Zero Punctuation: Final Fantasy XIII

[Caiti Voltaire]

If it was actually true, sure. It has a slow start. The first 10 hours are very slow. The plot develops slowly, the battle system develops slowly. That is followed by a solid 30 hours of game play depending on how fast you went through the combat and how much of the side content you explored. Considering few other games give me 30 hours of solid enjoyment I'd say it was worth it.

Even if we get past the slow start, simply having 30 hours of gameplay, or whatever arbitrary number we attach to the game length, the slow start is indicitive of the fact that the game story is slowly paced and not very engaging. I want to say that the rising action takes way too long but it seems somewhat of a stretch to call it either rising or action.

To me it adds nothing new, seems rather samey, and perhaps most importantly, it doesn't seem like much of a game. The gameplay seems to consist mostly of carting characters from fight to fight occasionally having to listen to them spout confusing and poorly-written (or perhaps simply poorly-translated) dialogue. This is part of the point I'm getting at an it is in fact perhaps the most important point - if you are going to have a slow story you had best have some engaging elements of gameplay to act as sufficiently entertaining filler.

 

[Caiti Voltaire]

It's indicates it takes a while to get setup. The problem is that the games does get deep on a number of levels. Such depth does take some time to get setup.

Planescape: Torment did deep in about an entire game-length of FF's setup, so I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Poorly written is what it is, and badly paced.

 

[Saarai-fan]

Pretty much what I expected from Yahtzee's review. I do love the game, but even I understand his points. Even the first few hours of playing it, I too felt little caring about who the characters were since they were pretty much throwing plot elements everywhere in the story at once without giving me time to soak all in my brain. It is indeed one of those games that takes a bit of time to get good with it's gameplay, it's characters likeable, and it's story to at least get to some degree of understandable.

The only thing Yahtzee really said that caught my interest was at the end, with the caption saying he's checked and there's already Erotic fan art of FFXIII online. Might as well check that. Sure Vanille is a little annoying at first when you play the game and acts like an alien of sorts, but like all the characters she becomes likeable to some degree as the story progresses, and even I can't help but to feel like acting like Wayne and Garth going "Shwing" when she was first introduced in promontional videos and art of the game. LOL

 

[crystalsnow]

No surprise here.

 

[demoap]

great review, as always.

 

[ilion]

The best narrative in FF will probably always be Tactics.

 

[Rockdalf]

Meh, I really didn't expect a review of this game and honestly didn't want one from Yahtzee.

It's one thing to review a game from a genre you admittedly detest, it's a whole other thing to only spend five hours doing so.

Maybe next week.

 

[PH3NOmenon]

Planescape: Torment did deep in about an entire game-length of FF's setup, so I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Poorly written is what it is, and badly paced.

So 30 hours of enjoyment means nothing? Have it your way.

I think the point is mainly that the 30 hours aren't 30 hours of enjoyment. They're 10 hours of enjoyment and 20 hours of grindyness and tedious, uninteresting padding.

Mind you, I think Yaht is forgetting that for its target audience, this game is good. He simply isn't the target audience. But good luck in getting any FF fan to admit that when viewed objectively, the games aren't *good*.

Good =/= You think it's good. As soon as we all accept and acknowledge that, we can move on.

 

[DracoSuave]

So after saying he liked FF6 because it was a quick 'just hit X to kill things' battle system, he complained that ff13 had a quick 'just select auto-attack' battle system.


Riiiiiiight.


I love you Yahtzee, but sometimes, cognative dissonance is displayed.

 

[jackelbeaver]

Across the board I basically hear people that even love the game (professionals like say...Jeremy Parish) talk about how the first 8 hours or so are really terrible and don't paint a good picture of the game to come, and that once you get to "the second half of the game" the game is supposed to heel turn and become incredibly good and explorative and combat focused and strategic and all that shit. I'm actually quite interested to hear what your thoughts would be after getting to that half of the game, maybe in your next Extra Punctuation column?



From the start I was interested in this game because of the idea (it was conveyed in the initial trailer just not explicitly) of playing a jrpg where you use an entire party's worth of attacks and tactics in a single character (with multiple attacks per turn). Basically speeding these things the fuck up so I'm not fighting like i'm still running on 8bit hardware that has trouble loading multiple things into memory at the same time. Seriously do we still need to be getting jrpg's that are just the dragon quest battle engine still?

 

[Splitfire3]

ahahaha=D the put your hand on a stove joke cracked me up^^ awsome

 

[Goenitz]

Wow, Was I the only one to find this episode.....Alot worse than usual?

Nope, this one was way worse than usual.

Yeah, I thought Final Fantasy VI was the peak of the series too.

That's cause it was.

 

[Ardna Xela]

Watched the video again and this time I lol'd. Hard.
<3

 

[Your once and future Fanboy]

Mph...
This is going to be a long one...(sigh)...(inhales)...

First of all i realise this is going to make me seem like a fanboy in more ways than one. I didnt expect Yathzee to like this game (no mater the quality of the game), and i do enjoy all his reviews (even the ones i really disagree with, like MGS4), but i feel this one gives me enough strife to comment.
when it comes to the idea of critiquing a JRPG or a Western RPG for that matter based on the first few hours, is ludacris. just think if he had done that with Condemed 2, then it would be his game of the year (his own words, see the review). But when it comes to a game like FFXIII, reviewing the first hours of that would be like if you just reviewed the last hours of Condemed 2. You would only get the "bad" parts. Everyone who have ever played one of these games know the third to the final act are the highlights.

The characters of FFXIII didnt intrigue me at first, but they are later redeamed. Even Vanille (who everyone have been bitching unfairly about in my opinion) and Hope are really fun characters who have great emotional conflicts that you become geniunly invested in.

The combat, i must agree, is complete bullshit... The first hours! After a while you encounter enemies that require real strategy (and repetition in some cases). And when you come to that point, the real challange of the game comes in to play, it can be trully rewarding.

I woun't get into the "its the same as all the other games" when it comes to the story. Because even Yathzee's favourite games (i.e Silent Hill) suffer from the same things, but as long as he likes it, the same rules doesnt apply.

Other than that there is two samll things i need to confront, first of all i never reacted to the "loud" footsteps and Secondly, and this is the thing that may result in me being branden a fanboy, I cant belive he played it on XBox 360! I mean even Square have admidted that the 360 vesrion is almost like a beta version. I where so bad that they faked the screen shots for press realeses ( No lie, they fotoshoped the X, square, O, triangle buttons off a PS3 screen shot, and inserted the A, B, X, Y.)

Again i did enjoy the review, and i am a real fan, even my username is a play on a quote from ZP, I just felt i had to comment on this review.

 

[CmdrGoob]

Spot on review.

Ignore the fanboys, if the game isn't interesting within the first 5 fricken hours, then it has very serious problems.

 

[Dogmeat T Dingo]

I dunno, I think he was pretty generous to give the game five hours, personally if I don't find what I'm playing entertaining after one it's either exchanged or shelved. I don't see why I should waste time playing through hours of crap game play to get to the good stuff when I can just go out and get a game that's good right from the beginning.

Personally I only found the SNES FF games even remotely entertaining, with pretty much every other game in the series I bothered to take a look at I felt I could do better by just... I dunno, watching a movie or something. At least then I wouldn't have to grind my party through a repetitive and mind-numbingly boring combat system to get powerful enough to unlock the next scene. The only exception was FFXI, which somehow made the franchise even less appealing to me. But as it was an MMO I'm willing to disregard it.

I loved the review even if it wasn't the most professional one ever, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a single FF fan who will be turned off from buying the game because of it.

 

[Grahav]

So much hate that even scared me. Specially at the end of the video. Did he just april fooled himself?

 

[sfried]

Yeah, I thought Final Fantasy VI was the peak of the series too.

Yes, this is precisely what we need to be clear about.

When FFVII came along, it introduced many of the things that I HATE HATE HATE that the series has somehow come to be known for from henceforth, if not the whole establishment of the "JRPG" trope that was only so recently created.

You see, there was this character designer in FF3/FFVI who usually designed monsters. They were great monsters, mind you, but then he went on and was made to do character designs for VII and later, and his style with characters it, to say the least, quite questionable. Spikey hair leads? Air-headed party members? and most of all, EMO? Yep, this dude, along with the newly assigned director of Final Fantasy pretty much turned the franchise into that nerdy district in Tokyo. You know, the one where they think "goth lolita" looks cute?

So yes, the series is trash now, but it wasn't always like that. Playing the Super Nintendo installments and perhaps you might understand why, aside from the fact maybe some things do look better in 2D.

And there's sand in my boots.

 

[FinalHeart95]

Well, I love the game, but I can clearly understand why others would hate it. I guess that's why I found the review amusing.

However, the paradigm shift system is very strategic, unless you don't care how long the battle takes as long as you win. I personally went for five stars every battle, and that made me try to think outside the box.

Also, complaining that FFXIII isn't as fast as FFVI? Really? Because I found it to be a much faster battle system than any Final Fantasy I've ever played, including VI.

 

[Lord_Seth]

I payed very careful attention to the plot of God of War III, and had a discussion with a friend about this. Anything but Gods killing Gods is ludicrous. I didn't say he didn't like games. But he has said several times that he dislikes JRPGs with the exception of Earthbound, and another really old game I forget, probably FF4, back when the Final Fantasy's starred total badasses like Yang and Kain.

In his Super Paper Mario review, he said the "two exceptions" to his dislike of JRPGs were Earthbound and the Paper Mario series. I suppose we can add the earlier Final Fantasy games (or at least Final Fantasy VI) to that list as well.

What I'm amazed about is the sheer number of comments. It's the day the video came out and this already has more comments than most of his videos get after several days.

On a completely unrelated note, I'd really like to see Yahtzee review Ace Attorney Investigations, just to see what he thinks of it.