Final Fantasy 13 General Discussion Thread

[ANDYBALLINA]

[LeonJ]

I got banned (unjustly) because of this stupid thread, and it's certainly firing me up again.

FF games, and JRPGs are certainly a very tailored genre and I'm not surprised in the slightest that people ran out and bought it only to find it's boring them to death and not in their tastes.

It's very easy to get excited by the flashy story and graphics. But it's still a grind based game and you are either going to love it or hate it.

Shiny light syndrome.
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Shin J Leon.

XBL - LeonJ
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[dloiscute]

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I just finished the game then.



Full-time Uni, social life and 25 hour work weeks only got in my way lol.

Such an amazing game. Loved it from start to finish. The FF13 logo is now so epic once you finish the game. As admeister pointed out, it is probably the longest main story JRPG this gen. Definitely my second favorite main Final Fantasy game (after FF8).

FFFFUUU So good!
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☑Tekken

[UWSguy]

^On a home console anyway

I found the game is much more enjoyable when played in small bursts. About one hour is the most I can take. I must thank FFXIII for making me miss towns and world maps and therefore making me go back and finish Dragon Quest V.

Back on topic, for me FFXIII is a decent entry. Really XII is the only one I love and the rest mesh together as pretty good but not mindblowing games. It's strange, the idea I have in my head of what FF is as a whole is more like Lost Odyssey than the FFs I have played.

Is anyone going to play any of the other FFs now? I have III (DS) sitting there.

[Scrav]

[Kikujir0]

Mmmmmm I agree with the above statement before about short bursts.

I'm up to chapter 11 I think now finally, where I am in the open plains, now I know its turned into Grindfest 13 Don't get me wrong I enjoy the game very much so, its just huge segments between story and fighting is much more prevalent than in previous games to me anyway. Final fantasy 7, 8, 9 I appreciate much more now because of 13, the old world map, towns where you could go around exploring and talking to people, gaining more insight about the world or witnessing an amusing scene happening not totally connected to the main story.

Mid-semester break is coming up, and I plan to make good use of it FF13 being one of the things that are *up there*. Supposedly I am in the part of the game of where it gets good lol (the 20 hour mark), can only get better I hope.

EDIT: I seem to hear about how FFVI is the underrated FF overshadowed by the seemingly overrated FF7, I wanna try it out, but not sure if I can adjust back to the old sprite type graphics.
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[diangelogrey]

I am enjoying it a lot more now. I think it helped heaps that I read through the datapad info. Before that I was pretty clueless about the story etc. I am still confused by a lot of stuff in the game (upgrading, making gil. etc) but Im slowly advancing.

I am now up to the Bioweapon Maintance Boss and he is pretty tough to beat, but it is still enjoyable if not terribly exciting.

Can anyone tell me later on if you get to explore the world a bit more freely without it being a part of the story?
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[Sinthesys]

[emech]

[Afty]

THE BEST GAME EVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
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This is my story and it will go the way I want it to or I'll end it here! ---???guess Who

[Cerebral]

Finally finished the game. Overall I'd say half of the game I liked, and half of the game I loathed, so it's a personal 5/10 for me. Few thoughts:

Battle system - loved it. Especially during the middle of the game where you start to experiment with paradigms and the boss fights that force you to switch constantly as the battle demands it. Somewhat restrictive in that each characters only (feasibly) gets three roles for the majority of the game, but I suppose it means that each character has strengths and weaknesses, rather than all becoming samey (FFXII). However, the game took far too long to give you freedom over the battle system - I spent almost 2 hours hitting nothing but 'Auto-battle' during the Hanging edge sequence because everyone defaulted to a commando class and the game didn't let me do anything else. Even after that, there were bits where I was stuck with no commando (Sazh and Vanille somewhere) because the game wouldn't unlock the extra classes for me yet.

Furthermore, the battle system started to drag on by the end. If you didn't stagger an opponent, you had virtually no chance of killing them, so the same tactic had to be used over and over - Relentless Assault -> Aggression -> Diversity if needed. Particularly at the end of the game where enemies have crazy amounts of HP, it prolongs the battles while not offering any variety to the fighting. I did like how bosses had certain patterns to them for you to learn (eg. Proudclad 2 will bombard the living heck out of you after recovering from a stagger) and adapt to.

Game design - didn't like it. FFXII had all these amazing locales to explore for treasure, hunt for marks, and towns full of people to talk to. FFXIII's areas were like a river, with streams coming off the sides leading to treasure that you usually end up as upgrade fodder. For the majority of the game it funnels you into an endless loop of running and fighting and running and fighting with no break or diversion (although Nautilus was cool, you couldn't actually do anything except make your way through it, and chase the stupid chocobo around for about 5 minutes. And then there was more fighting). I had to play the game in blocks of 3 hours, then take a break because I'd just be getting bored. I felt each of the games areas (especially the PSICOM facility Lightning and Hope went through on the way to Palum Polum) were about twice as long as they needed to be, like I'd happily play through half of a level, then have to play the other half wishing I was at the end and that something would actually happen.

Even the marks in Chapter 11 didn't really help - I was having a bit more fun in the open environment (and it was cool finding random cutscenes here and there) but each mark still boiled down to 'go to X, fight Y' prefaced by a paragraph of text and a single item reward.

Characters and plot - pretty average at the start (Snow annoyed me, Hope annoyed me, Vanille annoyed me) but got a bit better as the game wore on (Hope grew some balls?). I was hoping throughout the game we'd get to see a bit more of the 13 days, and I liked how it gave an insight into the characters lives before the purge (I loved it how Serah tells Lighting she's getting married and that she's a l'Cie and Lightning is all "Worst birthday ever"). But as the game wore on, I slowly lost my grip on what was actually happening. I just finished a lengthy final boss fight and viewed the ending and I have literally NO IDEA what just happened. I'm definitely going to have a look at the datapad, but frankly - I shouldn't have to. Mass Effect had a similar Codex system, but that gave you additional info on the universe and its inhabitants. Everything else regarding what was going on in the story was made clear to the player. Good storytelling shouldn't require you to read through pages of text to understand what's going on, or to bone up on the ridiculous vocabulary that the game throws at you from the very start (l'Cie, fal'Cie, Pulse, Cocoon, Purge, Focus, Sanctum) and I was finding myself checking it after every chapter just to clarify what just happened.

So I might give this a rest for now and start up a FFXII playthrough (It's still my favourite Final Fantasy). If I can't get back into the endgame of XIII to finish the marks I may well just sell it, because I'm sure as hell not going through that first disc again.
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[Ryvenor]

I think Yahtzee's review is spot on.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1569-Final-Fantasy-XIII

[Gamesta]

[admeister]

I know how you feel, I've been doing the same with Just Cause 2. I'm interested, but nobody has really said/shown anything that has made me go out and get it.

I'm not sure if there's anything I can say which would increase your interest in the game, other than sometimes it doesn't hurt to have a go at a game that you're not sure you'll like. I've discovered a lot of good games/series by simply throwing aside my hesitation and following my gut instinct. Review scores be damned, sometimes reading about a game just doesn't do it justice. Obviously you can't afford to just throw your money at any old game that comes along, but every now and then you'd be surprised. That's just me though. ^_^
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"The first person to prove that cow's milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty." - Fact Sphere.

[THEMAN]

[Gamesta]

[Quin]

[Cerebral]

[heyorange]

I'm at chapter 4 (been so for a few weeks) and can't seem to be able to get into the game. From what i've played so far, the pacing isn't good, there is little advances by cutscenes then a battle, then flashback and a little more battle then back to a scene. I didn't like the stop start happening so frequently. The dialogue is laughable at times along with the english voice (as opposed to the japanese version) of the girl with red hair.
From what i've played i've only been going on a linear path, feels so claustrophobic and forced, the map just makes it even easier.

[Quin]

[Jessara]

****May contain spoilers so I've done it in white text. Highlight to read****


I finished the story a couple of nights ago. I kind of had a love/hate relationship with this game. First of all the graphics look amazing even on my SD TV, I don't know how people can nitpick over the differences between the 360 version or the PS3 one.

Loved the in-game music as well as the game's voice cast. I went into the game expecting to not like Lightning as I thought she seemed rather plain. My bet was on Vanille being one of my favourite characters but in the end it was Light, Fang and Snow.

Up until chapter 11, I found it hard to continue playing due to endless corridors of baddies but once I got to chapter 11, I started to really enjoy the game more until it came to grinding again to get items or gil to upgrade weapons and accessories.

I still have plenty of optional things to do like finish off the remaining 20+ side quests and achievements. This will take some time as I think I'm burnt out on grinding.

This is my second completed Final Fantasy game so I don't have a lot of Final Fantasy experience to base this on but so far this game is the best one I've played in regards to story while Final Fantasy 12 still owns with the battle and loot system

I give Final Fantasy 13 a 7/10.
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[Adam]

I just finished the game, and I for one am going to miss having a game that I can successfully complete while almost completely focusing my attention onto university textbooks.

Seriously, as Facebook buddies will have seen, I spent most of the game reading books with one hand and mashing X and twiddling the analogue stick (lols innuendo) with the other, only concentrating on the game when there was a cutscene. I did this for twelve of the thirteen chapters, and only in that last chapter because the enemies were cheap and used debuffing spells all the time.

Did I enjoy it? Well, I guess I did. It kept me entertained. It was pretty, the paradigm changing was fun, and it moved at a decent clip. The plot was alright, I suppose. The problem was it presented a veil of mystery with impenetrable terms and concepts, and once that veil was lifted my reaction was, "Oh, really? Is that all? Oh well."

It wasn't as bad as 12. I pretend 12 was actually a weird Tactics spin-off that was accidentally labelled as FF12, while Lost Odyssey was the proper FF12 that mysteriously had its name changed.
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[Kyle Clarthy]

Oh, Adam ... you must have been twiddling the stick differently to me because I CANNOT beat the final boss, no matter what I do. The first time I managed to get him down to almost a slither of nothingness on his health bar only to be totally demolished by some cheap attack or another. Then the fifth, sixth, eighth, twentieth (can't remember how many really) battle I tried against him had me either die within seconds or get somewhere, but not far enough to dent him. Then this last (and final) time I tried to beat him I managed to get him down to 1/4 of his health left, only for him to use some attack that I couldn't see the name of to kill Lightning when she had 3/4 health.

I enjoyed the game, but as I grow older I come to realise that there's only so much I can take before it gets tedious and time-consuming.

I'm sure that if I give up now I probably won't pick this game up again, at least for a long time. And I don't want to see that stupid bad guy's face again. I was interested in unlocking the post game stuff, but I can't really be bothered at this point.

Anyway, I guess that people will tell me to suck it up or something but I am getting sick of end game bosses who have cheap tricks like attacks that get rid of almost all of your health and status effects that really cripple you. It's almost as if every boss does this sort of stuff, and it's cheap rather than anything else. All the boss needs to do is use that attack and then randomly attack the leader and bye-bye. It's frustrating having it occur 5 seconds into a battle, but I imagine having that occur 5 seconds before you throttle the idiot would be even worse.

I do like this game, but it's nowhere near up the top of the pile for me. When I think of it, this is what FF is today, and it's not how I recall it used to be in the past.

I literally don't know what to do now ... turn it off and never touch it again, attempt it once more, or try again another day. I'm literally at the point where I just don't know what to do! I don't think it's my strategy, but maybe it is. I mean, I buff and heal and ravage and all that ...

Anyway, I think I need a break for a few minutes.

Edit: I just tried again and I wish I could say I defeated him, but he defeated me ... I was going really well, only attacking when it was absolutely safe to, but this time he used that status attack that prevents me from using an ability and then before I could even do anything, he used that awful attack that causes massive damage and all you can do is watch as you die.

I really tried and I know I suck at this battle system, but there's only so much someone can take! Time to use my time wisely and start playing something else, I reckon ...
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[dloiscute]

If you have luckily saved up some TP, use that dispell thing when he does that annoying move that prevents you from attacking.

I only ever used that move twice in the entire game, and it was for that fight lol.
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[Kyle Clarthy]

Okay, thanks to the advice of both Adam and dloiscute I have managed to get somewhere with this boss, but not enough to actually beat him. Basically the bosses health disappears like crazy now due to a combination of poison as well as barfired weapons and other debuff, plus a paradigm of all three healers, but the thing that is killing me now is his instant death attack.

I won't have a rant about it being cheap, but I don't think I can beat it without a certain accessory that Adam told me about. For some reason, maybe it's a lot of luck, the boss thinks it's a good idea to target Lightning more than anyone else, so I basically cringe whenever I see that death attacks name appear on the screen.

I think I'll try one more time tonight before giving up and probably trying to find that accessory tomorrow.
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