I bought Final Fantasy 13 on launch and I put in 30 hours into it. Everyone kept saying how the game got better when you got to Gran Pulse, so I did, and it didn't. I have not played it since. With FF13-2 coming out today, I decided to give 13 another chance. This is that story.

11 miserable hours of self-hate and frustration. This was my experience all day yesterday as I was playing FF13. I started with my old save since I didn't want to redo the entire beginning and lose the 30 hours I had already wasted. After a few trial-and-error battles things started coming back to me and I started remembering exactly why I stopped playing this game.

If any of you have reached Ch. 11, you'd know that it gets a whole lot harder at that point. This basically means that I was getting my ass kicked by even the lowliest enemy and one-shotted by the bigger ones. To make this even worse, the CP cost in the Crystarium (how you level up) is basically doubled which means you gotta kill a hell of a lot of shit if you want to level up. So, naturally, I did what you do in every JRPG when you hit a wall; I started grinding.

But, rather picking one spot and gaming the game, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete some side missions. I mean, that makes sense, right? I'll earn some XP while doing side content. Wrong! I'm really led to believe that his game was either designed by a team of sub-intelligent monkeys or a troll. The side mission structure is a perfect example of this. You need to find these floating stones and activate them, which then gives you a task to do (all the ones I did consisted of going to the other side of the fucking map to kill a specific monster). You find the first stone right as you enter the area and the second and third are close by each other. However after that is when things get messy. You see, the stones are all labeled 1-50, and since you do the first three in order, it's natural to assume that you have to do all of them in order. It doesn't help that you see a bunch of "dead" stones on the ground that you can't activate yet. Normally, this isn't a problem, but the game fails to mark any of this information on your map. So, basically you have a giant map you can run around full of overpowered monsters that can kill you in one shot, and you need to find these stones in the right order. Or so you think. In reality you only have to unlock a tier of stones in order to do any of them in any order. But does the game tell you this? Nope.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the monsters respawn when you walk 20 feet away from that spot? Cause they do. Always.

And did I mention that the map decides to change it's orientation on a whim? Cause remember how your quest marker said to go north. Well, now it says to go south. Or east. Or west. It really depends on what the map feels like doing at that point in time. It doesn't matter that you just looked at it 30 seconds ago. No sir. You will have to double back through the tunnel you just ran through. Naturally all the monsters have respawned as well.

So, I did this for about 4 hours. I ran around like an idiot, constantly getting lost because the fucking map wont make up it's mind or because I had no fucking idea where the next stone I could activate was. And then I looked at my menu and saw that I only had enough CP to level up one tree out of 5 halfway up rank 8 (my current rank). In short, it was a complete waste of time.

Oh and get this. Some of the stones that give you missions also act as quick travel hubs. But only some of them. Why some, you may ask and not all of them? Well, because that would make sense, I reply. And this game tries really, really hard to not make sense. It's kind of impressive actually. No, that's a lie.

Thankfully my bro @N7 told me of a good place to grind. It's where two of the bigger monsters are fighting each other, and if you sneak up on them you can catch them unaware, fill their crit gauge and kill them really fast. At one point I had it down to 22 seconds per fight. You also get 6600 CP per fight. So this is what I did: I ran up to them, killed them, ran just far enough away so they respawned then doubled back and killed them again. Rinse and repeat. For 3 hours.

I forgot to mention that, one of every 4 times when you'd fight them, one of the enemies would heal himself to full health. At full health, even if I'm maxed out, he's a pain and it takes a few mins to kill him. So every time this would happen, I would merely press pause then retry the battle in order to save myself some time. Incidentally the quit function is right under the retry function. I think you can guess what happened after 3 hours of grinding and no saving.

So 4 hours later after I had recouped my lost CP and added a decent amount on top of it, I decided that I was done with this bullshit and headed straight for the story point. So I ran. And ran. And ran.

"Oh hey, there's a big robot guy. Hmm, I bet he'll be a piece of cake. After all I maxed out all of my characters and leveled their weapons to the max. Yeah, let's kick some... wait, what the fuck, how the hell did he one-hit KO me?!?! ...6 tries later.... Haha, take that you son of a bitch! What, he's not a boss? And there's not even a reward for beating him (and only 4000 CP)? And I gotta fight 5 more of them? Fuck!"

And I'm not going to even begin to talk about the god-awful writing in the cutscenes, or the shitty, shitty characters. Lets just say that if I had a hammer and a large sack I would put Hope and Vanille inside it and beat it till no more sounds came out. And then beat it some more for good measure.

So here I am, 42 hours into this mess of a game. I just fought a dude on a broken tower and now I'm looking for parts to repair a shitty little robot. I really don't know how much left I have, but since there's 13 chapters and I'm (I'm assuming) near the end of 11 it can't be that far, right? You know what, I'm probably wrong. This game has kicked me in the balls at every opportunity, so I wouldn't be surprised if I had another 40 hours to go. But you know what? I will not let this game beat me! Maybe I'm losing my sanity, but so help me god I will finish this POS and once I do I'm burning the goddamn disk.

I bought Final Fantasy 13 on launch and I put in 30 hours into it. Everyone kept saying how the game got better when you got to Gran Pulse, so I did, and it didn't. I have not played it since. With FF13-2 coming out today, I decided to give 13 another chance. This is that story.

11 miserable hours of self-hate and frustration. This was my experience all day yesterday as I was playing FF13. I started with my old save since I didn't want to redo the entire beginning and lose the 30 hours I had already wasted. After a few trial-and-error battles things started coming back to me and I started remembering exactly why I stopped playing this game.

If any of you have reached Ch. 11, you'd know that it gets a whole lot harder at that point. This basically means that I was getting my ass kicked by even the lowliest enemy and one-shotted by the bigger ones. To make this even worse, the CP cost in the Crystarium (how you level up) is basically doubled which means you gotta kill a hell of a lot of shit if you want to level up. So, naturally, I did what you do in every JRPG when you hit a wall; I started grinding.

But, rather picking one spot and gaming the game, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete some side missions. I mean, that makes sense, right? I'll earn some XP while doing side content. Wrong! I'm really led to believe that his game was either designed by a team of sub-intelligent monkeys or a troll. The side mission structure is a perfect example of this. You need to find these floating stones and activate them, which then gives you a task to do (all the ones I did consisted of going to the other side of the fucking map to kill a specific monster). You find the first stone right as you enter the area and the second and third are close by each other. However after that is when things get messy. You see, the stones are all labeled 1-50, and since you do the first three in order, it's natural to assume that you have to do all of them in order. It doesn't help that you see a bunch of "dead" stones on the ground that you can't activate yet. Normally, this isn't a problem, but the game fails to mark any of this information on your map. So, basically you have a giant map you can run around full of overpowered monsters that can kill you in one shot, and you need to find these stones in the right order. Or so you think. In reality you only have to unlock a tier of stones in order to do any of them in any order. But does the game tell you this? Nope.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the monsters respawn when you walk 20 feet away from that spot? Cause they do. Always.

And did I mention that the map decides to change it's orientation on a whim? Cause remember how your quest marker said to go north. Well, now it says to go south. Or east. Or west. It really depends on what the map feels like doing at that point in time. It doesn't matter that you just looked at it 30 seconds ago. No sir. You will have to double back through the tunnel you just ran through. Naturally all the monsters have respawned as well.

So, I did this for about 4 hours. I ran around like an idiot, constantly getting lost because the fucking map wont make up it's mind or because I had no fucking idea where the next stone I could activate was. And then I looked at my menu and saw that I only had enough CP to level up one tree out of 5 halfway up rank 8 (my current rank). In short, it was a complete waste of time.

Oh and get this. Some of the stones that give you missions also act as quick travel hubs. But only some of them. Why some, you may ask and not all of them? Well, because that would make sense, I reply. And this game tries really, really hard to not make sense. It's kind of impressive actually. No, that's a lie.

Thankfully my bro @N7 told me of a good place to grind. It's where two of the bigger monsters are fighting each other, and if you sneak up on them you can catch them unaware, fill their crit gauge and kill them really fast. At one point I had it down to 22 seconds per fight. You also get 6600 CP per fight. So this is what I did: I ran up to them, killed them, ran just far enough away so they respawned then doubled back and killed them again. Rinse and repeat. For 3 hours.

I forgot to mention that, one of every 4 times when you'd fight them, one of the enemies would heal himself to full health. At full health, even if I'm maxed out, he's a pain and it takes a few mins to kill him. So every time this would happen, I would merely press pause then retry the battle in order to save myself some time. Incidentally the quit function is right under the retry function. I think you can guess what happened after 3 hours of grinding and no saving.

So 4 hours later after I had recouped my lost CP and added a decent amount on top of it, I decided that I was done with this bullshit and headed straight for the story point. So I ran. And ran. And ran.

"Oh hey, there's a big robot guy. Hmm, I bet he'll be a piece of cake. After all I maxed out all of my characters and leveled their weapons to the max. Yeah, let's kick some... wait, what the fuck, how the hell did he one-hit KO me?!?! ...6 tries later.... Haha, take that you son of a bitch! What, he's not a boss? And there's not even a reward for beating him (and only 4000 CP)? And I gotta fight 5 more of them? Fuck!"

And I'm not going to even begin to talk about the god-awful writing in the cutscenes, or the shitty, shitty characters. Lets just say that if I had a hammer and a large sack I would put Hope and Vanille inside it and beat it till no more sounds came out. And then beat it some more for good measure.

So here I am, 42 hours into this mess of a game. I just fought a dude on a broken tower and now I'm looking for parts to repair a shitty little robot. I really don't know how much left I have, but since there's 13 chapters and I'm (I'm assuming) near the end of 11 it can't be that far, right? You know what, I'm probably wrong. This game has kicked me in the balls at every opportunity, so I wouldn't be surprised if I had another 40 hours to go. But you know what? I will not let this game beat me! Maybe I'm losing my sanity, but so help me god I will finish this POS and once I do I'm burning the goddamn disk.

Dude, I dunno how you made it past the opening battle with Odin or whatever I was fighting by pressing x repeatedly or up on my analog stick.

I burned out on Gran Pulse too, if that makes you feel any better. I think you're farther than me, though. If I remember correctly, I am still in some kind of tunnel made by a rolling fal'Cie, but that was in December so who the hell knows.

*breathes in, breathes out* I'll just leave my review here and back away from this thread.

XIII is a bad game, top to bottom. Little more to say than that.

I had also put the game down part way through chapter 10 (because another game had come out, not because of frustration) and recently started again on my old save. I didn't find Gran Pulse to be that difficult at all. At first it was but then I changed my default paradigm to be Commando/Saboteur/Ravager. That got me through most battles until I was leveled enough to make Commando/Ravager/Ravager a more efficient battle. You are very close to the end of chapter 11. New side quests are marked on your map. New crystals pulsate light while old crystals remain a solid colour (blue or yellow) and inactive crystals are black. The wall I'm hitting now that I'm doing missions 30-62 is that I'll teleport to the closest crystal, walk 10 minutes then complete the fight in 44 seconds. I'm walking past everything because it's not worth my time to fight them. Also, the robot side quest; I got a lot of good loot out it. Three items worth 150000 gil and 2 items worth 36000 upgrade experience at 1x multiplier and some other stuff. Do the side quests that unlocks the chocobos because it'll make getting around easier and provide you with some new items. The first one is near a red area that's blocked off and the second one is near a pond with a chocobo near it.

I just have one thing to say. Everyone has their own choice of games. For me, I loved this game. I'm always playing games for their story and FF XIII had just that. If the story isn't your cup of tea, then I don't blame you for putting it down and being frustrated.

However, I wouldn't give up on FF XIII-2. From what I've seen, Square-Enix added in some good things.

Battling in FF13 sucked ass.

All you had to do in every fight was start off with 3 buffers, switch to 3 debuffers, go all magic till they're staggered, then all physical until they're dead. If you got hit go 3 healers, if the enemy could one-shot you go 3 tanks for a second and then heal. I really don't get why people praise this battle system. Yeah it took me longer to figure out how to be unstoppable because it was way different, but once I did it was even more mindless than the old systems.

This one throws that curve ball in by replacing a real character with a lame-ass monster, but it's still the same system. Yet somehow there seems to be twice as much crap happening on the screen at all times. What the fuck?

@MideonNViscera said:

Dude, I dunno how you made it past the opening battle with Odin or whatever I was fighting by pressing x repeatedly or up on my analog stick.

Normally you can get through most battles just by pressing the X button, but when fighting an Eidolon (summon) you have to press Square at the end. It's a revolutionary system, really.

@pw2566ch: I'm getting 13-2 tomorrow or Thursday. It's one of the reasons why I started playing this again. Also I, too, enjoy story-based games, but nothing about this story has been enjoyable. It's a bunch of awkward writing and Korean drama-level drama wrapped in a pretty wrapper. The story is convoluted and told extremely poorly.

I liked a lot about FF13, especially the visuals and music - even the character design, voice acting and linear maps didn't bother me too much, but what ended it for me was the battle system. I know a lot of ppl liked that the most but after I got half way in to disc 2 (360, not sure of the chapter) and it still had not clicked or become fun I called it a day.

My biggest problem was the fact that it's sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow for the first half of the game. That and Hope. Watching hours and hours of anime must have granted me some sort of immunity to super-over-the-top-cutesy girl characters so I didnt really mind Vanille but the amount of whining that boy does is out of this world.

I really hope they allow you to turn on the japanese voiceacting in the european release of XIII-2.

I loved the later fights in the game. It really made you pay attention and use your characters and paradigms properly. People complain about the game being "press x and win" but that isn't so with many of the later fights.

@Enigma777 said:

But, rather picking one spot and gaming the game, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete some side missions. I mean, that makes sense, right? I'll earn some XP while doing side content. Wrong! I'm really led to believe that his game was either designed by a team of sub-intelligent monkeys or a troll. The side mission structure is a perfect example of this. You need to find these floating stones and activate them, which then gives you a task to do (all the ones I did consisted of going to the other side of the fucking map to kill a specific monster). You find the first stone right as you enter the area and the second and third are close by each other. However after that is when things get messy. You see, the stones are all labeled 1-50, and since you do the first three in order, it's natural to assume that you have to have to do all of them in order. It doesn't help that you see a bunch of "dead" stones on the ground that you can't activate yet. Normally, this isn't a problem, but the game fails to mark any of this information on your map. So, basically you have a giant map you can run around full of overpowered monsters that can kill you in one shot, and you need to find these stones in the right order. Or so you think. In reality you only have to unlock a tier of stones in order to do any of them in any order. But does the game tell you this? Nope.

Wait what?... What? Are you serious?

You know, I walked into this thread intending to be an apologist for this game. It may not be that good of an RPG but I found it interesting. But after reading this, that has to be the dumbest, shittiest design decision I've ever heard of. Thank god I still haven't done the side quests yet.

God I hate this game as much as you. Granted I only have 8 hours in the game and haven't played it since October(?) I still kind of suck at battling and everything about that game is terrible besides the visuals. Think of it. 8 hours and I already hate that game. I'll be damned if I don't finish it one day though. I can't live knowing I started it and never finished it. One day I'll go back. One day.

It's an acquired taste, but I personally really enjoyed the game. I really didn't see many of the things that the OP said to drag the game down so much to where I had to stop playing.

I enjoyed the game, so whatever, Hitlerchu.

I bought Final Fantasy 13 on launch and I put in 30 hours into it. Everyone kept saying how the game got better when you got to Gran Pulse, so I did, and it didn't. I have not played it since. With FF13-2 coming out today, I decided to give 13 another chance. This is that story.

11 miserable hours of self-hate and frustration. This was my experience all day yesterday as I was playing FF13. I started with my old save since I didn't want to redo the entire beginning and lose the 30 hours I had already wasted. After a few trial-and-error battles things started coming back to me and I started remembering exactly why I stopped playing this game.

If any of you have reached Ch. 11, you'd know that it gets a whole lot harder at that point. This basically means that I was getting my ass kicked by even the lowliest enemy and one-shotted by the bigger ones. To make this even worse, the CP cost in the Crystarium (how you level up) is basically doubled which means you gotta kill a hell of a lot of shit if you want to level up. So, naturally, I did what you do in every JRPG when you hit a wall; I started grinding.

But, rather picking one spot and gaming the game, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete some side missions. I mean, that makes sense, right? I'll earn some XP while doing side content. Wrong! I'm really led to believe that his game was either designed by a team of sub-intelligent monkeys or a troll. The side mission structure is a perfect example of this. You need to find these floating stones and activate them, which then gives you a task to do (all the ones I did consisted of going to the other side of the fucking map to kill a specific monster). You find the first stone right as you enter the area and the second and third are close by each other. However after that is when things get messy. You see, the stones are all labeled 1-50, and since you do the first three in order, it's natural to assume that you have to have to do all of them in order. It doesn't help that you see a bunch of "dead" stones on the ground that you can't activate yet. Normally, this isn't a problem, but the game fails to mark any of this information on your map. So, basically you have a giant map you can run around full of overpowered monsters that can kill you in one shot, and you need to find these stones in the right order. Or so you think. In reality you only have to unlock a tier of stones in order to do any of them in any order. But does the game tell you this? Nope.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the monsters respawn when you walk 20 feet away from that spot? Cause they do. Always.

And did I mention that the map decides to change it's orientation on a whim? Cause remember how your quest marker said to go north. Well, now it says to go south. Or east. Or west. It really depends on what the map feels like doing at that point in time. It doesn't matter that you just looked at it 30 seconds ago. No sir. You will have to double back through the tunnel you just ran through. Naturally all the monsters have respawned as well.

So, I did this for about 4 hours. I ran around like an idiot, constantly getting lost because the fucking map wont make up it's mind or because I had no fucking idea where the next stone I could activate was. And then I looked at my menu and saw that I only had enough CP to level up one tree out of 5 halfway up rank 8 (my current rank). In short, it was a complete waste of time.

Oh and get this. Some of the stones that give you missions also act as quick travel hubs. But only some of them. Why some, you may ask and not all of them? Well, because that would make sense, I reply. And this game tries really, really hard to not make sense. It's kind of impressive actually. No, that's a lie.

Thankfully my bro @N7 told me of a good place to grind. It's where two of the bigger monsters are fighting each other, and if you sneak up on them you can catch them unaware, fill their crit gauge and kill them really fast. At one point I had it down to 22 seconds per fight. You also get 6600 CP per fight. So this is what I did: I ran up to them, killed them, ran just far enough away so they respawned then doubled back and killed them again. Rinse and repeat. For 3 hours.

I forgot to mention that, one of every 4 times when you'd fight them, one of the enemies would heal himself to full health. At full health, even if I'm maxed out, he's a pain and it takes a few mins to kill him. So every time this would happen, I would merely press pause then retry the battle in order to save myself some time. Incidentally the quit function is right under the retry function. I think you can guess what happened after 3 hours of grinding and no saving.

So 4 hours later after I had recouped my lost CP and added a decent amount on top of it, I decided that I was done with this bullshit and headed straight for the story point. So I ran. And ran. And ran.

"Oh hey, there's a big robot guy. Hmm, I bet he'll be a piece of cake. After all I maxed out all of my characters and leveled their weapons to the max. Yeah, let's kick some... wait, what the fuck, how the hell did he one-hit KO me?!?! ...6 tries later.... Haha, take that you son of a bitch! What, he's not a boss? And there's not even a reward for beating him (and only 4000 CP)? And I gotta fight 5 more of them? Fuck!"

And I'm not going to even begin to talk about the god-awful writing in the cutscenes, or the shitty, shitty characters. Lets just say that if I had a hammer and a large sack I would put Hope and Vanille inside it and beat it till no more sounds came out. And then beat it some more for good measure.

So here I am, 42 hours into this mess of a game. I just fought a dude on a broken tower and now I'm looking for parts to repair a shitty little robot. I really don't know how much left I have, but since there's 13 chapters and I'm (I'm assuming) near the end of 11 it can't be that far, right? You know what, I'm probably wrong. This game has kicked me in the balls at every opportunity, so I wouldn't be surprised if I had another 40 hours to go. But you know what? I will not let this game beat me! Maybe I'm losing my sanity, but so help me god I will finish this POS and once I do I'm burning the goddamn disk.

I burned out on gran pulse too

still gonna get FF13-2 though

Yo I'm with you man, fuck Hope.

Didn't read the wall of text.

That's pretty much exactly what happened to me too. FFXIII is the worst game I've ever played 30hrs of.

Final Fantasy XIII: Welcome to hell.
 
That's what the game should have been called. It's not fun. The character suck. Story sucks. Everything is bullshit. Eat shit and die, Hope. X(

@Grissefar: Right now I'm using Lighting, Vanille and Snow. I switch up my Paradigms based on who I'm fighting (aka, more Sentinel-based Paradigms during bosses) but the most common ones I use are Com/Sab/Com, Rav/Rav/Rav and Med/Med/Sen. I have Com/Sab/Com as my default since I find that a dual Ruinga works wonders on groups of weaker enemies and that's primarily what I'm fighting right now.

@Ross: Oh I haven't stopped playing the game yet, but I'm running on pure, unadulterated hate now.

Eh, I disagree. I really enjoyed FFXIII.

@Enigma777:

Ow common, what is your problem? are you terribly insecure about yourself that you cant make your own decisions? If you already dislike it from the very start who in his sane mind would still put 40 hours into it? I would get an hour or 8 but 40? And next up you start calling the game designers dumb just because in your opinion the game is bad but you do not have it in you to say "ok this game sucks I'm just gonna go ahead and take cute pictures of my cat".

To me that just makes you look like a monkey.

dude, why would you play so much of a game that you clearly don't enjoy? there are other games...lots of them..

I was physically unable to finish this game. I liked the story but fuck me, that linear bullshit.

First Final Fantasy I ever passed on. Had an itch or two over the last two years to get it, but I didn't. Hell - I even played through the PSN version of FF VIII on a whim, despite remembering that I hated it the first time around, because I thought I didn't finish it. When I was done, I remember I actually had beaten it. It just didn't stick with me at all.

Long story short. Final Fantasy is dead to me. Final Fantasy VI is my most revered game ever and yet somehow, over the years, they managed to kill it for me - those bastards!

I don't know why everyone thought Gran Pulse was the best part of that game, because I ended up avoiding most of it. I tried the first side-mission, and then stopped once I realized none of it was fun; XII's "find-a-monster-and-kill-it" seemed more accessible to me, anyway. I battled some of the lower-leveled monsters on Gran Pulse, but eventually avoided everything and went into Mah'habara Subterra to progress the story. I avoided mostly everything in there too, except the enemies I could handle. If I remember correctly -- it's been a couple years -- I hit a wall with Vanille's Eidolon (I think?). I grinded for hours; I found a bunch of bombs to kill for like, 6000 CPs, and they quickly respawned.

After that, I had no issue for the rest of the game except for a forced battle with one of those giant apatosaurus-looking enemies on Cocoon in Chapter 12 (?), but somehow I managed to chip away at its health and move on.

I finished the game (still can't believe that I did), but I never want to play it again. Except for maybe Vanille and Fang (and Sazh to a lesser extent), I hated everyone. The chocobo chick was the most interesting character in that game.

You know what? The only way they'd get me back now would be...

'Dark Final Fantasy'. With Berserk-levels of awesome mature storytelling and blood and gore. A battlesystem with 'strategic dismemberment'. Essentially a melee-centric and much deeper VATS of Fallout fame. With an emphasis on cleaving through hordes of easily and bloodily dispatched dudes - a Power Trip!

And now - feast your eyes on some Berserk. Manly anime is rare, but it's out there...

@Video_Game_King said:

*breathes in, breathes out* I'll just leave my review here and back away from this thread.

I have never beat FF VIII. Here I am, considering I should beat XIII (being stuck in the same fucking place) and realize their is a good Final fantasy game out their I still haven't beaten.

I liked FF 1 - 10, 12, and 13. So I guess, that makes me weird, huh?

@Packie said:

@Enigma777 said:

But, rather picking one spot and gaming the game, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and complete some side missions. I mean, that makes sense, right? I'll earn some XP while doing side content. Wrong! I'm really led to believe that his game was either designed by a team of sub-intelligent monkeys or a troll. The side mission structure is a perfect example of this. You need to find these floating stones and activate them, which then gives you a task to do (all the ones I did consisted of going to the other side of the fucking map to kill a specific monster). You find the first stone right as you enter the area and the second and third are close by each other. However after that is when things get messy. You see, the stones are all labeled 1-50, and since you do the first three in order, it's natural to assume that you have to have to do all of them in order. It doesn't help that you see a bunch of "dead" stones on the ground that you can't activate yet. Normally, this isn't a problem, but the game fails to mark any of this information on your map. So, basically you have a giant map you can run around full of overpowered monsters that can kill you in one shot, and you need to find these stones in the right order. Or so you think. In reality you only have to unlock a tier of stones in order to do any of them in any order. But does the game tell you this? Nope.

Wait what?... What? Are you serious?

You know, I walked into this thread intending to be an apologist for this game. It may not be that good of an RPG but I found it interesting. But after reading this, that has to be the dumbest, shittiest design decision I've ever heard of. Thank god I still haven't done the side quests yet.

It seemed pretty self-explanatory to me when I played through it. I can't really remember WHY it was self-explanatory because that was quite a while ago, but I instantly understood that the stones were unlocked in tiers. Maybe it's genre familiarity?

Also the only enemies on the map that were able to kill me in one hit (or a few quick hits) when I first arrived were the giant turtles that were 10x bigger than anything else in the area. All the other monsters could be overcome with some smart paradigm usage. That's why I loved the battle system in FFXIII. With a little observation and some skill, almost every enemy was beatable no matter how relatively underpowered my characters might have been.

It's far from a perfect game, but a lot of the problems the OP seems to have with it could probably have been overcome by paying a little more attention.

@BrockNRolla said:

XIII is a bad game, top to bottom. Little more to say than that.

Really? I thought it was pretty good; especially the cel-shaded style and comic book motifs.

Maybe I only like really, really bad JRPGs. I don't know what my problem is, but I fuckin' loved FFXIII.

@N7 said:

Final Fantasy XIII: Welcome to hell. That's what the game should have been called. It's not fun. The character suck. Story sucks. Everything is bullshit. Eat shit and die, Hope. X(

Wait, didn't you platinum it?!

I personally hated Grand Pulse in FF13, i preferred the first half of the game.

@Demoskinos said:

I loved the later fights in the game. It really made you pay attention and use your characters and paradigms properly. People complain about the game being "press x and win" but that isn't so with many of the later fights.

The last boss in the game forced me to use a strategy and was the point where I actually figured out the point of the battle system (and that its pretty decent). I think that's a failing on the game designers part. The rest of the game I just attacked and healed and brute forced my way through.

Final Fantasy XIII is my favorite FF game and I've played a good majority of the Final Fantasy games.

I will now leave this thread and never come back!

I came to the same conclusion after about an hour. I think I win this thread.

@BeachThunder said:

@BrockNRolla said:

XIII is a bad game, top to bottom. Little more to say than that.

Really? I thought it was pretty good; especially the cel-shaded style and comic book motifs.

I thought that as soon as I posted the comment. Then I thought, "Who will even remember that game enough to call me on it?" Touche, sir. Indeed, I really enjoyed XIII as well.

@N7 said:

Final Fantasy XIII: Welcome to hell. That's what the game should have been called. It's not fun. The character suck. Story sucks. Everything is bullshit. Eat shit and die, Hope. X(

Wait, didn't you platinum it?!

@N7 said:

@Abyssfull said:

@N7 said:

Final Fantasy XIII: Welcome to hell. That's what the game should have been called. It's not fun. The character suck. Story sucks. Everything is bullshit. Eat shit and die, Hope. X(

Wait, didn't you platinum it?!

Nope. :(

But you were planning to. Or that FinalHero fellow was/did/has? I dunno, I recall ''platinum'' and ''FFXIII'' being in the same sentence somewhere.

@N7 said:

@Abyssfull said:

@N7 said:

Final Fantasy XIII: Welcome to hell. That's what the game should have been called. It's not fun. The character suck. Story sucks. Everything is bullshit. Eat shit and die, Hope. X(

Wait, didn't you platinum it?!

Nope. :(

But you were planning to. Or that FinalHero fellow was/did/has? I dunno, I recall ''platinum'' and ''FFXIII'' being in the same sentence somewhere.

I disagree. I think FFXIII is a good game, and I've enjoyed the story and the characters too.

except for hope. He's a cunt and I cringe every time he talks.

I swear, I'm thinking about holding a contest for a free game if anyone can describe the story to me in 10 words or less.

I swear, I'm thinking about holding a contest for a free game if anyone can describe the story to me in 10 words or less.

@Enigma777 said:

I swear, I'm thinking about holding a contest for a free game if anyone can describe the story to me in 10 words or less.

I can describe the story just fine. Can't do it in 10 words theres too much going on in the story.

@Enigma777 said:

And I'm not going to even begin to talk about the god-awful writing in the cutscenes, or the shitty, shitty characters. Lets just say that if I had a hammer and a large sack I would put Hope and Vanille inside it and beat it till no more sounds came out.

This made me laugh out loud a lot because I could visual you doing it.

@FancySoapsMan said:

I disagree. I think FFXIII is a good game, and I've enjoyed the story and the characters too.

except for hope. He's a cunt and I cringe every time he talks.

hope is at least a character, who goes through character development

snow is HEROHEROHEROHEROHEROHERO

@Grissefar: Right now I'm using Lighting, Vanille and Snow. I switch up my Paradigms based on who I'm fighting (aka, more Sentinel-based Paradigms during bosses) but the most common ones I use are Com/Sab/Com, Rav/Rav/Rav and Med/Med/Sen. I have Com/Sab/Com as my default since I find that a dual Ruinga works wonders on groups of weaker enemies and that's primarily what I'm fighting right now.

@Ross: Oh I haven't stopped playing the game yet, but I'm running on pure, unadulterated hate now.

RAV/RAV/COM - For staggering

RAV/COM/COM - Damage once the enemy is staggered

COM/SYN/SAB - For applying buffs/debuffs in the beginning of the fight and once they run out.

MED/RAV/COM - For light healing, while you keep staggering - make sure it's a capable healer, Lightning is no good

MED/MED/COM - Powerful healing for dangerous situations.

The last one is up to you. It could be something like RAV/COM/SAB for reapplying debuffs without having to pull in a Synergist.