whenever i get around to playing ffxiii

the point is, the way they had Hope handle his trauma was annoying to a lot of people. it dragged on for far too long to the point where his trauma WAS his character and he became on dimensional. he got better after his confrontation with Snow, but the payoff took too long to get to.

i think they could have handled better.

 

But it's kinda different when it's within a fictional story written for a game meant to be both entertaining and engaging. I wouldn't have minded Hope being angsty and such for the first scene or two after his mum's death, but it dragged on for far too long in my opinion.

Basically this. When you ask people who played Final Fantasy XIII what Hope's character was, more times than not you'll probably hear "whiny," and that's an issue if you're trying to convey a character who's supposedly experiencing a lot of heavy-hitting situations.

 

The thing is, the Hope thing does change beyond angst to just blind blood rage justice. I think the real issue is that none of the characters in 13 have much going on OUTSIDE their specific issue. Hope shares some minor details about what his life was like before becoming a L'Cie, but we aren't really given any scenes dedicated to ANY of the characters doing anything outside their own contained little story until the very end in a few optional scenes.
It's a major shortcoming that I think stems from them trying too hard to appeal to some sort of group of people that didn't really exist.
Like, after each character resolves their personal issue, what do they do? Sazh is a pilot, Hope and Vanille are vague romantic foils. Fang and Lightning just stop mattering. Snow is really the only one who goes through a major change late in the story, and that ends pretty quickly too. After these characters are sorted the game focuses wholeheartedly on its main plot... and that's really not its strong part.
It's a lot like Final Fantasy 8. The actual plot takes a back seat to what Square HOPES are good characters, but then they botch it. Some people (like me) can still enjoy it by reading between the lines adn seeing what they INTENDED, but it doesn't really change the end product

 

I do agree that the characters in XIII fall short due to having little to them outside their specified arcs and the game's main story. It makes me think also of the characters from VIII. As you mentioned, the plot and characters had issues (as one of my favorite entries, it's hard not to acknowledge them,) but they also benefit from the audience seeing them put in a variety of situations, not just being forced down the storyline. Lots of people dislike him, but to me, Squall isn't just an unsocial guy who focuses on the job; he's also the awkward guy who can't dance well, the unintentional leader of an entire school army...thing, the crush of his superior (who happens to wear glasses and use a whip RAWR,) the master Triple Triad player, the guy who jumps into freaking outer space alone to catch Rinoa, and even the rider of the occasional Chocobo.

tl;dr: I think characters can be really fleshed out more by putting them into varieties of situations that show us different sides to them, which Final Fantasy XIII didn't do so well.

 

The thing is, a lot of that comes down to it being gameplay variety. It wasn't that they wanted Squall to seem like he had a lot of skills (besides the first two which are definitely for story purposes) it's just that they wanted a side quest. By the same virtue, Hope is apparently so good with mechanics age 16 that he can activate and pilot a mech from an alien civilization without much trouble, and all six of them are master Chocobo riders when only Vanille, Fang adn -maybe- Sazh have any reason to be.
13 has a lot less variety in side quests, so that's about it, but a lot of Squall's 'skills' are ultimately because some intern came up with a mini game and they decided to put it in
(also was Quistis having a crush on Squall actually confirmed? That doesn't sound canon)

 

pssst, hope is 14 in the first game.
unless i'm missing some in-between-games thing.

 

While they didn't really intend for Squall to come off as having all those skills, in my opinion it still helped give the story more scope and the characters more personality (not a lot, but they weren't nearly as one-dimensional as XIII's cast)

Quistis having a crush is never flat-out spoken, but to me it never had to be. The way she finishes some of Squall's sentences, teasing him on his SeeD test to acquire Ifrit, showing some jealousy in Squall dancing with Rinoa (whom he'd only met at the dance,) and many more sequences, but the most telling sequence was this one if you bring Quistis with you as your third party member.

Spoiler

 

Oh, my bad[DOUBLEPOST=1398721592][/DOUBLEPOST]

Can you give me a time stamp?

 

There are lots of raisins people don't like the game

STORY
A lot of focus goes to characters that nobody really likes, Sazh and Fang were cool but everyone else was just kind of
stupid
And I don't mean "OH THEY DID SOMETHING I DISAGREE WITH! THEY MUST BE BAD" kind of stupid
I mean a lot of the things the characters do just don't seem to make any sense a lot of the time, this goes for the villains AND heroes.
Because of the linear nature of the game, there's not a lot of NPC conversations you can have, so every bit of hatred or love you have for a character will be coming from one of the cutscenes, it's kind of lame because optional conversations were used a lot in other Final Fantasy games and added a lot to the characters and the world around them. There's no way I could count on my hand just how many little convos in Final Fantasy X there are that you can completely miss the first time around and especially in Final Fantasy VI.
XIII doesn't really have any of these and if so they are very few.

And I hate when a series is stretched out into 3 games. I just don't think it's necessary for XIII.

GAMEPLAY: EXPLORATION
There's a SLEW of issues here. For starters it is incredibly linear. There is nothing wrong with linear games but Final Fantasy games have always emphasized exploration, even in Final Fantasy X there was the option to go to other areas and revisit old ones before you fight Sin. I've heard people say "WELL YOU'RE ON THE RUN! YOU DON'T HAVE TIME TO EXPLORE" but this is a stupid excuse since in Final Fantasy VII a METEOR WAS ABOUT TO CRASH INTO EARTH but I still had time to go breed giant Chickens or in Final Fantasy VIII, the space time continuum was about to go apeshit but there's still time to go play some cards.

Final Fantasy is a video game at the end of the day, there's GOING to be SOME sort of dissonance between the gameplay and the story, if it's never been a problem in the past there's no reason to try and cover it up now.

And of course the ability to never be able to go back EVEN WITH AN AIRSHIP is just lame.

GAMEPLAY: COMBAT
It's really not that engaging.
First of all the inability to actually MOVE your character(s) while in battle is really stupid. It's like they couldn't decide if they wanted the game to be turn based or real time so they turned it into this awkward mess of both. You are attacked in real time, the enemies and your attacks are all based on spacing so it is possible to have attacks miss you if you move out of the way and same with enemies.
Sounds cool huh?
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T MOVE ANY OF YOUR PARTY MEMBERS ANYWAY
All they do is aimlessly strafe around the enemy, there's no telling if they'll decide to move away from the incoming explosion or not, it's just a game of chance.
The worst part however if at the beginning of a fight, if you wish to change your paradigms, the characters do this little animation before changing that leaves you COMPLETELY OPEN to ANY ATTACK and there is nothing you can do about this. Granted it only happens during the first paradigm shift of the match it is still insanely annoying and just poor game design


Other then that though the actual difficulty is lackluster. The summon fights are as hard as it gets. You'll want your healing paradigms, your "hurry up and stagger" paradigms and then your "wail on it while he's staggered" paradigm. Switching between them isn't exactly hard.



On the bright side the graphics are pretty and Fang and Sazh are based but overall it's not hard to see why it's one of the lowest selling Final Fantasy games. Everything it tried to do other RPG's and previous Final Fantasy games have done much much MUCH better. It's just a lackluster game overall.

 

Shiit, I thought I put one :< It's like 16 minutes into that clip

 

The thing is it wasn't stretched. It REALLY feels like they came up with another game, and decided to attach it the the FF13 brand. 13-2 is so tonally different from FF13, so much gameier, never mind they had to cpmpletely retcon the ending of the first game to even make the sequels.
There was no stretching, if anything a stapler was involved.

Hm, sounds more to me like she was saying he wouldn't have been able to focus on the test

 

Eh, flirting can sound different to various people. To me, the scene clearly shows that she is accepting that her initial feelings for Squall wouldn't be requited (BTW that pretty much played out between some of my friends in reality so just sharing that.)

 

I guess life paints this sort of thing. I've never been good on picking up on things like this

 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I rather liked 13. I played it 3 times before I lent it to a friend that lost it. There is so much that has changed in Final Fantasy the "not what I was expecting from the series" argument doesn't hold much weight to me. People complain that the characters aren't realistic at times, but then say at the times that they are realistic that it isn't actually what they wanted.
It is a very solid title. Not perfect, and some people will like or dislike design choices more than others, but it really doesn't deserve a lot of the flac it gets?

Where did you hear that? FF13 is the 4th best selling in the franchise with 7 million sales. Maybe if you look at a specific console, but are you really going to penalize a game for having the fan-base not buy it multiple times?

 

I wasn't penalizing the game based on that
Did you even read my post?
Like did you? Did you see at any point I said "XIII is bad because of its sales"?

 

Can you address the part where he says the FF13 isn't the worst selling? Like, it's literally on the heels of FF10 and FF7

 

What's there to address? He said it's not the worse selling.
He however made the claim that I was penalizing the game based on sales.

 

Because you said it's one of the worst selling Final Fantasy games when it apparently is one of the best selling Final Fantasy games :B

 

I was not addressing the majority of your post. It is highly subjective and you are entitled to that opinion.
However, I only quoted you stating that the listed flaws were the reason for a poor sales performance. Final Fantasy XIII having weak sales is objective, and by normal standards wrong. That correction doesn't negate most of your post. A good selling game can still be poor quality depending on what you are looking at, what your standards and preferences are, etc. I was just pointing out that I saw a fact that I thought was wrong.
By the way, the question on where you got your data was only half rhetorical. I suspected you hadn't actually looked for the data, but sometimes I see new ways to look at data that changes things. Perhaps looking at game sales vs console owners shows that FFXIII sold to a lower percentage of gamers despite the high physical sale count. Maybe it had slower early sales than normal. But on the surface view of raw total sales, it isn't a metric I would point to to try and say the game was bad.