Or the fact that any status ailment will not work on bosses. FF12 is the exception, if you “reverse” them and throw a remedy on them.
List doesn’t work for me. Very little of what you enumerated is actually SPECIFIC to Final Fantasy.
Status Ailments don’t work on bosses? Cripes, people, what JRPG lets you use status ailments on bosses?
Main character is 17 years old? JRPG trope. 75% of all JRPGs meet this criteria. Same for the supporting cast. It’s not like you even have the same archetypes in every game necessarily, just that they’re pulling from the same pool. Oh, and I love how you had to COMBINE archetypes to make your list seem shorter. o.o Again, not in any way unique to FF.
Etc, etc.
So maybe I really wasn’t clear. What is it that unifies the Final Fantasy series and makes it DISTINCT from ANY OTHER JRPG. Main character always uses a sword? Are you kidding me? Swords are the generic main character weapon for virtually every JRPG ever. Indeed, I’m trying and failing to come up with a JRPG in which the protagonist does NOT use a sword.
So so far, your list consists of:
Comic Relief characters named Biggs and Wedge
Chocobos
Cid
Crystals. I guess. Though I never noticed this one.
Crystals were a mainstay in FF1-5 or so. Also I don’t think Cid made an appearance until… 4 (US 2)? I don’t remember him being in the earlier ones
Yeah, you seem a little too invested in this, and are going to a kind of angry place that I don’t really get. If it pleases you to think that a series in which each game has extremely similar characters and creatures, identical magical spells, a unifying art design, a consistent setting, the same names applied to characters who fill the same roles (in plot and thematic terms), the same vehicles and items, and similar core gameplay concepts is actually a series in which the games are not similar to one another… that’s OK by me.
This is how I felt. Not worth dealing with if it matters so much to the guy. Yes, FF is similar to other JRPG’s, but it is quite distinct as well. Shin Megami games also are JRPG’s and conform to many of the common “tropes” of the genre, but it is distinct in many ways as well. So is Dragon Quest. And the Tales series.
All are very similar on many of the fundamentals, but each series has their own style and trends that run only through their series.
Having said that, I hear FF13 is quite different, so perhaps is really could have been a “Tales” or “Persona” series or whatever.
I’m in chapter 8 now and liking it. It is very different from 12 which I was just playing, but I’m okay with that (FWIW, I side with Airk; FF has only the a vague “feel” tying it together as a series and was essentially rebooted after 7).
I find the comments about Vanille (damn Square and their spelling choices) interesting. I’m playing the game in Japanese and kind of did a double take when she first appeared because her mannerisms, speech, etc., all struck me as being very much those of a young Japanese girls. I was curious about how well that would work in English, and I guess the answer is: not very well at all. I remember similar complaints about Yuna, Rikku, etc., from FFX (all of whom were fine in Japanese) which makes me think that Square needs to either put more effort into English voice acting or let players choose their soundtrack. The only character that thus far has annoyed me was Hope who was channeling Ikari Shinji a bit too much for my liking.
[very minor spoiler for beginning of game below]
I have a localization question. How did they deal with the origin of Snow’s resistance group’s name? In the Japanese version they explain that the name comes from nora (野良) which means a stray (as in animal). Did they change the name of the group or Hope’s mother, include a different explanation for the name, or just ignore the name’s origin?
They made it an acronym, although damn if I can remember what it stood for at this point.
And my question: Has anyone found a good weapon/accessory upgrade guide? I looked on gamefaqs but there wasn’t one up yet. I keep getting them starred out and have no items that will upgrade them beyond that point, and then I find things that I like better but I need to upgrade them to get the stats back up to where they were with the one I abandoned…
It’s NORA, an acronym for hrmmm, I forget No something something Authority.
I got the game guide, so if you’re stuck I can just tell you what you need for the upgrades.
I’m not really angry about it. I just have a low tolerance for cop out answers. 
Yeah; There’s not a lot to tie most JRPG series together, but FF is particularly egregious. Tales at least has a more or less consistant battle system (Given technological evolution, anyway). Shin Megami Tensei likes to reuse the same sort of element system and list of “devils”.
I agree with cckerberos - if you divide FF up into FF1-6 and FF7-12 or so, you get series that have at least some underlying similarities in terms of feel. It’s when you try to reconcile the series as a whole that it comes out as a nebulous blob.
With regard to Vanille - this character type has always been a hard one for localization teams. Oftentimes, you get the really hideously grating English voice acting where the English voice actress tries to do the same sort of “squeaky” high voice that the original Japanese character had, and it really, REALLY doesn’t work in English. (The only time I’ve ever heard a ‘squeaky’ style character done effectively in English was Anise in Tales of the Abyss, and she was only supposed to be 13, so it was a little easier to work with.) The choice to give Vanille what my wife calls the “Luna Lovegood” accent isn’t a bad one, though the actress seems inconsistant about her application of said accent. The battle cry thing is just… a problem. Though based on the fact that they finally managed to make SOME people’s battle cries not sound really stupid in English means that hopefully someday they’ll figure out how to do it with this archetype too (Hint: Variety. More than two ‘attack’ phrases helps a lot.). So Vanille is an above average localization of a very difficult character type (Let’s face it - it’s much easier to get Snow to sound good in English than it is to get Vanille to ‘work’).
So now that we’ve established that FF games are discrete with only minor recurring themes…
would this be an okay game to start the series with? I like JRPGs but have never played an FF game. This makes things… difficult as far as discussions of the genre go. My (limited) list is that I liked Tales of Vesperia (though I sidequest BSODd and didn’t quite finish it), Eternal Sonata, Chrono Trigger, and TWEWY (though TWEWY is on there reluctantly, barely a JRPG)*, but haven’t really liked Kingdom Hearts (I’m in Wonderland and the combat bugs me, though the story seems like something I’d like.).
So would XIII likely be something I might like, or should I go find an older one?
- There are other games that are just tangentially JRPGs like MOTHER and Paper Mario that I’m not listing for obvious reasons.
Knock yourself out:
http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html
I dunno; Opinions on FF13 are very mixed.
It’s missing a lot of what people traditionally associate with JRPGs - aspects of exploration, towns, sidequests, etc. It’s very linear, and the battle engine is…strange. I still find it frustrating, because, by and large, you don’t control ANYONE. You give the AI an idea of how you’d like to fight, and it pretty much does the fighting for you. You can, if you want, spend the time to pick your own commands, though you’d better do it darn fast or you’ll be regretting it, and you can’t control things like positioning at all. Is your sentinel standing right in front of your medic, causing both to get hammered by a linear AoE attack? Sorry, nothing you can do about that except change to other roles and hope they move.
The story and characters, both of which could have really carried the game, are both rather mediocre in my opinion, and the storytelling itself - which really, REALLY should have been the strong point of a game this linear is actually sort of weak. You don’t really get a lot of info that might help you understand what’s going on and why people are doing things unless you’re into reading large blocks of text in your datalog. You know how a long of recent games have a “journal” where the game records what you’re supposed to be doing and why, so that if you put the game on the shelf for two weeks and forgot what was going on, you can catch up easily? Now imagine that you have to read that even when you’re NOT taking breaks from the game if you want to understand what’s going on. Not good, IMHO.
Character advancement system is needlessly stupid, with a weird 3d thing that serves no purpose, but otherwise works adequately.
It’s not a BAD game. It’s really pretty and neither the characters nor the story are actively annoying, but considering all the things they sacrificed, I would have expected more gains in the areas they were supposedly focusing on.
So should you start with this game? I dunno. It really depends on what you like about JRPGs. The battle system is hit or miss - some people really like it, but I find it tedious and irritating, and since the entire game is essentially either cutscene or battle, that’s a problem.
So… I guess what I’m saying is: Don’t pay full price for this game. In fact, if you can, borrow or rent it. It may not suit your tastes.
Hmm, I’m playing it (rented). I’m on chapter 3 or 4 (I think I saved in a transition, I just beat the giant dragon thing that spams lightning).
So far I’ve noticed that it’s actually fairly easy, so long as you pay attention, though that may change. I can’t say I dislike it, but it’s not exactly riveting either. Oddly enough, Vanille and Snow are my favorite characters so far, with Sazh in third. Vanille just makes me happy (though I’m still mentally debating whether in this sort of JRPG “peppiness” is a giant TRAGEDY INCOMING indicator or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not), Snow is the most developed character so far that isn’t so goddamn dour. Sazh is fun (and has a Chocobo in his hair!) but what keeps him from being up there with Snow and Vanille is just that he’s not AS fun as Vanille and he hasn’t had as much development as Snow and Lightning yet.
Lightning just annoys me, she ALMOST has emotion. She seems to have two modes: off and angry. I guess she’s a soldier archetype and given the circumstances I can’t blame her, but so far she’s by far the most boring of the lot. Hope is just mopey… I’m hoping (heh) he’ll get better.
I have to say that if you’re going to have a codex, at any point a character mentions something it should be there immediately. I spent about an hour and a half figuring out what the hell a fal’Cie is, and even after seeing one and reading the datalog I still only have the vaguest idea. And then the cutscene where they got branded just confused the issue even more. Storytelling annoys me when you’re in a focused perspective and yet all the characters seem to know way more than you. I’ve spent half the cutscenes going “Who are you? What’s that? A what now? Why is this important? Why are you scared of it? EXPLAIN!” It’s not even that bad of a story, so far, imo, it’s just that I feel it would be much stronger with some more exposition, or at least a more clear datalog.
I’m also beginning to worry that I’m going to end up screwing up my character progression once I start getting more roles, I have enough trouble figuring out what to work towards NOW since I have only the vaguest idea of what each stat does and how much or little +1 to it is.
Don’t worry about it. By the time I got to the final boss I had maxed out each of my characters’ 3 main roles, and I didn’t do any additional sidequests and only a little bit of grinding. I’d say HP is the most important stat, or at least the one that seems to make the biggest difference for survival (or maybe it’s second to having an Enhancer with Haste)
Oh god yes… a thousand times I agree with this.
I loved all the Final Fantasy PS1 and PS2 games and FF6 ranks in my top ten games of all time… I consider myself a fan of the series, but I just cannot get into 13 and I don’t know why. The combat is good. I understand the system since it is essentially similar to past iterations, and I haven’t been frustrated at all so far. (If anything it’s surprisingly easy…)
But the story just doesn’t make any sense to me. I still don’t know what a Fal’cie is or why I should care. I grokked that the tattoos meant all the characters had been made into “L’cie”, and that was supposed be a bad thing, but I don’t know what that means either. Are L’cie like sleeper agents for the Fal’cie? Are the Fal’cie trying to destroy Pulse? Or is Pulse the “natural world” and their trying to destroy Cocoon? I just don’t know. (Even after reading the codex entries I’m still baffled…) I know the Cocoon leadership want to kill the main characters because they’re “L’cie” but I honestly don’t know why. If anyone can break the story down into simple sentences I would be immeasurably grateful.
Positives… I like most of the characters actually, particularly Lightning, Vanille, Sazh, and Snow. They all strike me as classic FF style characters and that makes me smile. Lightning seems to be in the same vein as Cecil, Cloud, and Squall, as tragic main characters who grow into their humanity and “hero status” over the course of the story. I’m a sucker for that kind of arc and it appeals to me… I just don’t know why she’s making the decisions she is, which is annoying.
Hope can go rot in a ditch.
You know, I really like JRPGs, (and anime and Japanese movies as well, I think I have a pretty good grasp of Japanese storytelling techniques and their idiosyncrasies), but it strikes me that I’ve heard the argument a thousand times about that the stories can be “impenetrable”, and poorly told, but this is the first time I might actually agree with that criticism. There needs to be more exposition in FF13. I’ll probably get back to it and finish the game at some point, but right now it’s really not appealing to me.
From what I can tell, fal’Cie (yay weird capitalization!) are basically super advanced aliens, with power levels lying somewhere between archmage and god. They may or may not be mechanical in some way (they appear to be big buildings, the core in the Pulse one you fought was called an “Anima” which screams “computer” to me). There are two types of fal’Cie: Sanctum, who are basically allied with the humans and dedicated to upkeeping Cocoon, and Pulse who we are assured very much and very often that they (and anything else from Pulse) are Very Bad™.
They’re sort of like superheroes, I guess. More like “cursed with superpowers.” Any fal’Cie can choose a human as a l’Cie (think of it as knighting them or choosing a champion to represent them), they get branded with a tattoo that gives them 1337 magix and super strength and whatnot, but they’re basically doomed. They are presented with a short dream that is a clue about their “focus.” They have two choices: do nothing, in which case they get turned into those godless abominations you fought on the fal’Cie; or complete the focus after which they turn into crystal (which is spun as being a good thing in the myths apparently, but the characters pretty much spell out what we were all thinking, it totally would suck). Most people consider the whole crystal thing at least somewhat better than becoming an abomination/servant so they try to complete the focus.
From what I gather, Pulse is the natural world and Cocoon is a very large space station-like “Biosphere” of sorts. Pulse is made out to be Hell, basically, and the inhabitants of it out to destroy Cocoon. Of course, we’re reassured of this so often I’ll be disappointed if this isn’t twisted six ways to hell. I actually have a theory at the point I’m at in the story that:
Vanille is a citizen of Pulse, and there’s a LOT more to this.
The Cocoon leadership wants to kill them because they’re l’Cie, they want to kill l’Cie because they’ve been tainted by Pulse and this their logic is that they are automatically Very Bad™ because their focus presumably involves sabotaging Cocoon or the Sanctum in some way (even though from what we know it may not).
Sort of imagine the Sanctum as the Kingdom of Heaven, and Pulse l’Cie as people who were cursed by the Devil to have superpowers and told they would die in X days if they didn’t do something for him. Even though they can choose what to do with the powers, they’re still more or less enemies of God out of convenience.
This. I’ve played through a lot of JRPGs and a number of them had less-than-entirely-clear storylines, but this and (sorry) FFX still take the cake for the who-what-the-hell-why factor.
I don’t really see how the battle system is particularly similar to the earlier entries in the series though, unless you just mean the active time gauge. And if you do, well, then they did a terrible job of modernizing it. If you’re going to have a battle system where A) Characters move around in 3d and B) Where they stand is IMPORTANT, then you bloody well should have some way of influencing where they stand other than “Well, if I make him an attacker, he’ll probably move towards the enemies.”
I’m midway through Chapter 11, and I’m enjoying the game quite a bit. Now, I fully admit to being a FF whore, and the game isn’t without it’s flaws, but I’m having a great time playing it.
The thing I’ve found is that it requires a bit of patience on the part of the player. The early battles are (for the most part) very easy and the Paradigm and Role systems don’t really come into to play too much. But I’m at a point now where I can see (and use) the complexity of the systems to deal with each battle. And I like the on-the-fly adjustments necessary to win the tougher battles. Makes it a lot more interesting and I haven’t reached the point where I feel like I’m grinding.
The story and character development likewise takes a bit of patience. I found the Datalog was a great help in understanding the details of the universe of FFXIII and the characters. I think it was a decision made by the developers to try and balance storytelling and battle in a way where it’s not too tedious, but also not too much of a movie. Sure the exposition doesn’t come right away in Chapter One, but I find myself looking forward to the next bit of the story to come. It’s the same with the characters, where you learn more and more about them as the game goes on. I thought it was a good balance.
The first few chapters are undeniably linear. While I was playing them, I did get a bit frustrated with the inability to really explore the world. I still am, to a point.
I’m not done yet, so I may rethink the entire thing in the end. But I’m at a part of the game where I’m enjoying the game very much.
That’s because you’re not grinding. You practically can’t except in a few very specific instances, and there’s really no reason to. In a game where you practically CAN’T backtrack, and the storyline enemies give you all the XP you need to advance, the concept of grinding becomes a bit foreign, regardless of how the battle engine works.
I’m a little further along than you, and I’m still not seeing this supposed “complexity” in the battle system. All you’re doing is adjusting the AI strategy. That’s it. It’s not “complex”. All you do is pick some set of 3 jobs from a list. Sure, by chapter 11 you actually need to use jobs other than medic, commando and ravager, but that doesn’t make it complex, and sadly, for me, it REALLY doesn’t make it interesting.
It’s not a BAD battle system, but it’s really nothing special either. I would’ve enjoyed fights much more with either a turnbased system that allowed actual control, an action RPG system that…allowed actual control. They could’ve left all the mechanics fundamentally intact - stagger, weaknesses, paradigms, all that could’ve stayed, but they could have given the player actual control over the party (turn based) or the leader (action RPG) and made a much better, more engaging game of it.
Yes, but so far no one has explained to me WHY it should be neccessary to read the DATALOG to understand the characters. That’s just bad storytelling - it’s like the couldn’t figure out how to make all this stuff clear via the actual GAME, so they put in this dynamic ‘manual’ to explain all the stuff they couldn’t figure out how to convey to you in a vaguely organic fashion. Bad.
There’s no way they could have avoided making this game “a movie” and I’d argue that a little MORE movieness might’ve made the plot more clear.
I have nothing against story growth and character development, but there’s no reason that A) The story can’t grow in a way that doesn’t require you to read a text block every few minutes and B) The characters had to start out so bloody unlikable.
It’s entirely possible to tell a very good story in a very linear fashion, but somehow, they’ve failed at the TELLING. Or rather, at the SHOWING of the story. You can read all about it in the datalog, but that’s practically the equivalent of needing to have read the book to understand the game. Bad design.
The whole game is undeniably linear. A few optional ‘go here and kill a monster for loot’ missions don’t change that.
I’m glad you like it, but I’m a little perplexed that your reasons for liking it don’t really seem to line up with the reality of the game. Or maybe you’re just more forgiving of the sorts of bad design decisions that got made here. Because, oddly, the linearity doesn’t really bother me. It’s the bad storytelling that drives me up the wall. What’s the point of a super linear game if you don’t use it to effectively convey your story?
To each their own, I guess. Having the ability to decide the role of each character, to blend those roles in a group of three, to change those roles on the fly, and select the specific action for your character, all the while being attacked and dealing with status elements strikes me as more complex than most RPG’s I’ve played. If the system doesn’t work for you, that’s fine. But I rarely am bored with the battles, which has happened to me in other RPGs.
Again, to each their own. They had to balance between players who don’t want to watch a movie and those who want the depth and complexity of the characters and world spread out in enormously elaborate cutscenes. And they did a good job of it. You get the major points of the story from the scenes, but if you want more, it’s there for you. I suppose they could have done it as a movie with all the exposition in the first few chapters, but I would have greatly disliked that.
Again, to each their own. I never had to “read a text block every few minutes” like you to understand the plot. I’d play the game, understand the major developments, and then, when I wanted a break, I’d read the datalog to get more detail and flush out the story. And I certainly don’t mind a bit of edge to my characters as opposed to cookie cutter heroes out to save the world while everyone cheers their plucky grit on. Sure Lightning is kinda a hardass military type, but there is more there to here as you learn. Sazh is funny, but has a great story line, and other than waiting till whiny little Hope grows a spine I liked the characters.
I don’t want to play a movie; I want to play a game with a good plot, good characters, and a bit of depth. Sorry there weren’t enough cutscenes for you but I had little problem grasping the plot from them, and I didn’t have a problem reading the datalog. To each their own.
I’m horribly sorry that the game didn’t handhold you with cutscenes, made you read, and wasn’t a movie. But your “reality of the game” isn’t the end all be all. You were bent on disliking it, and to no one’s shock you didn’t. Such is life.