| Runa216 said: Well, the characters were flat, and the story was POORLY told, and I totally agree: the lore they put into this world is phenomenal...but you shouldn't have to go through the sea of bullshit to get to it. You actually had to read an in-game novel (practically) to hear any of that, and almost none of it was incorporated into the story. I did a lot of reading about it online and that's one of the only reasons I'm actually curious to play XIII-2. I knew someone would mention difficulty. I found the game disgustingly hard, but also remarkably simple. To me it was like EVERY FPS EVAR...in that it didn't require skill, just steadfast determination and a touch of luck. Anyone could beat the game and beat all the enemies, just keep trying till it works. To me the difficulty curve was broken and unfair, and entirely unrewarding. the grade isn't a matter of how difficult it is, but how well done it is. the difficulty in this game was bullshit. too much reliance on luck and repeat attempts. there was absolutely no 'innovation' in the battle system. It was basically a simplified, dumbed down version of 12's combat system, but sped up and with like 1/10th of the customization options. You had absolutely no control over your allies and blah blah blah.... The reason I gave this such a bad score is because as far as I was concerned, it was just a dumbed down, simpler version of previous games. No innovation, nothing new added. Yeah, it was faster paced and more action packed, but at the cost of customization. what replay value is there? you play through the game, you kill all the marks...there's no reward for playing it a different way, there's no alternate ways to do things, few hidden items you may not have gotten. Oblivion has good replay value because you can play it COMPLETELY different the second time. same with games like Red Dead Redemption (fame and alignment meter) and inFamous (Hero/infamous meter), THAT has replay value. this game was so restrictive and had so little side content/alternate gameplay styles that it objectively has no replay value. If you wanna play it again, I'm certainly not one to tell you no, but theres no incentive in game to do it. narrow hallways are HORRIBLE level designs. I know it's been said before (and for the record, I prefer linearity...storyline wise), but going in a straight line for 95% of the game is not good design. in FFX, you could explore side caves and hidden areas, the only remotely decent area in the game was Gran Pulse, which was just a series of different hallways. I do not currently have plans to review the sequel, but I'm sure if I wanted to I could, since nobody on the team (As far as I know) has any interest in it. That, and while we definitely encourage each reviewer to score it according to their own opinions, we all agree that the 9.0 FFXIII got is an absolute travesty, and we'd all change it if we could. I gave this game a 2.1, but I think in the interest of objectivity, if I was scoring it for the site, I'd have given it a 4.0-4.7 (no idea why I chose that range). It's not broken, just very, VERY poorly made in my opinion. Also, the only reason it didn't get maxed out technical visual fidelity score was because Squeenix had no care for the SDTV users out there, unless you were on an HDTV you couldn't see shit. That said, fuck the graphics were gorgeous once I saw them on an HDTV! |
Steadfast determination is fundamental for honing skill; maybe you're lacking.
