whenever i get around to playing ffxiii

my expectations are going to be absolutely abysmal because of all the **** talking and i will probably end up thinking its a masterpiece. or at least love it.

an alternative title to this thread is: whenever i get a ps3 and play all these games i constantly hear about but haven't played because i dont have a ps3

 

FF13 is treated like the Sonic 06 of the Final Fantasy franchise, when it's really just a weak entry. The sequels are weird, but quirky and fun, gameplay isn't the strongest in any of them though

 

lets take this one game i don't have for a system i don't have at a time

honestly the only thing i consistently hear people complaining about is the oversaturation of Lightning
i know very little about the game itself except for people not loving the gameplay. and Lightning.
Who, having played D012, I'm already not a fan of.

 

I liked the combat in XIII for a while, like the shifting of paradigms and such, but it just ends up turning into STAGGER AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN and gets kinda boring.

The story and characters and world are all pretty shite.

 

Here's the weird thing, Lightning is characterized differently in each game. Personally I find her more bland than bad, but the decision to focus on her is a bit baffling... except then I remember she IS a fan favourite character, just people who anti-hype her would have you believe otherwise
I feel like it's a Squall type of fan favourite though, like a "their brooding soul is JUST LIKE MINE!" kind of thing
Gameplay is incredibly automated for 10/13 chapters, and pretty much every boss has twice as much health as it should. Graphically, it's REALLY pretty, and these are easily the most well made cutscenes in any Final Fantasy game No syncing issues, no awful compression. Fairly well acted by all your standard anime voice actors, like Troy Baker

 

hope you like:
the game never giving you a reason to care about the characters/story
most of the interesting **** relegated to the codex thing
your party members being picked for you for 9 out of 13 chapters
the tutorial being fed to you bit by bit through the whole game
two out of the six main characters never even interacting with each other
lightning being an unlikable ****

the soundtrack is pretty cool though

 

Oh hey, someone who gets it and has a counter opinion rather than just shouting hate speech. SHOULDA KNOWN IT'D BE YOU. Anyway, the stagger thing never got old for me (just recently replayed it with all sidequests done). I felt it was about overwhelming your enemy rather than too easily relying on chip shots like EVERY OTHER TURN BASED RPG WHERE THE HEALER CAN HEAL YOUR ENTIRE PART SO YOU DO ONE BIG ATTACK AT A TIME YAAAAWN.

Don't listen to this- this kid right here used to worship Hope.

Ya know the weirdest thing about Lightning? She hardly talks. In fact, come chapter ten she just kind of... surrenders leading the party.

 

@DigitalAtlas it's a good thing I had a bunch of points that had nothing to do with Hope[DOUBLEPOST=1398661538][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, Sazh was the best character. Dude just wanted to save his son but got caught up with a bunch of obnoxious kids.

 

I liked the first game's story for its counter-religious themes. The scene where Hope and Lightning start to realize that humans in Cocoon are basically just pets for the Fal Cie is where I really got into it.

The characters were decent and I felt a real connection to Hope until he started to latch on to Lightning and made her take on that mother-figure role, but that's only because it's such as overdone stereotype for orphan boys.

The setting was okay and I felt like there could have been a lot of room for an Elder Scrolls level amount of lore and backstory, but this is Final Fantasy so that potential was bound to be wasted from the get-go.

 

The big thing to pay attention to with FF13 is that while lots of people sucks, pretty much everybody has a completely different reason and often will cite another person's reason why it sucks as one of the few good things in it.
That in itself should show you that it's not as pitch black bad as people say. I have a theory about this, but I really need to sit down and plan it out so I can word it properly

 

I would have liked the stagger system more if it wasn't pretty much the same objective in every single battle. Like, give me an enemy that I can't stagger, or stagger in really interesting ways (some monster that feeds off of pain and you actively have to heal or something? I dunno.) I mean, overwhelming your enemy is fun, but for me it got old quite fast, especially with the overly long boss battles.

Sazh is pretty cool. I also liked Fang for being someone I could have easily seen as the protagonist of a more interesting, action-filled game.

I dislike the counter-religious mindset personally (even as a lot of games seem to carry it.) Instead, I'm fine with some counter-organized religion. You can be a follower of a religion without adhering to all the rules set by the leadership, in my opinion, but to hate on something so completely like that doesn't sound all that great to me.

I disliked Hope the entire time, because I already knew what role he was set to play, and he was still annoying and unlikable to me. If he wasn't one of the best team members in the game, I would have never used him.

The setting was wasted, since there is no point in making things look so pretty and expansive when you don't get any exploration. Sure there's the part where you can run around in the grassy plains, but you're restricted by having no mobility besides running. Like, imagine if they allowed you to jump up mountains or climb waterfalls or something.

 

From a story perspective FFXIII has a lot of problems. The biggest is of course that you have to read everything in the codex, but there's also very little compelling about the plot or the characters. To be fair I only reached Chapter 11, but I kept thinking "okay, but when is the plot going to pick up?" and was assured that it already had. The game really just lacked the scope and magnitude of other Final Fantasy games. Since I'm replaying it & it's my fave, you really got a sense in FFX that their journey took TIME, you got a sense for all of the characters with their various subplots while still being constantly reminded of the larger plot (Yuna's pilgrimage), and all the subplots related back to it. FFXIII goes in a million different directions when it attempts to establish its characters and it never seemed to satisfyingly weave together. I also didn't feel there were any compelling relationships between characters; some had potential but were rarely harvested. Snow and Lightning don't get along. lightning is a cold mother to Hope. Sazh is slightly fatherly to Vanille. Fang and Vanille are kinda lesbians. Hope hates Snow (for a while). There's very little crossover in the relationships; they're developed between the two or not at all. Again to compare with FFX, Tidus is brotherly towards Wakka who, with Lulu, is a kind of surrogate parent to Yuna (my phone auto corrected that to tuna lmao); Lulu resents Wakka subconsciously seeking to replace Chappu with Tidus and is racked with grief still over Chappu though she has difficulty expressing it, and her relationship with Wakka develops over time, occasionally through the unintentional counsel of Tidus. There's just some much complexity and variation between the characters' relationships in FFX, they all relate to one another and influence each other, which is just sorely lacking in FFXIII. For someone who is mainly interested in video games for characters, this is a huge failing of FFXIII and probably my major issue with it. There are a lot of other problems that I could point to, the sexualization and over saturation of Lightning being one of them, but the character thing is really what bugs me.

tl;Dr version: I didn't give a **** about any of the characters in FFXIII and that is a HUGE problem.

 

LINE BREAKS

 

Speaking of breaks

WHERE WERE THE EPIC LIMIT BREAKS?

And stuff like "Army of One" doesn't count to me because of how weak they felt.

 

Really ? Which games ? All the "anti religion" games I' ve played bash dogma but actually praise faith, including FF XIII. Its characters have actual evidence that their gods a) exist b) are dicks. But no worry, you can defy physics through blind faith and save the day.

I' m not sure you meant to imply that, but criticism =/= hate speech. Personally I' m much more annoyed by all the games who laud faith through fallacies (but is there any other way to laud it ?).

 

I am one of the ones that really liked XIII. Yes, it's not the best FF game, yes it's got some problems, yes I liked the sequel better, but I still think it's a fun game all the same.

On the subject of characters, Sazh is absolutely the best character in the game, but he's not my favorite. That honor goes to Fang for being an absolutely badass beauty who can kick all amounts of butt with not a hair out of place.
As for Hope, a lot of the problem people have with him in the first game is that he's whiney. But see, he's a 14 year old kid who's mom just died. I think he has the right to be a little whiney. He cuts that out and becomes a Big Damn Hero by the second game anyway.
Lightning, while not my favorite character, I feel like gets more sh*t than she deserves.

 

I don't mean the games themselves, but the people who think like that. It's so annoying hearing people instantly dismiss religion and people who follow it :|

There's only so much whining that an audience should have to take before the character should actually become endearing though, in my opinion. Look at Simba from The Lion King. He had pretty much one scene of whining after watching his father killed by wildebeests, followed by grieving and then developing. And I personally don't really care what happens in the sequel for him, since I only played XIII so I'm only discussing that one.

 

In The Lion King, though, there's a time skip after Simba is taken in by Timon and Pumbaa. It's implied that at least a year or two passes during the course of Hakuna Matata. FF XIII, on the other hand, takes place over the course of, what, a month-ish?

 

I know about the timeskip and all, but Simba also meets Timon and Pumba not long after his dad's death. He's shown to still feel terrible about the event, but he's not being annoying and filled with angst -- just empty.

 

Yo, everyone handles grief differently. When one of my relatives died, one of my aunts was beside herself, bawling constantly, clinging to her husband, and so on, whereas my other aunt was upset, yes, but she was very quiet about it.