So um...What was so bad about Final Fantasy XIII?

[Overusedname]

The first FFXIII, ignoring the triology I mean. Is it really that bad?

I'm not asking sarcastically or anything. I actually don't know. It'll be quite a while until I can afford one of the consoles needed to play it...but I kinda like the look of it. It seems very pretty, expressive, Lightning seems genuinely badass and interesting, the music is great...Is it the story?

I rarely see a clear answer that people have a consensus on. Is it that bad? What good sides are there? I'm asking as an old FF fan (note the avatar) and I never saw the big issue from the trailers and gameplay I've seen. I just want some info. I'm an under-informed neutral for now.

 

[jehk]

For me it was the gameplay. The ability to explore the world and combat didn't open up until very late. Even then, what did open up wasn't that awesome. Decent at best.

The visuals and music were jaw droppingly amazing for me.

The characters were okay in general. Some I liked. Many I didn't. Their development felt akward.

 

[ThePuzzldPirate]

The first FFXIII, ignoring the triology I mean. Is it really that bad?

I'm not asking sarcastically or anything. I actually don't know. It'll be quite a while until I can afford one of the consoles needed to play it...but I kinda like the look of it. It seems very pretty, expressive, Lightning seems genuinely badass and interesting, the music is great...Is it the story?

I rarely see a clear answer that people have a consensus on. Is it that bad? What good sides are there? I'm asking as an old FF fan (note the avatar) and I never saw the big issue from the trailers and gameplay I've seen. I just want some info. I'm an under-informed neutral for now.

For one, The story is a convoluted mess, it does not spend a second to explain anything that goes around you, It just spews Jargan and expects you to know what it means. The game is extremely linear(worse than COD) where pushing forward is all the brain power you need. What good character it might have are completely dragged down by the bad ones. It uses a grid system like FF10 for leveling and skills yet somehow even made the super linear. And the biggest sin of all, It never feels like your playing, every single battle feels like a big circle jerk on the graphics. It's cinematic all right cause you don't do a damn thing.

 

[Ryotknife]

linear as all hell

characters are a mixed bag.

complicated story

It actually has one of the best combat systems in the series...after you take the training wheels off at about 35 hours into the game.

oh....the ending was kinda bad too, not nearly as bad as say ME3 or FFXIII-2, but the story takes a nosedive at the final boss. I actually liked the game a lot, but it had serious flaws.

To SE's credit, they did try to fix these problems in FF13-2, and mostly suceeded. They just also F'ed up in new ways.

 

[OrpheusTelos]

Really, it's that the game wasn't what everyone expected after going through a rather tumultuous development. Personally, I enjoyed the game, although I can't fathom how it deserves so many sequels. xD I'd like to see new Final Fantasy stuff, guys.

 

[TaintedSaint]

yes all jrpgs are rubbish. there is no real role playing in them. FF13 was even worse not only did you have no real role playing .. the game basically made you follow one straight path the whole way. No role playing and no exploration. If a developer wants to make a movie then make a movie don't try to hide your movie and pass it off as a game. I'm looking at you Kojima and your failed film career.

 

[ultrabiome]

the slow start before you have any real control of your party. the linearity of the start. how you aren't really giving your characters commands, you're telling them what roles they play.

however, the linearity of the battles and the lack of options were really all training for the paradigm shift system. each battle had a point, some tactic they wanted you to try or figure out (by force basically) so that you'd know what options you have when you finally unlock all 6 roles for each character.

its really more about timing your paradigm shifts to not break your attack rhythm, keeping buffs and debuffs active, and defend properly. manually entering in attacks will only slow you down in most cases (i did occasionally manually enter in debuffs, but that was rare).

 

[kyogen]

No, it isn't that bad. It isn't the best of the franchise, but I quite liked it. Don't try to stem the flow of the "let's hate on Square-Enix" bile, though. It still needs its purge.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

It never wowed. It was simply average the entire time. There were no peaks in gameplay.

The battle system was ridiculous too, when it takes several minutes to beat one basic enemy encounter, usually consisting of the same strategy over and over again, it's not a good sign.

My personal theory is that they spent so much time overreacting to the idea that JRPGs focus too much on story and not enough on gameplay that they went too far in the other direction and STILL failed to provide adequate gameplay (though before XII I'd never actually been disappointed with FF gameplay).

 

[alphamalet]

As someone who has played just about every other Final Fantasy, I liked Final Fantasy XIII. It's nowhere near the best, but still worth experiencing. The story is no more convoluted than say Final Fantasy VII, and the game is just as linear as Final Fantasy X. What the game suffers from, and nobody ever acknowledges because they just regurgitate what they read in an idiotic review, is poor pacing. Like I said, "linearity" is not the issue with Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy X was just as linear, and people still liked it. Final Fantasy XIII is poorly paced. Reason being, all you can do is fight monsters and watch cutscenes. Nothing else. No towns along the way, no stores, no minigames. It's a death march for the entire game. If Square-Enix had added something to break the cycle of FIGHT, CUTSCENE, FIGHT, CUTSCENE up, then the game probably would have been far better received.

As for the battle system, it's slow at the start, but when you get toward the end it is very engaging (like every other Final Fantasy). You are having to micromanage many things at once, and quickly change the roles of your party to adapt. It's an interesting system. Anyone who says it doesn't involve the player, and all they did was "Mash X" simply didn't play the game. The level progression is basically the same as the sphere grid, but in 3D.

Go into it with an open mind and give it a shot.

 

[Andy Shandy]

As far as I was aware while playing it at the time, nothing much. The only previous FF I had played was FFXII, and it was mainly previous FF fans complaining, so I think it may have been that I had never had the past quality/nostalgia googles of the other games.

 

[Aesir23]

As someone who has played just about every other Final Fantasy, I liked Final Fantasy XIII. It's nowhere near the best, but still worth experiencing. The story is no more convoluted than say Final Fantasy VII, and the game is just as linear as Final Fantasy X. What the game suffers from, and nobody ever acknowledges because they just regurgitate what they read in an idiotic review, is poor pacing. Like I said, "linearity" is not the issue with Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy X was just as linear, and people still liked it. Final Fantasy XIII is poorly paced. Reason being, all you can do is fight monsters and watch cutscenes. Nothing else. No towns along the way, no stores, no minigames. It's a death march for the entire game. If Square-Enix had added something to break the cycle of FIGHT, CUTSCENE, FIGHT, CUTSCENE up, then the game probably would have been far better received.

As for the battle system, it's slow at the start, but when you get toward the end it is very engaging (like every other Final Fantasy). You are having to micromanage many things at once, and quickly change the roles of your party to adapt. It's an interesting system. Anyone who says it doesn't involve the player, and all they did was "Mash X" simply didn't play the game. The level progression is basically the same as the sphere grid, but in 3D.

Go into it with an open mind and give it a shot.

This pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings. I didn't mind the abundance of cutscenes and while the linearity irritated me slightly, the battle system annoyed me to no end. Especially the battle system. Just pressing X/A made it incredibly boring. I realize that you could manually choose your moves but with the way it was set up you lost valuable time and possibly HP doing so. Also, the fact that it was game over if the group leader died irked the hell out of me. I have Pheonix Downs and Raise for a reason!

Aside from that, however, I did like the game. Particularly the story and the characters.

 

[Gizmo1990]

The first FFXIII, ignoring the triology I mean. Is it really that bad?

I'm not asking sarcastically or anything. I actually don't know. It'll be quite a while until I can afford one of the consoles needed to play it...but I kinda like the look of it. It seems very pretty, expressive, Lightning seems genuinely badass and interesting, the music is great...Is it the story?

I rarely see a clear answer that people have a consensus on. Is it that bad? What good sides are there? I'm asking as an old FF fan (note the avatar) and I never saw the big issue from the trailers and gameplay I've seen. I just want some info. I'm an under-informed neutral for now.

For me it was almost everything.

The story was a mess. Most of the cutscenes never really explained anything and I had to read the plot sysnopsis in the game log. When I did read it it was not very interesting. To be fair it looks very nice but the music was not of the same quality others in the series were, but then Nobuo Uematsu no longer does the music for Final Fantasy.

The combat was beyond dull, you only ever control the party leader and if the leader is taken out you get game over. There is also no world exploration for about 20 hours. It is just going down different corridors to get to the next dull cutscene. I could have lived with this if the story had been good but as said above it was crap.

And the characters are the worst characters ever created (with the possible exception of River Song from Doctor Who. God I hate her). One character, Hope, is a litle kid who spends the whole game whining. He has a good reason but it still makes you want to drill a whole in your skull. And then their is Snow. Snow is a douche. Snow is a Super Douche. He is the King of douche land. If you took all the douche's in the universe and combined them to make a super ultimate mega douche, Snow would still be a bigger douche.

A few of my friends say if I look at it as just another game, and compare it as such then it is good. not great, but good. But I look at it as a Final Fantasy game and I compare it to the older Final Fantasy games and it does not hold up. I did not finish it and it is the first time I never finished an FF. And I finished Final Fantasy Return of the Jedi 12 and really hated that.

 

[dimensional]

I quite liked it the only real problem I had with it was the game didnt fully take off the training wheels until you had defeated the last boss which pissed me off a bit because the battle system is one of the best in the FF series IMO but they take the whole game to explain it and leave you hitting auto battle for way way to long.

Really though people had a preconception of what the game should be and for most it didnt match up hopefully they will change things completely for FFXV just like they did with this game and most of the others it keeps it feeling fresh if running the risk of sometimes making a dissapointing game.

 

[MammothBlade]

The linear - and thoroughly boring - gameplay, really. You just kept walking down a path, limited scope for backtracking or exploration, no proper towns inbetween frogmarching down the road. The battle system was dull and made every fight feel like a chore. There really wasn't that much scope for different gameplay styles as paradigm shift is all there is to it. You only control one character at a time, which is a big break from the FF series where you control each character's actions individually. Not saying that's always a bad thing, but it just wasn't fun. Compare it to FFXII, where the combat could be at least a little exciting. This was extremely repetitive and limiting.

The visuals were the strong point, especially the Sunleth Riverside. Yet I'm sorry, that doesn't make up for how boring it was to actually play.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I never really understood the complaint about the battle system. If you just hit X for every battle and nothing else, you'd be unable to progress a few hours into the game. The depth of the battle system isn't in selecting individual moves but balancing the paradigms. Now, I will say that it lacks true depth in that there isn't much to it besides Debuff/Buff/Healer to Magic/Magic/Magic to Com/Com/Com back to Debuff/Buff/Healer when the Chain resets, but that's pretty much par for the course for a turn based battle system. Buff/debuff then attack. But it's certainly not just 'mash X to win'.

As for the rest of it, I really had no complaints about FFXIII except that Hope and Vanille pissed me off for different reasons.

 

[geK0]

The game doesn't let you make any decisions until about 20 hours in; that completely defeats the purpose of it being an RPG in the first place!

The 'speregrid-like' system only gives you one direction to go and caps your level at different spots for each part of the game, so you can't make the decision to beef up your party (not that you ever really need to) AND there is no way to customize your party in any way.

The game doesn't let you change party members until you get to gran pulse.

There are no alternate routes, no backtracking, no exploring.

The game removes town hubs all together by turning the save points into the shop and upgrade center (makes the game feel a little dull imo)

The combat system encourages you to just auto-attack (I refused to), and even if you don't, you don't have many decisions until you unlock sabatuer and synergist.

I pretty much just played the entire game hoping it would get better, and even when it did, I was still kind of underwhelmed. Gran Pulse just seemed like a somewhat bigger version of the Calmlands in FFX, it really didn't make up for the rest of the game.

I did like the combat system though.

 

[OrpheusTelos]

yes all jrpgs are rubbish. there is no real role playing in them. FF13 was even worse not only did you have no real role playing .. the game basically made you follow one straight path the whole way. No role playing and no exploration. If a developer wants to make a movie then make a movie don't try to hide your movie and pass it off as a game. I'm looking at you Kojima and your failed film career.

There's a lot I COULD say, but right now I'm just wondering when Kojima ever made a JRPG. I want it.

 

[Mirroga]

A story can be linear (All FFs). And even the world may be linear (Kingdom Hearts Series). But never EVER make it that blatantly obvious that a gamer's suspension of disbelief cannot hope to ignore it. Look at how expansive and exploration-heavy FF12 was. It has hell-all linear storyline. But they made the world so big and so awesome that it feels like an epic adventure/pilgrimage. FF13 made me feel like I'm walking in a straight line. It doesn't help that the Map makes it feel more blatant and obsolete for the matter considering you will never ever get lost.