There is one thing that I don't understand is why everyone seems to share so much hate for this game? Sure it is a bit long-winded, but the story is really interesting and the game play is really good. I don't get why everyone says its not a good game, everyone is entitled to their own opinion sure but I just don't get why everyone dislikes it so much??

There wasn't anything really wrong. Gamers just have ADAD these days and cant handle anything with story driven cut scenes in it.

FFXIII has a Metacritic score of 83, so it's not as if the game was universally trashed. It might be the case of a very vocal minority.

@Dragoness1993: if you've played any final fantasy from X and earlier, you should know this answer

I was completely lost and had no idea what the fuck was going on for like the 10 first hours of that game, I consider myself a fairly patient person but that was ridiculous.

I liked the combat though.

It's mostly assholes.

Don't get me wrong, there are legitimate issues with the game, but a majority of the harshest critics obviously either A) did not play the game, B) did not play the game nearly long enough to form an informed opinion, or C) wanted to seem cool and anti-establishment. Unfortunately the least informed opinions are often the easiest ones for the mindless internet drones to parrot.

Its a final fantasy game, they all get hate. Seriously I've never seen a more divided fan base than the final fantasy fan base.

so you know many people dislike it but you haven't heard one single time why?

it's a long corridor, no towns, many people don't like the characters and it only gets going and opens up after 10-20 hours or so if I remember correctly. that's not what people wanted apparently. it got its praise for the combat and pretty graphics but most people cited the EXTREMELY long ramp up and narrow corridors that were so annoying (because you'd always be reminded of the linearity on the mini map)

The characters are 2D, the story is boring and thick with no way to get into it, the combat while a good idea is just boring, the dungeon design is straight forward and boring, the character advancement system is good but you don't get any control over it until too late into the game. Hope sucks.

To sum it up: It's not a very good game in my opinion.

@StarvingGamer said:

It's mostly assholes.

Don't get me wrong, there are legitimate issues with the game, but a majority of the harshest critics obviously either A) did not play the game, B) did not play the game nearly long enough to form an informed opinion, or C) wanted to seem cool and anti-establishment. Unfortunately the least informed opinions are often the easiest ones for the mindless internet drones to parrot.

This.

the open world, when finally presented to you, isn't even worth exploring. it's basically a wider hallway, and all the side quests are the same but with a slightly different enemy to find and kill. it's a shallow game with gorgeous visuals that delude you into thinking there's more to it than there is.

I have not actually played any FF games before X, so I can't really judge what they were like but in my opinion, I think FF13 is a good game. I think they made FF13-2 for people to understand the plot better and think that's the main reason why people dislike it so much because they do not understand what is going on.

It wasnt bad, I liked Final Fantasy 9 better, but that was because of vivi and the art direction. Final Fantasy 13 seemed like a action drama that wanted to be a action flick.

dont get me wrong it was compleatly fine, and i enjoyed the 3 hours i have played of it so far, and i do plan to play more of it, i just dont like the long stretches of combat that they have you run through.

I played 25 hours of that game. I got right to the part where it opened up and stopped playing. No matter how amazing the final chapters of that game may have been, it took way to long, and was way too uninteresting by the time it go there. Other than the black guy, there was absolutely nothing memorable about any of the characters. I stopped caring because it was boring, and all that happened when I got to that giant open field was that I realised that I didn't feel like power levelling to try and make this game fun. I feel like I gave that game more than a fair chance, but whatever greatness came with the final fantasy name has clearly disappered.

Now for a game that did capture that greatness, Lost Odyssey is fantastic and SE should really look at how that game managed to combine old and new JRPG styles in an incredible way

I wanted to like this game, I've been playing FF since the SNES, but it's far too linear, the characters are uninteresting in my opinion, the story is super heavy on melodrama but light on actual character development. The first 20 minutes of the game are enough to turn a lot of people away. There is no context at all. You are just running down a linear corridor fighting robo-tigers...for a long time. I think most of the people that dislike it are either Final Fantasy-haters (for which there is no swaying one way or the other) or people who played FF for decades and remember a time when they prized actual gameplay over expensive cut-scenes. (I'm the latter)

I found the game to be alright. I would give it a 3 out of 5.

I really liked the combat system. I found the lengthy super linear progression tiring, and the open world stuff to be too little, too late. The story was ok, however the characters themselves were annoying. If the world opened up in the sequel then I could put up with the story and characters again to play it.

Vanille.

I for once was glad of the streamlined experience of FF XIII , lets be honest folks japanese cant make interesting hub towns or interesting non critical npcs (reason why I couldnt keep playing FFXII). And I guess people wanted FFVII again without realising that they can play it again in today´s consoles anyway.

A lot of people dislike the new battle system (although many do). A lot of people dislike the linear path. A lot of people dislike the characters and especially certain voice actors.

I suspect it is mainly due to certain expectations of a FF game, if this were called anything else it would not polarize people so much. I really liked FF12 though and lots of people hate that too.

The battle system was great, the voice acting, story and characters make me want to hurl.

The first 20 hours of the game are kinda savage. The gameplay remains simplistic and it takes forever for the story and characters to kick off.

Most people can't handle it. I don't blame them, I only made it because I had my girlfriend around to help MST3K the game.

Battle system was great. The game's problem was that that battling was all that the game was. Battle after constant battle and even after the game "opens up" toward the end, it just opens up from a corridor full of monsters to battle to a room full of monsters to battle. There is nothing to do in the big open area except more battling and a weak chocobo treasure hunt mode. And half the characters are extremely unlikable in the beginning, so much so that when the game tries to redeem them, it's not enough for me to still not hate them. The RPG mechanics are light at best. I still think the sphere grid/chrystarium is terrible and you don't get any equipment other than your weapon and accessories. Also no fucking towns, no down time to just lose yourself and wander about the world they created. I'd say there are maybe 2 times throughout the whole game where you get to some place close to a city hub and one of those times it's just a dungeon that takes place in a city.

If it weren't called Final Fantasy, I wouldn't have hated it as much. Petty? Maybe, but with the Final Fantasy name, especially a major numbered one, comes certain standards and expectations. If you're gonna deviate so much from that, then don't call it Final Fantasy XIII or just call it Final Fantasy Chrystarium Chronicles or whatever.

I'm cautiously looking out for FFXIII-2 because I think Square was spending 3/4 of the development of FFXIII freaking out over how they were gonna turn the debut trailer into a fucking game. So now that they actually have a battle system in place and a mythos, I can at least hope they make a game that lives up to what I expected out of the first one.

I was pissed how enclosed it was compared to other Final Fantasy games, then I pulled the stick out of my ass and enjoyed the ride. The people you talk about still havent removed it.

Its a shallow but pretty experience, with horrible and fantastic characters, an interesting world with varied designs. Its just enjoyable, good on the eyes and ears, just dont think too much.

I really liked it, for all its faults (Vanille, slowburn).

@TobbRobb said:

I was pissed how enclosed it was compared to other Final Fantasy games, then I pulled the stick out of my ass and enjoyed the ride. The people you talk about still havent removed it.

Its a shallow but pretty experience, with horrible and fantastic characters, an interesting world with varied designs. Its just enjoyable, good on the eyes and ears, just dont think too much.

I really liked it, for all its faults (Vanille, slowburn).

Sure, if stick = brain and ass = head, then I can see how you would enjoy it!

I would argue that the story is not very good because of the fact that I had to look things up in the in-game encyclopedia to know what the hell was even going on in their convoluted story. As people have mentioned, the characters weren't memorable. Then there's the part where I spent 20-ish hours until it took the brakes off and let me play a Final Fantasy game. But despite all that, I loved the combat system. I don't hate it, I'm just indifferent about it.

I just couldn't stand that paradigm system. It made every encounter in that game feel like the most boring thing in the world, just sitting and watching my guys jump around and act like it was an action game while I occasionally switch roles. Could not have felt more detached from the game. Another big problem was that despite the game world having multiple cities, you never actually get to do any exploration- it's always just walking to the next trigger that will start you on a long pathway full of enemies, and then repeat.

Awful characters, poor story, incredibly boring and linear environments for the first 30 hours.
 
The combat system was great though, it deserved to be in a better game.

I played for about 10 hours, then stopped. I still want to go back and play the game sometime, because it's a ridiculously beautiful game, but there are other games I'd rather play before I get back to it.

For me it was the characters. I can't stand Snow, and Hope is even worse, and when Hope tried to confront him a few hours in, and couldn't, it really turned me off to the game. It was an issue of pacing. These characters are going to be interacting for a good 40+ hours, and if the majority of that time will be filled with it's-hard-for-me-to-explains and I'll-tell-you-laters, which is what the first 10 hours seemed to indicate to me, then it doesn't make me optimistic for how character development will play out for the remainder of the game. There is a place for suspense in a story. This wasn't suspense. It was fluff.

I don't hate the game. I thought it was fine. What made me stop playing was that my goals boiled down to going down a straight hallway ad nauseum.

I wanted to finish FFXIII, I really did, but it never felt like I ever got anywhere. I was just going down straight lines that led to more straight lines. From what I heard there weren't even towns to at least have some kind of hub to rest. Maybe I'm just set by the old JRPG standard that your goal was to reach the next town where you'd get your next quest and whatnot. So I just sort of subconsciously kept running down those halls hoping to reach that "goal" and rest point but seeing as there's no towns I never got that break and I just sort of broke away after a point from fatigue.

XII-2 seems to fix at least a few of these problems, I just have to think on whether I'll play it or not after not having completed the first one. Aside from that, I'm really hoping Versus is palatable to my tastes. The battle system is supposedly KH-fare and I rather enjoyed the battle system of BBS so that seems fine. Hopefully it can avoid the hallway fatigue that turned me away from XIII proper.

Well it sold well enough to warrant a sequel, so it can't have been that hated. I didn't really care for it just because it felt like it was way too long for what content there was. The actual gameplay was actually a lot of fun for me, it just kind of over stayed it's welcome.

I think what made me dislike the game or at least put it on the back burner was the leveling system. I really liked how you leveled in 10 and wanted something more like that. I don't know maybe I just had to give it more of a chance. I didn't like the combat in 12 but then really started to enjoy it after some time.

I really wanted to like the game but so much made me dislike it. I actually liked Hope at the beginning but his story with Snow never really panned out in a meaningful way. The story just wasn't that interesting, the combat was very boring to me, the final boss could one hit kill you, the battle winning tune was changed from every other Final Fantasy, and putting that all together led to a very dull and frustrating experience.

You have multiple camps of FF fans. I'd say it really boils down to pre-7, post-7, post 10. Pre-7, the game was much less verbose, the game had a less over the top anime feel to it, since a character jumping across the screen could be interpreted differently than "Celes is jumping four hundred feet into the air, running up buildings that are collapsing on top of her, slicing those buildings in half with the thirty food atma sword while casting Ultima while internally monologueing in her head about her love of death and Locke's friendship while Mog flies by with pink sparklies going, "KUPOPO!". There was a sense of exploration and danger. Because the graphical fidelity and memory limitations, the older games left a lot for the player to interpret.

Post FF7, the game went began to trend more towards a cinematic experience. Cut scenes were a reward for gameplay and served as narrative anchors. A bit like pictures added to the begining of a chapter in a book that paints a scene. You were still exploring a world and you were still breathing life into these characters in your mind.

FFX on, the game became a cinematic experience. Where cut scenes were once used as rewards for gameplay, it began to lean more upon cut scenes. Control of the experience was taken away; not just by the loss of exploring an open world, but the loss of breathing life into these characters ourselves. Every facet of these characters were laid out for us and while a character like Squall was brooding and kind of annoying, a voice acted Squall would be insufferable.

It's like Lodoss Wars, Lodoss Wars Chronicles, and Slayers.

Everyone seems to forget that FFXII has a pretty big open world. It's not really cinematic.

When it comes to numbered Final Fantasy entries, there is no definitive "best". Opinions on this series in particular vary more than practically any other series in any medium that I know of. Pretty much the only constant is that no one talks about the first, second, and third games.

@believer258: Final Fantasy I is the shit, Warmech all day everyday Mr. Idontknow258. That and the two tiles on the eastern side of the map where you can powerlevel. Also great villain motivation.

I dunno, I have played every Final Fantasy except XIV and the XIII saga is my favorite out of the entire series. When I see hate I usually never see reasons, I just see stuff like "the story is garbage" or "the characters are the worst in JRPG history" or "Hope/Vanille are annoying" or "Time Travel?! WUUUUUUUUTs going on!", these are the same folks whom think Resident Evil 4 is the greatest game ever, which is fucking ridiculous.

Hope.

For me, FF XIII was subpar for two main reasons. One, that the first three hours or so is mind-numbingly simple, what with there being no paradigms whatsoever. Second, it seems that the cutscenes both treat me like an idiot, yet don't adequately explain things to me so that I care about them. I mean, sure, I don't want an info-dump, but I would like to care about the story.

That said, when I got out of the slog, it was a somewhat serviceable game. Not the Best Final Fantasy by a long shot (I would still say that's VI, because of it's focus on the interaction of characters in a rather rote story. That really goes far for me) but okay.

I don't think the characters are the worst in JRPG history; there are so many contenders for that that I don't they any of them qualify (although Vanille is one of those characters that is the reason I have turned away from anime as of late). But hey, it's serviceable. I think if it wasn't a Final Fantasy game, it would be above average with some interesting ideas.

Being able to reflect on this two years later is interesting. I have less bitterness towards the game but my nostalgia driven love for the old victory theme will always sour me on this game. But my real disappointment comes with Hope. I really liked him in the beginning and saw tons of potential that never really goes anywhere. And the Leona Lewis song kicking in right at the end just put a bad taste in my mouth (just really despised that song). Overall, the game was fine and I never minded the pace. Maybe the game needed more Sazh? Him and Fang were the only characters I ended up liking. Everyone else just never caught on with me.

The nonsense story didn't help either. Others may love it but with the time commitment involved in a game like this, the story just failed for me with tons of exposition hidden behind text. But I liked the characters being sectioned off from each other and Sazh's attempted suicide will be the one thing that always sticks with me in this game.

And no games need one hit kill final bosses with multiple forms.

For me, the game is non-sense. Unfun non-sense at that.

Without talking about the brainless battle-system (one hand), the story is BS, aimless wondering with no objective, objectives which counteract any reasonably good outcome, cut-scenes don't match established facts or established reality, the world isn't set-up all that well and the characters are idiots not the understandable kind either, they know nothing.

And non of the above stops through out the game.

At first the linearity bothered me and I stopped 20hrs in, a while later I restarted and it was still terrible and unnecessary (a grid like map system like in RTS's would have been better or something) but when i found out what the bad guys plan was, it was such a waist of both his time and mine, everything every character did was counter active and there was no real reason why they should have succeeded.

I am not really a FF guy, but I gave this game a shot.
And I didn't like it. The 15 hour tutorial part of the game was okei, I really think the game would have shined better with a more "open" world game. It was extremely linear and I gave up on the end of the game. I had no interest in battling a boss for 15 min to then do something wrong, and then having it to do it all over again.

So yes, I would claim this is a bad game.

I hate to point this out but a lot of games are like this.

Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout, Dragon Age 1, Mass Effect. Basically Western RPGs come out and you have so much damn freedom and the worlds/universes seem so fully realized with a history that can be found and explored and read about all within the game. I love the way in those games how NPCs talk to you as if you know the history, referencing events or policies. History and other people. Here it seems like the history is kinda just there to fit the story, not the world they want to present. Those other games have shit that happened that doesn't even touch the main game or story.

Funny, because that's one of the reasons why I think the fighting system is the best in the series. You are being trained slowly from the start of the game to be able to quickly adapt and change to your customized paradigms that by the time you get to Pulse you are able to take on these long fights that would have been otherwise impossibly difficult, as if you're some menu god or something. I just love it.

As an example of this, I recently tried to help my sister out on her file as she was in a later area of the game and was having trouble. I a), wasn't used to her paradigms and had to mess around with the paradigms and go with the characters I liked to use, and b), I wasn't accustomed to the speed and thought process the game demanded because I haven't played it in a year or so. I ended up not really being able to help her because I kept dying. And to me that is the test of a good battle system, when you actually need both skills and the knowledge of your enemies.

I think that also, people don't realize that this game is actually teaching you the battle system during those "tutorial" hours. I don't even have a problem with the pace they teach it to you at - I think that was done intentionally and I appreciate and like that approach because I got really, really damn good at that game.

I just never got any long time enjoyment out of the system. It cool once they give you freedom but in the end i just felt the deepness of the battle system was hollow. The only thing you really had to worry about was having the right mixture of classes. Any other battle tatics you normally would worry about did not really matter. Add the fact that half of the classes were not really needed as much. I also did not like how it turned some fights into long drawn out battle, when you could otherwise blow pass thanks to you being higher leveled. This along side unavoidable battles thanks to liner pathways with enemies smack in the middle of. This just made battles a chore around the end point/endgame, also leaving behind all the many things that was awesome about final fantasy .Stuff like limit breaks, armor,useful summons, awesome ultimate weapons.

@xyzygy said:

What you've described was someone who hasn't played something in a long time of anything, that nothing special. I haven't played poker in years I'd be rusty too.

There's just one fatal flaw. You don't have to do any of that at all, once 1 thing is maxed out you don't have to max out anything else. I didn't, it's entirely possible not to do any further class building beyond the one you start with. What makes it worse is the thoughtless upgrade/level up system.

- hold button - grow crystal - end.

At first I did think about what i wanted leveling up first but as I played I then noticed it didn't matter, it's almost negligible because it amounts to the same for almost every character.

Another bad thing was how it felt how no character felt specialised. They where (I guess :/), but it didn't feel that way because i did the same thing for all of them, I didn't have to play all that differently.

I find it hard to believe that you completed the game just by mashing X.