Final Fantasy XIII: The Escapist's opinons.

[Xathos]

I pleasantly enjoyed XIII. While I didn't think it was the best Final Fantasy game, I had a lot of fun with it.

The gameplay was fun, and I loved how you constantly had to switch Paradigms to account for certain situations, especially near the end of the game. Graphics were obviously great, and I really enjoyed the main cast. The only once I felt was really annoying was Vanille, and that was only in the beginning. After a while, I got used to her voice and the character.

Sadly, the supporting cast wasn't that great. This is especially true on the villains? side. Not the main bad guy? Well, then you are pretty much screwed. Still, I liked the story (though I thought that the game was trying to tackle a lot of themes at once and hurt itself in the long run) and the difficulty spikes proved to be a nice challenge.

But, like some other people said, I guess I'm in the minority

 

[RikSharp]

as soon as you learned to paradigm shift quickly, the game became stupid easy* just time consuming (the peeps above who say 10 mins a regular fight and an hour for bosses were not kidding)

*stupid easy except when they cheap shot the party leader causing an instakill you cannot avoid which, inexplicably, leads to a game over.

how come (for example) snow can get murderised then brought back to life but lightning cant?

 

[cj_iwakura]

All I hear is bad things. Like, reluctant approval. "Well, [x] was awful, but [x] was okay..."

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

I liked it... It's not perfect, but it has its good points. First of all, the soundtrack is outstanding. It's really linear, but I'm kind of OK about it... EXCEPT that every chapter is, pretty much, a point of no return until later in the game. The battle system is... alright. The paradigms are a cool addition, but they're cripplingly overspecialised, which is kind of the point, and a 4-person party and a smarter Medic AI (yes, Vanille, we're in green-range HP. now can you heal us to full?) would've made some of the bosses much less annoying. You'll never understand how much I wanted a Medic-Sentinel-Synergist-Saboteur party at some points... Anyway, the worst part of battle is the fact that, if the leader dies, you automatically lose. Good upgrading materials are really hard to come by; at the end of the game, 2 of my characters had tier 2 weapons. As is money. I suppose it's more realistic than finding cash after every fight, but I'm not here for realism, and it makes good materials even harder to get because they all cost a small fortune. When you set foot on Gran Pulse, there's such a huge power spike in the enemies that you probably can't deal with a good amount of them until the endgame.

Spoiler

The final boss is also really anticlimactic. It's vulnerable to instant death, so all you really need to do is stagger it and then spam death, and hope to get lucky. It tries to cast instant death on you, but with proper preventative equipment, it becomes exceedingly unlikely to succumb to this.

Anyway, back to the good. The story is great, if a bit drawn out. The characters are pretty good, too, but I didn't exactly like Hope... However, none of them deserve the hate that they get. And despite the amount of bad things I've said, they really aren't all that bad, and what's good is really good. I liked it, but it could've been better.

 

[Zhukov]

Worst game I have played in quite some time.

Cannot think of a single nice thing to say about it.

...

EDIT: Wait a sec, yes I can. Some of the environments were rather pretty.

But apart from that, the game was had all the appeal of a lukewarm turd.

 

[GundamSentinel]

I really liked it, but I guess I'm in the minority.

Same here. I really enjoyed it for the most part, especially the gameplay and soundtrack. Vanille and Hope could get annoying sometimes though, however I don't think it deserves all the hate it gets.

I didn't even find them that annoying. Once Hope stopped whining and decided Snow needed to be stabbed in the face I warmed up to him pretty quickly.

He redeemed himself at that part, but both of them were still annoying as heck to me (Hope started parroting what everyone else said on revelations throughout the story to sound more "leader-like", and Snow was still that mindless "Hero's don't need plans!" tangent). Though otherwise, I was one of the ones that liked the game as well, save perhaps the obvious grind part of Gran Pulse that could take nearly 30 hours to get anywhere productive. The graphics were orgasmic, if anything.

But by far, my most favorite character is still Lightning (Completely a surprise, I know), of course.

Hope an Vanille were horrible at the start of the game, but a few chapters in Vanille stopped making lewd noises and when the whole crew came together at last on the Palamecia Hope stopped being a pain as well.

Other than that, no complaints about the game (be it story, gameplay or otherwise). Finished it three times now and enjoyed every playthrough. And yes, Lightning was an excellent character.

 

[mr_rubino]

Seems to me that while everyone goes on about FFVII, nobody will even publicly admit to playing FFXIII.

 

[chainer1216]

i really liked the characters. snow, because i see far too much of myself in that character, sahz because i thought he was just going to be a racist stereotype and then he turns out the be the most mature, level headed one of the group with the saddest story. and...and...after actually thinking about it, those are the only good characters, lightning and that other chick in the blue are very meh, lightning is just way too generic "badass female" for me and the other one is very forgettable, so much so i cant remember her name. and both hope and vanille make me want to murder them whenever they open theyre mouths.

the scenery is beautiful.

the story is just tripe and you need a thesaurus, from the in-game world, just to know whats going on. and the paceing and level layout are some of the worst i've ever seen.

and then theres the combat, personally i disliked the system, it made the random encounter fights take like 10 minutes and boss fights could take hours, and every boss has the same pattern "strong attack hitting one guy, strong attack hitting one guy, light attack hitting everyone, super strong attack that reduces everyone to about 100 HP, strong attack to hit one guy, light attack to hit everyone." so if your not super careful you could die like 40min into fighting the bastard.

in the end i ended up doing what the OP did, i played the game all the way to the end, i'm just about at the final boss fight(i think) and i stopped.

 

[Harlemura]

I liked it, easily in my top five games of the year.
It's one of the only games I actually cared about the characters. The main ones at least, I kept forgetting who Rosch (or whatever his name is) was.
I found the gameplay pretty satisfying as well. Something about the lowering the enemies defence and boosting my party's attack at the exact same time and then enjoying the inevitable whaling on kept me playing.

Also, the ending made me cry. Saying it didn't strike some kind of chord would be like arguing I don't have a face.
It'd be Hopeless.
[sub]Derp derp, bad pun.[/sub]

 

[BlumiereBleck]

Unnecessary comes to mind.

 

[AngelicSven]

I beat it, I liked it, but there is a very large amount of games that are way better.
I really did Lightning though, as awkward as she was.

 

[Nifty]

Likes:
Combat system

Dislikes:
Contemptible characters
Those footstep noises
The waffle that is the story

 

[Hosker]

I REALLY wanted to like it. I played until I got to Gran Pulse and realised I wasted my time.

 

[JWRosser]

I think it is worth playing...but now I've completed it I doubt I will touch it for a while. I did quite a few of the monster hunts, but the last few have stupid amounts of health and I couldn't be bothered.

It was a very linear game with not much room to do anything else, apart from the monster hunts. Also it was tedious. The battle system got a bit boring after a while; I could just sit continuously pressing A to select the autobattle option. The characters were alright, but no one really stood out. Also, I pretty much just used Fang, Hope and Lightning (or occasionally Snow) all the way through, when I could.

The story was interesting but did get a bit confusing at times. Graphics were very pretty I must admit, and some of the scenery was beautiful to look at. The Paradigm system was interesting but I'm still a fan of the classic 1-character-class system like in the older Final Fantasys, or FFIX, or sort of FFX. Likewise the Crystalium or whatever it was called wasn't too bad, but there wasn't really any room for variation...

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Well, it looked great and I really liked the combat system once I figured out all the finer points.

But except for Sazh, the characters annoyed me. The story was convoluted and hardly made sense until about 3/4 into the game. And why was the final boss so easy compared to the second to last? Seriously, I beat him in a little over a minute and he's supposed to be the final boss with the highest hp in the entire series.

I'd say that FFXIII is a mediocre Final Fantasy game. Not bad, since it does have some things going for it, but not reaching the lofty standards set by its predecessors.

 

[KILLERTHING]

I liked it a lot (going for the platinum just now) but there were a lot of points where it got glaringly obvious that there was a lot of cut content and the linearity was ok (my mate who is a final fantasy nutter says they all start linear anyway) but the non linearity suddenly stopped way too soon which kinda killed it.

 

[starhaven]

i liked lighting

that is all the rest can burn in a fire