| Runa216 said: Final Fantasy has always been a good game series, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 are all some of my favorite games of all time, so it pains me to so loudly proclaim how bad this game is. First of all, the developers failed to take people who don't have HDTV's into consideration. When playing on an HDTV it's fine, but if you're still on Standard Definition like me, the chances of making out any of the words or numbers is pretty slim unless you get in close or squint. 90% of the time I couldn't tell if I was doing 300 or 800 damage. No excuse for this. Metal Gear Solid 4 had the same problem. The characters were all boring and 2 dimensional with almost no character development. That and I personally hated them all except...no, I hated them all. None of them were likeable and they might as well have been cardboard cutouts. "Oh look, the chipper cutesy female with a dark past", "The stereotypically black dude who's only funny because he lost his son!", "Oh look, I'm the bad guy using religion to rule the world!" None of the characters, good or bad, was memorable or interesting...and what the heck was with 'cid'? he's in it for like 1 battle and 10 minutes of story! It's SO linear, there are NO sidequests, NO exploration (save for one small area at the end of the game) and NO replay value. Everything is a straight line with no branching out for anything. LEvelling up is linear, movement is linear, there's no freedom to do anything, everything is controlled strictly. The story is a joke, 90% of which you have to absorb by reading a goddamn encyclopedia. Even with all that, it's not a GOOD story...I would spoil it for you just to say how bad it is, but people would be angry with me. The weapon and Accessory level up system was horrible, NO game should rely that much on the element of luck. The game doesn't stop sucking balls until 20 hours in...when you get onto Gran Pulse and have some freedom to explore, but the fact that everything leading up to that, and after that, is carefully controlled with no chance of deviation is an atrocity. No endgame content. the 'hidden bosses' are just marks you hunt down, and that's IT, there are no sidequests to unlock the backstories of the characters, nothing, just the mark hunting. Final Fantasy has always been about an element of exploration and this game has NONE WHATSOEVER. I cannot stress this enough. And keep in mind, I loved Final Fantasy 10, so I know Square knows how to make a game linear but give us some sidequests to work on as well. there's no excuse for the lack of content in this game. ESPECIALLY considering the massive production budget. and then there's the battle system, oh god it's such a bad battle system. I could see what they were trying to do: a more action packed version of Final Fantasy XII's system, but it failed miserably. If you don't do things a certain way, in a particular order, you died. If you deviated from the pattern you died. If you were a split second too late changing paradigms, you died (and even if you did it right, the enemies could, and would, still kill you mid-animation, something you have no control over.) If the enemy got a random hit on your main character and killed him/her, you died and had to start the battle over. You can only chose preset paradigms so you can't even truly make your own up. It's atrocious that the game's enemies have 'area of attack' moves, yet give you no control over where your characters's locations. That, and the decision that "if the character you control dies, game over" was just a game breaking flaw for me, especially when so many enemies could instakill you, or damn near it. PRetty much the whole game played like this: "Do exactly what we say, go exactly where we tell you to, fight using our pre-determined layouts, use these exact patterns to kill bosses and even basic enemies, and we might not kill ya..." And even then, if you did everything right and perfect, there was still that chance you'd be instakilled without warning, having to start over. The game has a shoddy plot, bland characters, a horribly created world, lame enemy, and a broken beyond repair battle system. There's no replay value and no sidequests, it's just crap from beginning to end. I got the game at launch, played for 5 hours and gave up....then picked it up again becuase DAMMIT I WANTED TO LIKE IT...made it 10 hours more, hated it, quit again. Then picked it up again because dammit I hear it stops sucking 20 hours in. I get further in, my Playstation breaks, and I don't care. I eventually get a new PS3, and it takes all my willpower to put this POS game back in, and I get to the end only to realize that, in the 45 hours I've been playing it, perhaps 5 of those hours didn't entirely suck, and those were the 5 hours I was on Gran Pulse hunting marks, becuase that was the only part of t he game that looked pretty and had some semblance of freedom to it. The plot and characters didn't matter because I was focussing on the gameplay...and it still wasn't that fun becuase in the off chance you encountered an enemy that was too strong for you, you'd die...sometimes over and over again. At least they don't make you go back to the save point every time you die. I would have murdered someone if they broke the game this much and punished you and harsher than they did for being stupid enough to play it. Keep in mind, I wanted to like it, I still WANT to like it, but there's nothing likeable about it. Piss-poor story, bland-assed characters, broken combat, totalitarian linearity, and it's just....bleh. The only thing remotely good about the game was the concept of the people turning to crystals or the summoning thing...could have led to drama, but they REALLY dropped the ball on that. |
If I want to sum up my experience with WRPGS like Oblivion or Dragon Age I would sound pretty much like this. After 30 hours of playing Oblivion I found not 1 thing that I liked about it. Dragon Age was also a really bad experience... At the same time FF 13 is still the best game of this generation for me (so I would be one of the 5). I do not want to change your opinion, since you just expect something different form a RPG.
Yes, it is linear. And that is the strong point of the game. The story is very intense because you are bound to concentrate on it. And that is making it very memorable. It is just not possible to ignore the Main story because it is the main point of the game. It should amount to like 80-90 % of the game. What I hate about WRPGs (that I have played) is that they do not offer a thrilling Mainstory. Instead they rely on Sidequests (the old repetitive go fetch this and kill that and then return. The same thing over and over in every game). I find it sad that the "main story" often only amounts to like 20 % of the game. The quality of the Main story is also not that great and I did not found them memorable ... they were pretty generic instead.
Spoilers ahead!
The story of FF 13 had some very heavy main topics. It borrows from the Naziregime and wanted to show, what can happen if you use propaganda for a long time and how people start to adopt this way of thinking as their own and start to act on their own. The whole starting scene with the deportation train was a very heavy scene. The thing is that the population feared everyone who only came close to a Pulse object and were willing to deport them to Pulse which was regarded as certain death... I remember the scene where you saw Barthandelus grinning devilishly during the news report because he realized that his plans were going well. The Government did not have to order it because the citizens where demanding it earlier...
The developers wanted to make the gamer think about what is going on. That was one of the main topics of the Nazi regime. Was the civil population in fear of the Regime and acted passively out of self defense or were they active supporters. Especially the young people where raised with propaganda. Did they adopt the propaganda and were truly believing the propaganda? The citizens of Cocoon were seemingly believing the Propaganda and they feared everything regarding grand Pulse. The whole story was built around that element... although you were trying to be loyal to Cocoon and protect it everyone feared and hated you. They didn't even wanna listen to you. And thats why it is okay for me that this game has only a few moments where you could run around in towns.
I also found the characters portrayed really well. Hope was a strong character, although he suffered heavily during the first chapters. He was sentenced to death only because he was near the site where they found the Grand Pulse object.
Than he had to see the death of his mother. So he was alone and had nowhere to go. And he was not a soldier or fighter... He was portrayed rather weak and vulnerable, and that is what I somehow liked about him.
FF XIII was not a story about heroes... it was a very dark story about one of the darkest moments in recent history. It wants to make you think about what could happen if people give in to their inner fears and how fear can turn into hate... and how hate could ultimately lead to the destruction of the world. The main villain was not Barthandelus or Orphan... it was "Fear"... FF XIII just shows how brilliant japanese story telling can be.
Another topic of the game was, that although the Fal'Cie were beings with immense Power they did not have free will. Humans, weak compared to the Fal'Cie, however have the Power of free will. The Fal'Cie could not destroy Orphan although they have immense Power. They can't force Humans to do so... Even if they make a L'Cie he just could refuse to fulfill its focus and just become a monster... so they plotted a plan spanning over 1000 years to incite fear within the population and let it slowly turn into hate. They could probably make a whole game covering the events happening 1000 years ago..
So in total I think the story is really deep because there was put a lot of thinking in it. It is not the generic "an evil force is trying to destroy the world blablabla". It was spent a lot of effort in creating the motives of the Fal'cie and the characters.
The Story wasn't told mainly via the Log. Most of the story was told in the Cutscenes, the Log only gave further background information. The log is also available in the Kingdom Hearts series, so it is not a brand new FF13 exclusive feature.
The Paradigm system is not preset, you can choose any available combination of jobs as you like. But you have to customize them yourself.
Exploration has never been a vital element of the Final Fantasy Franchise. You were always tied to the story and had to visit the locations in a predetermined order. The games always opened up a little if you were close to the end. The world map never allowed free travel since there where always mountains and rivers blocking the paths. They were never meant to be like Oblivion where you could go wherever you want after you have left the Prison. Sidequests also never had that importance. You had several secrets available at the end of the game to get the Ultimate Weapons, spells or Summons. But they were always only a few. But since FF 7 they often put in some mini games (Gold Saucer, Triple Triad, the card game of FF9, Blitzball, Monster Hunting). FF 13 had another round of "Monster Hunting".
For me FF XIII has an enormous replay value, because I just want to relive the story again. I will probably play it through every 2-3 years, because the story is so memorable. And that is the main point why I buy a JRPG. I want a story that is very deep and leaves room for interpretation. I do not take the role of any of the party members, but I watch the game and think about what is going on. I am more like a beholder and that is one of the main differences to WRPGS. They do not want to tell a story or make you think about a certain topic... They just give you a playground and give you the illusion to play as you like...
That could be your problem wtih the game. You try to identify with a character and are annoyed when they do not act like you want or when you have to do a quest that you don't like to do. And thats why I find WRPGS to be so boring. You start with creating YOUR own character, the story is told through the eyes of YOUR character and YOU should decide what to say most of the time (although you do not have real freedom, since you can only choose from predetermined lines and often your choices have no heavy impact on the overall story). If I want to exaggerate a little bit I could even say that they outsource the storytelling to the gamer and make you pay for it...
