BlueberryMUNCH said:
For the love of god OP, listen to this.
End of the day, everyone's just gonna hate on XIII-2 because they despise XIII 'cos that's the 'cool' thing to do.
If you're looking for longevity and a game you'll always enjoy, get XIII-2.
Please><.
Normally I don't indulge posts like this one, but Final Fantasy XIII is a special case.
The first RPG I ever played (and understood, because I was too young to actually get anywhere in
Betrayal at Krondor) was
Final Fantasy VII. It enthralled me, enough so to make me acquire
Final Fantasy VIII,
Final Fantasy IX,
Final Fantasy X,
Final Fantasy XII,
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and even
Final Fantasy X-2 (which I never finished) all on release. And, aside from the already appended title, I loved every one of those games.
Why did I love them? The story has always been a largely linear affair ever since the jump to the Playstation, however the games all retained things such as numerous cities and NPCs to add in side-quests and back-story, as well as allowing and rewarding the player for exploration.
X was the beginning of stepping back. There was no longer a playable world map, but the game world remained large and kept all of the previous elements.
XII kept the lack of a "real" world map but expanded the size of the game world considerably compared to
X. So when
Final Fantasy XIII was released, it seemed obvious to me that I should purchase it.
At the time, I was largely absent from websites such as this one. I didn't follow video gaming news avidly, if I wanted general information about whether I would like a game or not I would look it up on Wikipedia. I had not seen any pre-release hype for
Final Fantasy XIII and I did not know anybody online or in my immediate area who even cared about it. I bought the game a week after release. I installed it on my Playstation 3 and proceeded to play the most linear, constricting game I've ever seen in my life.
I don't mind games that prioritize story. As I said, I've been a huge fan of previous
Final Fantasy titles and I'm a massive fanboy of the
Metal Gear Solid franchise, ostensibly famous for ridiculous cut-scene/game-play ratios.
Final Fantasy XIII did not feel like a
Final Fantasy title to me. Gone were the cities full of life, the character and party customization, the side-quests and exploration. Any cities and non-player characters in the game had been relegated to pure cut-scene status. Shops were gone, merged with Save Points. Moogles were gone (Upon further reading, they apparently have an extremely small cameo in the game). Being allowed to control more than one character during combat was gone. Item acquisition had been simplified into a crafting mechanic, completely removing the element of searching for ultimate spells/items/weapons.
And when I finally did begin loitering about websites such as this one, what was the number one defense people said in favor of
Final Fantasy XIII? "It gets better later." I don't doubt that, I honestly don't. It holds true for most of the titles in the series. However, the "later" in question comes much, much later in
XIII than any of the previous entries. In
Final Fantasy VII, the story is largely linear until you first encounter Cid and make away on the plane that gets damaged and so can only travel by water. However, up until that point there are still small extra things you can do, and the story doesn't feel like it's ramrodding you in a linear progression to push it along. Traveling to the Golden Saucer for the first time feels like your own choice. Stopping at the tower where the Phoenix is after traveling through the cave following the Midgar Zolom is completely optional, and results in an interesting little Tower Defense mini-game. In the same area, you can encounter and recruit Yuffie, which in itself is a game of cat-and-mouse because choosing any of the wrong things will cause her to steal something and run away. Vincent in the Shinra Mansion is another character that can be completely missed if you don't do the side-quests.
Nothing like that was present in
XIII. It was a soulless, corridor-driven nightmare, whose sole concession to any of the customization present in previous games was the Paradigm system. The combat was not tactical. You didn't need to tell one character to attack while the second character scans and the third one casts heal. You couldn't set up the AI in an extremely particular way that allows them to analyze a creature's weakness and attack accordingly, or to target the weakest enemies with powerful magic, or to defend while holding the attention of a powerful monster. You couldn't tactically position a character in a front/back row or maneuver them manually along the field (
XII) to allow weaker characters to take less damage or stronger characters to deal more damage. There was nothing like equipping materia or junctioning magic, or equipping certain gear that taught spells/skills, or even a sprawling grid to level upon like
X, which was even clearly the inspiration for
XIII's leveling system. Even the leveling system was a linear design, allowing only for specific pre-determined character archetypes that were slowly unlocked throughout the story.
The story itself was incredibly poorly paced, as well. There are six main characters: Lightning, Hope, Snow, Vanille, Sazh, and Fang. The game forcibly rips control from the player at various intervals to catapult them into the body of a different protagonist and at no point allows the player to decide which character to control or pair up with. That's a stylistic choice and difference, and it's not very high up on my list of grievances because
VIII did the same thing with Squall and Laguna. What is high up on my list, however, is just how slowly the game moved along. I've been told that, assuming the player isn't gripped straight away, the game gets better after 15-20 hours. First of all, that's a completely ridiculous point and if any game ever takes 20 hours to enthrall somebody (the average length of 4-5
Call of Duty campaigns, for comparison), then the person writing the story needs to get an incredibly talented editor. Secondly, a game needs to use more than the story to hook a customer. Granted, that's a textbook example of opinions at work, as I'm sure other people have likely immensely enjoyed the game-play of
XIII.
I played the game for twelve hours. I died a few times, I found the fight against Odin to be a welcome change to the normal battles even if it did dissolve into the same thing after discovering the strategy for the fight. Calling back to the last paragraph, I only know Fang is a main character because of what I've looked up on the internet and what other people have told me. After twelve hours of playing the game, Fang had only just barely been introduced in a short cut-scene detailing her capture of Snow. Obviously I can't fault the game for that by itself, because Yuffie and Vincent are arguably significant characters in
VII and if you don't do things correctly you can completely miss even recruiting them. Amarant, Quina, and Eiko are all fairly late characters in
IX with less characterization as well. But,
XIII also felt like it dwelled much more heavily on character than overall story when compared to the previous titles. It was developing and pushing forth the stories of Sazh, Hope, Snow, and Vanille in a way that hasn't really been delved into by the series, at least following
VI. Taking that into account and accounting for the fact that there is only a whopping six main protagonists, when compared to the only other title in the main series (that I've played) to contain six main protagonists (
XII) which introduced and characterized them all within the first few hours of the game,
XIII stumbles heavily in its pacing.
I could very well keep going, but if I did then this weighty block of text would be more suited to the User Reviews section than anything else. Suffice to say, no, I do not hate
Final Fantasy XIII because it's "cool" to do. I hate it because it did not feel like a
Final Fantasy game, at least not one deserving of being in the main numbered series.
And all of that being said, I do still want to give XIII-2 the benefit of the doubt.
EDIT: Oh, for the topic at hand: Minecraft is fun but can get boring if you don't have something in mind, and can have a rather steep learning curve depending on the difficulty you're playing at. I can't speak for XIII-2 because I don't pre-judge games based on promotional material.
