yanipheonu said:
Vestsao said:
FFXIII is the only FF game I've played and I really like it... My heart is broken and I shall now email YZ about how wrong he is and how he should reviewing games..
Which raises a great point. A lot of the nay saying is due to nostalgia. Most (actually likely all, even the linearity) of the elements people don't like have been done in FFs before.
I know it would be wonderful if FFXIII was the same as your favourite, but Square wants to make what they want.
How is the naysaying due to nostalgia if all the points of contention are elements from previous games? That makes no sense
And regardless, it's almost the default "covering my ears, I'm not listening!" argument of people defending an entry into an established series to suggest this. Not that it doesn't ever happen, but really LISTEN to the things people are saying about it. The complaint isn't "this game has some minor linearity", it's "this game is TOO linear." There's a big difference there. The argument is thus that the game is more linear than its predecessors, not just that it is linear. Previous games all - repeat, ALL let you freely explore the environment to a certain extent (and I'm just talking about "Numbered" Final Fantasy games here, not Tactics, etc...) from the get-go. Sure you didn't get access to the entire world right off the bat, but unlocking more and more of it as you progressed and obtained new vehicles, etc... was part of the fun of exploring. They mixed this up a bit with FFX and FFXII, but you still had the ability to backtrack, sidequest, and explore a little bit (moreso in XII). Thus, completely removing this freedom from the game is a big change.
And yes, change isn't necessarily a bad thing, but having played the game myself I can safely say that, to me, every single mechanic change they implemented is just terrible, and makes XIII far less fun than any of the previous titles in the series.
ShibuyaRiver said:
Again, this whole '20' hours thing has been blown out of the water as well.
The game is actually pretty fun and opens up within the first four hours. Jesus. Stop being sheep and listening to everything your internet celebs say.
Because nobody could possibly actually dislike something you like... How exactly does it "open up" in four hours? You for damned sure can't make it to Grand Pulse in that time, which is the 20 hour mark everyone else is referring to. You're probably just talking about the combat system fully unlocking, but I don't really care about that, since the whole system is **** as far as I'm concerned. The "opening up" bit people have been talking about is when the game stops forcing you to run down straight-line corridors punctuated on either end by cutscenes, and 20 hours is a pretty accurate guess on that.
The combat system is the least-involving, least-nuanced iteration that we've ever seen with the ATB. You only directly control one character, and even that is a tenuous claim, because most of the time you'll just be hitting the auto-battle button, since battles occur in real time and thus wasted seconds are truly wasted. You can issue your party general commands with the paradigms, but think of how simplified that has made things - your control over your entire party has been essentially whittled down to the same level of control you have over squadron-mates in flight combat games like HAWX or Ace Combat. "Attack, Defend, Support" has been expanded to include "attack with magic, debuff the enemy, and heal us", but it's still an incredibly basic, AI-reliant mechanic that ensures most of what you'll be doing in battles is watching from the sidelines, casually tapping one button again and again until you need to paradigm shift. It's all just BORING. At least with Gambits when the game played itself it did so based on the rules YOU set for it.
