Gralian said:
I skimmed over your review. I stopped right when you started talking about the characters being realistic and "no more emo". Excuse me? What about Hope? All he does for the first half of the game is ***** and whine about his parents, or specifically, avenging (or not) his mother. To the point where Lightning has to act as a surrogate parent role in order to toughen him up and provide a laughable cliché excuse for two dimensional "character growth". Oh look, the tough chick softed up and the wussy child toughened up. You could see it coming a mile away and the reasons for making it happen were horribly contrived. Getting seperated at that junkyard-esque place just for the sake of alone time for character growth? Please.
I'm glad you recognise the gameplay as being the worst aspect of the game, but really, for the first half of the game (again) it's mashing A over and over and over. Well, in fairness, that's only completely true for the first act of the game, before you gain access to paradigm shifts. Then you press a second button to swap classes. But until then, it's just one button. Auto-battle is a terrible idea, the point of a video game is so the player can play the game. The only highlights of the combat were the boss fights. I will concede that defeating a boss is gratifying, but all the mooks before that are nothing bit time wasters.
If that weren't bad enough, did you know it's possible to glide through the entire game without upgrading your weapons or accessories once? How do i know this? Because in order to create the optimum equipment for the hunting missions at the end game content, you simply must not upgrade a thing, or you won't be able to get five stars on each mission because your gear won't be up to snuff. If you create a long RPG where you never once need to upgrade your gear, and still not be challenging as a result of that, something is wrong.
I won't talk about the linearity, because honestly, that's beating a dead horse. But you can't tell me it didn't make you woefully disappointed not to see the kind of lavish, grandiose towns we've come to expect. Think Lindblum from Final Fantasy 9 and Luca from Final Fantasy 10. I can swallow vendors being replaced by holodesks, but come on now. Towns are staple of the Final Fantasy series and reinforce the feeling of a living, breathing magical otherworld. Rather than hollow corridors populated by some sort of malicious beast or trooper.
As for the story, did you know after the first act, i still had no idea what was going on and so had to open up the glossary in order to understand what the hell was going on? In fact, during that Hope-Lightning "character development" bit i discussed earlier in the junkyard, i'd thought they had already left Cocoon. Turned out they hadn't. I had no idea what Pulse was, what Cocoon was, and what they were in relation to each other. Throwing you into the deep end of a new mythology is fine, as long as it is introduced to the player at a steady rate rather than throwing terms around and expecting the player to simply understand. I would also call the lack of any major 'Big Bad' to be another serious flaw in the story, as it forced me to lack the motivation for continuing. It's not Final Fantasy 8's Sorceress Edea or Final Fantasy 7's Sephiroth. It's fate. That's it. That's your Big Bad. Defying fate. However, Nyx Avatar from Persona 3 said it best; whether they die now or die from old age, death comes for you eventually. Now, both Persona 3 and Final Fantasy 13 dealt with fate, but the major defining difference is that you had a big bad in Persona 3, but the fact you didn't learn about it until the end of the game was unimportant because you had a clear goal - get to the top of the tower. You know something bad is up there, and the guardians you kill on your way up gives you an idea of what to expect. This lack of any real objective goal and visible antagonist really made the game hard to connect with and care about.
And another thing, calling your readers a psychopath is dreadfully unprofessional. I know user reviews are not and should not be held up to professional standards, but if you're putting your criticism up for public viewing, it should also be held accountable for public scrutiny. There's certain level of etiquette that should be maintained when writing and displaying your opinions.
I really need to stop getting involved in this sort of thread because I feel like I end up playing devil's advocate. I enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII a great deal, and still go back to it occasionally, but I can certainly see how it's a flawed game in a great many respects. The problem in my mind is that people tend to take these incredibly negative standpoints where they refuse to acknowledge any possibility of things being open to alternative interpretation beyond their own that gives them greater meaning. It's like every time I come into one of these threads I'm compelled to make lengthy posts defending the game, even though I think it's far from faultless.
I'm going to make the point right now that I think one of the biggest flaws in Final Fantasy XIII is it's method of storytelling and how it relates to gameplay. The developers put a very heavy focus into giving a "faithful" adaptation of their story and thus put lots of barriers in place that took away from the game. If they hadn't made the characters effective pariahs, started them off without powers and decided to plan their level design around the greater narrative, a great many of the main complaints about the title could have been avoided. They had a story they wanted to tell and often pursued it to the denigration of the gameplay experience.
Say what you will about the relationship between Lightning and Hope being contrived, it is in the sense that any part of a plot in media is, but you're giving an incredibly cut-down interpretation of what this actually involves for the characters. "The tough chick softened up" by exposing a significant part of her psyche to a complete stranger and essentially forcing her to decide whether she would stick to the principles that were holding her together or compromise and force herself to acknowledge that there were options beside effective suicide. Lightning's nature, resulting from the loss of her own parents, is to force all other issues beyond one focal point to the side and throw herself into the matter at hand without a second thought. In Hope, she has to confront what is potentially a younger version of herself and face the choice of how she'd mould someone else in her position. Say what you will about two-dimensional character growth, you're talking about interaction between a reclusive, suicidal sociopath and a young boy struggling with the loss of his mother. It's not as if her guidance makes things all sunshine and rainbows anyway.
FF XIII's gameplay is ... odd. It straddles this weird position of simultaneously being a system with a lot of complexity and an uber-simplified game where very little input is required from the player. One of the major problems that's evident in the design behind the game is how certain aspects of the game design lampshade how lacking this genre actually is once you refine gameplay aspects to their core mechanics. Auto-battle is essentially the game taking the decision away from the player by choosing the most logical available options at that time. In all likelihood, the player would just use the same commands if they had control. It's a strange form of streamlining that only goes to show how much we'll put up with if we actually get engrossed in a system, rather than having it managed by a third party.
Weapons, gear and upgrading are clearly further victims of the game's simplification and streamlining - they're not at all necessary if you don't want to grind but the option is there if you want to invest the time. Why should gear be necessary to complete the game?. If there aren't going to be towns or quests that could lead to superior gear, everything is going to have to be available to the player either through shops, grinding or simply story progression. If you don't want to force the player to grind, why not give them the option to use gear, rather than force it upon them?.
I realise this is going to sound incredibly stupid and fanboyish but I thought I'd better make that point here before you or someone else does the same later. Final Fantasy XIII is linear for a reason.
A key aspect of FF XIII's story is the idea that the characters are essentially bound to a linear path heading to an unavoidable fate which they cannot escape - this is reflected by the game design. I'm not saying it's excusable, or a good idea, but I do believe that was the developer's intent; the game makes no attempts at offering the players the illusion of choice because the sam is not available to the characters. There are no shops or detours because the character's would be lynched if they went out in public. The game is meant to reflect that manner in which the l'cie have been bound by the will of the fal'cie to inexorably purse their goal or simply give up and sink into eternal sorrow. If you didn't complete Final Fantasy XIII, it's because the game designers took their story too far to heart and let it take precedent over the gameplay.
As I said before, Final Fantasy XIII's method of storytelling is one of its biggest design flaws. It's a student of the Lost school of narrative, where events and motivations should be explored over time, rather than being made readily apparent. To this end, it begins in medias res in a world the player doesn't know whatsoever and makes few early concessions to get them up to speed. I think one of the main reason Sazh is generally put forward as he most easily identifiable character is because his emotional investment in the opening few hours isn't played-up at all. He comes across as the relatable everyman character for the simple fact that he isn't ex-military and is more concerned with survival than some personal goal. It's not until we get a good distance into the flashbacks detailing the thirteen days before the game's opening that we really have a good understanding of the characters. The developers wanted to tell a particular story using characters and a setting that already "existed", rather than bringing the player into a new world through a character who had to constantly have things explained to them - ala Tidus. Unfortunately, their method of doing so left a lot to be desired.
Final Fantasy XIII has a big bad - I'm really uncertain what point you're trying to make here. The game is all about fighting fate because the big bad has forced the characters to confront a particular destiny none of them wants a part of. His whole plan is to force them to either overcome their malaise and strengthen themselves up to attempt to overcome that fate or to simply surrender to hopelessness. The big bad makes quite a few appearances throughout the game to check on his investment with accompanying battles. Fate remains the overbearing antagonist because the main villain is deliberately waiting for the protagonists, rather than looking to confront and destroy them. They know their destiny is to meet him in battle but have to face up to the realisation that things might be far better for the world if they didn't.
