Zero Punctuation: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

[Roxas1359]

Lightning keeps coming back because she is Nomura's waifu and he wants to dress her up like that girl at the conventrion who is trying waaaay too hard to get noticed.

I honestly think Toriyama had more to do with...that than Nomura to be honest because Toriyama was the director and producer for all the XIII games, and we've seen how obsessed he is with Lightning. It's really creepy really.

 

[EternallyBored]

I'm just glad it's over. Onwards to XV and it's glory.

Hasn't the only thing released about FFXV been that gloomy looking trailer with the leather wearing, androgynous fella talking in a car?

*prepares party popper*

There's the latest gameplay trailer. So yeah, at this point it's basically closer to the Kingdom Hearts II combat model, it even has a single context sensitive button that pulls off those cinematic counter moves. At this point, any hope of FF going back to a more sedate turn based model is dead, and to be fair, if you liked the combat in Lightning Returns and KH II, that might not be entirely a bad thing.

I honestly think Toriyama had more to do with...that than Nomura to be honest because Toriyama was the director and producer for all the XIII games, and we've seen how obsessed he is with Lightning. It's really creepy really.

To be fair, Toriyama isn't solely responsible for XIII lasting as long as it did, even if he might be responsible for the fanservicey direction Lightning Returns took, and I also recently learned that X-2 was kind of his doing too, so I'm not sure if he just has a cosplay fetish he's trying to force on us, or what.

Anyway, SE has kind of sunk a crapload of money into the original XIII, as it was supposed to be a cornerstone of a whole new series of FF games, even now, they are still tagging FF XV as part of the Fabula Nova Chrystallis universe that XIII is supposed to be the foundation of the whole thing.

So, even without Toriyama, we would probably be getting stuff from the XIII universe shoved down our throat, since SE basically went all in on XIII being a sort of temporary soft reboot for the entire FF series. Of course, Toriyama is probably the reason that the series dived straight into X-2 territory as far as giving female characters fashion based superpowers.

 

[Epidemic Magick]

I think this video basically shows that Yahtzee doesn't understand why people play JRPGs. It doesn't matter if the plot is non-nonsensical or totally contrary to science or reality or sense. The entire thing happens in an alternate dimension where magic and monsters and other stupid things exist. You have to constantly learn now things apparently work in this huge fictional world and as long as it's consistent it's not going to bother JRPG players.

Hope being the age he was in Final Fantasy XIII instead of XIII-2 can be explained by the fact that the entire game of XIII-2 happens in a time loop and resolving it wipes it from the timeline. If you'd beaten it, you would know that.

The whole jRPG thing seems to have become about writing the most ridiculous story and executing it in the most elaborate way possible. I'm not 100% sure why I enjoyed playing Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 but I imagine I'm going to enjoy this too. Maybe I'm just broken inside, but there are a lot of other broken people too.

P.S. I like Lightning too, probably because she's basically just an avatar for the player and not a real character. Hope is very annoying and I wish they'd picked someone else for the sidekick in this, Sazh would have been great.

No, the problem is that Sqeenix turned the JRPG world on it's head with writing abhorrently bad stories with idiotic plotholes and awful unlikeable characters and the people bought into it, therefore influencing other studios to go over the top with their stories and ideas.

The finest example of what JRPGs used to be are the many RPG games made by indies nowadays. They care about their storylines much more, and tend to have only 1 or 2 leaps of logic in their stories (I'd say you always have to have a couple in these kinds of games).

SqEx just takes a sentence that would sound deep to a 12 year-old and would look cool as a tagline for the game, and builds the world around it, pasting any crystaline spiky thing they can think of into it, and filling up the character roster with same rethreads they had since FF7.

 

[Quellist]

Don't be timid - most people like FF12

Actually I meant I liked FF13....in fact I loathed 12 with the kind of passion most people seem to reserve for 13...

 

[deadish]

Ah well, FF13 has been pretty much a train wreck from the start.

The best SE can do is try to salvage it.

Some people enjoyed the sequels ... so at least there are some good elements to them.

 

[deadish]

Don't be timid - most people like FF12

Actually I meant I liked FF13....in fact I loathed 12 with the kind of passion most people seem to reserve for 13...

I like neither.

12 was boring. The story was boring. The gameplay was grindy (more than usual).

13 was a corridor with poor paced difficulty spikes - I gave up after getting to Gran Pulse, the fights were just getting tedious. The story was a bit of a mess ... although I did enjoy some of the arcs.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Don't be timid - most people like FF12

Actually I meant I liked FF13....in fact I loathed 12 with the kind of passion most people seem to reserve for 13...

Then I retract my recommendation.

Ah well, FF13 has been pretty much a train wreck from the start.

The best SE can do is try to salvage it.

Some people enjoyed the sequels ... so at least there are some good elements to them.

Is it ironic or just sad that FF13 starts with a train wreck?

 

[Something Amyss]

Thief came out yesterday.

He does not write, record, animate, edit and upload Zero Punctuation between Tuesday game releases and his Wednesday video time slot.

Well why not?

All he does is play games for a living! How hard can it be to play long enough for review material, write a script, perform it, and animate it?

....I am being facetious, but it's amazing the number of people who don't seem to get how much work goes into it.

 

[Roxas1359]

Well yes, Toriyama and Nomura both show us just what a personal fanservice mess this game was from the outset. I don't understand how they thought this combination of things would even approach being good, i guess they got to make their dress-up game in which their doll shows no emotion (really a bang-up female lead there) so for them it was a success but for the rest of the known universe it just further tarnishes the reputation of the flailing Final Fantasy brand.

You can generally tell when it's a character that Nomura makes because they have 1 or 2 of these things. One, way too many damn belts all over them, and two, an ungodly amount of zippers. *glares at Sora*

Well why not?

All he does is play games for a living! How hard can it be to play long enough for review material, write a script, perform it, and animate it?

....I am being facetious, but it's amazing the number of people who don't seem to get how much work goes into it.

Don't know what you're talking about man, it's easy to do something like this and because of it Yahtzee shouldn't be paid for it at all since all he's doing is playing video games and saying what he thinks about them. /sarcasm

[sub][sub][sub]*put there because sarcasm in text is hard to convey at times, and people seem to miss that*[/sub][/sub][/sub]

 

[Hutzpah Chicken]

Never saw the interest in JRPGs. Seems like a good game to skip over, much like everything else Yahtzee reviews.

 

[mike1921]

[That sounds like an odd viewpoint to take. The playstation 3 is cheaper than ever, and games will still be coming out for it for a few years. Who cares if it's technologically inferior if overall its a superior product and will remain as such for along time?

Personally, I think it's an odd viewpoint that a product has a long lifetime ahead of it when its parent company has released what is intended to be a straight up replacement to it.

I said games will be coming out for a few more years. I'm not sure I would call that a long lifetime ahead of it but it really doesn't matter. That is demonstrable. The game I'm most excited for, period, is a PS3 exclusive game coming out 2015 maybe 2016 (tales of zestiria if you care). Game production takes a long time, you can't switch consoles on a whim. The ps3 still has life left in it.

The new consoles always fail to be decent replacements without backwards compatibility. The PS4 is just not an inferior console to the PS3 by any reasonable measure. PricepointS3 wins and will for probably around a decade if not forever. Library: PS3 wins, PS4 only has mediocre to good release titles . Stability: Sony has had so many years to patch the PS3, the PS4 is new and much more prone to bugs. New releases: we still have two years of games coming out for the PS3. God of war 2 and Persona 4 both came out for the PS2 after the release of the PS3.

I don't see why it matters if the PS3 has a life ahead of it if you didn't see the much cheaper life behind it though. You can buy both Infamous games for $16 , you can buy the one upcoming Infamous for $60. Consoles get better long after the games are released, not when they're released because you get the same experience with more stability for a lower price. If you're convinced if you bought a PS3 it would only be for lightning returns: Fine it's probably not the best idea. I don't know why you'd ignore a whole library just because it's cheap though, or if you're not ignoring it and think the library isn't worth buying into I don't know why you think the PS4 library will be better.

 

[Cybylt]

Well yes, Toriyama and Nomura both show us just what a personal fanservice mess this game was from the outset. I don't understand how they thought this combination of things would even approach being good, i guess they got to make their dress-up game in which their doll shows no emotion (really a bang-up female lead there) so for them it was a success but for the rest of the known universe it just further tarnishes the reputation of the flailing Final Fantasy brand.

You can generally tell when it's a character that Nomura makes because they have 1 or 2 of these things. One, way too many damn belts all over them, and two, an ungodly amount of zippers. *glares at Sora*

Well why not?

All he does is play games for a living! How hard can it be to play long enough for review material, write a script, perform it, and animate it?

....I am being facetious, but it's amazing the number of people who don't seem to get how much work goes into it.

Don't know what you're talking about man, it's easy to do something like this and because of it Yahtzee shouldn't be paid for it at all since all he's doing is playing video games and saying what he thinks about them. /sarcasm

[sub][sub][sub]*put there because sarcasm in text is hard to convey at times, and people seem to miss that*[/sub][/sub][/sub]

You forgot the third criteria. A resemblance to Gakt.

I wish whatever game the mechanics of this title actually belonged to weren't strangled by being tied to 13, especially when the combat and core questing mechanics are all basically Valkyrie Profile.

 

[Dalisclock]

I already decided I'm not going to ever bother with this series. I decided to watch the "movie" version on Youtube and even then the flaws are pretty glaring. Yes, the backdrop is really pretty but it's painfully linear looking and the level design, for the most part, is pretty boring(What is squares obession with floating platforms anyway?). The version I'm watching skips the fights but from what I've heard I'm not really missing anything.

When I started watching, I hated almost all of the characters except for Sazh and the plot felt really thin and uninteresting. At least the characters(most of them, anyway) have become somewhat more developed and likeable. The plot is more interesting but it feels like it's being doled out i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and it's frustrating considering there's some really interesting ideas at play here. I'm not opposed to a slow reveal and I've seen it done well before, but this doesn't seem to be one of those occasions. It just seems like Square Enix didn't really feel like exploiting the lore and world they built up. Instead a lot of it feels like window dressing.

 

[Thanatos2k]

I already decided I'm not going to ever bother with this series. I decided to watch the "movie" version on Youtube and even then the flaws are pretty glaring. Yes, the backdrop is really pretty but it's painfully linear looking and the level design, for the most part, is pretty boring(What is squares obession with floating platforms anyway?). The version I'm watching skips the fights but from what I've heard I'm not really missing anything.

When I started watching, I hated almost all of the characters except for Sazh and the plot felt really thin and uninteresting. At least the characters(most of them, anyway) have become somewhat more developed and likeable. The plot is more interesting but it feels like it's being doled out i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and it's frustrating considering there's some really interesting ideas at play here. I'm not opposed to a slow reveal and I've seen it done well before, but this doesn't seem to be one of those occasions. It just seems like Square Enix didn't really feel like exploiting the lore and world they built up. Instead a lot of it feels like window dressing.

If you don't want to play the games, just watch this:


Hopefully they'll make one for FF13-3 so people don't even have to touch a single one of the games.

Also, the hating everyone but Sazh thing is pretty common. I hate everyone but Sazh. Most people do. Why? Sazh is the only character who actually feels real, and isn't a whiny brat. He has an actual character arc too (they try with Hope, and fail miserably), and is relatable.

 

[SteveoTheBeveo]

I have to ask the question on how possibly the worst game in the Final Fantasy franchise not only managed to gain enough revenue that it would develop TWO pointless sequels, ignore the problems with the first game, and instead add further onto the pile of garbage that the series has dragged itself to. I can only pray that Final Fantasy XV comes soon. ;_; I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

 

[Quellist]

Don't be timid - most people like FF12

Actually I meant I liked FF13....in fact I loathed 12 with the kind of passion most people seem to reserve for 13...

I like neither.

12 was boring. The story was boring. The gameplay was grindy (more than usual).

13 was a corridor with poor paced difficulty spikes - I gave up after getting to Gran Pulse, the fights were just getting tedious. The story was a bit of a mess ... although I did enjoy some of the arcs.

Thing about the 'corridor' was, just recently FF had become so weighed down with sidequests (look at X-2 where you even had to complete most of them just to get the true ending) this was a breath of fresh air for those like me who just wanted to enjoy the story. Have to say I loved the combat too. Pity XIII-2 ruined both

 

[DjinnFor]

Most of the "plot holes" aren't really plot holes and make sense if you play Final Fantasy XIII-2, which was all about paradoxes introduced by the concept of time travel. Some time traveler traveled back to the ending of Final Fantasy 13 and messed it up, so the characters of 13-2 went to stop him.

In FF13-2 Hope was older, because the main characters traveled to a time set 10 yrs after the events of FF13 and then met up with him. When they solved the problem that had motivated them to time travel all over the place, and the plot picked back up after the events of FF13 10 years earlier, Hope was still a kid. Then, since the lack-of-aging process kicked in, he remained a boy for the next ~500 years.