Poll: Is Final Fantasy XIII/XIII-2 The worst Final Fantasy games?

[Ironbat92]

So, with Final Fantasy XIII-3 coming out in 2014 and sale at Gamestop this weekend, I've decide to see if I can purchase both these titles. However, from what I've been hearing about Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequel has been over the place. A lot say it's the worst game in the series, some say it's the best. So, Escapist Forum, I want your thought. Is it the best or worst?

 

[Cabisco]

That or 10 for me.

I loved 8 and 9, thought 6 and 7 were alright (played them later) but 10 and then 13 were downright horrible in my opinion. I think 10 is worse to me personally because 13 only confirmed that the pile of shit 10 was part of a trend.

It's a shame really as the final fantasys were one of the first games I ever played, to see it get to a stage where I never want to play one again is quite sad in a way. End of a gaming era for me and all that, I bet this is how Sonic players felt.

 

[Thebazilly]

I couldn't finish Final Fantasy XIII. It was more the straw that broke the camel's back than anything, but it was still a terrible game. I wasn't the biggest fan of FF XII, and then playing XIII, I found none of the characters likeable or sympathetic, the story started out as nonsense and progressed into further nonsense (as opposed to the usual tactic of starting out as somewhat normal and then becoming balls-out absurd), and the game just wasn't fun to play.

There was no strategy involved in the fights. Since you were timed, you couldn't navigate menus fast enough to select all the attacks you wanted. So the devs gave you an option to "auto-select" attacks. And then you just pressed X and watched the game play itself. It was a step further from FFXII's gambit system. The level-up system also gave the illusion of customization underneath pretty shiny crystals, but was really just nothing but a linear progression when it boiled down to it.

I didn't play Final Fantasy XIII-2, and I don't think I'll be giving Final Fantasy games another chance at all because of XIII.

 

[WeepingAngels]

Anyone who says XIII is the worst Final Fantasy hasn't played Final Fantasy II.

Of course, if we are talking about PS1 and beyond then I still like XIII better than IX which was just too slow.

 

[Elfgore]

Well I've only played FF13 so I can only give judgement on it and not how bad it is compared to the others. The gameplay is like Thebazilly said, it handles combat for you. You just have to switch formations and occasionally use a revive or heal potion. The story... Well I'm on chapter 7 and have no clue what the fuck is going on so that should answer the story. The characters all suck besides one guy. You have: A *****, A guy who thinks with his dick over his head, a random Aussie person, a whiner, some woman, and a funny black guy. Not the best cast of characters. Even with all of it's flaws the game isn't that bad if you get it for like 10 or so bucks, it's a decent deal.

 

[piinyouri]

10-2 has possibly the best iteration of the ATB combat system I've seen.
It's not strategic at all, but it's fun in it's own way.

You could think of this way, older FF's are to Disgaea and 10-2 is to Makai Kingdoms.
The former being games that require a good amount of thinking and strategy and the former being pure beat downs.

 

[Miss G.]

Since I came into the series in '06 I've only played, in order:

X-2 wasted hours, I recall. I did like the ATB system it had, I'll give it that. I felt dirty once I looked at the reviews. Only then did I understand why my friend, a longtime fan of the series, gave me such a pitying look when she heard that I not only bought it, but it was my first time with a game that had the Final Fantasy title.

X because I wanted to see if it was better, didn't finish it but I enjoyed it a lot more than X-2 and ended up watching the Spoony One's review for the ending a couple years after the fact.

XII which I loved, but I still feel Balthier should've been the 'Leading Man' or at least Basch whom they originally replaced as lead for the ascended-side-character and all-around-unnecessary-to-the-plot Vaan.

III for the DS which I also loved.

... and XIII which I quit after an hour more than Yahtzee played, an hour that was spent reading the in-game encyclopedia just to figure out wtf was going on. Spoony's review only reaffirmed what I already thought of it.

XIII-2, I didn't even open the box and traded it in with it's prequel just to get them out of my apartment. I can only say they were the worst from my rather limited experience with the series.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Nah I thought XII was the worst. It was a shitty singleplayer MMO with a terrible story and a completely out of place main character.

 

[Mangod]

Anyone who says XIII is the worst Final Fantasy hasn't played Final Fantasy II.

Of course, if we are talking about PS1 and beyond then I still like XIII better than IX which was just too slow.

Strange, I liked IX a hell of a lot more than XIII; at least in IX you had some freaking idea what you were doing going into the game, starting out trying to kidnap the princess and then the situation spiraled out of control until you're stuck saving the multiverse from an Omnicidal Maniac.

XIII gave you no~o~o~o bloody context for what you were doing until several hours into the game, and then it takes even longer for the game to actually get good. I can agree that IX is a bit slow at the beginning, but at least you never had to sink 20 c***-gargling hours into it before the game "gets good".

 

[FootloosePhoenix]

There hasn't been a single Final Fantasy game I've played yet that I disliked...aside from XIII. And I hate it, honestly. The combat system and story are just so goddamn boring that I simply cannot stand playing it anymore. I've tried, but I can't. I can't do it; I refuse to do it. And you can't make me! So in my opinion, yes, yes it is the fucking worst (again, that I've played, but I find it hard to imagine a more soul-wrenchingly terrible experience lurking in the franchise. Dear Bahamut, that's a scary thought).

Needless to say, I never touched XIII-2 (except for the demo, which even then I barely played before giving up on it), so I can't say much about it. The general consensus is it's better, but still far from worth bothering with if you ask me.

Now, that said...I think Lightning Returns looks promising and this coming from someone who had a knee-jerk reaction of "RAAAAAAH, WHY IS SQUARE ENIX MAKING ANOTHER ONE OF THESE GODAWFUL THINGS? DIE, DIE HEATHEN! DIIIIIIIE!"

 

[WeepingAngels]

Anyone who says XIII is the worst Final Fantasy hasn't played Final Fantasy II.

Of course, if we are talking about PS1 and beyond then I still like XIII better than IX which was just too slow.

Strange, I liked IX a hell of a lot more than XIII; at least in IX you had some freaking idea what you were doing going into the game, starting out trying to kidnap the princess and then the situation spiraled out of control until you're stuck saving the multiverse from an Omnicidal Maniac.

XIII gave you no~o~o~o bloody context for what you were doing until several hours into the game, and then it takes even longer for the game to actually get good. I can agree that IX is a bit slow at the beginning, but at least you never had to sink 20 c***-gargling hours into it before the game "gets good".

What I meant by slow is that the ATB in IX is pathetically slow. The story in iX is fine, the characters are fine and the world is fine but if battle is slow....I couldn't finish more than once and that was back in 2000.

XIII is nice and fast and I guess I like that better in 2013. The story and characters in XIII were fine if you read the datalog (I agree that you shouldn't have to). Hope was the only character I really disliked and that passed once he stopped procrastinating about killing Snow.

 

[omegaweopon]

Tips to make XIII Enjoyable:
Turn off auto-attack
Ignore the story
Rush to post game.

Alright, what happens post game is that the game opens up considerably. More battles, that require some actual strategy to it, item hunting, optional areas, repeatable battles so that you can try to get better at them, and more overall customization. The crippling linearity is gone once the credits roll, and a lot of the battles become far more enjoyable.

If you remove the auto-attack, the game swiftly becomes about quick thinking, ad accurate menu navigation. The paradigms system actually Adds to the combat to make it more frantic, and takes more careful planning. In the last stages of the game, a paradigm swap to the wrong thing for too long could spell out doom for the party. However, after getting everyone's Crystarium maxed out, the best paradigm palette, is simply Paradigm x3 for each of the six roles.

No, the game is not great, it's merely passable, but it is far better than people make it out to be.

Now then. XIII-2. XIII-2 is far better than the prior game. It's a lot less linear, there's tons of things to do, hard battles (Until you get to a certain power level, then everything falls) The qualms I have with it, mostly lie in the leveling system. The leveling system does allow you to end up with significantly less than optimal characters. The monster raising aspect fits well, and actually lead to much better paradigm diversity (as each monster had a role, and you can only have three on your party, which means that though you can set up 6 paradigms, only three roles are available for the monster portion of your party at any given time) The ability to "tune" paradigms is a nice addition too, as it allows you to set whether the party targets individual enemies, or if they target the same one. The music is XIII-2 is kinda awesome, the things to do are so much better.

The plot is still garbage. Toss it out.

 

[shrekfan246]

However, from what I've been hearing about Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequel has been over the place. A lot say it's the worst game in the series, some say it's the best.

Welcome to Final Fantasy.

No, really, taking the average forum around the size of the Escapist, you could just have a list of every main-series Final Fantasy game, throw a dart at it, and whichever title it lands on you'd be able to find an equal number of people claiming it's both the "best" and "worst" in the franchise.

Personally, excluding X-2, XIII is the only game in the franchise I've played that I couldn't finish. I haven't played any of the pre-Playstation era ones (I don't count VI one way or the other yet, because I've only put a collective fifteen minutes or so into it), but I've played VII-X and XII and immensely enjoyed all of them. I still play VII and IX today and rank IX as one of my favorite video games of all time.

On the other side of the coin, a fair number of people with little or no exposure to Final Fantasy have few issues with XIII. Disregarding how crushingly linear it is, and how annoying the characters can be (which is mostly a personal thing anyway), the biggest problem it has in my eyes is just that it doesn't really feel like a proper Final Fantasy title, because about the only striking similarity it has to the earlier games is that the story is absolute insanity.

 

[alphamalet]

God no! Final Fantasy 8 is by far the wrost one I've played.

The draw and junction systems were terrible, and the story was ridiculous. Final Fantasy XIII is definetly not the worst.

 

[Altorin]

ehhh... they're all kind of the same.. Final Fantasy has always been about bombastic operatic setpieces, it was just locked in 16-bits so it was hard to see for itself. If you play say FF6 and then play FF13... 13 might be worse, but it's really exactly the same thing. People complain about "the hallway", but final fantasy has always had a hallway.

I think it's just taking nostalgia and looking through your nostalgia glasses in reverse gives you a headache.

 

[Magicite Spring]

My personal opinion is that FFXIII is not a good game by Final Fantasy standards, but is still a great game regardless that is unfortunately let down by pacing and linearity. Basically, if you love the earlier Final Fantasy's, you probably won't like FFXIII, but if you are like me and can get drawn into the story and world that the XIII portrays and don't mind linear levels, you will have a blast with it

 

[Roxas1359]

XII which I loved, but I still feel Balthier should've been the 'Leading Man' or at least Basch whom they originally replaced as lead for the ascended-side-character and all-around-unnecessary-to-the-plot Vaan.

Fun fact, Basch and Balthier were supposed to be the main characters of XII, but Square felt that they were too old for the audience to relate too so they made Vaan and Penelo.

OT: My answer was already stolen by Shrekfan pretty much. X was my first Final Fantasy and after that I played the old numbered ones going from I to IX. My personal favorite is XII actually because I liked the huge emphasis on sidequests and sequence breaking giving you good rewards. My least favorite is probably II, because...it's just so weird when coming from Final Fantasy.

That being said I still enjoy all the Final Fantasy games, and while XIII disappointed me I won't say it's entirely bad.

 

[loc978]

Best or worst at what? I'd say it's a natural progression for the series, really. Better looking than the last one, completely incoherent world and storyline. That's the direction they've been going since VII. Game mechanics have had their ups and downs since then, but since they started making MMOs they've tossed the classic line up direct control ATB system completely... What they replaced it with is like a distillation of MMO combat roles with an indirect party control scheme. Not my cup of tea, but I'd be remiss to call it objectively bad.

So...

If you're lookin' for a visual spectacle, lots of pretty lights and action sequences... XIII is great for that. Probably the best in the series.

If you're lookin' for memorable, relatable characters with understandable motivations interacting with a world that operates under consistent logic... XIII is terrible for that. Probably the worst in the series.