Tried FFXIII on PC and...

[Vorark]

Final Fantasy post X is a series you need to approach without major expectations. I played XIII right after it was released on Steam. While retards were crying about muh 60 fps, I capped mine to 30 and went to town. Never had an issue. Not justifying the hackjob Square-Enix did, but it was playable.

I really enjoyed the battle system, the paradigm mechanic was fairly interesting. You adapted on spot -- need more offense? Go Commando + Ravager. Buffs and debuffs? Shift to Synergist and Saboteur. Healing magic? Medic. Offensive magic? Ravager, again. Need a tank? Sentinel. I tried to get max rank in most battles, was surprisingly fun.

"Wah wah autobattles" ~ who never took the time to learn the systems and relied on the noob proof solution provided by Square-Enix.

Visuals are still impressive, even more so considering it was originally developed for the PS3. Soundtrack is terrific too. Story is ye usual jrpg nonsense, but I thought the characters were alright.

 

[CptMace]

I clearly remember that before FF13 the consensus was that FF10 is shit and even 8 and 9 are not that good

I thought 9 was the one everyone loved because it has black mages and other throwback bait all over it, after a couple games that didn't feel like classic FF.

To be fair, trying to find a consensus among FF fans about anything FF related is like trying to get the poles to agree on which one of their neighbours they hate the most.

 

[Tigranes]

Did OP literally justify cutscenes by saying the game is an endless corridor so need cutscenes to break it up

 

[Jacob]

Just no. Bethesda already had garnered decent popularity with Morrowind. "By August 2005, the game had surpassed 4 million copies sold.". That's a shitton and on par with or more than all but the most popular FF games.

Still, you get my point. Oblivion/Fallout 3/Skyrim gave Beth the prestige, while FF XIII takes them from Square Enix. Besides, depending on who you're talking, Morrowind could be considered one of the "shitty games."

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Quoting a Jon Tron video unironically.

You shouldn't make fun of that guy, his life is tough enough as is.

 

[miles teg]

How's the performance? I had a problem with the game periodically dropping to sub-30fps despite running at a silky smooth 60fps the rest of the time. Some kind of bottleneck going on there. Dunno if it was ever patched.

The soundtrack is excellent.

same here. Game is mostly running at 60fps with some drops for no apparent reason.

 

[aweigh]

FUCK YOU FF13 SUCKS

 

[miles teg]

nah, it doesn't really. A lot of design issues, as said, but shitty jrpgs are another thing.
Another thing I really dislike is that summons are motorbikes and you battle them for no reason. At least in FFX they were fully integrated into the lore

 

[CallMeSnek]

I was surprised by XIII. I went in just wanting to look at some pretty graphics for once; but the gameplay was actually pretty neat, for a jrpg. In particular, that chapter where everything opens up and you're getting your ass kicked left and right is one of my favorite times in gaming, period. Possibly my second favorite FF, after XII. Weird.

I think part of my enjoyment had to do a couple things I did. First, I'd recommend turning off the mini-map. Doing that makes a huge difference in how large the world feels psychologically. Also then you're engaging more with the visuals, which are a huge part of the reason to play this game in the first place.

The other thing I did was skipping as many encounters as possible (only stopping to grab guarded treasures). This game lets you get away with being criminally under-leveled, if you're willing to engage with the combat system a little more. Strategy matters far more than stats in this game; it's great.

Some more tips I have jotted down:
Treasure is valuable, as money is rare. The summon battles are all dumb "puzzles"; you're supposed to cast libra twice. If you get stuck on them, try turning down the battle speed - and don't forget to press square to finish the match. Unequip accessories after boss battles if you get the chance, because soon after each you'll usually be switching to other characters who might want them. Look up online to see how upgrading works, and how to do so efficiently (also find an exp calculator). You can safely sell anything that says "can be sold for a premium". Accessories are cheaper to upgrade than weapons. Some of the best accessories to upgrade, especially if you're underleveled, are the ones that resist a percentage of physical/magical damage, as they scale well; otherwise you want stuff that speeds up battles, like auto-haste. The final dungeon is a total slog; at some point, just turn it down to easy until the boss fights.

I'm half-tempted to recommend just skipping all the painful cut-scenes. But that might just be me; my least favorite part of jrpgs is when they talk.

~

1. XIII-2 pretty much sucked, on the other hand. The story is somehow even worse. It's not half as fine-tuned, being grossly unbalanced on the side of way too easy. All the encounters are pure fodder. If you try to hold back your levels, then the boss fights become nigh-impossible in a bad way. Also, the side-quests are amazingly unsatisfying. If you must play this thing, I'd highly recommend skipping them. You could easily get away with skipping the whole game, though; almost nothing happens until the end.

Not sure about XIII-3: Lightning Returns. I feel I would've enjoyed it more if I hadn't tried to do all the side-quests. If I play it again, I might try to just blitz through the main quests - possibly on Easy (?) to compensate for the lack of stats.

 

[ilitarist]

Snek, you said you like FFXII. That's the one with job system, right? I very fondly remember FFV and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (the one on Gameboy), those had job system too and felt great. Do you recommend FFXII because of gameplay complexity? Do you think FFXIII has that? To be honest, I have not even finished the first location after you get that Crystarium thing so I didn't see much of RPG system. Cutscenes are painful, SARAH.

 

[Perkel]

10 had actual story you could follow and was actually pretty great story by itself.
If it didn't have that story it would be shitted on just as XIII.

Secondly linearity is one thing but constant tunnel fighting mobs non stop is what XIII is and only toward the end when you get onto pulse it opens up a little (which was my favorite part of the game and somehow thanks to this i don't hate completely XIII).

Aside from Pulse, 0 sidequests or interesting things. Just follow damn tunnel.

 

[Taurist]

FFX is as to FFXIII as Bioshock is to Bioshock: Infinite.

Yes, FFX is decline, yes its linear. But FFXIII is on a whole other level of shit.

 

[Ash]

Nice.

At least in infinite you aren't goddamn invincible though, but I'll let the comparison pass because the game is basically Call of Duty in the sky.

Aside from Pulse, 0 sidequests or interesting things. Just follow damn tunnel.

Exactly. 10 was more linear than previous games, but each location was more diverse, had its small amount of exploration, hidden side quests, NPCs, chests etc. A bit too linear for my liking but FF13 is just...wtf.

 

[CallMeSnek]

Snek, you said you like FFXII. That's the one with job system, right? I very fondly remember FFV and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (the one on Gameboy), those had job system too and felt great. Do you recommend FFXII because of gameplay complexity? Do you think FFXIII has that? To be honest, I have not even finished the first location after you get that Crystarium thing so I didn't see much of RPG system. Cutscenes are painful, SARAH.

I'm always hesitant to recommend games - largely because I think what appeals to me is a fair bit different from what appeals to most others. Also, RPG experiences are particularly susceptible to the happenstance of one's particular disposition, at that particular time. I've enjoyed RPGs I had no business liking, and hated RPGs that I know intellectually didn't deserve such vitriol. Also, it's just been a long time since I've played these games, and I'm always increasingly skeptical of my prior opinions over time.

Anyways, I'd say 12 and 13 are at least "worth playing"; though the latter comes with the reservations I mentioned earlier. I don't know if I'd call the gameplay "complex"; but most JRPGs (or even RPGs in general) aren't that complex in their day to day encounters anyway. I certainly found 13 to be "engaging" though, at low levels. And I'm really looking forward to replaying 12 again, after I finish a few other RPGs I'm playing.

On 12: the job thing came in the "International" re-release; I haven't played that version. I think I may recall reading that you can't change your jobs after selecting them though.

Speaking of which, one of the things I disliked about 5 was that you had to level up your jobs. I feel it would've been much more interesting if the game was designed so they were at full power from the get-go, and balanced as such; so you weren't discouraged from messing around with all the different classes.

If I play 5 again, I'm going to try it with infinite job points. Obviously, that'll be a little overpowered; but that can be alleviated by avoiding the obviously OP abilities, and cutting the encounter rate - which I like doing whenever I can in JRPGs, to lower tedious redundancy and increase difficulty.*

* Though annoyingly, a lot of them use level difference as the dominant factor in their formulas, such that you're grossly underpowered if you're even a couple levels behind the boss, forcing you to grind. I found Persona 3's gameplay a real downer because of this, after having just finished SMT3: Nocturne.

 

[aweigh]

P3 is a shit game while Nocturne is an all time classic maybe that had to with it as well??

Speaking of which, one of the things I disliked about 5 was that you had to level up your jobs. I feel it would've been much more interesting if the game was designed so they were at full power from the get-go, and balanced as such; so you weren't discouraged from messing around with all the different classes.

If I play 5 again, I'm going to try it with infinite job points.

nigga what the fuck kill yourself

 

[Okagron]

I genuinely tried to give this game a chance but some things killed it for me.

- The game plays itself basically. If they wanted the players to use the more intricate elements of the battle system, they shouldn't have made auto battle so damn broken. I literally used the auto battle 90% of the time and i won. The other 10% i used the commands myself to keep myself from blowing my brains out of boredom.
You know what auto battle does in other games, at least the ones i played? The characters literally only pick the basic attack. Games like Bravely Default allows you to setup what your characters will do in auto battle, but they will still only do that.

- The game is super linear. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend the previous Final Fantasy games weren't linear, they were. But even if they were linear, most of the time they had this open area with like a village or whatever where i could interact with people and get a feel for the world. Or an optional area i could go and maybe get some cool shit. There's almost none of that for the first 20 hours of this game. It's just hallway after hallway.

- Even for Final Fantasy standards, the story is so damn stupid. The characters still know that killing Barthandelus will send Cocoon falling towards Pulse, killing millions. But still do it because fuck it, we need a main villain driving the plot. You have to read the database that is built in to get a damn clue on major things. Can't have characters dump exposition on those things (or you know, actual npcs), need to have them repeat what their Focus is for the hundredth time.

- Crystarium is an hallway. I thought maybe i had to pick a path for each job, leading to different setups in different playthroughs, but no. It's the same shit for every job in every playthrough. All those lines and nodes look so complex but then it's literally spam the X button and watch a line get filled and move on to the next one.

- Party leader dies and it's game over. Who thought this was a good idea?

 

[Deleted member 7219]

The game is quite easy and boring most of the way through. When you get to the open world area (not so much open world, as a very large area that's still railroaded in its basic design), there are much tougher monsters that you're not meant to be able to take on without a lot more grinding.

What I found was that I read all these reviews of the game that said "Unless you want to kill the optional monsters, forget about grinding - you can play through the whole game just by moving forward", but this isn't true. Not long after you leave the open world area, you face some crazily difficult monsters including a string of high level, HP bloat bosses. It was here, 40+ hours in, that I finally quit the game. I couldn't get past them despite having spent at least 3 hours grinding in the previous section on the XP exploit mobs.

 

[Shaewaroz]

OP, I think you need to watch this guys video serie deconstruction of FF13:



He will very politely and thoroughly explain whats wrong with FF13. If you really wanna know, that is.

 

[Felix]

Why are these people insisting on inserting their faces in their videos?

 

[Viata]

- Party leader dies and it's game over. Who thought this was a good idea?

I love this when the party leader is fixed, like MegaTen series.

 

[Malpercio]

... it's MUCH better than I was expecting. Why did this game receive so much hate?

It's extremely linear, but so was 10 and it didn't receive as much hate as this. And all the FFs are "linear" in a manner of speaking.

No, they are not. There is a difference between being linear and being a straight line. Take FFX, the FF most similar to XIII. It has towns, side-quests, side-activities, dungeons and occasional detours (and the game world fits the game's theme anyway).

And FFX did get hate for ditching the world map anyway.

 

[Ash]

It's almost like people who enjoy FF13 have never played another game in their life or are completely retarded, or just devoid of standards. There is very little merit to that piece of shit at all.

 

[miles teg]

takes a retard to recognize another one...

The fact that maybe we enjoyed it despite its problems can't be possible.

We must be retard.

Thanks for your massive contribution to this thread, you definitely opened my mind!

 

[Ash]

 

[Falksi]

There's a torture device in the new Saw film which traps the victim in it, and forces them to play FF13.

Sick stuff.