Final Fantasy XIII, why quit after Gran Pulse?

[Epona]

I noticed that alot of people say they quit Final Fantasy XIII after getting to Gran Pulse, I am just wondering why?

Is it because Gran Pulse wasn't as great as promised?
Is it because without the linearity, the game lost it's drive?
Is it because the difficulty level ramped up?

Other?

 

[krazykidd]

I didn't quit . But the game gets INSANELY difficult after grand pulse . The second time you fight dysley is a a real chore . And once you get to the last area , it just gets ramped up through thr roof , add that instant death spells make their appearance and i understand why some people quit.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I didn't quit . But the game gets INSANELY difficult after grand pulse . The second time you fight dysley is a a real chore . And once you get to the last area , it just gets ramped up through thr roof , add that instant death spells make their appearance and i understand why some people quit.

Good grief. Understatement of the century, if that's the boss I'm thinking it is.

I watched my friend attempt that battle three times; each attempt took TWENTY MINUTES.
That's way, way, WAY too long for a boss fight that can luck-hax you into loss, as it happened to him (the boss activated game-ending-bullshit much earlier than it was supposed to).

It wasn't even legitimately difficult the time he finally DID win; he just didn't get randomly-screwed. His strategy didn't change at all either, so the game was just rolling dice at that point.

I don't know if his characters were so spot-on even for that level that the variance alone could determine a win/loss, but DAMN was that fight a bore to watch. It couldn't have been fun to play.

 

[krazykidd]

I didn't quit . But the game gets INSANELY difficult after grand pulse . The second time you fight dysley is a a real chore . And once you get to the last area , it just gets ramped up through thr roof , add that instant death spells make their appearance and i understand why some people quit.

Good grief. Understatement of the century, if that's the boss I'm thinking it is.

I watched my friend attempt that battle three times; each attempt took TWENTY MINUTES.
That's way, way, WAY too long for a boss fight that can luck-hax you into loss, as it happened to him (the boss activated game-ending-bullshit much earlier than it was supposed to).

It wasn't even legitimately difficult the time he finally DID win; he just didn't get randomly-screwed. His strategy didn't change at all either, so the game was just rolling dice at that point.

I don't know if his characters were so spot-on even for that level that the variance alone could determine a win/loss, but DAMN was that fight a bore to watch. It couldn't have been fun to play.

I'm pretty sure it's the same boss , even the target time is like 20 minutes . Not really a bore to play though because youbare constantly doing something ( at least i was ). Always changing your classes , rebuffing , debuffing , healling , ranking up chain bonuses, keeping chaing bonuses steady , trying not to lose your chain bonus , a lot going on there , on screw up left you dead, not to mention the luck factor . It was very stressful to say the least , but it gets harder from that point on , it's almost like everything up to that point was practice and you now had to put everything you learned to practice.

 

[Weaver]

I stopped playing WAY before Gran Pulse.

 

[Epona]

I have been playing JRPG's for 20 years so I grinded every time the Crystarium was upgraded. When I got to Gran Pulse I was pretty strong. I never saw that doom counter that people talk about but I remember fighting Cid 4 or 5 times because I couldn't beat him. Never had any trouble with Dysley but it's all about how you set up your paradigms. Apparently I set them up poorly for Cid but well for Dysley.

 

[F4LL3N]

Perhaps the people who found certain fights difficult weren't taking advantage of the battle system, rather just pressing A and hoping for the best.

 

[him over there]

Because Gran Pulse is a giant field of nothing! All you do is arbitrarily run around and kill specific monsters or head straight to Oerba which renders the game a linear corridor again.

 

[Sandjube]

I've never even played a Final Fantasy game =3

So I don't really know why I'm posting here...just for the sake of posting because it's a new thread and I'm booooored I guess.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

FF13 has far worse things against it than Gran-bloody-Pulse.

You know, like, everything else.

 

[Catfood220]

Because Gran Pulse is a giant field of nothing! All you do is arbitrarily run around and kill specific monsters or head straight to Oerba which renders the game a linear corridor again.

Pretty much this, I got to Gran Pulse and was like "is this it?" That in itself pretty much killed any enthusiam I had to continue playing the game, which annoyed me as I had played that far to begin with with all the horrible characters, the running down one long character and the boring as fuck combat system.

 

[Revnak_v1legacy]

I quit right before the final boss because I lost all sense of motivation after the first time I had to go back and grind. I just felt that I had no real reason to fight the bastards. That and they are so annoyingly difficult.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

FF13 has far worse things against it than Gran-bloody-Pulse.

You know, like, everything else.

couldn't agree more.

reaching that point is like running up a hill of flaming hot needles, and you reach the top thinking you are over only to realize you just reached an even more boring hill of steaming shit to climb up.

99% of the time i don't mind grinding, especially when it comes to jrpg's, and i also am one of the very few who like jrpg characters...but good god almighty, that game is a diabolical blu ray of fucked up torture to sludge through.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

FF13 has far worse things against it than Gran-bloody-Pulse.

You know, like, everything else.

couldn't agree more.

reaching that point is like running up a hill of flaming hot needles, and you reach the top thinking you are over only to realize you just reached an even more boring hill of steaming shit to climb up.

99% of the time i don't mind grinding, especially when it comes to jrpg's, and i also am one of the very few who like jrpg characters...but good god almighty, that game is a diabolical blu ray of fucked up torture to sludge through.

Indeed, there's a lot I will put up with in JRPGs, but FF13 pretty much combined everything I hate about the genre and distilled it into pure liquid awful.

 

[PaganAxe]

I tried to have perseverance when going through this game. I eventually decided to quit and turn the game in after the 10th or so failed attempt to kill the pope.

 

[Feylynn]

I quit a few hours after getting out of Pulse because I realized how much I hated playing the game. The battle system wasn't actually difficult if you equip random death protection, it was just tedious. I didn't like 45 minute encounters or whatever when all I did was build some stupid gauge until I could actually fight.
I was sick of the characters who had resolved all of their personal stories 20 hours prior and had just been stuck on loop with hope and optimism and the adamant will to not follow this path.

I just watched lets plays to see the end which was worse then was needed for me to give it any credit. The entirety of the ending was them losing, just deciding "Well we were pretty sure we were defying a god but it turns out we're dumb asses and now that we are in the final boss room we still won't fight of course not... Unless he fights us." Retcon the reasons for evacuation not being viable, drop every person on pulse to die to rampant monsters, kill god without becoming Ragnarok despite the lore establishing that as impossible and waste 60 hours of set up, copy paste FF7's ending sequence stopping some meteor like object with crystal flows of energy for good measure.

Well done FF13.

And I loved the first 30 hours of this game, I initially liked Hope's whiny bit, I didn't mind the battle system when it was about rationing small numbers in a sudden death split second reaction game...

Longer fights, higher HP pools, more defense phases do not make a game hard, they make it boring.

I sold it for a game that is at least a billion times better in every aspect except pretty word maps. Dragon Age 2.

 

[King Kupofried]

Likely because that is when the game begins to slow down gameplay-wise.

Enemies start to get considerably more health and defenses, which forces you to rely pretty much 100% on staggering to do any significant amount of damage. It makes random battles take longer than they should which makes exploring or going anywhere feel much slower. You get considerably more CP for these battles, but at the same time the by this point the crystarium is costing substantially more per 'level', so you end up with longer battles that give you rewards which don't really justify the effort.

Which is to say nothing about Bosses, who crank the previous statement up to eleven. The Bosses get such bloated health bars that even with the perfect combination of paradigms that completely cripple them, you will still find yourself sitting there for the better part of a half-hour cycling through the same commands over and over hoping that the boss doesn't decide to suddenly focus all effort on killing the Leader and make you do it all again.

 

[Fensfield]

That's just.. bizarre

I had so much fun with FF XIII, and the only boss gave me any trouble was Cid - 'only beat him on the second try.

Now, things like the adamantoise? Obviously that's a post-end thing, and I left it well enough alone as such. But.. hard? Certainly not the mainline quest stuff and not most of the side stuff either.. not for me.

As for Gran Pulse.. again.. 'had fun and I really don't see why people'd meander off. I fiddled about sidequesting a long while and the got on with the story - you don't have to do the sidequest stuff after all (maybe that's why I didn't have trouble?), and the moment you dive back into the main story the plot flow pretty much gets back to normal..

I swear though it's depressing seeing people rag on it, especially when it comes to stating elements happen to not be compatible with their preferences as reasons the game is fundamentally bad. It's.. well, frankly my favourite FF, and I've played a fair few - most all, really, though only completed a few. 'Got to the final chapters of 7 and all post. And always, always, they just.. seemed to dump their interesting ideas and most of their character development around the 2/3's through mark in favour of exposition and epicness instead. XIII is the first was so far as I saw not only primarily character driven, but grabbed its key ideas and ran with them through right to the very end.

So it was linear in large part.. so what? That's the only thing the complainants seem to state that I agree with, frankly.. and even that's just a matter of taste. I play and love visual novels to bits admittedly, maybe that's why it doesn't bother me? But I enjoyed the characters, how they interacted, had fun with the battles although they were very macroscopic, the world, the ideas.. I'd say about the only things got up my nose were Vanille and Snow - and certain story elements paid off my persevering with them.

Really, I honestly think most of the stuff the game gets slammed on, it gets slammed on for flying in the face of popular opinion more than actually being bad. God knows I'm enjoying this second play-through.