Hong Kong gaming magazine gives Final Fantasy XIII 4/10

http://www.allgamesbeta.info/2010/01/chinese-game-magazine-gives-final.html

~ Translation:

Scenario: 2.0 — "An epic tear jerker"

System: 1.0 — "Such a crude system barely warrants being called an RPG at all."

Graphics: 9.0 — "Full marks here."

Sound: 7.0 — "Mostly quality."

Enthusiasm: 1.0 "As if you could play this for 100 hours! I could put up with 8."

Total: 4.0 — "To think it got this bad…"


"The game is complete linearity until the open areas near the end. You can’t even backtrack."

"Of all the RPGs I’ve played in recent years, this is the first which has been so linear that it’s little more than riding an amusement park ride."

"I had heard the opinion that “It’s amazing once you get to Chapter 11,” but why should you spend 20 or 30 hours on a game to get to the only enjoyable part? Just how do they intend to make me play this? Do they think I’m some kind of masochist?"

"A button mashing puzzle game with no real strategy or RPG elements and a plethora of annoying features, game as a whole is little more than a digital novel of sorts."

"For such a game to approach 2 million copies sold must be due solely to the strength of the Final Fantasy brand"

"biggest swindle in gaming history"

"biggest joke of 2009."

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i jst cancelled my preorder ths game sounds horrible. i think i will buy other game in march instead. for me this is disappointing very much. will u still buy ff13?

4/10, not bad than i thought

I'm brutally disappointed with this game, it will be the first Final Fantasy that I don't buy during its lunch.

Regarding this review I honestly don't care about reviews.

4/10 thats really bad.

yeah I'll be laughing when it gets 9's from all the big gaming sites just like it got near perfect scores from the major magazines in japan

Besides did he just say he played only 8 hours? he said "As if you could play this for 100 hours! I could put up with 8."

BTw  this review was posted on ffxiii.net's FF13 review thread & the chinese people there said this magazine is crap & over-exaggerates too much

you are on my marked list now akiba fan, I will find you

I'll reserve my judgement. Odds are, the vast majority of reviews will be in the 8's and 9's and sincerely doubt that this review fits the game at all. I've yet to play a poor Final Fantasy (X-2 had its cringeworthy moments but it was still a decent game) so I can't bring myself to believe that SE have all of the sudden fucked up this bad after having spent so much time on the development.
Wait for 30-40 reveiws to tick in, it'll give a more nuanced picture of the game as a whole, this guy sounds like a hater.

Even if we don't take this review into account, and judging by what has been said all over the internet, it seems that FFXIII confirms that the good and sunny Square days are gone for good.

There will be more FF to come. Some will be better, some will be worse. But they will never be the same.

R.I.P. Final Fantasy series.

I have trouble trusting this review. The text is in line with what most reviewers give to decent Wii games, though the numbers seem more exaggerated: still, the whole thing reeks of anti-console bias. The game may be good or bad -I don't rightly know yet- but this does not sound like a review that can be trusted. As a Wii owner who's seen far too many biased reviews this generation already, it would be hypocritical of me to trust yet another example just because it's targeted at another console.

The one thing I will give the reviewers here, though, is the point that if it you can't stand to play a game for long enough to get to the good parts, that's a game-killing flaw: the good parts are worthless if you quit before getting to them. A lot of people have been saying this of FF13, and while I'm not yet sure whether or not to believe them, it wouldn't be the first time an FF game has been guilty of that (personally I'd say it's happened twice before, though my wife would say only once). It's been my hope that S-E would have learned its lesson by now, but perhaps it has not.

^

I agree with Millennium. Numbers are exaggerated in this review.

This is going to be the biggest selling FF ever, just because you want it to fail so badly.