KazeAizen said:
EternallyBored said:
Metacritic works by taking the overall scores dished out by professional review sites, it has a separate section for user reviews too, but those usually get bombed by people voting either perfect scores or 0's in order to manipulate the system. As for your movie comparison, yes, a movie can still fail financially while being considered underrated by critics, or garnering a cult fanbase, but the FF XIII trilogy has fallen in both reviews and sales numbers, so the movie comparison doesn't work.
See, the thing here is that all you've got is personal opinion, and hey, that's fine, like the games all you want. Plenty of reviewers have already torn apart the sequels, and even the original XIII, too many for it to just be rose colored glasses. There are plenty of reviewers and players out there that started out with FF X or even XIII itself, that have found the series to be thoroughly enjoyable, except for the XIII sequels, or XIII itself, the more acerbic critiques may come from the older fans, but my two old roommates who started with XIII as their first FF couldn't even make it through XIII-2 because, and I'm paraphrasing from memory years ago, "the story is fucking stupid, the combat feels like goddamn work by half-way through the game, and Serah is an even more boring character than Lightning, which I thought was physically impossible, fuck this shit I'm going back to the Tales games".
Wow I had the exact opposite reaction as your buddy. Hell Final Fantasy XIII-2 is the first game that made me shed a tear. To me its probably on my list of top 5 PS3 games. The critic backlash I can handle. I came to grips with them a long time ago. The utter bile, rage, and hatred from fans though I see no real rhyme or reason. It seems half the time they are yelling because "its not muh Final Fantasy". At least that's how half the negative comments I've seen towards that XIII's come off. There is a point when the fan critique stops and just descends into fans using a game as a convenient punching bag.
That does happen, in some ways, the game gets a lot of hate because it also gets love, with a polarizing opinion people tend to gravitate towards the extreme ends of the scale more often, look back at the beginning of the thread to Chocorodeo's posts to see someone who seems way too invested in defending the games.
As for XIII-2, while I didn't hate it as much as my roommates, I found it to be an overall forgettable experience, time travel is hard to pull off well in even the best of stories, and 13-2 mostly just felt like an empty spectacle. The story of XIII also seems to be largely pointless in the scheme of XIII-2 as well, the time travel seems to erase what character development the original XIII, and I will never be able to forgive the game shunning Snow in favor of giving Serah yet another Bishonen pretty boy to pal around with, at least they didn't arbitrarily break off their engagement or anything, I will give the game that much.
Combat never felt like anything special, it was better than the borefest that was the first 20 hours of FF XIII's combat, but it still didn't really feel feel fun, and I had to stop multiple times playing through it because I just couldn't stand getting into one more battle. The multiple endings were a decent idea, but even the best ending just felt like pointless drama to set up another game, it almost felt like a goddamn cliffhanger, I haven't been that blueballed by a video game ending since Halo 2.
Lightning Returns was another mixed bag in a different way, as Yahtzee touched on, the whole time jump was kind of jarring considering that noone aged, but they all changed characterization anyway. I feel like if they hadn't pulled the same character reset in XIII-2, Lightning Returns would have worked better, doing it two games in a row just makes it too difficult for me to care about any of the party characters from the first game, their characterization isn't consistent enough for me to be drawn into their new situations. The whole end of the world, and drudgery of eternal life thing was actually interesting, but Lightning wasn't an interesting enough character to make the interaction between her and the immortal populace interesting. In the end, the story just feels so disconnected, and the entire trilogy just seems to end up trying to do too much, and accomplish too little.
To sum it all up, the 13 trilogy is polarizing because there are people that like it and hate it, and that friction causes people to become more extreme, either ignoring flaws in order to prove critics wrong, or exaggerating flaws to prove that the people who like it must be wrong. It's kind of like the DMC reboot debate, the game is far from perfect, but people get too emotionally invested in defending or attacking it, to the point that it is either an awesome game better than everything before it, or it is the worst thing ever and ruins all the past games retroactively.
