final fantasy 13

  On 3/15/2010 at 9:08 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

you just seem awfully quick to shoot down other's opinions, when they are more or less in the same boat as you regarding actual first-hand experience.

 

 

just sayin.

 

 

but i really hope this isn't true.

 

FFX was somewhat linear, but even then they gave you a TON of sidequests towards the end.

Well, I think, unlike the opinions I'm shooting down since they haven't played the game yet it seems, is based on the reviews and comments of those who have played it - not my personal experience or opinion of the game itself.

From what I've read, 25+ hours in, it's a story-driven, linear experience, and then the rest of the game opens up a bit, but the lack of towns and npcs to interact with seem to make the side quests a bit hollow. I wonder how many of these people last played a FF game, then went on to play Western-style RPGs, and now are playing FF XIII, expecting it to fit that template?

i agree with your last statement.

but even FFX had two or three different branches you could follow now and then, as long as it keeps that.....

I mean, i love Fallout 3 and Oblivion, but give me a nice solid FF and im game....i just dont want it to literally be "follow me from point a to point b on the map"

  On 3/15/2010 at 9:16 PM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

i agree with your last statement.

 

 

but even FFX had two or three different branches you could follow now and then, as long as it keeps that.....

 

I mean, i love Fallout 3 and Oblivion, but give me a nice solid FF and im game....i just dont want it to literally be "follow me from point a to point b on the map"

See, I'm rather the opposite - give me a great story and let me interact with it along the ride - as long as it's not painfully obvious what lies ahead.

i mean, i thought part of an rpg, or at least the FF series, was that it was somewhat linear, but even then there were tons of options, sit back and build up your characters, go on a "hunt" like in 12, etc etc, find extra gear, materia, this n that....

I played all the FF games on the nes, snes and ps1 but then I remember playing FF X and I thought "what the hell is this?" I never played them ever since.

see, besides the characters, i thought FFX was one of the best....it had tons of sidequests, the battle system was traditional and pretty accessible, the aeons were badass, and the story was pretty awesome.

Characters were ok, but I didn't like how linear it was. I felt like I was watching a long cartoon.

There's the rub with story-driven RPGs - if the game allows you to create your own character, how can that character be integrated into the storyline effectively? There really hasn't been any successful attempts at this so far, and thus, RPGs typically fall back to giving you protagonists to control and live through their story and watch it unfold.

I never felt FF X was linear at all; yes, you progressed through the story, but I didn't think that the fact I really didn't have no choice as where to go since the story was so engrossing. I think I'll find FF XIII the same way (hell, not having to grind to level up sounds very appealing to me already), if not moreso.

Every RPG is story-driven and has a beginning and end. Around the time FF X came out, I had already played the Fallouts and Planescape Torment and I was just not able to sit through a FF game. I guess that was that for me.

This game was pretty crap and cringeworthy. I feel ashamed to have played it, fucking waste of time. FF games have disappointed me too much these last years.

I'm ready to give up this entire fucking franchise now.

i don't know if i could ever make it through a ff game again. even if i was blown away by the story and gameplay, i haven't had 50-70 hours to spend on anything like that since my carefree college days

lots of women in japan actually look like this so i was quite interested in this character design... apart from that, the rest of the characters are too perfect... id like to see ones that look like regular human beings...

i think part of the success of ff7 is that a city like midgar never really appeared in japanese RPGS before... it's like a futuristic model of tokyo that you see in akira and neon genesis evangelion, two of the most popular anime of all time... i think that's a pretty cool setting, and because the staff are mostly japanese they understood very well the life there in japan and could show it to the rest of the world... think of the honey bee inn or the weird little slums, neon lights, salarymen, weird little countryside vans, and sky scrapers... if you go around tokyo you will see some things like that... so i think the success of ff7 is partly down to the expression of japanese kind of things

another part of ff7 is that it's clear that at every stage they wanted to do something ULTIMATE. like cloud had to ride the ultimate cool motorbike like in akira, and he had to carry a BIG ASS FUCK OFF KICKASS SWORD. and what if we make tifa's tits massive, wouldn't that be awesome? so they tried their best to make every little detail as brilliant as possible. and i can forgive the mistakes and weird old graphics because the main ideas and the small details are so enjoyable.

look at the success of a manga called naruto, that's bloody huge and well loved... and a big part of that manga is based on japanese mythology and life.... they drink japanese tea, eat ramen, etc etc

since ff7 theyve tried to pretend not to be japanese and have tried to take more foreign influences that they dont really understand first hand... i reckon the secret to success is for them to go back to japanese culture, take entertaining details from their lives, things they actually know about and show it to the rest of the world

the story is too complicated and I don't care enough about the characters to find out what the story is about. like someone else said in this thread, almost everyone in the game is perfectly beautiful so any visual character is formed from clothing and hairstyles alone. No worn out out faces like Barret or Cid's from ff7 , just a bunch of fake manga faces (excluding sazh). Snow is a total douche, Vanille and Hope are fucking annoying. The only decent character is the black dude. The battle system is alright i guess but the battles last for ages and I have no idea how square figured that people would want to spend half an hour in a single battle.

As i dont give a shit about the story and there are no fun things to do on the side, the game for me is a monotonous series of battles one after another. I hope they all die in the end. FF7 was awesome, fuck square for turning it all into shit.

Finally, the lamest moan of all- It sucks how in all the cutscenes (about past events) the characters are always wearing the same clothes. I mean when lightning is at home does she really wear a fucking cape and a gunbelt

battles don't last half an hour, sure you had your team balance set up right for each group of beasties?? Then again, i didn't get that far in, lost intrest.

My two cents

I'm playing through Fallout 3 and FFXIII at the same time. FF games are what got me into RPGs so I'm definitely a "fan boy". But I find myself gravitating to Fallout 3. Both are considered RPGs but only one of these allows you to create a unique experience all your own, which, to me, is the essence of RPGs. At 20 hours into Fallout there's probably a 1% chance that some other player could pick up the game and end up with the exact same character/stats/leveling/etc as me. At 20 hours into FFXIII there's probably a 1% chance that some other player could not end up with the same set of characters as me. The levelling system is crap. All of my characters can do exactly the same things/spells/etc.

My complaint with FFXIII is the same complaint I had with Metal Gear on PS3.... way too much emphasis on the drama and the visuals and the cinema-feel to the game and not enough attention to the gameplay itself. I definitely get tired of the same old brown and gray graphics and the same old monsters in Fallout 3 but the thrill of being able to do whatever I want, wherever I want and really having to think about survival trumps pushing 'x' as many times as possible just to get to the next cut-scene in FFXIII.

There have been points where the storyline in FFXIII brings me back for another hour of play. (The scene on the dock between Snow (d-bag) and his girlfriend with the sunset in the background wasn't too shabby) But I agree with the other comments on here that the chracters are so overly dramatic that they get annoying. And the storyline really is hard to follow... what's the difference between Fal'ci, La'ci, ... geez... the entire time I'm playing FFXIII I'm thinking of how it would be so simple to make an open-ended FF game that's in a real-world setting (a university or a downtown) but instead the emphasis is on the Fantasy.

I was one of the few who didn't mind FFXII b/c I enjoyed hunting down the rare beasts and the rare gestalts (or whatever they were called)at my own pace... and the levelling system was definitely unique in the early levels. The story line was thin but none of the characters were overly annoying and none of it was heavy-handed. It was also kind of hard in some places. FFXIII has been a cake-walk. So FFXIII has been a disappointment and is making me convert to "western RPG's" (Mass Effect is good stuff too). I agree with the nostalgia comment... maybe I'm not the demographic anymore for FF games. I do admit that sexing the ladies in "the Witcher" was a nice add to the RPG world.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII should be better. It's supposed to have a world map and such. Can't wait.

you mean there's more final fantasy games other than VI?

that can't be true.

Just got it. Played up until the bit where you first control Snow. Wtf is this shit? I'm bored.

I've played every FF except for 11 and 12. Was moved to tears in 7, 8, 9. They remain some of my favorite games ever. Loved 5, 6 and 10. Binned X-2, but who didn't bin that one... Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, check, check, loved etc. I even liked Nier.

I gotta say. Even after all the drama, the reviews, people saying it's shit, that it's disappointing, that it only "opens up" 25 hours in (whatever the fuck that means). I don't have a job, just finished uni, I'm in my vacay, i wasn't too concerned about the long-haul thing. But WTF IS THIS SHIT AAA??? Even the walking is feels weird. I jump when i touch a blue ring!? How can something get boring SO FAST!?!?!

... is it me? Should i just try to sell the fucking now while it's still even remotely current or should i keep playing? Does it ever get fun?

I just feel like I'm watching some CGI and then i have to press some buttons inside some more CGI. Do i at least get to see Ifrit within the first 6 hours?

I should just have been a movie. Maybe even a 60 hour movie. I'd watch that. Whatever. This GAME, however, makes me feel useless to it.

I think the only people who should be allowed to voice their opinions on this game are the ones who get to Chapter 11 at least.

Otherwise you should STFU

so it's one of those "it gets good (very) later" games?

I've been playing this since a few weeks. This game is so linear and there is no possibility until the 3rd disc (I'm playing it on Xbox 360). Yeah they focus too much on cheesy cutscenes like you see everywhere in japanese culture. Yes, Snow is a douchebag, yes, Hope is emo, yes, Vanille is a jailbait, yes, Lighting behaves likes a badass who hides her past, yes, Sazh is the black idiot...

Anyway, the lack of exploration doesn't make it a real Final Fantasy game. It gets more interesting after you spend 25-30 hours on this though. It's sad that the training system limits you in every way...