So um...What was so bad about Final Fantasy XIII?

[MegaManOfNumbers]

I think my main shtick was the shitty, convoluted, and overly bloated story.

Let's face it, JRPGs and RPGs in general, no matter how good the gameplay is, the story has to make some sort of sense; because we're putting up with these twats for +45 hours.

Also, NEVER make up words. And if you are, don't make them sound FUCKING nauseous to say! I mean, the fuck is a "l'cie"?!

 

[Myndnix]

It's linear. In every single way. Not just in exploration, the whole 'just run down corridors thing', but in other ways too- bosses all have a very specific couple of ways of defeating them that you must adhere to in order to effectively defeat them, and that never changes. And character growth is the same way- the characters will always have stat increases at the same time in the same order every time you play the game (The characters each have their own leveling pattern, but there's no way to stray from any of them).

Oh, yeah, and the story is a completely inpenetrable mess, too.

I've heard arguments about it saying 'Final Fantasy IV was linear too but lots of people love that game!'. While that is true, FFIV was made in 1991. FFXIII was made in 2009. There's a big difference there.

 

[Xathos]

I always assumed people just set their sights too high and became extremely disappointed. There are some legitimate points though.

Any major or supporting NPC isn't really given proper depth and are kind of just there. They seem interesting, but you can never really connect with them.

For the first three hours of the game (give or take) you do not level up. Its all about learning the battle system. Frankly, that's a bit too long and gets to be quite tiresome towards the end.

The system itself is hit or miss with people. I personally didn't have a problem with it. Like others have said, it isn't until about 30 hours or so that you can really play the game the way you want. Up to that point, you are limited in party member usage, who your leader is, and what roles are available. I guess SE wanted you to experience how to correctly use all the characters so you could set up a good team later, but again it went on for slightly longer than normal.

People like to hate on the characters, which I never really understood. I thought the game was more character driven than plot driven, but that's just me. In fact, Hope is one of my favorite characters (besides Lightning and Sazh), and is generally hated by a lot of people. Again, this is a personal thing.

Story starts off fine, but near the end just loses a bit of steam and some unexplainable stuff happens. The in-game Datalog can explain a few things, but some feel that the information should be explained through cutscenes and whatnot.

The linearity wasn't too much of an issue (except for the constant Fight, Cutscene, Fight formula), it was the fact that I didn't feel too engrossed in the world. I felt a lot of things were happening around me, rather than me being a real part of it. I suppose some of that is due to how towns work in this game, which is vastly different (to my knowledge at least) than other Final Fantasy games. I suppose for the overall story, it makes sense for the towns and cities for not be like the other games, but eh...

Most (if not all?) of the sidequests in the game revolve around killing certain monsters. No real variety.

That's what I always thought about FFXIII anyway. Not the best Final Fantasy, but definitely not the worst. Just keep an open mind I guess and you won't be devastatingly disappointed.

 

[debtcollector]

Take what you hear case by case. I personally liked it a lot, I understood the story that apparently confused everyone else, I enjoyed the fast paced combat that apparently required only one button press from everyone else, I liked Vanille (even though everyone else apparently drove nails into their faces after 3 minutes), and I didn't mind the linearity because it was surpassingly beautiful linearity (VIDEO games being a VISUAL medium, prettiness is still pleasant, "graphics whore" accusations or not). I can sort of understand everyone else's whining, but if you judge it by its own merits, then it is a good game (not the best! Heavens no, but a good one), rather than if you keep comparing it to FFVI, FFVII, FFIX, etc.
Also, it took a risk by changing its own established formula, which is exactly what people complain about so many other franchises NOT doing, and yet if Final Fantasy does......

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

While all games are linear when you get down to it this was too linear. It made perfect sense from a story perspective but it need more side quests like FF IX or VII but what really fucked it up here was the formulaic method of it. Some of the characters weren't up to par compared to other games in general and the group split didn't feel as seamless as FF VI's. They weren't bad just not great.

Most of all the combat. I understand the challenge was to get 5 stars in a battle and that is fine with me it allows the game to be accessible to all but mastered by some. It was the UI layout that really let it down here. That skill list needed three columns badly as we were expected to select skills quickly when after a libra the auto battle nearly always had the best choice. The only exception is when you wanted knockdown or aoe which was highly situational. Worst FF battle system ever.

Also fuck the Crystarium, Licence Board and Sphere Grid they are all fucking awful systems and need to die in a god damn fire.

EDIT: I remember from another post that it dragged way too much. I understand sometimes things start off slow for example a book of 50 chapters might take 5 to get going and set everything up. It shouldn't take 20 chapters to get going.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

It's very linear and blatantly so. There are no sidepaths, no exploration, no freedom. Even CoD and the like give you open areas to shoot people but FFXIII is literally corridors.

It has an utterly atrocious battle system, too. You just swap between classes and watch your characters win. They sacrificed gameplay to allow for flashier looking combat, because they wanted the fights to look like Advent Children. The worst thing? The fights aren't fun to watch, either, they don't look very 'cool' at all.

It's not a game, it's a bad CG movie, basically (hey, I guess it kinda is like Advent Children then).

From what I played the plot wasn't awful, as long as you read the codex, but it was very average. It throws a load of random terms at you at the start and expects you to know what they mean, but the codex does explain them. It also expects you to care about the characters long before you even know anything about them, but they're not terrible characters and their development was fairly good (well, insofar as I saw, anyway).

Bear in mind I stopped long before it apparently got good. I gave it a good chance, but I wasn't having fun for a single minute.

While all games are linear when you get down to it this was too linear. It made perfect sense from a story perspective

It kind of does, but don't Sazh and Vanille spend ages faffing about in a theme park? Nobody seems to know that they're l'Cie.

 

[William Dickbringer]

-SNIP-

I felt like I was dragging around in the beginning of the game I really didn't like the characters except for one (it was the black guy with a chocabo chick) and I really dislike how if you died as the character you played as it's a game over even though the other character is doing fine it really just didn't stand out to me

 

[Burst6]

It looked pretty and personally the story wasn't too horrible compared to say, call of duty, but for final fantasy it felt way worse. Most of the characters felt very underdeveloped and Hope was annoying. One example is that there's a group of characters that are supposed to be very important to snow. They show up at the end of the game but they're so woefully underdeveloped i didn't recognize them until they said their group name, despite them making a big show about their appearance.

The worst thing though was the combat. To me combat in final fantasy is something i at best tolerate. I hate turn based games but i can generally deal with it because final fantasy adds a decent amount of strategy. Well they sort of threw it out with this game. Only controlling one character is a horrible thing to do in a turn based game. There's not much to do with that one character. The paradigm system was supposed to add to the strategy but it didn't do nearly as much as i would have liked. I found myself turning away from just pressing the auto attack button no matter how convenient it was to stave off the boredom.

It looked pretty, but i think that's the only thing they concentrated on.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

It's very linear and blatantly so. There are no sidepaths, no exploration, no freedom. Even CoD and the like give you open areas to shoot people but FFXIII is literally corridors.

It has an utterly atrocious battle system, too. You just swap between classes and watch your characters win. They sacrificed gameplay to allow for flashier looking combat, because they wanted the fights to look like Advent Children. The worst thing? The fights aren't fun to watch, either, they don't look very 'cool' at all.

It's not a game, it's a bad CG movie, basically (hey, I guess it kinda is like Advent Children then).

From what I played the plot wasn't awful, as long as you read the codex, but it was very average. It throws a load of random terms at you at the start and expects you to know what they mean, but the codex does explain them. It also expects you to care about the characters long before you even know anything about them, but they're not terrible characters and their development was fairly good (well, insofar as I saw, anyway).

Bear in mind I stopped long before it apparently got good. I gave it a good chance, but I wasn't having fun for a single minute.

While all games are linear when you get down to it this was too linear. It made perfect sense from a story perspective

It kind of does, but don't Sazh and Vanille spend ages faffing about in a theme park? Nobody seems to know that they're l'Cie.

I meant in general but yeah that was also there for a reason too more of a lull them into a false sense of security thing. Maybe perfect sense was an over statement but the game being linear up until the Gran Pulse does make sense. Boring sense but still sense.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Hm...my only real problem with it was the first part of the game. Going down a really long hallway. And when you hit the part with the monster arc, that's the breaking point for a lot of people. Once you get to Grand Pulse it's better, but getting there can be a chore for a lot of people. That was the hardest part for me.

Here are some additional thoughts:

Characters: I liked them. I can actually remember their names off the top of my head, something I can't do with XII. These characters were unique and had personalities and stories. Hope though...ugh. He needed to get smacked. Nice to see he's grown up and not annoying in XIII-2. Snow still gets on my nerves though. Someone needs to make him understand that not everything can be solved by attacking it head on. He gets tiring after a while with his constant, "We can do this! Let's all attack!" attitude. Noel calls him on it in one point in XIII-2, which I loved.

Story: Can be hard to follow the finer points, but I was able to tell what was going on the whole time, unlike (again) XII. Two things come to mind regarding the story's flaws: First, there is a villain that plays a major role in Sazh's story. It's classic villain-action, and when you finally catch up to said person, you're like, "Oh yeah, payback time!" However, you don't get payback. The fight never happens, and that bothered me. Second, the ending is a case of "Out of the frying pan, into the fire." But, with the release of XIII-2, that problem is solved.

Combat: A lot of people say you can button mash the entire time and just use auto battle. I found that true up until I hit a certain required boss in the game. Then, I was very quickly ground into paste. So, I turned back to go level and found all the optional fights. THIS is where the combat will shine. Tactics are key if you want to even stand a chance in some of the optional battles. Button mashing will not help you here. You must be on your toes or die horribly. When I went back to that boss, I still couldn't button mash--he pulls a cheat move when he's close to death that forces you to start thinking about combat--but he was much easier.

So, there's my opinion. It's a really divisive game. Some Final Fantasy fans love it, while other FF fans hate it and want them to stop making games about it. I do not want this to happen until I get the classic 'happy ending' that Final Fantasy games always come with, and XIII-2 does not come through with that either. Personally, I think it's several steps up from Final Fantasy XII--I did NOT like that game at all in case you can't tell--but it's still not up to the older versions of Final Fantasy.

 

[Cheesepower5]

The dialogue is what ruined it for me. The battle system was fairly fun, the over-arching plot was fairly interesting and none of the characters had any inherent problems, but the only one not constantly spouting stupid shit was Sazh.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

I meant in general but yeah that was also there for a reason too more of a lull them into a false sense of security thing. Maybe perfect sense was an over statement but the game being linear up until the Gran Pulse does make sense. Boring sense but still sense.

I can't remember the game too well, really, I just remember the park and it seemed odd that they couldn't go into towns but a theme park was fair game.

Still, I think they could have made each area a bit more open plan. I'm fine with no having towns, I'm even fine with it being linear (almost every FF is linear, practically every game, period, is linear), but just having a single straight path felt so pointless, like the game could have been just cutscenes and fighting without losing anything important. All it really needed was to let you run around and stretch your legs on the field screen and have some hidden treasure, maybe (not just forks in the road that very obviously lead to treasure).

 

[Launcelot111]

Characters, story, presentation, music were all fine to great for me. What really got me was the battle system. If it's so fast paced, then why have a difficult to sort through menu system that impedes fast action? On top of that, the strategy was essentially the same for 95% of the enemies in the game- use some ravagers, then go all commando when the guy staggers, healing if necessary. With occasional buffs/debuffs, this is the entire game, and the enemies just get more HP, which means continuing the same strategy for a longer time per fight. It's a very dynamic and fun to watch system, but it's painfully tedious to actually play. RPG systems are often repetitive, but this took it to new levels, especially as the auto-fight button's presence makes your presence even less meaningful in the fight.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I meant in general but yeah that was also there for a reason too more of a lull them into a false sense of security thing. Maybe perfect sense was an over statement but the game being linear up until the Gran Pulse does make sense. Boring sense but still sense.

I can't remember the game too well, really, I just remember the park and it seemed odd that they couldn't go into towns but a theme park was fair game.

Still, I think they could have made each area a bit more open plan. I'm fine with no having towns, I'm even fine with it being linear (almost every FF is linear, practically every game, period, is linear), but just having a single straight path felt so pointless, like the game could have been just cutscenes and fighting without losing anything important. All it really needed was to let you run around and stretch your legs on the field screen and have some hidden treasure, maybe (not just forks in the road that very obviously lead to treasure).

Well they took a risk going there because of Sazh so they weren't just heading there for the lulz.

 

[Epona]

Pros:

- Great battle system

Cons:

- Great battle system but stagger got a little old by the end
- Horrible weapon upgrade system
- Confusing terminology (too many like sounding terms that cause confusion)
- Long tutorial, takes too long to get the full battle system unlocked
- Summons are useless yet you are forced to fight them in timed battles where you must figure out the trick to beating them
- Story is pretty simple when you finally understand it, it is told poorly
- The cutscenes are action-packed and nothing more, they tell you very little about the plot
- Maxing out the Crystarium is an exercise is patience because it would take so many extra hours of grinding, I have never done it
- The quests are pretty boring and you often have to run back and forth

I did like FF13 alot though, it's just that when you break it down into parts, it has it's issues.

 

[Woodsey]

Not played it, but the most common thing is that it seems to be linear-as-shit, takes 25 hours to get interesting and is pretty much just a combat system and nothing else.

The consensus has always seemed pretty clear to me.

 

[Mastemat]

Personally.... I never understood how people claim its story is "complicated" or even "complex"... it's not. It's actually really simple and straight forward.

But it contradicts itself and has plot-holes and deus-ex-machinas out it's butt. It's not that the story is too complex or convoluted to follow... it's just that it's dumb and doesn't know what consistency is... Homestuck is a complex and convoluted mess of time shenanigans, but it keeps its consistency up and doesn't make plot holes. FFXIII, much like VIII back when it came out, only has one thing going for it: It's really pretty.

(And of the characters, there was only one person who had any sort of meaningful depth to them, ie not superficial depth -Sazh-, and that was Fang... too bad she coupled with XIII's version of Selphie... strange that the two games who are only pretty both have the most annoying, dumbest, braindead, insult-to-all-women-by-their-mere-existence characters.)

 

[CannibalCorpses]

Pretty poor addition to the series. The combat is detached and fairly simplistic. The environments are all straight forward until right near the end of the game. Your level capped for each of the boss fights until you finish the game which makes deviation from the set path almost impossible. The story is as crazy as ever and the graphics are high quality too. The final boss has ridiculous insta-kill attacks that really pissed me off...so much so infact that i didn't even bother getting all the achievements.

Final fantasy should have ended at number 10...nothing since that has come anywhere near being the whole package it once was. Infact i'll go further and say that Square has lost the plot with the garbage it's been churning out for the last 3-4 years...maybe they want to be shit enough for EA to buy

 

[Epona]

Personally.... I never understood how people claim its story is "complicated" or even "complex"... it's not. It's actually really simple and straight forward.

But it contradicts itself and has plot-holes and deus-ex-machinas out it's butt. It's not that the story is too complex or convoluted to follow... it's just that it's dumb and doesn't know what consistency is... Homestuck is a complex and convoluted mess of time shenanigans, but it keeps its consistency up and doesn't make plot holes. FFXIII, much like VIII back when it came out, only has one thing going for it: It's really pretty.

(And of the characters, there was only one person who had any sort of meaningful depth to them, ie not superficial depth -Sazh-, and that was Fang... too bad she coupled with XIII's version of Selphie... strange that the two games who are only pretty both have the most annoying, dumbest, braindead, insult-to-all-women-by-their-mere-existence characters.)

So in your first sentence you say you don't understand something and then spend the next few sentences explaining what you don't understand.

Vanille was fine, her voice actress was the main problem with her. Selphie was fine too and FF VIII had a nice battle system too if you learn to exploit it. If you tried to play FF VIII straight then you are missing the point.