Ok, so I just beat FFXIII. It had its moments, and I don’t consider it a waste of my time, but I got it as a gift and lord knows I never would have paid 60 bucks for this game. For those who haven’t played it and are considering buying it, this post will be extremely long and hopefully relatively informative. Let me go into each aspect of the game.
Visuals:
What do you expect? FFXIII is obviously a beautiful game. Everything is nice to look at, and playing it on a widescreen TV with HDMI is eye candy from start to finish. The cutscenes are beutifully rendered, only hurt by the fact that all of the characters are boring and the story is an absolute mess. My advice? Look and don’t listen. You’ll enjoy yourself more. As for the battles, nothing could possibly be more tedious to watch. Out of the six possible classes that each character can play as, only one of them actually moves during battle. Everyone else stands perfectly still, so if watching a bunch of people grunt and moan while they jiggle their arms is your bread and butter, prepare to be deeply satisfied.
The Battle System:
I don’t understand why people heap so much praise on this thing. You have no control over the AI’s actions other than to switch “Paradigms”. What a paradigm is, is a set of classes you establish prior to battle, and must reestablish every time you switch team members. Even if you use a certain set of 6 paradigms for a certain party for most of the game, the moment you swap in another character for a particular battle, you have just guaranteed yourself 2-3 minutes in the paradigm menu reestablishing your setup. For your average battle, you can simply choose any combination of an Attacker/Blaster Paradigm to deal damage, switching in more or less spellcasters depending on how low the stagger meter/damage multiplier is. Each enemy has this meter, and it is raised through continuous attacking, and falls while the enemy is not being hurt. For most enemies, the damage you deal is rather miniscule until this meter is filled, at which point you can start to really beat the hell out of them. How do you beat the hell out of them? Press X once to choose auto-battle, and once more to choose a target. You could take the time to scroll through the menu and pick abilities, but for the most part, the computer does a fine job. To switch paradigms, you press L1, likely the only time you’ll ever press a button that isn’t X during battle. If you want to have a ridiculously easy time with the game, just start each battle with a Medic/Enhancer/Jammer party and then switch to your attack paradigm after a minute or two. Rinse and repeat for every tough enemy you come across, and you have every battle in a nutshell. Brilliant apparently. If you plan on renting the game, you can pretty much ignore everything I’ve said, because for the first 25 hours of the game, you aren’t even allowed to choose your party.
Where’s the challenge? I’ll tell you. Unlike every other rpg you’ve probably ever played, in this game, your party leader (the one you control) is the lifeblood of the party. If the leader dies, it’s game over. Your other members can die all they want. I’ll often just leave them dead when they bite it because characters are fully revived and healed at the end of the battle, so as long as I can finish the fight on my own, who needs ‘em? Some of the battles in the game are designed to last a very long time, and there’s nothing quite like watching in horror after 10 minutes of pressing X as your party leader gets targeted by a one hit kill move and you don’t have enough time to raise his defenses. This happens a lot. You’d think the AI would prioritize the life of the party leader, but this is not the case. The medic AI is broken as all hell, never prioritizing Revive or Esuna to help out dead characters or remove debilitating status effects because they find it far more important to cast heal 5 times on someone with half health, even when the first 3 heals were enough to fully restore their HP. If you want someone healed right, you better make damn sure one of your teams healers is you.
Menus:
Oh god the menus. The leveling system in this game is the most tedious thing ever created. Instead of directly applying experience points and raising your stats all around, you must use collected XP to charge a beam of energy along what amounts to a huge coiling string of beads and crystals. The beads are HP/Strength/Magic bonuses, and the crystals are abilities. Instead of choosing one bonus and then moving on to the next bonus in line, you must hold X anywhere from 1 to 5 seconds (depending on the amount of XP required for the next bonus) and wait for the string of energy to make it from one bead to the next. To fully level all 6 characters in each of the 6 classes, I am willing to bet you would have to hold the X button down for a grand total of 2-3 hours. Since this is the only way to directly strengthen your characters, you will have to do this every time you reach a point where the enemies become too difficult, or instead of waiting, just do it every 10 minutes. Try to spread out those hours of holding down a button as much as possible, and maybe you wont notice how much the idea sucks.
As well as leveling characters, you can also level items. Each weapon has three levels. You start at level 1, feed the weapon loot for experience, and once it’s maxed, feed it a transformation catalyst to take it to level 2. From here, repeat the process to get to level 3 and then repeat the process again to max the weapon out. Not really all that bad, but there is of course one problem. All the best loot worth the most experience costs money. A lot of money. And you don’t get any from battles. Until about 30 hours into the game, I had amassed maybe 100,000 bux. The most expensive major XP loot costs 50,000 a pop, and to fully level a single weapon, you may need about thirty 0f them. This means that in 30 hours of gameplay, I had 1/90th of the money I’d need to fully level all 6 of my weapons. The only good way to make cash is also the only way to get the rarest transformation catalyst needed to make all of the top tier weapons: Killing a dinosaur whose only move is stomping the ground and instakilling under-leveled players and hoping he drops the loot you need, which he seems to do only 20% of the time. Fucking hell.
The one complaint I’m not going to go into much detail about is the “linearity” of the game. Yes, for the first 25 hours every map is effectively a straight line, and yes, the one large area in the game is simply a circle with more straight lines poking out from the center in every direction like a child’s drawing of the Sun. But instead of being delighted when I was finally given the chance to explore, I was so used to stuff being right there in front of me that I didn’t even want to. In FF 12, the world is huge. You revisit old areas to find newly opened paths that might end up leading you to another area, reinforcing the idea that your in one big interconnected world, but it is ridiculously easy to get yourself lost. I don’t mind it but I can understand why they might want to eliminate that aspect from 13. Give the people what they want, and if FFXIII and W+M1 pyros in Team Fortress 2 are any clue, what the people want is to hold a button down and run forward for hours on end.
I think that about covers it.
what are you on about man, the story messed up, it is one of the most passionate and amazing storys of all time. The charactors are heart filled and you really can relate to them. The system is ok but can have its floors. The upgrade Crystaliriam is an amazing way to upgrade so shut it
I’d enjoy an explanation of how the Crystarium is amazing if you don’t mind, because for the most part it’s a time consuming version of auto leveling that serves no real purpose.
Listen this guy is right about all the points, the only thing he didn’t say enough was is how much the game sucked. I have been a Final Fantasy fan since I played FFVII when I was just seven years old, now at 20 I want the game to be as awesome as possible, but it wasn’t. The story was so freaking bad that I thought I missed some of it, so I watched every cut scene (which is where all the story progression takes place) and nope, it still sucked. The character dialogue is the worst I have ever heard in my life, nothing has ever been more awkward and down right moronic in a video game. Relating to the characters? Who in the hell could? They have a ‘small’ problem easily solved and very straight forward, yet they search for deeper meaning throughout the whole game. It was nothing more than a bad soap opera with a battle system.
Man I couldn’t agree more. I was so damn excited about this game, and couldn’t be more disappointed.
I mean, FF3 and FF7 had two of the most amazing story lines ever created, and having the option to explore the entire world or raise chocobo’s or do a million other things made them great. With this one, the first few hours I thought that I’d eventually get to a town, so that I could walk around and explore. Finally, around 10 hours into it I accepted that that was not going to happen.
Right now I’m on Pulse where it’s finally ‘opened up’, and your description of it is dead on. I’m not even interested in doing the quests, because essentially it’s just more of the same. Just walk, battle, rinse and repeat.
This game fucking sucks, which normally I wouldn’t mind, but for them to call it a Final Fantasy game just pisses me off.
Oh, and the dialog?? I mean come on, it’s like watching an underfunded 80′s movie. The acting is horrible. I fucking cringe every time Snow opens his goddamned mouth. And how lucky are we that we get to travel with a whiny little punk the whole game too?
Fucking. Fail. XIII
I couldn’t agree more. I’m already on Gran Pulse and I just left Arcalyte Stepp, and I’m so annoyed with how long it’s taking to get to the fucking end that I just want to avoid all the battles I’ve been purposefully fighting for loot and stars.
Yeah, this game’s opening and gameplay rocked when I first got it, but now that I’m on the peak of beating the game, I can’t help but think: “What the fuck did I just do the last 25-30 hours?”
The Crystarium is spot on about leveling. Why have us trek around a globe of spears when the characters could just easily level up on their own after each battle? I don’t get it…
Anyway, I hope the game is a climax, and then I can put this shit down and look forward to the decency of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and hopefully, FFXIV.
Cheers!
I have really high hopes for vs 13.
I love RPG, and for me the best is Demon soul, and FFVII. I´m in chapter 11 in FFXIII, and like he says, I´ve lost the will to play it. I´m desapointed with FFXIII, because I´m a RPG Gamer, its not normal to lose the Will to play a RPG. The Figth take long, and the reward doesnt make for it. Sorry for my ingles.
After having patiently having beaten FF13, gone through pulse for 15-20 hours after beating the game, and putting up with all of the melodramatic moments of the game, I find myself hoping that I missed something. I keep longing to restart the game from the very beginning just to revisit the places I can’t see anymore because I’m sick of Pulse and the only other open (and empty) area that you’re allowed to revisit. I find myself longing for the constraint of having only 2 characters on your team because it was that much more challenging and, in retrospect, more fun. Reality is, I don’t want to fight Odin again, and there are some things you just don’t want to do twice in the game. Also, I’ve finals to study for.
In addition, I find myself hoping that Square Enix will release an add-on to the game that will either expand on the gameplay or give us the chance to do something other than the tedious missions.
The point is, the game was great but there just isn’t enough content for a REAL replay from the beginning. There is no mode to change the difficulty and allow you to restart the game with your current stats, which works like a charm for any true “linear” video game like God of War.
The mixing of the open-world genre and the linear, action-oriented perspective of a video game is the reason behind it all. FF13 has shown us that this works only to a certain extent… but in the end it’s much too limiting. I’m sure the developers saw this too as the game came to completion.
Truth is, after beating the game, all we have is the moment right before fighting the boss… which is Pulse, a huge….map. In actuality, Pulse just feels like something Square Enix dumped into the game in order to be able to use the words “open-world”. It really isn’t. If anything, I find myself falling asleep as I meander around Pulse trying to kill the next pathetic monster with my characters all equipped with omega weapons. Yes, Pulse has the Adamantoise that can kill you in 1 hit at the beginning, but that’s about it. You can’t fight that gigantic magma titan. He simply walks out of the area once you finish the Titan trials. I even saw a youtube video showing what happens after you finish all of the missions… all they give you is a “Congratulations!” sign. Seeing the vid, I thanked god that I didn’t grind through these missions and have wasted hours of my life. I can only imagine how empty the player felt after going through so much to finish all of those crazy missions….
Friends, all we can do is wait for FFversus13. Wikipedia says it’s going to adopt Kingdom Hearts and a 3rd person shooter play style, so don’t expect it to be the game we all want it to be in an Final Fantasy RPG. It will be different. We are in a new gaming era. Game developers are experimenting with high-def, next-gen gaming. They want to cater to a different kind of audience after having been faithful to us for so many years.
Change is something we need to accept even in our most beloved gaming titles.
FF13 had it’s moments. It’s time for us to recognize what could have been better, and realize that the next best thing is always prone to change. Music, movies, video games, and shows are all evolving. In short, we gotta move on as well :)
God I used to love the FF series, up until this one that is. Wasnt to thrilled with Xii but it was WAY better than xiii. Square-Enix I hope your reading this because you really fucked the pooch on this one. Ive played for 9 hours and cant talk myself into picking back up the controller. Where are the towns? Where are the open areas? Buying your items online? Maybe thats how you do it in japan but i America we still have these things called stores and we use them. Not even going to buy the next FF, Im done.
lmao man, great blog. I agree with you 90% without a doubt. The game isn’t all that great but it feels great after you press x a million times and finally beat the game.
This game pissed me off after the first 2 hours of gameplay. I was so excited at the beginning with the cut scene to find out how much the game sucked. I noticed immediately that every level was fucking linear. Literally meaning that the level were all in a straight line. Then the battle system sucks. WDF! I have been playing Final Fantasy since I was 10 years old and I started FF8. You can’t even use the other people in the battle system and I noticed immediately that the only button u use is X. WDF!!!!!!! FUck this game glad I only spent 30 dollars for this piece of shit. Oh and the acting sucks also and the relationships is fucking weirdddddddddddddddddddd.
I can’t stand this game is spells out BORING and wait more BOREDOM.
No side-quests(them gay monter killing things don’t count as side-quests), no depth, no character customization(stat-wise, like in every other flippin’ ff game), no god damn towns, no damn wilderness, no airships or plane-type things like in the rest of the games, no control over my gaywad party members in bettle, stupid-ass leveling system that can no f–king way replace the good old EXP system, no replay value. And I pre-ordered it, along with the special edition guide because i thought like every other ff game it would have massive amounts of shit, so I pretty much stuck a hundred dollar bill in my dog’s asshole and then lit it on fire. So if you want anything done right these days, make sure it’s American. Red Dead Redemption ftw!
Totally agree dude, that game completely sucked. I can’t really tell if the story was good because the gameplay was so painfully boring. It doesn’t matter how nice a game looks, if it isn’t fun to play it’s just not worth it. The linearity was by far the worst part for me, maybe because I really liked ffxii, though I can understand why a lot of people didn’t. That game gave you freedom and you could actually upgrade your characters, do side quests, make your characters sweet, etc. Speaking of characters, ffxiii’s cast was really lame and winy and over dramatic even for a jrpg. It was like a little kid wrote that story, a little emo kid. My main problems with the game though can be summed up by saying I agree completely with everything Steve said. And yeah Red Dead Redemption is awesome I love that game, though it’s not an rpg, though I really don’t think ffxii is either. I sold my xiii and bought Dragon Age, it had it’s problems but it was a lot of fun
Instead of getting better they got worse. I was a follower of the series since like 4 & 6 and really loved them to death, they gradually got worse.. I even dropped 10 & 12 about 75% through because I find em lame & couldn’t even stand up to the classics, but this? Man I think they’re losing customers they intend on making it real easy so non-gamers could play/watch the story, more customers and so.. Profit! Which doesn’t seem to be all that awesome anyways seeing as even 10 & 12 already make me feel wtf and now this.
I agree on this comment chain regarding western games, or wrpgs even. Like, I’m no fan of space themes, you know, space voyagers aliens & stuffs that the moment I stumble upon them I usually put them down not long after. But Mass Effect got through to me. I thought people were just talking about this game they like but I was wrong, it got me hooked, over a theme that usually rubs me off. I dunno, but these days I keep finding western games better. Half-Life 1 & 2, Starcraft 1 & 2.. etc. and most of the japs games only seem to get worse.
Excellent review. You know a game sucks when even the huge, ass kissing media sites are “only giving it 7 and 8″ and stating it’s glaringly obvious flaws. The cast of FFXIII were terrible aside from Sazh, and were bland copies of characters we’ve seen before. The dialogue made me want to bang my head against a brick wall until concussion made Hope’s whiny bullshit, Vanille’s apparent mental illness, Lightning’s faux-profound emo drivel and Snow’s dumb machismo not so horrific.
The story was complete shit, but what do you expect from Toriyama? Basically the game runs on the bare minimum of plot (evil government/regime, run away) then at the end it hurriedly tacks on some shit about fighting fate, and the strength of the human will. Basically giving the game the green light to ignore everything it’s attempted to tell you so that it can pull some happy ending about friendship and light and just go ahead and do what you said you wouldn’t do, it’ll be alright. IT’S A MIRACLE BORN OF MISERY! No it’s not, it’s an asspull born of mediocrity.
The combat is okay, but I only had need of about 3 paradigms, and it got just as predictable and tedious as the old, random battles and turn based style. The world is BORING and one dimensional, or pointlessly large and empty. How could they do this to a franchise I loved so much? After the great transition from the SNES to PS1, then the PS1 to PS2. I loved em all. I don’t like the direction FF is heading in, they are no longer about playing a role and finding your way in a world, they are about the developers pretentious movie making ambitions. What will the next FF evolve into? A collection of cutscenes and that’s it?
Well, I liked it. I’ve played both better and worse games and I have to say… I think XIII is getting so much crap because it’s a Final Fantasy game and everyone expects to ejaculate as soon as the game touches their hands.
personally i think everyones expectations were too damn high and before people even gave the game a chance it was never going to measure up to classics like ff7 and 8. however i do agree the game was too linear, shite character development etc etc not going to repeat others.
now im sure this is just me being an idiot lol but im kinda disappointed there was no impossible side boss like for e.g ultima or omega weapon in previous ff games. you spend all those of farming plat ingots and traps to beat what exactly? also, all that build up beating all of titans trials and he just walks off? seriously?
p.s ff10 shit? unlike 13, they got their story, characters, side quests and pretty much everything else dead on. i strongly recommend trying that one again.
good thing i didnt buy this game probably never will…..
since i just borrowed from a friend and played a couple of hours till i finally said to myself im never gonna play this game again…..
graphics is just eye candy, story fail, gameplay fail, and so on……
id rather wait and totally buy the remake of the recent best ff’s from 2-8…..
i guess ff series is starting to go down the slopes since most of their previous developers/producers are gone……
FF13 is the stupidest FF ever. i still dont even understand this crapy story. Leveling up will take ur @$$ 30-40 hrs and money is the hardest thing in here when everything u need is money. Fuk this game. it can’t live up to the name Final Fantasty. I GUESS IT SUKS SOOO BAD BECAUSE ITS A FINAL FANTASY GAME.
You guys are morons. I found out this game sucked like goat sperm in 15 minutes then turned it off.
Yeah, I’m not even half way in & I am deeply dissatisfied with a lot of things in this game. Who in the hell told these assholes I would enjoy only controlling 1 character is beyond me. And WHY THE FCK IS IT SO TECHNICAL? There’s no way of knowing half the stuff in the game that you NEED to know based off of the tutorials. There are things I like, way more I hate! Battle rating system absolutely sucks! How could it be enjoyable to burn out & end battles super fast rather than the standard tried & true method of strategy and technique? I don’t enjoy battles anywhere near as much as any of the other FF games I’ve played! Oh and the story IS bad! I mean, it had potential but the way it’s told just sucks….paper thin plot. Thank you for giving a voice to what I was feeling upon playing my first few battles and Eidolons….Ugh!
Snow, air-headed generic hero type that clenches his fist and says “LET’S DO IT!”
Vanille, cutesy innocent stupid girl and makes goo gaa sounds and then gets sad when people do their own thing
Hope, whiney emo who after some revelation tells everyone constantly that he’s tired of running away from his problems.
The story is frayed, long and stupid, the gameplay blows bananas and the only reason to stick around is decent visuals and some amazing quality pre-rendered cutscenes.
Omfg, 10 hours in and this game is fucking shocking. Run in a straight line mashing A for battles. All the characters are stereotypes with personalities like planks of wood.
Fucking sucks so much donkey dick its uuntrue.
Lol. Lets see… I played through the opening part with Lightning and the afro dude with a Chocobo in his fro. Played through the 2nd part with Emo-Snowballs. Got to the 3rd part of the opening with a whiney homo named Hope, which is a girls name, and some nut-ball pig-tailed chick. Turned it off.
Worst FF game I ever played. I even liked FF8 when most people criticized it. FF10 was OK, but I found myself playing Blitzball more than anything else. I think they need a new plot… Main character being a Soldier, Mercenary, etc. is just kind of old. Almost every one is the same sort of plot.
I loved FF6. The story was epic, tons of weapons and items, espers, pretty decent sized open world, etc. I was sad when I beat FF6, because I didn’t want the game to end. I wanted more. The same with FF7. How many people got sad or depressed when Aeris was killed? I didn’t play FF7 for 3 days after Aeris died, lol. FF8 wasn’t bad either… It felt pretty damn good to play a character who was the headmaster of an elite mercenary group. Maybe it was the graphics that sucked me in, but I beat FF8 over and over. Plus, the “Lion Heart” move was pretty sweet. It seems like they spend so much time on voice acting (which was horrible in FF13) and graphics that they pass off the storyline to someone in accounting and are like: “Crap, we forgot about this… Hurry up and write something. We’ll fill in the gaps along the way.”
Finally, It does the heart good to hear some truth doled out In between the kind of bullshit you have to listen to everyday, This game almost put me off gaming for good, and Is a major buzzkill even today.
I completely agree with everything in this post as a matter of fact i sold the game a week after i bought it for 20 bucks and wish i hadnt lol this is by far the worst ff game ever i wasnt a big fan of viii but i will play that shit 24/7 if i dont have to ever play xiii again
P.S. where were the side games or quests? after the end? yeh like i want to grind for 30+ hours too try and have a lil fun with it! nope everything except the visuals SUCKED DONKEY BALLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m really sad they are making a sequel and it just like x-2 a frickin chick flick but this time they kept all the shitty paradigms and shit i mean come on we didnt like the first why make a second?
This game was for newbies, not veteran gamers. I forced myself to the finish, hoping something interesting would happen. Nope. Just bullshit ontop of more bullshit ontop of even more bullshit that ends with the biggest bullshit ending I’ve ever seen. I wasted 3 hours on that stupid crystarium shit. What’s the point it if all you do is following the straight path? What’s the point of a level up system if you’re always fucking capped? The battle system was extremely broken. Fuck this game!
After realizing that FF13-2 was coming out soon, I wondered if I was the only one who hated FF13. On all the bigger media sites, they gave it average scores and whatnot, meanwhile I even had a few friends who said that they liked the game. (“Lightning is cool! She’s a deep character!”)
Did they really play the game? I thought it was so boring. I agree with this whole post pretty much. There was nothing riveting about the game. I know people had high expectations, but comparing FF13 to another RPG that came out around the same time (i.e. Dragon Age) and you have to see how flawed FF13 is. Dragon Age wasn’t beautiful graphic-wise, but it had a compelling story, and characters with personality. Not to mention DA was actually FUN to play, while FF13 felt painful to play.
I think they took linear to a whole new low in this game. It’s one thing to have a set map, but FF13 was literally just walking in a line for 20 hours.
I’m sad to say it, but I think I’m over JRPGs. (Except the Persona series.) I’ll still play FF Versus 13 if it EVER comes out, but if it disappoints me like FF13 did, I think I’ll just pass over the FF series from then on.
While all of these are valid points, I think what everyone is expecting is something even greater than ff7, which is in no way shape or form going to happen. In every one’s mind every game they came out with after that, that was part of the final fantasy franchise, was a dud. I don’t believe that any of the games are duds because of the fact that they were all different. Some aspects were the same, but not all. They tried a new battle system here and it didn’t work, but every game so far can be classified as “rinse-and-repeat” considering it’s always grind until you level then beat the bad guys. The acting was atrocious but it always is. & as for the crystarium system, I think they were going for one of those ff10 leveling systems. The only real criticism I have for the game is that the story didn’t latch you in like the others did. I didn’t feel a real connection to the characters. The plot line is really boring and I miss having towns to visit where you can go into different shops, not internet shopping like ff13.
I know a lot of people are saying that it was only so bad because we were expecting far too much out of it, especially since most of the series is worshipped as god’s own creation.
However, I found myself seriously disappointed with the game, even without having prior expectations.
Other than a very brief run-in with Final Fantasy VII, when I was too young to really understand it, I had never played a final fantasy game before this one. After hearing from so many people how amazing the series was, I decided I was going to try and work down the series, rather than up. It would be 13, 12, you get the point. I don’t think I’ll carry on however.
This game was without a doubt, one of the most boring and unenjoyable games I have ever played.
It just wasn’t any fun. There was nothing fun about running down the corridors which make up the universe, regardless of how astonishing said corridors looked. There was nothing fun about the battle system, it required minimal input, it didn’t even feel like I was playing the game, it was like telling the game to play itself. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, all I managed to gather was that some weird ice thing cursed them all somehow, and how it’s really bad and stuff. I didn’t get that far into the game, but I doubt it would have entranced me that much if I carried on. I hated most of the people I met in the game anyway, especially Lightning, who I could not have been any less invested in, she was just unlikeable.
I know pretty much everyone, everywhere will say that the rest of the series is much better, but I almost don’t care. This game has essentially murdered Final Fantasy for me, before it even began to live.
I could not have chosen a worse game to start on, scratch that, I could not have chosen a worse game, at all.
I am dissapoint.