That was a compliment! Your cat has a beutiful tail, I wish I could pet it. hee hee

On topic: Anyone know the budget on FFXIII and FFXIII-2 I can't find XIII-2 budget numbers for the life of me. I know XIII-2 is said to have a smaller budget than XIII I figure if it was half of XIII maybe that was mostly profitable for Square.

exactly this

you got proof? that sounds like a lie. hell it probably is. 

Does it really matter. You seem to like FF13, and thats fine.

Some people love it, some hate it. A lot of people have mixed feelings.

I can understand why some fans like it a lot. Theres some really great moments in it, but ultimately I feel the series needs to drastically improve to recapture many of the fans who were unhappy with the FF13 series.

@The Fury

If you look very closely, everything about FFXIII is borrowed from past games. If the game was called anything other than FFXIII, it'll be a huge plagiarism job. I guess S-E can't plagiarise themselves though lol. I'll elaborate:

-The MC was ripped from FFVII

-The over arching game design, pacing and levelling system is  nearly identical to FFX

-The sidequests are straight from FFXII

-The idea of monsters free roaming the world is from FFXII again

-The actual battle uses ATB charging from older games combined  with preprogrammed AI a la gambits but less flexible

The only thing new was the idea of staggering enemies. How can this not be an FF game?

I though FFXIII also had great voice acting especially compared to FFX that's beloved. Most didn't like FFXII's story for being too political as well but I'll give you the point on FFXII's story lacking mostly because you have to read the datalogs to comprehend a lot of stuff.

Leader death = game over is not a bad thing. It makes careful selection of your leader part of your strategy. This is why it's better to use maybe Fang or Snow instead of Light as leader. Ironically, I'm having a similar conversation on another site and my debate opponent there thinks that FFXIII was the easiest of all of them because she never died lol. I did think it was the most difficult like you but I also thought that was a good thing. There was no real punishment for dying anyway so I don't understand why it bothered you so much.

As for ether management, did you know in FF7, you can duplicate items? In FFVIII, there is no MP, you can draw magic indefinitely from enemies, refine items etc. Can't remember FF9 too well. In FFX, save points refilled MP too if I remember correctly so ethers did not need micromanagement. In FFXII, the clan shops sell ethers. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that magic is some rare commodity to be managed carefully in previous FF games. Manybe FFVI and earlier? I haven't played those so can't tell you.

I know nothing about the advanced sphere grid. I've only played the NA version of FFX so I can't speak to that. I will say though that in NA version of FFX, all the characters ended up the same stats and ability-wise. Only difference was overdrives. I thought FFXIII improved on the FFX formula in this regard. I just don't see how regular sphere grid =/= crystarium except for holding x to move vs pressing x on each node.

Nostalgia is good because it's a cheap way to get people to buy the game (just ask nintendo) but it seriously puts a damper on developer creativity. We will never see anything really new if the nostalgic always had their way. In a game with regular sequels I'll understand your complaints but the standout thing about FF vs other games with sequels is that FF games are all stand alone games with no real ties to their predecessors besides some common elements like summons, chocobos, a guy named Cid, magic called firaga, thundaga and blizzaga, etc.  Compare to say resident evil series with it's clear connection between games. With every new FF, we expect a fresh game, not a play on the old. Only FFX and FFXIII have had real sequels and they didn'tgive the sequels new numbers for a good reason.

Well when a game like FFXIII is hyped to the stratosphere millions of people bought it just because it was the new main Final Fantasy game. There should be somewhat of an expection for a game like this but instead people hated it and so they made a second one, and people hated that even more and it got even less sales so what do they do, they make a third one, beating a dead horse anyone? Move on. Not to mention their being lazy reusing stuff thats been cut out of the first FFXIII game.

FFXV will do just that imho. It has the Kingdom Hearts dev's behind it and the power of the PS4+SE.

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games

FFXIII isn't the only FF in town.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn PS4 launcehs soon.

Final Fantasy III Ouya

 You have all the VC/PSN re-releases, the PSP Final Fantasy Type-0/Vita/DS re-releases and newer stuff like bravely Default for the 3DS. Along with FFLR and FFX-X2 Remakes and Kingdom Hearts Remakes. That's a huge amount of content SE is cranking out for us FF/JRPG fans imho. I like the FFXIII world so them reusing things makes total sense to me. :) If you don't prefer FFXIII there is plenty of other options SE has available. I don't see the reason to get all angry because FFXIII is not their only available title in quite some time.

Sorry I cut down a lot of your post just to comment on these parts, most of it I understood.

First, I know there are many things ripped off from previous FF games, thing still didn't sit well with me. Maybe it's more complex than 'It has a feature which in themselves are good so it is good.', you know, even lack of steampunk in it was sad.

I didn't find the game hard, I found it frustrating. As soon as was able I stopped using Lightning as my main playable character. This was more because I didn't like her character.

After some research, I did not realise the US version of FFX didn't have advanced Sphere Grid, I thought it was the standard, PAL did so I played a drastically different game to you it seems. A shame.

I can understand what you mean. There are many nostalgic feeling things in the games, for me it was too far removed from what many of us know and love. But understand the story and liking characters were a huge factor as well, as in I didn't with either. FFX-2 had a very odd story, extremely cheesy writing and I doubt anyone will openingly play this game in front of people but it had a fantastic battle system which kept many playing.

I can see why many like FFXIII so much, it's quicker paced, beautiful graphics, stagger is an interesting feature but for me it was the worst Final Fantasy game I've played.

No freaking way!

FF 13 was absolutely crap! Graphics dont cover up weak gameplay and corridor hunting. I almost made it to the end, but then i thought f*ck it.

This post right here is what I think the main complaint came down to. Half the people that picked up this game wanted the whole game to be a sandbox game, but they didn't pay attention and just assumed it would be like Skyrim, and wrongly so. This person and people like him/her should make sure FFXV is sandboxy enough for them before they pre-order, or else you only have yourself to blame for getting a game that doesn't play how YOU want it to. which really is very immature of yourself. There were plenty of videos up on youtube and other sites that clearly showed that part of this game was clearly not 100% sandbox.