I missed out on most of last gen, fill me in!

[Cloudman]

ExplodingBlock said:

Cloudman said:
I`ll just start off with don`t play FFXIII. Save yourself the trouble. Why would you want to play that game... x_x

Gameplay looks fine to me, graphics are great, has good reviews. Why not?

Oh, forgot to answer this. The game overall is quite terrible, the story, goal, characters, and battle system. The story I found to be too hard to follow, using a lot of similar sounding nonsense words such as Ciel, Fal` cie, Le `Cie, and what not, and doesn`t really a goal aside from... moving forward. Honestly the characters` modivations are stupid, and their actions are very questionable.Throughout the game, I had little clue what was happen and what the purpose of the game itself is. I think the dev team gave up and made it a generic end for something that sounded very complex. Also, there is a lack of any towns, shops or exploration to do (until the end of the game), and there are random chests on a deviated path. It feels very cold and linear.

How the game handles story telling is through journal logs, which there are a lot. So if you want an idea of the story, you`ll be doing a lot of side reading.Even the modivation is outright stupid (We must now fulfill a goal which we have no idea what it is... Let`s just go down the hall to get more plot!) The characters are very poor also, being very shallow characters and being one note. (Lightning- Cold , Snow - Loud heroic guy , Hope - the sad crybaby  , etc ) They can be boring to outright werid and annoying. The characters overall are not very likable personality wise, but they do have good designs.

And my biggest gripe with the game, the battle system. Usually battle systems are enjoyable, with having control over your party, characters having different skills and magic attacks, and they felt different from each other. FFXIII takes all that away for a very boring system you mostly watch. It even has an auto system, which means you have very little imput in the system. Also, the attacks are divided to attack single, range, magic single, and magic range. And they all look the same. Even magic they managed to make very dull. There`s also the support and gaurd class, but the system is overall very boring too. Battles quickly become a chore and makes the game very unenjoyable. The highlight of the battle system is the paradigm shift, which you build different sets of classes and switch them to do different jobs, such as attack, defend, heal, and so on. Essentially, you spend your time in battle just switching your party roles and using the auto button. ALSO, if lightning dies, your match is over, which cause a lot of annoying frustration when your main gets 1HKOed.

Overall, these issues come together to make a very poor game overall. You can give it a try if you like, but I recommend you save yourself the trouble.

It does have good music however, so that`s a plus...