Astralpulse said:
20 hours in order to get into a story is not acceptable. Not for a book or game. 5 hours should be quite acceptable to at least get a good grip on the story. FF XIII did not do this very well, at all, unless you read the datalogs, which is an extremely poor way to give story information for a game.
Not acceptable to you, maybe. But that says nothing about it except that you didn't have the patience to stick with it. And even if it is, Yahtzee is paid (I assume) to review games. It is NOT too much to ask to have said reviewer play the entire game before posting up a lot of hate-filled bilge online. Some of his points are correct, but others are disingenous, and he'd know why had he finished it. The Escapist's other review of FFXIII is far more balanced and truthful, if less amusing then this.
Why is this? Because they bothered to actually stick with it and play the game to the end. Now, if you or I were doing it that might be a bit much to ask, but for a professional job it's lazy at best and shocking at worst. If a movie critic watched the first half an hour of a film and wrote his review based on that he'd be ridiculed, and rightly so. Same logic applies here.
I personally found the story easy to get a grip on, and I'm really not getting the hate on this Datalog business. The game is giving you more information then you need, for those who want to know more about the world and its characters, in an easy to find, simple, and completely optional format. What's not to like? It's not like you wouldn't understand anything if you didn't read them.
Astralpulse said:
No. No no no no no no. No. The outro to this video, where he killed off Vanille about 5 different ways? Hell yes. Vanille, Snow, Fang, Lightning, Hope; all terrible, all the the way through the game. Sazh was the only good character in the game.
Any evidence to back up this blanket statement? Or are you saying "I didn't like them, so they sucked!"? Sazh is the best character, I agree, but I liked Snow, Fang, and Lightning personally. Hope starts off whiny but gets better over time, and even Vanille grows on the player. None of them are terrible, and all of them go through character development provided you don't abandon the game. None of them are perfectly likeable, but that's realistic. If I ever met Snow, I'd probably punch him too, but that doesn't mean he's a terrible character- quite the opposite. Realism is part of what makes a good character.
Astralpulse said:
I can partially agree here. Anyone who frequents here knows Yahtzee hates JRPGs, so it would be much better to go read the thousands of posts on other forums saying some of the same things Yahtzee does here.
This game was the worst in the FF franchise.
One, I am not a regular on here. Two, I have read other reviews, and though most of them do point out some of the same flaws that ZP does, most of them at least go to the effort to point out the good parts, too. That's part of what makes a critic as opposed to simply someone who plays a bit of the game and declares it terrible- which is, ironically, exactly what ZP's done here. I'm not saying some of these complaints aren't valid, because they are. I'm saying the review is lazy and because of that it paints an misleading picture of how bad the game is. Again, he stuck with Heavy Rain despite being even more disconnected from the game then with FFXIII, and was able to point out that getting better over time was a redeeming point. The exact same is true of FFXIII, but he doesn't do the same here because he's not given it a fair review.
and a really dopey, lovey-dovy, friendship based, emotional plot.
