 is effectively over when your character dies in ME2.kaioshade said:
Also, FFX is not a good game.
Also also, I think people are becoming used to Square Enix pumping out what is more or less garbage FF games. Their (both SE and fans) standards have sunk so low that they will take anything that SE produces and has the Final Fantasy name on it.
FFXIII did indeed have issues. It wasn't exactly the BEST of Final Fantasies, but I'd take it over 1-7 and MAYBE 9 and XII (emphasis on 7).
I think this was meant as an experimental Final Fantasy for the current gen of consoles. It's focus was on graphics and story, trying to see what they could push on today's platforms.
Personally I did like it, and only wished there was a collector's version but oh well.
At least it had a good story, which is more than I could say for some of the other shit games out there like the recently released shit sequel to a shit game series...Duke Nukem.
Someone called it a man's game in this forum and he may be right....if your definition of a man is a mindless idiot who can't go five minutes without unleashing your sexual tension in the form of crude jokes and feel the need to just blow crap up without any reason.
However I'd like to think we men are above such crude things, that some of us can appreciate the story a game presents rather than complain about linearity, and battle mechanics...but that might just be me.
I think this was meant as an experimental Final Fantasy for the current gen of consoles. It's focus was on graphics and story, trying to see what they could push on today's platforms.
Personally I did like it, and only wished there was a collector's version but oh well.
At least it had a good story, which is more than I could say for some of the other shit games out there like the recently released shit sequel to a shit game series...Duke Nukem.
Someone called it a man's game in this forum and he may be right....if your definition of a man is a mindless idiot who can't go five minutes without unleashing your sexual tension in the form of crude jokes and feel the need to just blow crap up without any reason.
However I'd like to think we men are above such crude things, that some of us can appreciate the story a game presents rather than complain about linearity, and battle mechanics...but that might just be me.
Pretty much this.kaioshade said:
People complain about FFXIII but there's no reason for it really. So the main character dies and the game is over...so what? Is that really such a bad thing when YOU are meant to be the main character in an RPG
The AI is incredible, there really isn't an argument here, you can change things up plenty and the AI does it's job more or less flawlessly
I can't add anything more to the last comment.
I thought that Hope in particular was a very good character and very relatable, I too lost a parent at that age so I know what goes through your mind and being angry at the one responsible is completely natural, Snow gets better and realises he's a moron at the very least but yeah he isn't great.NickCaligo42 said:
I disagree with any notion that the game removes the player as I did exactly the same (if not more) in this game as I have done in any Final Fantasy. All random battles in EVERY Final Fantasy can be solved by holding the X/A button. Bosses require you to pay attention to use it's weaknesses well and heal when needed, however in XIII the random battles change so that you have to pay attention in both them and boss battles.NickCaligo42 said:
That scene is mostly character development, as are a lot of the scenes, which would be amazing if some of this character development actually went anywhere, which tends to be an issue in every visual media. I can barely think of any tv, game or film that does conversation shots in an interesting way consistantly and this is as a film student.NickCaligo42 said:
It's mostly the fact that the cutscenes look bloody magnificent but SE always have three levels of graphics, amazing, great and looks ok, amazing is used for cutscenes, great is used for certain story based or emotionally interesting scenes and the looks ok graphics are for general gameplayNickCaligo42 said:
I genuinely enjoyed it but if you didn't that's fine and I know it's not for everyone, I think all Final Fantasies have this divide, some love them and some hate them and barely any of the fanbase enjoy all of the titles, even the purely passionate fanboys.NickCaligo42 said:
I'm the only one who didn't mind the linearity, because it actually made sense in the story. The mythos had good potential as did the characters, but they were just poorly executed. The battle system can be incredibly fun, but it takes so long to get to that point, and it's only truly used in a lot of the side quests.
I didn't actually mind a good deal of the dialogue, but I could clearly pick out what Nojima wrote and what Toriyama wrote because the dialogue turned to fourth grade shit.
I didn't actually mind a good deal of the dialogue, but I could clearly pick out what Nojima wrote and what Toriyama wrote because the dialogue turned to fourth grade shit.
Mass Effect 2 had all of those problems as well. Final Fantasy XIII has more problems than that.Ace of Spades said:
Veldt Falsetto said:
You pretty much summed up everything, much better than I could've, and agree with you on everything. I really enjoyed the characters, maybe except Hope but that's my personal opinion, so I don't understand any of the hate towards them. They have reasons for the things they do and it's a nice change of the game blatantly telling you everything about each character when you can just see how they are acting.Ramzal said:
As for the length of corridors, that too makes sense, yeah it was kinda boring, but considering what was going on story wise what else did you expect would happen? Them running around and getting caught every few feet? So yeah, good read and you made some points that I never considered.
in truth, i actually really enjoyed this game. people say that it sucks compared to other ff games, but that might be why i like it, its one of the two that i actually played. the other game being the very first one, and i got sick of that fast because i kept being killed every second. but i enjoyed this game and played it to the end. personally (and i know i will get crap for this) snow was my favorite character. the reason is, he is the one who seems to have the most faith in what they do. people have called him an arrogant ass, but i dont see it. i also thought the combat system was fantastic and well made. overall, i am proud to say i am part of this game's solid fanbase. if you dont like the game, then no arguing from me or anyone else is going to change that. you, just like me, are entitled to your own oppinion.
No, Mass Effect 2 had none of those problems, and yes FFXIII had plenty more to complain about, which I've already done extensively on these forums.Defense said: