Already imported and completed.
1. The battle system is terrible. All you do is click auto battle constantly and change from blaster/blaster/attacker to healer/defender/healer when you need to and jammer & enhancer for boss battles, it's like FFXII but without the programming AI priorities yourself such that you are letting it make all the decisions. Most of the time during battles I was not looking at the screen but just tapping x. When 2 characters die and u want to revive them, switch to healer paradigm and watch your character healing itself instead of reviving a healer. Yes you can select moves individually but it's only necessary once in the entire game. Near the start a flying motorbike will destroy your whole team, u have to switch Snow to Defender, lure it to him, and he tanks the damage. Soooo many other things are wrong with the gameplay. It's not intelligence based anymore, the 5 stars system is flawed and entirely based on how quickly you kill enemies. Juggling enemies in the air is over the top and unnecessary even for final fantasy. You only control 1 character so you can only make 1 summon, the other characters do not do what you want all the time, if your main character dies and your other 2 have full health you have to try again. Some fights an enemy will instantly kill a random character and you just have to replay it until it's not your main one. The game is far more about battles than any previous FF, probably 3/4 of the game time, but boring RPG gameplay is not the reason I play FF games.
2. It looks nowhere near as good as uncharted 2, the only thing that looks good is the character models which are fantastic models but low quality animations which is one of the great things in uncharted. The environments are really poor, most of the game you are on implausible thin linear sky paths with enemies just standing around on them. Some of them are incredibly low poly, and the maps play more like little big planet than an rpg. Little hooks off the path ALWAYS contain a treasure and u can see where all the treasures are by looking at the map, very boring uncreative design. The footstep sound on these skypaths is the same single footstep file repeated and it can get annoying how bad it sounds. There is no society in the game. You don't feel like the world exists, it's more like a mario world than a real fantasy sci-fi world like star wars. There are no other races, the least number of everything in a FF game, it barely feels like a FF game, chocobos are only unlocked in a side mission after the game.
3. Crystarium - they've replaced auto levelling up 1-99 with having to manually level up a pretty much straight path. There are 1 or 2 nodes that go perpindicular to the grid on each circle but they do not add anything they may as well all be straight and it's just a waste of time levelling up characters when it used to be done automatically. They've merged the sphere grid and levelling, but in doing so have taken away the gameplay design of the sphere grid so there's no intelligent user input. It's also level capped on each chapter!
The first half of the game you don't choose characters but once you do you are pretty forced to use Lightning/Hope/Fang or possibly Lightning/Vanille/Sazh if you want to have the necessary paradigms. If you had fang,snow,sazh for example, you would have no healer. Or lightning, vanille, hope you would have no defender. So I only used 1 party for the rest of the game, and I controlled lightning so only used Odin which got really boring. I tried controlling others to see their summon but always went back to lightning. FFXII let you switch characters during battle didn't it? R1 should have let you switch and the battle system would have been so much better. Summons are useless and take too long, their drive mode is disappointingly implemented as you don't actually drive at all you stand still and click and attack and it drives into the enemy for a second. The only time I used summons was when characters had died or had negative status effects and low health during boss battles, after your summon departs your characters lose their status effects and have full health. It seems the designers knew summons were useless and put this in to make you use them.
4. Story - The story may be fine by video game standards, but there's no depth to it, there are only 19 characters and no towns. Think of FFVII's variety in futuristic midgar to primitive wutai and grand canyon to the holiday resorts of golden saucer and costa del sol. It had huge variety which made the world immersive. There's no variety in FFXIII, just boring implausible skypaths until you get to the open area which is even more boring and desolate. There is no society in the game, you are not fighting for the world but on a personal mission to save 2 people. There's no minigames and the only side missions are battles. Each character used to have a home town, family, a detailed backstory and their own missions. Think of going into space for Cid, finding Seto for Nanaki, etc. but not in FFXIII. Only hope has parents and a house and the house is nothing like a real house. The developers in interviews said "futuristic setting of the game." but this game is less sci-fi than any other FF except IX and X. Just because the enemies are all made of metal and there are airships in cutscenes doesn't make it sci-fi. There are no races of people except humans, the story is just told while standing around a meaningless path between 6 charactersm, there's no sense of time or journey. Serah and Sazh's son are only in the game in a couple of cutscenes. There was a LOT more story in the Episode Zero prequel novella which got me far too expectant for the game as there was a lot more interesting locations and character development in those. Lost odyssey is a hell of a lot of a better game yet when I played it I thought it was pretty bad because it wasn't up to FF standards. I know the series has the most unpleasable fanbase, but I loved every game in the series since 7, my top 5 games ever are FF, I thought it was a no-brainer that this one would join them and I wanted so badly to love it. I like lightning and sazh, and the battle gameplay seemed cool for a few hours but I think most will reach a point where they have to be honest about the series and it is becoming something hideous and completely lost it's heart and soul.
I'd still say it's a good game but by FF series standards it is not, I'm quite certain that the majority of fans who have been playing every game will think it's one of the worst in the series. The only thing better is graphics, everything else has gone backwards. Save points are useless because you can't die, they're just there for shops which themselves are useless. I never used a shop once in the entire game! I never even upgraded a single weapon, I had the first weapons for the whole game and I had no trouble getting 5 stars on the end boss first time. Don't let people fool you saying this is a hard game just because you can die a lot. This is the easiest final fantasy yet because dieing means nothing. You never need to grind even. I can't imagine how I would have played any previous FF without speaking the language, but there's nothing in this game that needs it, that needs intelligence to get past. Turn based combat used to be intelligent at least for the bosses.
One last thing, I hope FF fans are horrified that the developers think it is like like call of duty than a WRPG. They are right though. WRPG's are about exploration, socialising, choice dialogue. Those things have disappeared entirely from FF and it has been replaced with an over the top style over substance linear battle to cutscene game. Did you like Advent Children? That's what FFXIII is like.
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