Final Fantasy 13

This series has gone downhill.

I hate this game. A lot.


There is literally nothing redeeming about this game. Everything is bad. Not because it doesnt work, its just because they were all bad decisions. Everything in the game works exactly as it is supposed to. Its just the way it is supposed to is fucking stupid.

The plot of this game is just like every other final fantasy game. A bad guy wants to destroy the world so he can rebuild the world for whatever god he is worshiping. Nothing new here. The game focuses on a woman named Lightning and all the people she meets on her way to save her sister, Serah, who is being exiled from a floating city called Cocoon. Why is she exiled? because the government is purging the city of what is called l'Cie, people who are marked by gods and appointed tasks to carry out. While doing this, Lightning and her friends end up becoming marked themselves, so now they are being hunted by the government while they search for her sister.

After that, it all dive bombs into sucktown. From this point on, you are forced to play games with specific groups of people who dont really have the skills you need to deal with the situations you are thrown into effectively, which leads to a lot of artificial lengthening of the game through mindless, multiple random encounters, which take a lot longer than they need to because of the lack of proper abilities. You never have the option to pick a team you actually want to use until the very last leg of the game. You are constantly being split up, reunited, and split up again ad nauseum. This is the first of the problems.

The next problem is the battle system. As I said, everything works how it is supposed to, its just that that is stupid. The battle system revolves around Paradigms, which are predetermined battle AIs that you can swap between at will. It sounds cool, but really its just a hassle because if you don't use the right one, you will lose, to enemies you shouldn't really be losing to. The other problem with this is that the game never lets you actively control more than one character, nor can you swap between characters in the middle of a fight, which means you have to build strategies around a specific thing a character can do. Its not difficult, its just bothersome and unnecessary in today's world of gaming.

The other characters in your party follow a decent AI. They get the job done. Its just that the AI leaves a lot to be desired. For example: a character is the only one with access to an ability, but that ability only functions well after another character uses a specific ability, you cannot use such a combination because the AI will never use the ability you want them to. Its things like that that should not hold players back in games these days.

The next problem is the equipment system. This is a problem for a number of reasons: 1) weapons and accessories are meant to be upgraded; 2) upgrading weapons and accessories takes a lot of money; and 3) making money is pretty hard, to the point of "why bother?" The only thing that really makes a difference as far as character performance goes is getting a few accessories that reduce damage from spells and melee. EEverything else has a minimal effect, as the majority of what determines how effective a character is after that is the Crystarium.

Let's talk about the crystarium. Remember the sphere system from Final Fantasy 10, and how awesome that was? Yeah, this is like that, without the awesome. The game opens up new levels of the crystarium only after key points. Ok, that makes sense. Its just a nuisance because it prevents you from powering up your characters to make the game a little easier. I get that a game is supposed to have a challenge, but when a bat can kill your character in the last section of the game, that's just stupid. Not everything needs to be a challenge and require 20 minutes of strategy to beat.

The last problem is the stagger system. This is what the combat system always comes down to. Killing enemies depends, for the most part, upon staggering them and reducing their defences so you can do massive damage to them. Interesting idea, but it becomes a chore quickly, and in some cases it just completely removes any element of possibility or fun from the game. I hate this more than anything else about the game.

About the only thing this game has going for it is how good it looks. If you ever get a chance to just sit and look at it. Which you don't, because you are constantly watching the stagger bar, and checking your teammates' hit point level, or switching paradigms, or any number of other things the game is constantly making you do to keep up with what is going on.

Technical problems, retarded design decisions, random deaths for stupid reasons. With all these problems, there has to be something good somewhere, right? Wrong.

Everything about this game is bad. The characters are pretty lame, the cutscenes, while they look good, are generally either too full of things to look at so they are visual confusion, or are completely boring watching people fall 3 miles out of the sky. The unnecessary character stunting, things only becoming available until after you have beaten the game (I'm not totally opposed to concepts like that, they just have to be logical... ill talk more about this later), and the horrible placement of save points, especially in important areas of the game. All these just really killed the experience of the game.

If you are a fan of the series, and want to play it just to say you did, well, have at. For everyone else, just do yourself a favor and pick up Star Ocean 4 or Infinite Undiscovery, they are the best role-playing games so far this concole generation.