I think 3/5 is the perfect score for the game even though you can fairly argue it deserves a 4 or a 5. You shouldn't rate a final fantasy game the same as other game series because it would be uninformative for them all just to get 10/10. We know what to expect from a FF by now, if it fails our expectations regardless of how unfair they are, it should be getting a low review. I dont think reviews are as important to FF as they are for other series, so there's no need to give a great score in fairness to the developers. It's my 4th favourite ps3 game, out of over 100 that I have completed, yet I would give it 6/10 because it is by far my least favourite final fantasy game and is missing the thing I most love about final fantasy which is a world with an immersive society. FFXII did a decent job at entertaining me, I loved the archades missions, I loved rabanastre, bhujerba, ba'gamnan's side enemy character etc. There truly was a memorable character to the world of Ivalice. A lot of people rag on it because of the gameplay, but I liked it, it was streamlined and perfectly designed for what I enjoy.
I cant think of a single thing I loved about ffxiii, there is nothing that it excels at. They all have their failures like 8 has bad battles, 12 has poor characters, etc. but there's always something to love, 8 and 12 had fantastic societies to explore. XIII didnt. Pulse looked totally different in the cutscenes with dense forests and luscious grass and a roaring river, what we played was a desolate boring ugly area with flat grass textures and small stagnant lakes and the vast majority of enemies pop in at close range making it hard to appreciate what was supposed to be a vast wilderness. The design of ffxiii's worlds was a failure to me, they should stick with medium sized areas and put more detail and interesting design into them. I bet a large number of you think cocoon was the surface of the moon thing, but it was inside it! The game doesn't relate this to us at all. There's supposed to be millions of gods and all that, we just read about all these cool things that they could have showed us somehow.
I don't understand people loving ffxiii gameplay so much when XII was almost unanimously hated, because I played xiii before most and was anticipating people really hating on the gameplay even more than they did with XII. It is like they take XII, but take away the gambits and replace it with AI, so you have much less input and spend most of your time just overseeing battles with paradigms and autobattle. Paradigms reduce the whole system to 6 different spells, and summons are just reserved for bosses. They should either just go to an action system like kingdom hearts, or stick with full on strategy like every other FF. XII was comprehensive, it offered 5 different battle speeds, you controlled every character in battle (strategically with gambits, and one at a time with movement, a really fantastic system I have few complaints about) and in my mind, XIII is XII and XII is XIII, because XII is the step ahead in terms of battles. It doesn't transition to a low quality battle screen for example. Honestly I dont think people look at the backgrounds in the battle screens, the environment is very low quality (go load up nautilus park and look at the moving rollercoaster that turns into a low quality 2d texture during battles) and the battle graphics (fire etc.) are really really not advanced graphically, they are just cheap overlays like they've always been. I think the graphics are fine yes and I dont want to seem too nitpicky but it's just because they are being lauded as the best and it's almost like they're still evolving the nes game engine and using sprites. Imagine in mw2 if you throw a grenade at someone and it's just an explosion overlay while the character does the same robotic jerk back movement as when you shoot him. There's no physics engine. The scene constantly transitions if you are doing something different. Even to ride a chocobo you wait for a transition to load that shows you jumping on it where all the enemies have disappeared that were right beside you. Get off and another transition and the chocobo disappears from the map. This sort of thing is what was expected in the past but now seems primitive.
Graphically they've just got higher polygon characters and better water effects, XII still looks almost as good. FFXIII's battles, there is honestly about 100 complaints I have and I'm not going to list them all. Random battles in ff have always been just a way to make you challenged slightly and force you to have to heal up and prepare for bosses (xiii doesnt have that purpose), they're rarely interesting themselves, only the bosses are ever fun to fight, and the bosses in FFXIII did not have anything special. I can remember the first boss of lost odyssey a lot more from 3 years ago than any boss in FF, because it was a pretty cool boss that required strategy. The enemy design in XIII is pretty poor, nothing has any character, the whole world is lifeless, few of the enemies have eyes, and those are just 2d textures. The tonberry's are fantastic, the chocobos are fantastic, the ochu is fantastic, and those are the only ones I like.
I've said before that the battles are tedious, and people have said in reply that it's the fastest paced battle system yet and that I'm an idiot. But there's so little interaction in the battles, and some of them do go on for a long time just repeating the same 2 or 3 steps for 20 minutes, and the only config option is for a slower speed! Then the end game grind is a nightmare devoid of fun that I am forcing myself through. XII had botting grinding, which you may say was lame but I thought it was unbelievably genius and I was very grateful for it. The crystarium and equipment system in XIII is a huge failure. It takes 3 hours to fully level up the crystarium based on my extrapolations from levelling just one role, when it is basically just a replacement of the automatic 1-99 levelling of the past. The sphere grid/license board etc. were inarguably more interesting than the crystarium, and the equipment was really poorly implemented. I've played through twice without levelling up any equipment, and done the first 60 missions now too. It barely makes a difference when in the past it was exciting to save up and buy some new weapons, you just get them from treasure orbs.
I will get loads of hate for this, but I think XIII is a lot like 6. Ok the character design is completely different and there's no towns, but it was mostly a simple dungeon crawler too. I dont think before 7 that the FF games were very interesting. I played 6 for the first time a few months ago & completed it in 20 hours. There were no minigames, no interesting missions, practically no sidequests, the towns werent developed properly, there was no variety in gameplay, there is no depth at all to the characters who only have a few lines of dialogue each, you really can only like those games if you enjoy the strategy of battles and dungeon crawling, which I really dont (sorry). I thought the zelda series was over-rated but it's much more fun than the old FF's. It is blind nostalgia that has 6 the most snobbishly accoladed FF. And people say the love for 7 is just nostalgia but it has the most diverse world, by FAR the most gameplay variety, interesting characters with lots of backstory and plot (each one has a lengthy history and town, like Nanaki in cosmo canyon with bugenhagen and seto, from the slums in midgar to costa del sol to chocobo farm to wutai, it really felt like this was a deep living cultural world of adventure better than any movie), and the most developed mythology and plot complexity with shinra, the turks, the ancients, jenova, hojo, zack, avalanche, life force, etc. X comes close I guess, and XIII has mythology too but not so much plot and characters.
You can say XIII is like watching a long movie for the most part, you cannot possibly say the same about VII. Every bit of story almost has interaction, even the flashbacks as illogical as that is. There's a bike chase in both VII and XIII (start of chapter 13 in Eden), in VII you get to control it and yes its primitive but its fun. XIII has nothing like that, the developers forget they are making a game and people lose interest with long cutscenes. There's a FFVII making of video, and Sakaguchi says that after FFIV they did research and found that players like to be involved more interactively with the game so they considered this in designing VII. Then they've slowly forgotten it since.
I'm sure I would have liked X a lot less if they took out blitzball and towns, but basically that's what XIII is, only with a worse story and characters. There's no cool badasses like Auron & Kimahri. There's no loveable, light hearted like wakka and rikku (vanille fails, sorry). I like lightning and sazh but there isnt much to them. I really feel like the characters have little personality, that Hope is just a cliche to show a bit of character growth, serah and snows love is just forced on us with no appreciation for it. Hope's mums death should have been a tragic moment, but I didn't care at all. We dont know anything about hopes past. The game is full of flashbacks in which we learn almost nothing about the characters. Sazh for example, we never see his dead wife or anything he did in the past. Now compare with Cid from VII where we see him in rocket town with shera on the failed space mission. That sort of thing is necessary to make us care about him then it means so much when we help him do a succesful mission. I cared a lot for the characters in heavy rain, mass effect & GTAIV, that it moved me when bad things happened, but I didn't care at all for those in FFXIII. I think the current team at square enix have lost sight of the art of good game design somewhat. Either you create fun or strategical gameplay like a nintendo game, or an emotional story with likeable characters and a varied world, or you can do both like FF used to be. FFXIII is so primitive at those 2 things.
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