I am a long - time Final Fantasy fan, but as soon as I read my first review of FF XIII, I knew this was the end of the road for me. Every review I have read since, has only maintained my violently negative impression of the game. I've never played it, and I never will.
Based on other reviews, I actually think this is one case where YAHTZEE'S opinion could reasonably be considered objective!
Bottom line, as I see it:
* Emo ***** for protagonist?
* More cutscenes than gameplay?
* Boring, repetitive gameplay?
* No exploration?
* "Gets good after you've played it for 20 hours" touted as major selling point?
I am currently in my first play through. Roughly 27 hours in now. I have been in Gran Pulse now for 3 hours. The game got super hard at that point. Which personally for me I love. Game was way easy before but the story and characters were good enough to overlook the easy sauce intro to the game.
I had bought this game like 4 months ago but never played it because of the bad reviews. Once I finally started playing last week it has had me hooked. I can understand some of the complaints - but I can't understand how people let the downsides get to them.
Corridor style maps - Um - most RPGs are corridor style. They just aren't so obvious about it. Besides I feel it fit the story and where your characters were going. *minor spoliers* There are l'cie. When you become one you have no choice. You are on a guided path. It wasn't until they decided to follow their heart when the world opened up. Coincidence? I happen to thing it isn't one.
Complaints about Gran Pulse mobs being hard - I watched a youtube video of a guy bitching about how shitty the game is - he had the character Hope as his main - had roughly 1600 HP and was bitching when he was fighting one of the 20 story tall turtles and it was one shotting him. Seriously? Hope is a healer. My tank at the same time (Fang) has near 3000 HP and even with tank skills I am not stupid enough to walk up to a 20 story tall mob and wack it. What do you think will happen?
Combat system - mobs not dying? Learn to shift more. Every video I have seen about people complaining about mobs not dying is sitting in one stance for nearly the whole fight. Of course it will take you a long time and of course you won't kill anything. I rarely sit in one form longer than 20 seconds. I am constantly shifting and I find it VERY easy to kill shit. For the record I run - Light,Fang,Hope ----Also have you upgraded your weapons? I am sitting around lvl 15 to 18 with everyones weapons.
I am sorry - I don't mean to rant - I just can't stand people bashing this game over things I don't see as an issue. Ah well - to each their own. I love FF 13 and IMO its the best RPG this gen so far.
Overall I give this a solid 9 out of 10 for me. I will probably play this game a few times over the years and probably a second time as soon as I beat it the first time. Anyone who skips this game because of what others say is only missing out.
Bad, but not terrible, at least for an FF game.
The game started off strong, beginning in a place that reminded me of Midgar. However, it soon turned out to go bad way too quick. You see, I assumed that as time went on, the game would improve. I expect the first few levels of any game to be linear, but FF's have always opened up soon after, and even if they were a straight path, they still had several branchs that rewarded you for exploring. These branches came in around chapter 9 out of 13. Look, I loved X more than most people, but even I couldn't stand just how confined I was in 13.
Then you have the combat, which pretended to be more action oriented than the others. However, it forgot a huge detail that I could never get over (much in the same way how a lot of people complained about Brutal Legend, with its sandbox focus, didn't allow you to jump): moving your character. You were at the mercy of an AI to move them, and only really controlled the character when they attacked. This meant that dodging that tail swipe aimed at the entire party was dependent on how suicidal your AI was feeling at the time. Look, Square, I know that you're able to grand us control over motion and combat at once. I've played both XII, Kingdom Hearts (Yes, they were made by different teams, but they still operated under the Final Fantasy name), and Parasite Eve.
Another problem was just how little Final Fantasy was in the game. Look, I know every Final Fantasy is different, but they're connected by similar themes. These were barely there in this one. Sure we had Chocobos, and named summons appear, but they all seemed sort of forced in. You had an area based off of what I assume was Golden Saucer, but it only existed so a very false sense of peace (which I didn't even fool me for a moment) could be put up before you were attacked again. The summons themselves were practically thrown in (like the B&Bs from MGS4, they existed outside of the fights with them, but in the grand scheme of things, were more like bosses thrown in more for the need of a boss in a level rather than them being an important enemy). The point is, the game could have easily been a different, unrelated JRPG without much being changed.
Then you have the story, in which the characters seem deteremined to take as many detours as possible before FINALLY admitting that they've padded enough and head along the main story, which has been sitting around feeling neglected. Also, the game introduces things at rapid fire early on, making everything very confusing and strange, only to move onto a dead zone where nothing is really introduced or done (which does allow you to process the previous information, but is damn boring from a narrative perspective). In short, the game feels like it padded itself to reach its 13 chapters when it only needed 5 or 6.
Let's look at the change between chapters too. A chapter change always means a HUGE jump in difficulty, which although I can respect that to a point, becomes absolutely outragous near the end. I've always had to grind in JRPGs, especially in Final Fantasies, but the amount I have to do in order to face the monsters of the 12th chapter made me take a break from the game or risk snapping my controller in half (allow me to say this, some of the enemies in that chapter, who are unavoidable by the way, are as strong if not stronger than the toughest enemies in the previous chapter, some of whom you weren't told were incredibly strong when you first arrived, leading to your instant death). The game stopped being fun and turned into a chore, all for the sake of making you spend more time leveling up.
Speaking of leveling up, remember the sphere grid? Well its idiot cousin is here, just as restrictive as before, but now pretending to be something else. You CAN decide to make a character into a class different from the 3 you begin out at, if of course you decided to spend even more time grinding for an impossible amount of AP. You also can grab those upgrades on the side of the grid, but keep in mind that they too will be insanely expensive (with the ones near the top taking forever to be affordable). The only improvement here is the ability to go back to any point on the winding spiral upwards and expand out into a branch without spending points to go backwards. It does get points for being more interesting to look at than the sphere grid, but that's about it.
The story itself is mostly forgettable, save for a few events here and there. Sure the villain deserves a lot more credit than he will ever get (he should be up there with Kefka, Kuja, and Sephiroth in terms of great FF villains as he destroyed as much as the first two and is extremely similar in story to the last one) but due to the difficulty of his first fight, his character design, and how very little his motives are expanded on, he'll probably be forgotten.
He doesn't come anywhere close to Yevon though, because although he screwed the world over without anyone knowing, he really isn't anywhere close to the asshole level Yevon achieved after he created a religion that took control over the world after making the monster, and kept it alive in an unimaginably evil way, it was sworn to save the people from, and made it so that saving the world from him could very well destroy it. XIII's villain got the last part right though, so he was at least aiming high
However, the design of both characters and environment was well done (Nomura must have been locked in a closet because while there are more belts than necessary, there aren't nearly enough to satisfy him), and the voice acting (for all but Vanille) was just right, so the game isn't completely awful.
It's meh to average to good. It's odd really because in a complete turn of events in the case of Final Fantasy games, I liked most of the characters and hated the world and story. Usually its the other way round. (Yes I even liked Vanille. She's a heavy metal fan you see)
(Poor lass must have arhritis in her knees by now though)
Let me sum up the plot of FFXIII in one sentence, "It's pretty much the plot of Sands of Destruction, only less interesting.", really you get turned into some dudes minions and he want you to kill god, end of story.
This is a pretty mixed result, I personally loved everything about the game.
It was exactly what I expected from a Final Fantasy title and especially one I looked forward to so much.
I loved it. It's linear to start off with, sure, but the whole series is like that. It is fair to say you have to play for a while before it gets good,Snow is a terrible character and Vanille needed a different voice actress.
On the other hand, the setting was interesting, the plot was fast paced and exciting, the themes were well communicated, the combat system was excellent and Hope's character development made him one of the best characters in the game.
I haven't actually finished it yet, I've been on Pulse for a little while but those are my impressions so far.
I played for a few days, got to a boss fight that was taking ages. I almost got him to about 25% health (but for all I know it could have been just the end of a stage). He then killed everyone, I put the disc away and never put it back in. I couldn't be bothered to try again.
But to answer the question I was enjoying the game, it just din't feel as if I was getting anywhere with it and knowing it was only going to get harder didn't excite me. Guess it serves me right for not playing RPGs that much.
Combat
I thought overall this game was good- if you take away the combat system. I honestly think they should have made battles real time to keep the player immersed into the game world b/c transporting to a battle arena (prctically ever 1-3 minutes) gets tiresome and made me not want to fight enemies at all. I also think they should have made the player be able to move his/her character around. It'd make the battles feel more realistic.
Music
I personally hated the fact that they took away the grand classical musical scores from the previous iterations and added a more techno...whatever. I hated listening to that while I traversed an extremely long hallway.
Graphics
Yes they were great but I consider a 9 Uncharted 1 or Killzone 2 and a ten the likes of Uncharted 2 and God of War 3. Pretty close to that status though.
Story
The story was bleh. They were trying to be creative but it had too many stupid plot twists (like that guy who initially helped you being a l'cie traitor) and wasn't compelling enough to be a memorable 9. This wasn't one of the games faults though.
I enjoyed it. However, there are many things that I really didn't like, those being:
-Extremely linear. I usually like linear games, as long as you can go back to previous area. Miss something in the Sunleth Waterscape? Too bad. You're never going there again.
-The fact that there is no leveling up for the first 2 hours.
-The battle system, while being good on paper, gets to be extremely tedious.
-The huge difficulty spike once you get to Gran Pulse. I HATE difficulty spikes. Half of the enemies there, you can't take on unless you did lots of level grinding.
-You don't earn money in battle. This makes you really tight on Gil, meaning that you can't afford to buy very many weapon upgrade items. Which takes me to my next point...
-Weapons upgrade really slowly. Yes, I do know about the multipliers.
-Weapon upgrading is pretty much necessary. You can't just find a Helter-Skelter Gunblade; you have to upgrade that Gladius first.
-ONE ridiculous mission-completion sidequest. I love sidequests, and I wish this'd have more.
-Padded. There's so much padding on this game that it could survive a fall from near orbit.
-I really wish that there were people on Pulse...
-Vanille could've had a better voice.
-You can't move freely during battle. At all. They could've AT LEAST given you a reaction command-like dodge move...
Despite this, I had some fun with it. It's not the worst game that I've ever played, but it's certainly not the best. I liked the characters and the story was pretty good, but the game itself was so linear that it might as well have been an interactive movie.
This is a pretty mixed result, I personally loved everything about the game.
It was exactly what I expected from a Final Fantasy title and especially one I looked forward to so much.
All of the main series except XI, most of the Tactics franchise, Crystal Chronicles for Gamecube and I'm a big Squaresoft/Square Enix fan.
Basically, I expected XIII to be as it was because, each Final Fantasy is different or edited in different ways. The only thing that REALLY links every single Final Fantasy is change. From I to XIII and all of the side games, every single game has been different.
XIII is much different from every game in the franchise, but a lot of them are.
In essence XIII is just an advanced version of X with X-2's battle system just enhanced and story telling elements of VI, a change in levelling (it was a bad version of the Sphere Grid, I'll admit where game went wrong), everything else was different. Yes it was linear, but it was only linear to give the story a bit of urgency and a sense of being alone, being lost. There isn't such a thing as urgency in open world gameplay, not in any game I've played anyway. The only reason people didn't like the linearity of XIII and loved the linearity of X is that since then, games have been very sandbox, people have gotten used to that and it's pretty much become standard now. For story purposes, especially ones that require character development and a certain feeling around them, in games the gameplay needs to be controlled.
It's different in Bioware's RPGs because recently (the two IPs I've played you've had a hub, whether it's the spaceship or the campsite, you have some way of getting to know all of your characters without them putting any real effort into having the characters do much, letting you have complete control and having the characters as back ups with no real back story unless you talk to them for hours. The reason these games can give a sense of urgency is because they aren't sandbox, you pick a location and you go there in a cutscene or on a map but they're going for a different feel. Never in either game do you feel lost or overwhelmed, you feel in control and you know you're going to win. These games are VERY linear, just they don't feel it because you actually decide stuff yourself, it doesnt make that much difference (so far anyway). None of the environments are at all different from FFXIII's corridors, both Mass Effects and Dragon Age are long corridors of enemies, just you get to decide what your party does instead of being swept up in massive story and having no choice.
Bethesda (the ONLY OTHER big WRPG developer this gen) does things a different way because it uses a sandbox, if anyone can tell me that Oblivion or Fallout 3 have a great narrative and story and that's why you bought and love it, then you're lying. We love Oblivion and Fallout because of what you can do and the atmosphere of the world within the game. Cyrodil is this HUGE world in which you can do anything, you can be a thief, a fighter a mage, an arena champion BUT you can also just be a civilian if you want to, you can buy a house, do non violent quests, be an alchemist, play the game how YOU want. If you don't want to do the main story, you don't have to because that's not what the game is about, that's just a segment of it.
Sorry for the huge amount of text, it wasn't all directed at you, I just decided to write and I didn't stop, I'm not even sure if all this makes sense or it's all I actually have to say but I'm gonna stop before I fill this thread with random crap.
Personally I thought it was a pretty good game. Not too sure about why some people complain about the huge difficulty spike when you get to Gran Pulse. You don't HAVE to fight the massive beasts. Have you ever tried avoiding them?
Sorry if this is a double post but I felt it needed a seperate comment.
Why does everyone seem to think this game has a ton of grinding? They literally stopped the need for grinding, if you fought every monster you saw (which unless you're playing The Last Remnant you really should, this is a JRPG, it's what you're supposed to do) you get to the end of the three main crystallium grids for each character at the end of most chapters, the fact that CP earned carries over to characters you weren't playing as helps too, because, y'know you don't have to play catch up with anyone when you get them all back.
If grinding IS present in this game, I don't think any of you have been playing it properly.
I grinded once at the end of the chapter in Palompolum to finish off my Crystal Grid and once at the end of Gran Pulse chapter because I actually wanted to see if I could get their job roles up high enough in other areas of each job to be of use.
The only REAL place I've found grinding is needed is after you've finished the game, if you want to 100% the game, then you might have to grind a bit. From what I've heard people got to chapter 11 and started grinding, here's a hint, you know those GIANT monsters, almost every monster wandering around Gran Pulse, you aren't meant to be able to defeat them until the end of chapter 11 the start of chapter 12, at the start of chapter 11, you're meant to die and think, oh I can't kill these so I'll avoid them, I remember at one point during a Sazh and Vanille chapter a tutorial message came up saying something like, 'Sometimes enemies in an area will be too difficult for you to kill, in these instances, run away' If you decided to ignore that message you'll be in for a series of 10 minute battlesn against one monster, you can win but it isn't exactly advised. So when you get to chapter 11 thinking you're strong and get flattened in one hit, you're supposed to think, oh I'm too weak to fight them I'll just avoid them like it said before and not, oh I'm too weak to fight them, I'll fight weaker monsters for hours on end before I carry on with the story JUST so I can beat this one monster.
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