@hailinel said:
@sessh said:
20 hours or so later I really don't know anymore.
I pretty much hate every character in the game, Hope, Dazh, Lightning (to a degree), every single sub quest character. The quality in dialog is just so fucking terrible (from the writing to mostly awful deliveries) and I even end up skipping most of it (something I never do in any game really), because I just can't take it. Pretty much every Lightning message I send goes: "Shut up already." or "Really?" and of course a huge "Yuck fou!!!" to the kid who talks like that in the Dead Dunes.
Also nothing makes any fucking sense. We have a week left to life. Hm, what to do? Oh I know, I will try to change myself, or open up a new restaurant, or learn to cook, or pretend to have died so my kid will grow up (!?) or something equally dumb and pointless.
Am I alone with thinking that the drop in quality from the first two games, who I really liked, is really immense?
The combat seems broken too against certain enemies. It's a breeze through normal enemies, and then suddenly you face off against Earth Eaters, or Chocobo Eaters (after the first battle) or Gaius (yes, he is a Boss, but still). Are you really supposed to just flee from battle, wasting precious time, just so you can design a whole new setup just for one stupid fight?
The only thing I enjoy is the main story, really.
I'm tempted to say that even FF X-2 was a better game.
Of course nothing makes sense. Everyone in the game has been alive for over five hundred years. I wouldn't be surprised if society just felt...off, at that point. Routines are ingrained, one day after another. No babies can be born, children remain children for all this time. With the world coming to an end, what could most of these people do, save for live their everyday lives as normal? There is the crowd of 24/7 party animals in Yusnaan, but the point is, everyone in this game has been suffering the quiet frustration of being unable to live the natural lives they were meant to have. It doeesn't surprise me if things seem off-kilter, because they are.
The same goes for Lightning and the other major characters. Lightning has had her emotions taken away by Bhunivelze. She's been rendered numb to the hundreds of years of frustration and despair that's piled on other characters. Before the fight with Noel, she says she doesn't even know what she is anymore. She doesn't have human emotion, she's been granted powers by a god. She's more or less become the Final Fantasy XIII equivalent to Lenneth in Valkyrie Profile, who had her memories sealed away by the gods so that she could be a good little worker bee and bring them lots of souls to serve as Einherjar at Ragnarok. It's bizarre, yet also tragic, in its own way.
And while I've had moments where the combat has certainly been difficult, nothing I've encountered thus far has been insurmountable. There have been times when I've come across enemies that were clearly too powerful for me to engage, but I've been saving frequently, and so when I do run up against a brick wall, I just reload from the title screen and either try again or go attend to something else.
Honestly, Lightning Retuns has been the most engaging RPG I've played in a good long while.
Well yes, that this a hopeless and dreary world is obvious and not surprising. And that forced immortality can be a curse (something I don't agree on, but that's besides the point) can be tough is also clear. But to be honest I just think that the world is painted in this way simply because of lazy writing.
If humanity knew that the world would in fact end in a few days everything would just completely explode (even with 500 years of preparing them for this inevitable moment). We'd have violence and uprisings and also a fair share of orgies and stuff. So it's obvious why the didn't choose to go that route, and rather just said, hey let's just take the easy way out and pretty much kill off all emotion in everyone, that way no one will really give a fuck. That's okay, but then please take it all the way, and not just make the game one pointless sidequest after the other. Because in this scenario no one should give a shit about their petty day to day problems anymore either. With hopelessness in and all around you, I don't think your first priority would be to open a new restaurant, and make it the best their is, because your dreams and aspirations should also be done already.
And yes, technically humanity just is numbed by now and didn't have everything taken like Lightning did, but it's all the same really. Also the children not aging anymore thing and retaining their "innocence" is just plain cruel, which granted, is because God is ignorant of human emotion in the first place.
Lightning, like I already said, still has her charms, but I don't think that it was really necessary to also kill all emotions in her. I know that her transformation is supposed to be her sacrifice for Serah and humanity as a whole, but couldn't her sacrifice also have been to just feel all the pain around her? I don't think she couldn't have taken it after all she already went through in the previous games.
In my opinion this whole game just had way more potential in it's setup and execution.
The combat is another thing, and yes it is enjoyable and you have the saving/retrying over and over option and of course the option to postpone fights, but the way the leveling is built, fighting enemies days later still might not make much of a difference. Which is what I dislike about it.
Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to love this game, and I certainly enjoy aspects of it (like the time mechanic and the idea behind the story and setup), but it just could have been so much more. (for me)
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