| Runa216 said: Here are a few broken mechanics off the top of my head. I actually have a muuuuch lengthier and detailed breakdown of the borked parts of the game, but this'll have to do for now. 1 - You have absolutely no control over your movements in battle. this wouldn't bother me except for the fact that many battles rely on movement-placement strategies and being in the wrong place at the wrong time can and will hurt you. You have no control, therefore no ability to avoid this fate should the AI chose it. 2 - The Paradigm shift animations resulted in exposure to enemy attack with no ability to defend or even prepare a counter. This wouldn't be an issue if not for the fact that the enemy ATB bars continue to fill and they continue to attack you when your bars are frozen and are incapable of doing any action or moving. Simply having the battle stop for that split second while you change paradigms would have fixed this, but instead it's a broken mechanic that most certainly should have been fixed. 3 - Too much reliance on random chance. Much of the summon/eidolon battles (it's been a while, I don't remember what they were called) required that you fulfil a certain task to complete. my friend would do it with ease, and complete it first try. I would do the exact same thing and fail a dozen times. sometimes the bar would fill faster than others in spite of our stats, move lists, and abilities all being identical. 4 - Random weapon/accessory upgrade system. I understand that there's apparently a method to its madness, but after 60 hours of playing this game, as well as looking at countless faq's and testing for myself, I saw no patterns and what worked one time wouldn't work another time. Too much reliance on random chance and too little explanation to give you a hint. 5 - Unavoidable instant kill attacks. I know there are items to prevent these attacks somewhere in the game, but I didn't get them. your ability to survive should NOT be entirely reliant on chance (did you find the item? did you equip it? did you even know it was an issue?). the final boss had a move that would kill one of your members in one hit. It was 100% effective unless you had a certain item equipped and had a 1/3 chance of hitting your leader, resulting in a game over. it wouldn't be so bad except he waits until I think his second or third stage (after 15-20 minutes of battle) to do it, then he does it almost constantly and of all the FAQ's I read, I found no defense against it that I had at my disposal. 6 - To make it worse, a lot of enemies had attacks like this. the game literally demands you either be clairvoyant or persistent (keep playing and dying to learn the boss's patterns). Many bosses and even some regular enemies would change stances or attack relentlessly without any foreseeable warning, often instantly killing you. Yeah, sometimes they give a warning, such as flashing lights or a stance change, but you have to know exactly when something's about to happen and how to counter it or you will die, and reacting often isn't enough due to the fact that attack patterns change so quickly you're dead before your paradigm shift animation is complete. This happens entirely too honest, and unless you're psychic and fast, you will die. a lot. 7 - Above all else, you die a lot. In fact one could argue that a game mechanic is trial and error by death. there's no way a reasonable person could beat 90% of this game without dozens of needless deaths, and that is a flawed mechanic in an RPG. sure, if you wanna reserve these instakill moves for hidden bosses or hunts, then by all means go wild. Some of the world's best hidden secrets had to be found during trial and error, but when almost every battle has a combination of random chance and trial and error like that, it's a flaw. This could have easily been fixed by tweaking the damage the enemies did or how much health you had or even making it so you had more warning or you didn't instantly get game over when your one character died. A lot of these flaws in the combat system could be fixed easily. a tweak here, a few lines of programming there. Instead we have a battle system that doesn't actually work. I mean sure, people can beat the game, but you shouldn't need to do the virtual equivalent of shooting in the dark over and over again waiting for random chance to not fuck you up. as it stands the battle system is broken, and since it would require so little to fix it and make it more balanced, I'm convinced they developers did it this way intentionally, so that angers me. To me, a battle system like this would be like playing fallout three and there was say a 1 in 100 chance a bullet would backfire and instantly kill you, or like if you were playing mario and some mystery blocks exploded, sending you back to the beginning of the level. |
1. So like in every other FF game? Even in XII, where you could move, you still get hit most of the time and the bosses have unavoidable special attacks. You seem to be confusing this game for an action-RPG where you could move and dodge attacks. And like outlawauron said, you could sort of navigate your character by selecting a target and physically attacking it. Your character will move towards the target. If you don't want your leader to get hit, have one of your other party members provoke the enemy.
2. The first paradigm shift lasts about three seconds while the ones after that last less than a second. If you die because of those few seconds, it's because your timing was off or you don't have your paradigms properly set up. Also, your ATB charges up during the scene, so it's not a big deal at all. Whenever the first paradigm scene finishes, you have the ATB gauge fully charged. The ones after that are about 1/4th filled. Did you have a problem with the other FF games when you cast a magic spell? You leave yourself open because you can't do anything; you have to wait for another gauge to fill up when you cast magic.
3. They tell you what you need to do -_-. If I remember correctly, they sometimes ask you for different stuff, so what worked for your friend might not work for you.
4. It's pretty straightforward actually. I learned the method myself after trying it out the third time. Most of the components you get from enemies (organic components) give you little exp but they increase the exp multipler. Mechanical components like conductor reduce the exp multipler but give out a lot of exp. The trick is to use organic components first in order to increase the multipler and then use mechanic components. There are icons next to the name of the component which indicate what type of component it is. You can even sort/organize them. Whenever you fully upgraded a weapon (has the star symbol), you can use a catalyst to evolve it. It will even tell you which catalyst you can select.
5. What item are you talking about? As for the last boss fight, I never had a problem with him. He was one of the easiest final boss fights I've played in a JRPG. I'm pretty sure I didn't have whatever item equipped (mostly equipped the HP ones). You know what I did to prevent getting killed or getting a lot of damage? By using the sentinel paradigm. It boosts defense while also healing you. If I remember correctly, the battle does warn you when he's about to use his special attack. I think it even counts down. Whenever he was close to casting the spell, I would switch the characters to sentinel.
6. Again, never had a problem with this especially with the boss battles. I don't think I ever died from a boss fight. I maybe died like five times in the campaign (died quite a bit with the optional missions), but it wasn't bad like you're making it out to be. The only time I got instantly killed was in chapter 9 with some flying enemies - they all ganged up on me. On my second try, I was able to avoid getting killed by using the sentinel paradigm. Maybe you didn't use the appropriate paradigms?
7. I would hate to see you play a Shin Megami Tensei game.Many RPG gamers agree that XIII is one of the easiest RPGs out there. It's tougher than most FF games, but compared to a lot of JRPGs, it's easy. FFXIII is actually pretty lenient since it lets you redo battles, and not every battle is difficult or filled with trial and error. Expirement with your paradigms and cast some support skills or ailments if you're having trouble. Some of those abilities help increase the stagger.
