Final Fantasy XIII

[Eaglestrike]

I seriously don't understand a lot of the complaints people have about the game.

Good things:
Upgrade system, just takes money, no waiting for special drops. I really enjoyed XII as well, but I quit that game for good once I went 15 pops and never got the Danjuro to drop off the NM that dropped it. While yeah, upgrading money is the big grind of the game, that's better than a lot of other games where you're acquiring nothing and depend on luck for everything.

Battle system, it was actually difficult. You needed strategy to beat a lot of the bosses. You had to tailor make your paradigms to beat it, which is an important strategy decision, and you had to libra and debuff it however you could, get buffs on yourself if it didn't dispel, etc. You're going to die a LOT in the game, which isn't how earlier FF's were for me. As well, I selected the abilities to use VERY often towards mid/end-game, which meant I was controlling the characters a lot more than previous FF's where I largely just spammed attack.

Characters, aside from Snow cheesiness, I either liked or approved of all the characters. As much as I hate Hope being a whiny emo bitch, he had full right to be one because what 15 year old momma's boy wouldn't turn into a whiny emo bitch when his world gets torn apart and he watches his mother die? It was annoying, but he was completely justified. Sazh was great, Lightning was a badass, Vanille was cute/humorous and the scene when her and Fang finally meet up was great. They weren't the best line-up ever or anything, but they were good.

The Bad:
Can't move your characters in combat. Man, that was so crazy annoying.

Takes too long to get to a full 3-man team. Way too long of a "tutorial". Luckily they did add in the feature to skip each CS so it's not really that long to get chapter 11 from the start when you skip them, like 8-10 hours or so? I forget exactly.

So for me there's 3 major good things and 2 minor annoyances, which puts the game clearly in a "good" ranking for me. Although I think it would be nice to break apart from the "story-driven" games of 12/13 and hit up a "World exploration" for FF15. I think that'll sooth a lot of the angry people and it's time to go back to that anyway. I don't really want a "Western RPG" in my FF, but you do only get to see some of Cocoon and a small bit of Pulse. You never get to go to the other big nation in XII, there's a lot more they could have done with the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it'd be nice to finish a game and be like "There's nothing more I want from this story, I'm happy."

[Nevex]

It seems that the number 1 complaint about FFXIII is the auto-battle feature being too good and accessible, which sorta kills the challenge for those who use it over manual commands. The game even sets it as the default command and you have to change it from the options menu. A decent auto-battle feature is great but not when it screams "use me as much as you can!".

In order to fully appreciate the battle system you have to avoid using it and play it like any other FF. That way battles are far from being just a "mash X" fest like many people who just spam auto-battle say.
I love how buffs, debuffs and elemental magic are all extremely useful (or rather, practically required) in this game whereas in the older FFs all you had to do was spamming "Attack" 99% of the time.

Once you're more experienced you learn to know when auto-battle is good and when it's not, in fact you're most likely going to use a combination of auto-battle and manual commands during the endgame, which is a good thing of course.

Everything else is kinda subjective I guess. I liked the story and characters, especially the fact that all of them get proper development and screentime and aren't there just for the hell of it (see: Yuffie, Vincent, Quina, Amarant, Freya, Khimari, Vaan, Penelo and most of FFVI's cast).
Linearity, no towns and almost no minigames didn't bother me much, in fact I like how FFXIII had the balls to move away from stereotypical RPG elements that seem to be there only because every other RPG has them.

Overall FFXIII is a "hit or miss" experience depending on the approach you take and on your expectations.
I can see how many oldschool FF fans were disappointed by it, but I don't think it's inferior to the old FFs by any means, it's just different and hard to compare to them.

[Eaglestrike]

You should stop using auto-battle early on for maximum effect. Early on auto-battle will rarely AOE, when that's how you'll get 5-stars a lot of the time.

[Souj]

I seriously don't understand a lot of the complaints people have about the game.

Good things:
Upgrade system, just takes money, no waiting for special drops. While yeah, upgrading money is the big grind of the game, that's better than a lot of other games where you're acquiring nothing and depend on luck for everything.

Yeah, instead of trying to get Dark Matter and Traps to drop, all you need to do is farm about 30billion gil.

And as far as needing strategy;
SEN/SEN/SEN, MED/MED/MED, COM/COM/COM etc. The only strategy other than that that you needed was when you purposely chose not to do that. That's not to say other FFs used anymore strategy.

[Eaglestrike]

Yeah, instead of trying to get Dark Matter and Traps to drop, all you need to do is farm about 30billion gil.

And as far as needing strategy;
SEN/SEN/SEN, MED/MED/MED, COM/COM/COM etc. The only strategy other than that that you needed was when you purposely chose not to do that. That's not to say other FFs used anymore strategy.

I know I for one didn't have more than level 1 for most of the extra jobs for a while. Hell I'm on mission 56 or something and I have only very recently maxed out all 3 jobs for people, I'm not even certain I have, been a bit busy and haven't been on FFXIII much so maybe I still only have 2 jobs maxed per.

And there are plenty of situations where you need a tank at all times, so you'd use rav/sen/med, com/sen/med, rav/sen/sab, com/sen/syn, etc. as your line-up.

[orson]

It's not like this was a bad game. As games go FFXIII was good. The production values were extremely high (though a dual voice over track for PS3 being scrapped was sort of annoying.) The characters for most part were as interesting as FF characters go and the story wasn't too bad but nothing special. As I said before (again I know it is really hard to evolve a game series without taking risks) I don't think they added anything that overall improved on the formula. The rating system wasn't nearly as good as the chain system in FFXII (speaking of Danjuro that's how you got multiples if chaining the monster.)

As for endgame it's not like I haven't done any of it. I've beaten hunts up the Titan's area (whatever the limited # of hunts area is called.) I've beaten adamantoise and neochu with death spam cheese and overall I'm just not finding the hunts really all that interesting. Either they're too hard and I die multiple times or I can beat them with relative ease. In FFXII there was a a major point of completing hunts and the harder fights. In FFXIII the best weapons are achieved through grinding the only thing I can really see that are important in the hunts are genji gloves and a handful of other accessories.

I guess being that I'm not into completion just for the trophy or whatever it's harder for me to justify spending all the time maxing my characters. I enjoyed doing the hunts in FFXII for the the massive level of exploration, the challenge, and obviously to get some cool looking weapon models. Overall I think that the hunts were a little better balanced in FFXII then FFXIII. Not only that certain hunts in FFXII would only appear if you did certain things which was really cool. I really hope they keep the hunt system intact for future. Tweak it so that it's an ongoing thing that starts from the beginning of the game. Also stream line it to keep challenge level and hunt order correctly laid out.

Oh also I agree, fuck W-RPG style for new FFs. I play both but J-RPG > W-RPG for actual emotional story telling and likable characters.

edit: P.S. I think actually the more they talk about a FFXIII sequel the more I like it. There's so much they could do with one

Spoiler: show

and I'd love to see the group rescue Vanille and Fang.

Pulse and Cocoon are both huge and open for all sorts of new stories. Really if you take the FFXIII formula and do some major tweaking it would be awesome.

[Havok]

Probably going to repeat a lot but whatever.

I just played the game as well. I liked the battle system but honestly that's about it =/ Even that could have been made better if they simply gave the OPTION to control your other characters in battle. Lots of stuff is opinion obviously but here goes:

Storyline is by far the worst of any FF. Possibly because this also had larger supply of annoying characters than the other games as well. But still the plot didn't grab me at all.

I feel like every new game, they may improve something (battle system in this case) but then forget about what was well done in the previous game(s). Weapon/accessory upgrade system was really simple and uninspired; FFX's system was a lot better, more involved, and more fun to me. The crystarium system basically forces you to use each character for specific things untill very late in the game. It's almost identical to the sphere grid from FFX but with less freedom. The maps in this game are infuriatingly bad. Maps in XII were PERFECT and you could go from one linked area to another from the maps. Seriously why go from something so good to the garbage in XIII? Makes no sense.

And that's all there is to compare because there is NOTHING ELSE TO DO IN THE GAME. Now, that may be fine for some people. That may be the type of game they enjoy. But this is the main reason people hate the game. There is NOTHING to do besides battles and farm gil to upgrade shit. The "sidequests" are chocobo digging and the mark missions (just fancy-name battles) where the majority are just unimportant fights against normal monsters anyway. Very few marks actually related to any kind of plot, so it's mostly forgettable. That's it.

There are no cities/towns to explore and virtually no npcs to even talk to in the game. Only 4 NPCs were even important enough to remember their names. And at the end of the game you can't even go back to old areas. You can go to the last dungeon, Eden, and Pulse. No where else. Huge mistake and I hope they never do this again.

Hmm what else. Battles not giving gil at all was just strange. Only way to make gil is by selling drops. Like what, 10 chests in the whole game have gil in them? And in tiny amounts; even at the end of the game you'd get like 3,900 gil, what the hell?

Soooooo yea basically I liked the battle system; with a little tweaking it would have been almost perfect. Rest of the game was just not my kind of thing at all :/

Seriously need to just take the best features of each game and maybe tweak them to be a bit different, and build a game around that. People will still complain but they'd secretly be having fun.

[Nevex]

You should stop using auto-battle early on for maximum effect. Early on auto-battle will rarely AOE, when that's how you'll get 5-stars a lot of the time.

I know, in fact I didn't like the way auto-battle performs early on so I just used manual commands all the time.
My point is that the game is still beatable if you grind enough and rely on auto-battle alone, so a lot of people just mashed X even if their performance wasn't optimal, which led to the "FFXIII is a mash X fest" negative feedback.
It's pretty much the same complaint FFXII got about the Gambit system.

[miokomioko]

Something I really liked about XIII was that there were blockades in the leveling process that made some boss fights somewhat challenging, unlike most RPGs where spending an extra couple hours in one spot could set you way ahead of the curve and turn the entire storyline into an annoyance as you just want some "end-game" to challenge you.

Gran Pulse was a pretty sweet point in the game that made sense in the context of the story, but I wish there were maybe 2 other major points in the game where you got free stress-less roam of a large region before you got bottlenecked into the next tunnel of cutscenes.

[Eaglestrike]

I know, in fact I didn't like the way auto-battle performs early on so I just used manual commands all the time.
My point is that the game is still beatable if you grind enough and rely on auto-battle alone, so a lot of people just mashed X even if their performance wasn't optimal, which led to the "FFXIII is a mash X fest" negative feedback.
It's pretty much the same complaint FFXII got about the Gambit system.

I mashed X (or O) for just about every previous FF, far moreso usually. I rarely ever used magic in FF7, fuck I never even tried for Blue Magic until my last playthrough a couple years ago. I remember when I first was beating FF7 I almost never cast a cure that wasn't paired with an All materia. And tried to only cast a cure when the all would take effect.

And please, don't say summons are a fun, interactive, "different" thing you always did in past FF's, they're typically annoyingly slow. At least FFXIII's ones, while still annoyingly slow, serve a better purpose: They're the "oh shit" button, that can save your ass from a wipe. Which it has many, many times.

[sruon]

Does anyone have a PS3 save they could upload me around Chapter 11 or 12 (Eden Assault), NA or Asia(undub) version. My PS3 HDD crashed =/

[Souj]

is that even possible?

[Gokulo]

Afaik you cannot save game on the copied saves? (some kind of protection?)

[sruon]

Jailbreak'd PS3, not an issue. I got it to work with american saves but it doesn't work at all with European saves (which the only one I could find around CH11 was.)

[Anakron]

At what point does it really become feasible to use the alternate roles for the characters? I just hit chapter 10 and all the roles unlocked, but 3000 CP for a level 1 role ability and ~500 CP per battle make it really cost prohibitive.

EDIT: Or are the alternate roles really meant for people that do hardcore grinding?

[Nevex]

No, secondary roles are pretty much necessary for the post-game.
I'd suggest you to unlock the first few nodes on Fang's RAV (up to -strike abilities) and SYN (Haste), Lightning's SEN (Elude), Hope and Vanille's COM(Ruin), Snow's SAB(Daze) and Sazh's MED(Cura).

[Niiro]

Basically that ^, secondary roles are insanely expensive to level and not necessary for just a standard playthrough.

One thing you should do tho is spend the points to learn at least 1 ability for each chars secondary roles (you need to learn at least 1 to use the job) so you have the option of doing stuff like SEN/SEN/SEN to survive certain mega attacks (this combo in particular is useful for the final boss).

Even if only 1 of your SENs is worth a damn the others still get the -damage taken job bonus that comes innate and the party bonus stacks as well.

[Anakron]

Got it, thanks, guys. Light, Hope, Fang it is, until endgame then.

[Nevex]

There were rumors a while ago about the chance of a sequel given the way the game ends.
Looks like those rumors have been recently strengthened by this illustration and the release of Episode i novel, which takes place after FFXIII's ending.
The novel has already been translated and can be found here. The way it ends literally screams "sequel", even moreso than the game's ending.

[Eticket]

Started this up again recently. Working on upgrading weapons and equipment before I go back to try to 5 star my last few missions.