Poll: Which is worse Final Fantasy X-2,12 or 13?

[Raziel_Likes_Souls]

Well, X-2 was more unnecessary plotwise than a morning after pill to a woman who's 6 months along, but it wasn't bad. I liked the combat system.

XII was meh, but it didn't take 6 years to make, and I at least liked Ivalice.

XIII was a waste of six years, and the amount of effort and polish into everything just kinda felt... rushed. I don't know why, but that's the feeling I get from it. The game is perfectly functional, and everything does what it should, but it feels bland, really.

The script wasn't the greatest, the characters take a while to develop, and are pretty much fucking unlikeable for the first 10 hours. And for some reason, I got this feeling that they were trying to go SMT a bit, with the whole sneaking up behind monsters thing, and the inabilty to control more than one character, and that if the main character dies, you're fucked. Not to mention the final boss took as long as Nyx. The combat system was good, but it was kind of boring to use when every goddamn weakass enemy takes 1-3 minutes to fight, even near the end of the game.


TLDR; I didn't like XIII. Not at all, not at all. Like this like that like this this like that.

 

[Harbinger_]

X-2 was ok for what it was, it was clearly a Final Fantasy game aimed at the fairer sex and thats fine, didn't really interest me when I owned it but I do have some fond memories of playing it.

XII I really enjoyed, the style of the world and the gameplay far outweighed a bit of questionable voice acting and poor character design (I'm looking at you Vaan!)

XIII makes me wish I could get back the time that I spent on playing it. Other than good CGI there was not a single redeeming quality about the game at all in my opinion. A game where it feels more like an MMO is never good and removing options and choices in combat in favor of presets isn't something I enjoy.

 

[LetalisK]

I've never played XIII, so I can't comment. But between the other two, XII was just bad. You'd think from what it completely ripped off..*cough*...I mean was "inspired" from I'd enjoy it, but they managed to fuck that up.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

I've only played a part of FF XIII, so that's the only one I can talk about

And I hated it. So I would happily state that it's the worst

 

[Zeema]

i LOVED X-2 beat it 3 times

and i liked 12 but 13 was terrible

 

[spacewalker]

i liked X-2, as an epilogue. I had always wanted to go nuts on a world after the final battle.
I felt 13 was the worst of them, great cutcenes though.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

I abandoned Final Fantasy X-2 after the first boss. It's still buried deep within my PS2 games somewhere, but it will never be played again.

I've completed Final Fantasy XII three times.

Final Fantasy XIII still remains unfinished. I got a couple of hours into Gran Pulse then stopped playing. However I was enjoying it and I have every intention of finishing it, eventually.

 

[Kotaro]

I liked both XII and XIII. Haven't played X-2, though, and I probably never will.
Sorry for the lack of explanation, but I can't really explain why I like them. They were just... fun? I don't know what else to say.

I'd say that it's a toss-up between III and VII for "worst" Final Fantasy.At least in my opinion.

 

[Mikeyfell]

I'd say 13 was the worst. run forward, press A 1 billion times. No thanks.

In my opinion 12 was the best. followed by 10 and 8
The license points were a little stupid but the combat was the best mix of real time and strategy the series had to offer.

X-2 was inoffensive to me. It wasn't close to good but it wasn't bad either.

 

[x-machina]

I don't like any of them, do I really have to chose just one to hate? Honestly, even the "greatest" Final Fantasies( like 7 and 10) are kinda just meh. I don't understand the popularity the series has.

 

[DBLT4P]

why choose? burn 'em all... and while you're at it throw in Raiden from MGS2 he belonged in one of those games....

 

[F4LL3N]

I played and loved both X-2 and XIII. Didn't really find anything bad about them, although they could have had slight improvements.

I played XII for about 1 hour before I stopped playing. I didn't like it, but I don't want to actually say I didn't like it. One hour is obviously not enough to make a fair assessment. But my main problem was I played it several years after I finished X and X-2, including several years after owning an Xbox 360. So my standards, mainly graphically, grew so much I wasn't able to give it a chance. I had the same problem with Kingdom Hearts 2. Number 1 is one of my favorite games of all time, but after owning a 360 for so long, I found it too out-dated to enjoy. Unfortunately.

With that in mind, XII, but I wouldn't look to far into it.

 

[Firstmark_Bannor]

It is my considered opinion that XIII was by far the worst game I've ever played. I hated 2/3 of the party, Snow and Vanille rock, the rest were rubbish. XIII's combat system was the killing blow for it though, selecting auto-battle every time is not fun. The paradigm system limited your abilities so bad it was almost unplayable for me. When I play an RPG I set up every character i have to be able to heal and deal damage at the same time. Everybody heals and everybody melees, if you can't fit that role then you can't be in my party. Having to assign roles in XIII negated any ability I had to do that. Now that being said I played through XIII and was completely startled when I arrived at the final boss. I had played through the entire game waiting for tutorial section to end.

X-2 was awful but at least functional. I know how bad this sounds but the all girl party just didn't sit well with me. Yuna and Rikku were fine, Payne was weird. Hell, Rikku was my favorite character from FFX and she was a main liner for me in X. But the dress sphere system, constantly changing clothes in combat, it felt like i was playing some bastard nightmare of Final fantasy and Barbi's play house. I just couldn't get into the story which was weird because i blew through most of it in two sittings. I barely remember anything about it other than abusing the dress sphere system with the super mode.

That brings us to XII, I loved XII. Easily one of my favorites up there with FF7. I wasn't really a big fan of Ashe, but Fran totally made up for her. Balthier is one of my favorite characters ever, he was just so damn calm and collected all the time. Vaan was moron but ultimately likable. Basch was alright nothing special. Penelo, she made this game worth playing. She is the kooky character this time around instantly catapulting her up my scales, combined with the fact she was very fast and reasonably strong she never left my front lines and was often the reason for victory. The combat system was just insane amounts of fun once you speed it up as fast as it will go. The gambit system that allowed you to program your own AI ensured that none of my characters ever dropped below 30% hp, coupled with the fact you could swap between characters as party leader in battle or just sub in the rest of your team, made for exciting battles that often involved all 6 of my party members subbing in and out for each other. The main plot wasn't grand but it was at least interesting and made sense. The summons were cool especially the fat one Cuchulainn. The mist chains were cool to see and a fun finisher for fights as long as it actually killed them. More than once I made long mist chains only to have the boss survive and me be completely out of mp. But then again you could regen MP just by wailing on monsters/bosses so there was always that.

 

[DirgeNovak]

X-2 was... er...what's the word I'm looking for... ah yes, shit.
XII was fucking awesome.
XIII was a pretty decent game despite a lot of flaws.

So... I'll go with X-2

 

[AlternatePFG]

I've only played XIII out of all of those, and didn't particularly like anything too much about it. Not saying it's a terrible game, it just never really interested me.

Except for Sazh. I liked Sazh.

 

[NickCaligo42]

FFX-2
X-2 has at least an interesting battle system. The writing is half-assed and stupid, the tone is all over the damn place, the characters are obnoxious airheads, but Square was at least trying to give it a fun tone and make a game based on proactive female characters, and I can honestly applaud the effort. If they'd put a little more effort into giving it a unified plot, maybe not have us fight the Leblanc gang every 30 minutes, it might have been really, really good. Half its struggle was following on 10, which, depending on who you talk to, was either one of the best games in the series and therefore a ludicrously hard act to follow, or one of the worst games in the series and a ball and chain around this game's ankle.

FF12
12's worst crime is being boring. It's predictable, the twists are incredibly weak, and the characters barely grow or change and have no chemistry. They're far from being the most obnoxious, stupid, or illogical characters, but throughout the game there's virtually nothing going on with these people. For instance...

Spoiler

Ashe wants revenge, and gets it. Balthier says, "I'm Cid's son," everybody goes, "okay," and they just keep on going like nothing happened. Vaan wants to be a sky pirate. He gets to be a sky pirate. Bashe goes "I'm not the traitor--I have a twin brother!" and everybody nods and goes, "this guy makes a lotta' sense!" taking him completely at face value.[/quote]

There's decent ideas, a few interesting concepts of political intrigue and ambiguity, and a very rich, detailed setting to support them, but they're really under-developed. It's a story that wants to be Akira Karasawa's Hidden Fortress but ends up being a degenerating Star Wars replicant.

Meanwhile the battle system itself isn't that bad... but, the presentation is really underwhelming. Tetsuya Nomura's character design, a staple of the series since 7, is completely absent, and thus we end up with fairly indistinct, generic-looking character models. All spells, regardless of scale, are tiny fireballs. This is coming off 10, which had eye-poppingly flashy and gorgeous special attacks and spells--and it's amazing what a difference that makes.

The real kiss of death on 12 for me is the awful license board, which is just broken. Before I ever left Dalmasca, I had all characters in the party at level 10, each with all three of their quickenings. To put that in perspective, that's like if in FF7, by the time you leave Midgar, you have all characters in the party and they each have all their Limit Breaks. The developers, keenly aware of how broken this system was, could only compensate by using extremely cheap, artificially-inflated bosses and monsters meant to account for the fact that you presumably had this power prematurely.

Even so, the worst? Nah, it's just kinda' meh in the aesthetic department

FF13
FF13, though... awful battle system, awful plot, awful characters, awful pacing, awful cutscene direction, awful everything. At the very least it brings back some of the sound and fury the series is known for, and I do actually dig the neo-baroque art style, but that's about all I can say for it. There's an interesting idea behind the battle system, but the player doesn't get nearly enough control for it to realize any of its potential, and the paradigm and stagger systems seem like unnecessary and needlessly abstract complications on an action system that could have stood on its own just fine with a little more emphasis on concrete logic--even with only one playable character.

The characters... cripes. I don't get what this game's fans see in them. They all have essentially three modes: 1 - bitching about whatever one defining life problem Square gave them, endlessly; 2 - bitching about their "focus" and general pseudo-philosophical debate; and 3 - irritating, grating friendship speeches that would make the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh roll their eyes with cynicism. Snow alone is enough to make me want to drive forks into my skull, but when Lightning said "I want you to find the hope you're named for!" I ended up shutting the game off for about a month. Bleh! These people make me sick! They sound like lines from a self-help book...

Then you've got the environments. Let's not even go into the linearity--that's never been an issue with gaming, and that's not this game's problem. Not really. They just don't feel like believable locations, and they don't offer any means of exploring the setting or getting to know the world around you or the people that you're fighting to save. Instead, you have a menu for that. Because I really wanted to read about a place instead of seeing it. Given my favorite part of a Final Fantasy game is its setting, this was an especially huge disappointment for me.

I can go on like this for a while, shit, I could write a bloody graduate thesis on why this game's designers and writers should be put in front of a firing squad for crimes against humanity, but I feel like I've made my case enough.

Here's another one that I want to put up for this debate... how about...

FF8
I'm surprised this one didn't make it on the list, given that it makes many of the mistakes of these other three plus several more. The magic system and leveling scheme are notorious. The storytelling is really disjointed, and it seems to make itself up as it goes along, pulling whole continents, governments, characters, and plots out of thin air. Just answer me this: who were the SEEDs at war with at the start of the game? And then why did they go from storming the beach at Normandy to having a prom?

 

[badgersprite]

X-2 was hilarious and stupid in all the right ways. XII had a combat and leveling system I couldn't stand but a good plot, well executed. XIII had no clue how storytelling in games was even supposed to work and was at once banal and pretentious in a way that heightens its overall obnoxiousness, like a bad fanfic writer who constantly drones on and on about how their work is ~deep, but I've slowly grown to appreciate its stupidity more and more with time.