FINAL FANTASY® XIII

so good i cried

I bought this because it was cheap and I never finished playing through the game in 2010 when I first played it. I remember now upon replaying why I didn't finish it. This game is boring as piss. Game design doesn't make any sense in this game, even for when it came out. 1. Auto battle shouldn't have even been in the game. Its the default option and because of that most people are going to use it. This makes the gameplay so uninteresting because you aren't actively making any decisions. The game is doing it for you. You can't even point at FFXII and try to say "well the gambit system..." because its different. You are mostly manually playing FFXII and you set up gambits to supplement your gameplay. You don't really get the option to do fully automatic stuff until you unlock all the gambit slots and buy the options which is really late game. 2. Upgrade system sucks if you don't look at a guide. I don't think most people are going to figure out that you are supposed to use Organic Materials to build up the EXP bonus then use Synthetic Materials actually level the item. The game just says "be sure to experiment" when there isn't any real category or notation of what materials fall into what category. 3. Story is in the datalogs. The game expects you to actually read the datalogs. Like all of them. The general plot is put into the gameplay/cutscenes but places/people/events are all in the data log. Bad choice as datalogs are usually seen as an optional thing. 4. You are forced to use whatever the game sets you to use for a pretty large part of the game. The game is split in chapters, and until about chapter 11 you don't have any free reign in what you do with your party. This results in a lot of times like you getting a summon on a character, then that character getting rotated out so you can't use them for a few chapters. If you just watch cutscenes and kill only necessary fights it still takes around 20 hours to get to chapter 11. I personally think most people won't make it to that point in the game. 5. Map design is ♥♥♥♥. They look pretty but I am not lying that you can make it through a decent chunk of this game by holding up on the analog stick while pressing the X/A button. All of this stuff just makes the early game feel like a total slog. Yes the game does open up and you get more freedom in chapter 11 but damn it is a CHORE to do. I don't like it and to be honest I don't expect other people to like it either. If you are a die hard Final Fantasy person and I mean DIE HARD fan then by all means play this. You might be able to glean better value from this game than me. If you aren't a fan then you aren't missing anything from not playing this. Go play XIII-2 and LR, those are MUCH better games in literally every aspect. OH YEAH, you need to download a mod called FFXIII Fix and also run an updater onto the .exe for the game to utilize more than 8gb of ram. If you don't the game will launch but then it will crash after like 5-10 minutes.

[h1] FFXIII: Grab your c**k chair and watch the game play itself. [/h1] It's a long review. So, TL;DR: This game sucks. I never had a PS3. After FFVIII I skipped the series entirely. People spent years telling me Final Fantasy was dead, FFX was a disaster, and Square had lost its mind. So I avoided all of it. Then I played FFX. Loved it, despite the miserable minigames and superboss nonsense. Played FFXII next. Didn't love the combat, but I loved existing in its world. I wandered into places before the story wanted me there. It felt like an RPG. Then I got to FFXIII... Nope. This is where the corpse starts smelling. Everyone complains about the corridors, but that's not even the main problem. The real problem is that the world doesn't exist. It's a gorgeous wallpaper. You walk ten feet, fight enemies, watch a cutscene, walk another ten feet, trigger another cutscene. The game constantly interrupts itself to remind you it would've rather been a movie. It's style devouring substance in real time. You're not playing an adventure; you're escorting a screensaver to its next cinematic. Congratulations, you've been promoted to passenger. Combat isn't much better. Forget party building, experimentation, or those little moments where you outsmart the game. Everyone eventually learns everything. Most fights revolve around filling the Stagger gauge because enemies apparently have diplomatic immunity until the bar says otherwise. Meanwhile your AI companions fling abilities around like raccoons fighting over electrical wiring. The story hides basic context in a datalog. Not extra lore. Context. The writers throw a thousand made-up terms at your head and expect curiosity to do the heavy lifting. By the time I understood what was happening, I didn't care. That's not mystery. That's administrative failure. Reading supplementary entries should enrich a story, not perform CPR on it. If your plot needs homework before it can function, you've already failed the assignment. The cast doesn't help. Lightning spends hours acting like a human workplace complaint. Snow delivers motivational speeches with the energy of a malfunctioning action figure. And every cutscene has somebody obsessively fiddling with the same prop like a first-year acting student who just discovered stage business. Lightning flips her gunblade open and shut. Hope stares at his knife for the seven-hundredth time. Nabaat removes her glasses, says something sinister, then puts them back on. Snow tosses his crystal around before delivering another speech nobody asked for. It's like watching a theater class where everyone was told the object in their hand [i] is the character [/i]. Vanille never stops being irritating. Fang is fine until she repeats herself into irrelevance. Sazh is the only character with genuine humanity, which is probably why the game keeps shoving him into comic relief instead of letting him carry the story. Then there are the Eidolons. They don't arrive naturally; they materialize whenever a character reaches the contractual obligation phase of emotional development. Cue another round of recycled dialogue, another personal crisis, another giant transforming summon dragging an already tedious battle out for longer than human patience was designed to tolerate. It's less mythology and more HR paperwork for magic robots. And then people tell you it "opens up" after ten chapters. Ten. Chapters. Imagine defending that. That's like serving someone a burnt steak and proudly announcing dessert gets better after the third hour. When I finally reached Gran Pulse, I found what fans call freedom: a large field full of monsters. Not exploration. Not discovery. A field. The reward for enduring dozens of hours of hallways is receiving a bigger hallway with wildlife in it. Revolutionary. I've disliked games before. I've refunded games. This is the first time I felt cheated after buying one on sale. FFXIII is beautiful and spiritually vacant. A hollow machine wearing Final Fantasy's skin. Progression isn't exciting. New abilities aren't exciting. Even upgrading equipment somehow becomes a chore. The game keeps handing you new systems while making you dread interacting with them. And to the people posting essays about how we owe this game an apology: absolutely not. If this is your idea of a masterpiece, I can only assume the last RPG you played was a microwave. Avoid this game like you're smuggling narcotics through airport security and FFXIII is the TSA. It's a bad movie periodically interrupted by gameplay, a monument to style over substance, and the moment I finally understood why people spent years saying Final Fantasy had lost its way. They were being generous.

I like getting stuck on a boss, finally doing it and then the game crashing. I particularly like when it happens three times back to back. So fun man.

RAS Un classique dans l'univers des FF. En appliquant les guides d'optimisations+mods, le jeu est magnifique.

underrated

First of all, let me clarify that I not only invested over 140 hours into the game, but also completed it at 100%, including all achievements. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ waste of time, I must say, but back then it was a sad and lonely time in my life, and I needed an escape. As a big fan of Final Fantasy, who grew up playing the old SNES classics and experienced first hand the golden era of the series on Playstation 1 and 2, having played most main titles so far, it pains me to say that this game is by far one of the worst entries of the entire franchise. The story is bad and unnecessarily convoluted, the characters lack personality and are pretty lame (even if I kinda like Lightning and love to see another strong main female character) and the overall game is too simple, linear and boring, and don't get me start talking about the mindless combat system... This does not necessarily mean that it's a horrible game, it's a Final Fantasy after all, but it falls far short of the standards the series has accustomed us to, and definitely even compared to other populars JRPGs. Sure, you can give it a try and have fun, but if you still haven't played most of the other important entries from the franchise, just don't waste your time with this one or any of its sequels. On top of that, I must add this is a terrible piece of crap of a PC port (like most FF titles originally released only for consoles) that can be really frustrating to play without relying on third-party programs, mods and unofficials patches.