My experience with Final Fantasy XIII has been an interesting one. Until tonight, this game may be the single most time I spent with a game to never beat. My first attempt at this crazy ass game was on the Xbox 360. At the time, the novelty of playing a Final Fantasy game on an Xbox was a crazy thought in of itself. Of course Final Fantasy had switched teams before XIII jumping from Nintendo to PlayStation. At the time, Final Fantasy felt so synonyms with PlayStation but glancing back retroactively the Finalist of Fantiest series had simply become too big to be held down by one platform. There is also no mistaking how insanely slow XIII starts out. Arguably, there is no mistaking how slow the first 90% of XIII starts out...But if there is one single redeeming quality to Final Fantasy XIII, it is undoubtedly the combat system. The time sequence battle system is definitely what had me coming back to this game so, so many times.

My first play through of XIII ended abruptly about 20ish hours in. While playing Gears of War at a friends house with my Xbox 360, a heavy metal tape measure came crashing down from an above shelf and landed directly on the the hard drive for my Xbox. I shit you not. There was no rhyme or reason for this to happen but it just did. Even though it was just the hard drive that broke, I still had a replacement plan with Best Buy and they gave me a whole new Xbox that same night. It never dawned to me until the next morning that all saves (including Final Fantasy XII) were long gone. I had no backups and this was years before cloud saves. So I put XIII on the shelf, "I'll come back for you, someday" I said to myself. Given how slow and honestly extremely confusing XIII can be it wouldn't be for a few years before I delivered on that promise. My 2nd attempt with XIII on the 360 did not go much better. I have no divine intervention or crashed hard drives to use as an excuse for not finishing my second play through. Instead, I got to almost the same exact spot as my first play through and just fizzled out from ever playing it again. It would go on to be a sore subject in my video game library history. Eventually my 360 would red ring like so many of them did, I didn't have a replacement plan, all my 360 games were given away to my cousins (unbeknownst to me until a few years later) by mom after I went off to college, and Final Fantasy XIII would always be a game I spent 40 hours with and never finished....

That was until 3 years ago when Final Fantasy XIII was released on steam coming as a huge surprise to me and most of the gaming world. A console exclusive game from 2010 was being released on Steam 4 years after its release? Why? I wasn't going to get it, I told myself. The sluggish and ridiculous hand holding nature would be too much to play through thrice let alone one more time, I told myself. But remember how fun that combat gets after the first 10 hours? About an hour after the steam release, XIII was in my cart and waiting to be downloaded. If you guys think the beginning of this game is slow, just imagine having to play through it 3 TIMES. But alas, my brutal and self inflicting time with XIII would not wrap up as soon as I thought it would. This time I promised myself I wasn't going to fizzle out from the game. I'm gonna brute force my way through it and get to the good parts that everyone talks about. However, my PC specs did not agree with my self. You would think a PC port of a 4 year old game would run better but a lot of things about Final Fantasy XIII never made sense. On my old as dirt i5 processor and even older GTX 570. This game was not happening for me. The frame rate performance would hit into the low teens at times. This would not do, I knew I would update my PC eventually and XIII (like the crazy intense love interest you can't quite get away from) would be waiting for my return.

Thank god for cloud saves. If not, I really don't think I could play through the begging of XIII a fourth time. I'm not THAT crazy. A few years later I did upgrade my gaming PC and was ready to run a 7 year old game that had ridiculous high hardware requirements. But EVEN STILL this was not a straight shot to the end. I would install the game to get a nostalgia fix for that sweet combat. Newer games would come out and I would need to uninstall XIII to clear up hard drive space. Rinse and repeat this practice for almost another year. Eventually after plugging away at this ridiculous game time after time, I reached the penultimate chapter of XIII. THIS IS IT FOR REAL THIS TIME. I didn't tell myself, I demanded it of myself. So for the past week I have been digging away at getting through this game and today I played through the last bit of chapter 12 and all of the last chapter. It's really hard for me to admit if I really enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XIII. The combat is an excellent way to modernize turn based role playing games. I wish the Final Fantasy VII Remake would use more of a similar system instead of the more action oriented system from XV. The story is definitely a grand experience one comes to expect with Final Fantasy even if it is extremely convoluted while taking its sweet time to make any of kind of sense. Also, besides my man Sazh, I think I hate every character in Final Fantasy XIII? In the end, I finally beat the game and it was a thing...I guess.

There was definitely a time where I really thought I would never see the end of Final Fantasy XIII. It seemed as if there was almost some kind of unknown entity that truly didn't want me to see the games conclusion. Maybe I should've listened to it, but I didn't. Also, while I do own XIII-2 and Lightning Returns in my steam library (steam sales be crazy) I think I may be done with the grand tale of The Fabula Nova Crystallis. I also find it slightly humerus and extremely coincidental that I finally finished this game on the eve of the PS4's Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age's release. I never picked that one up one for its original PS2 release and I've only lightly touched the game via a PC emulator. Maybe I'll go out tomorrow morning and look for a steel book edition of XII so I can have a whole new Final Fantasy to questionably finish or not within the next 7 years...

I'm a pretty big fan of 13 (or an apologist, some might say - but it's actually a decent game and I will defend a lot of its design choices) so congrats on finishing it and also as a fan of 13 stay the fuck away from the sequels. They are both worse.

Cant believe its been 7 years, wow. I was so hyped for this game when it came out, got it on PlayStation because its final fantasy, played about 30 hours and never touched it again lol. Haven't played a final fantasy since, maybe i will try it again one day with the Japanese dub or something.

You didn't like Fang? She was easily the coolest out of the bunch to me. FF13 is probably the one I like the least out of the ones I've played but strangely, also the one I've thought about revisiting.

@donchipotle: What are you talking about sir. The story definitely goes down hill but 13-2 and LR are clearly better than 13 in almost every other aspects.

@liquiddragon: Fang is alright. You can definitely do a lot worse within ffxiii characters (see snow and hope). But she doesn't have a baby chocobo nesting in her hair so...

13-2 and LR are only 'better' if you think side quests and bigger areas make for a better game. Functionally 13 and 13-2 have the same mechanics when it comes to battle, just without the Eidolons and a monster raising thing instead of an actual party with characters that actually have personality and growth. LR might as well not even be in the same universe for how differently it plays and feels since the crux of that game is doing side quests while waiting for the plot to happen - and then regretting it when it gets there because fuck. From a narrative standpoint, 13-2 and LR do everything possible to ruin all of 13 and its characters and themes. They are pointless sequels that don't enhance the lore but only nuke it from orbit while giving it the middle finger. The music is consistent for all three of them I suppose with 13-2 being a very experimental OST that mostly does well even with its over the top metal stuff and LR has a couple of decent tracks.

13-2 and LR add nothing to 13's world except glaring plot holes and ass-pulls. LR is especially a terrible coda to a series that didn't need two sequels. There's nothing in 13-2 or LR that is better than 13 proper except being able to actually explore a big open city for a bit. But the lack of big cities and side quests wasn't an issue with 13 so why they decided to focus on those aspects for the sequels is beyond me but there it is. I suppose not getting a game over if Serah or Noel dies in battle is one actual improvement but one step forward doesn't make up for three steps back.

You mean the best characters in the game?

I never even got to the "open" world part of XIII. I think I gave up about 4 or 5 chapters in because I could not stand anything about the combat system or world design. I might have stuck it out if the story had been interesting (or even comprehensible), or if the characters weren't all wet blankets. Kinda stunning that I bailed so early when you consider that I have finished ever other mainline Final Fantasy game at least once.

I am also curious what you liked about the combat system in XIII? There are a not insignificant number of people who swear by it, but I thought it was the worst in the series by a large margin. Having a game over if your main character dies was a terrible idea, and when combined with a combat camera that was more focused on feeling epic than actually showing the battlefield made for a bad time. And the system being so heavily invested in needing to break enemies to do any appreciable damage made even standard random encounters tedious. I just don't see it.

Do yourself a favor a pick up XII. It's pretty awesome and the remaster fixes some lingering issues with the original release. It's one of those games I think is going to get reevaluated. It's systems were actually a little too far ahead of their time when it was originally released and the story might have been too political for what was probably the average age of a Final Fantasy fan back then. I'm thinking it might get a better reception today. Just try to ignore that Vaan and Penelo exist. They're only there because Square corporate forced their inclusion. You know, for the kids.

Don't know why but I finished this game. I hate this game so much, it's so bad in every way and even now I still can't understand why people find the combat system even remotely good (for me it's the worth combat system of every final fantasy I've ever played, so every one of them except 3, 4 and 11). That's going to sound like a cliche or an exaggeration but I really finished this game by just pressing the attack button, never needing to change whatever they called the sets of attacks because whenever I tried to I would die.

@xanadu: I think it's interesting that fans of XIII seem to universally praise its battle system. As a Final Fantasy veteran, it's what put me off the game the most. You get used to Proper Noun salad and terrible pacing in JRPGs, but the persistent feeling of lacking control in XIII always bored the snot out of me. I felt like I was just waiting around to time paradigm shifts, and I remember being very frustrated at having no control over character positioning (to dodge AoEs) or the party's AI, unlike in XII.

They cleaned up some of the combat issues in XIII-2, but then went and added an ill-conceived monster collector mechanic instead of a fully developed party/cast. XIII was already on the small size with three (of six), but in XIII-2 you only have two actual characters, period. My 360 achievements tell me I finished XIII-2, but I seriously can't remember having done so. It's only one of a tiny handful of games like that for me.

It's weird because I actually beat this game pretty recently too, I kept wanting to try it, and I agree with so many of the flaws of the game, but I still had a good time with it. Unlike a lot of people, I actually did like the cast, and my problem with the game - again unlike most other people - is that when the game finally DOES open up, the story goes at a freaking crawl, and it takes at least fifteen hour or something insane like that before it finally gets back on the fast track.

I did start FF13-2, but I was so burnt out that I only managed to get about an hour into it before I set it down. I'll probably go for it soon, but not right now.

I just bought it on 360 for 99p + shipping. I'm sure I'll enjoy it at that price and appreciate its positives. I've liked every FF I've played (the main numbered ones, not all the side games), so I'm not overly worried. I'm excited to hear that it's at least fun to play, combat-wise. I played a bunch of FFXIII-2 and thought it was awful, especially Noel as a character. I had a constant frown for like four hours; a lot of the design decision are questionable at best.

I also got a bunch of other games I never got 'round to playing - Dark Sector, Amped 3, Bad Company, Blue Dragon, Beautiful Katamari, Crimson Skies, etc.

One of the ideas I have in my wheelhouse is playing Final Fantasy XIII after playing Final Fantasy X-2.

I'm pretty sure this would KILL ME!

@zombiepie: Don't do that. If you committed to playing the sequel to FFX, you'd need to commit to two sequels to XIII. And XIII is a terrible game. I think that about X as well, but it isn't anywhere close to the dumpster fire XIII is. XIII is my answer to the question about what I would do if I had Terminator powers and could go back in time change history. I'd make sure XIII never happened.

Play XII. XII is good.

@zombiepie: I second the notion of going from X-2 to XII (there's a new remaster coming) if only so you'd be moving chronologically through the single-player games in the series. Twelve is also generally considered to be a better game than thirteen.

@freedom4556: I think what I mainly like most about it is coming up with class combinations and seeing how they work together. I also like the timeline bar aspect with skills taking up 1-3 sections of the bar and coming up with combinations to maximize the most effectiveness (thought I did usually just use the auto fight in most situations). Overall, the whole combat system feels like a weird mix between traditional turned based RPGS, the gambit system of XII, and the dress system of X-2. That is a completely crazy thing for a franchise as big as Final Fantasy to do and I really like it when major games do unexpected things like that.

Nah you'll be fine. XIII is a better game than X-2 for sure. XIII is kind of a chore until you get to Gran Pulse and thats when I think it gets really good. Unfortunately that takes about 15-20 hours which is a deal breaker for a lot of people. After that though the game is great. I have to agree with @donchipotle that XIII-2 and Lightning Returns don't add anything to the franchise other than being anime as fuck. Especially Lightning Returns and it's philosophical bullshit ending. Just skip them!

@zombiepie: I'd go with 12 if I were you. Better game than 13 and has a new version that just released. Just know going in that someone got the loot rpg bug for 12 and drowned the game in a bunch of loot that can be hard to find based on drop chances and spawn rates of enemies, and a ton of additional post game content like rare monster hunts, secret bosses, extra areas, etc. You don't have to find the most annoying offenders to compleete the game though.

@zombiepie: As much as I found myself hating almost every non-Lightning character in XIII while recently playing through it, I was shocked by how much I enjoyed actually playing the game. The linear nature of the game makes it something of a cousin to X, which is pretty good Final Fantasy, and there's not a lot of faffing about with equipment and the like until the back third of the game. Also, hot take: the game gets dramatically worse when it gets to the much-ballyhoo'ed "open" part of the game on Pulse.

i beat this game years after the fact as well...maybe 2013 or 2014?

and i have absolutely no memory of the end. just a lot of "god, hope needs to take a long walk off a short pier."

I just picked up XIII for the first time during the Steam summer sale. After a history of disliking or outright hating most Final Fantasies I'd tried before, I decided to give this one a chance because I'm still on a JRPG high after Persona 5 (and it was only $7). Intent on actually enjoying a Final Fantasy (which hadn't happened before or since FF6), I decided to have more patience with this one.

I definitely wasn't ready for how confusing the story was. It would constantly just throw in new made-up terms and expect the player to sort everything out himself. One moment, everyone's standing around talking about fireworks and then suddenly the l'cie brand and the fal'cie with Pulse when eidolons but watch out for cie'th and Pulse l'cie fal'cie. On top of that, the story often withheld vital information from the player until after dramatic events to heighten the drama. Normally I would have written off the story as an unsalvageable mess within the first five hours, but I took the extra effort of reading every entry in the Datalog to make sure I was caught up on everything.

Poor storytelling aside, once I dug through the Datalog and sorted out the mess, I discovered a pretty straightforward and unremarkable story about untrustworthy authority figures, godlike villains, and big finales that turn out to be fake-out endings. Regular JRPG stuff. In the end, it definitely wasn't worth reading through all those Datalogs for that.

But it absolutely was worth reading them for the characters! Well, most of the characters... Three characters. Hope was annoying, Fang and Snow were just boring. Cid and Nabaat were pretty much pointless, Serah was just a mouthpiece for all the previously-mentioned delayed reveals, etc. Lightning, Vanille, and Sazh were the stars. It's not often that elder sisters get the role as main protagonist (in anything, let alone JRPGs). Like Vanille and Sazh, she had character, had flaws, made mistakes, and developed over the course of the game.

In a weird way, the game's linear structure helped endear me to the characters as much as I thought it would sour me on the game. It helps to better pace the game (not by much, but every bit counts), allows the party as a whole to develop (yes, even the characters I didn't much care for), and avoids the trend of having the entire story revolve around the main character.

Near the end of the game, when I was suddenly dropped in an open field and given the ability to do optional content, I was excited to finally stretch my legs a bit. But after a few hours, I noticed some flaws in my new paradise. I quickly got bored of running into foes with no knowledge of whether or not I even had a chance of beating them. Coupled with the several minutes of walking in one direction with nothing but rolling hills to see between each point of interest, the open areas of the game were a big disappointment for me.

In the end, I definitely preferred the linearity. Which isn't something I say often. Most RPGs, I'd do all the side content first and just breeze through the story, overleveled. But because XIII gates your level by where you are in the story, the game was a constant challenge, balanced perfectly for a specific level window. Forcing level caps maybe isn't the most elegant way of balancing a game, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the combat itself wasn't the best supplement to the challenge. By the time you have access to everything the combat has to offer, it's clearly more engaging than it was at the beginning. And it's definitely serviceable. But there were glaring flaws that really annoyed me whenever they came up: The first paradigm shift of each battle requires a lengthy animation, there is no control over character movement and they practically seem programmed to clump together whenever an enemy casts AoE, there isn't a lot of feedback for when things go horribly wrong so in some fights I ended up trying different paradigms at random until one of them worked.

As much as I complain, I liked it enough to buy both of its sequels. And write all this junk about it. I'm surprised and happy to find that there's still room in my stubborn heart for Final Fantasy.

Anyway, all that I wanted to say when I started this post was: Congratulations on finally beating the game! Sounds like I enjoyed it a bit more, but judging from the posts here, it's a pretty divisive game in general. I wonder if it has to do with everyone's fondness for Final Fantasy as a series.

@jurck: yeah I think you did like XIII more than did and even I consider myself more of an apologist more than people. You're 100% right though that the story gets much better when you actually understand what's happening. Fortunately/unfortunately for me I didn't have to read as much as you did to understand. Playing through the opening sections 3+ times is just as effective...

I tip my hat to you for having to sit through the braindead first 20 hours of this game 3 times. One of the most beautiful messes in gaming which only in retrospect I appreciate.

Also, I agree with you about Snow being shit (he and Serah made up 50% of my issues with this game) but Hope's shittiness was at least intentional I feel, probably one of my favs in the series. What a horribly uneven game.

Ahh, Final Fantasy XIII my nemesis. I hate this game. Hate it with a passion. The combat sucked me in so hard, I finished all three of them, but I hated absolutely every other thing about them. The plot is the kind of abject stupidity that doesn't stand up to even the barest of scrutiny. Character motivations make no sense whatsoever. The world makes no sense whatsoever. Lightning is possibly the most boring protagonist ever written. She has the merest of personalities and precisely zero character growth over the course of three massive games, but everyone keeps treating her like she's the best thing since sliced bread. The rest of the cast range from barely tolerable to contemptibly stupid to inane. Even Sazh, who has some potential in the first game, just repeats his character arc over for the second and third games - he loses his kid, he gets his kid back. Same thing three times over. Someone call child services already! I'd sooner tear out my eardrums with rusty fishhooks than listen to "Hope" (Holy fuck Square, subtlety much?) mutter another fucking inane platitude. Argh!

I mean, they named him Hope in English (ホープ Hōpu) in a Japanese game. They were being kinda subtle.