This is a commentary about the storytelling, but involves spoilers up through Chapter 7 so be warned:
The thing is, they could have had WAY more exposition than they did, since I was right about Vanille being Pulsian. That one scene on the Airship was perfect, Vanille acts like a ditz to get information on Cocoon. Unfortunately, they tell us about a guy that for that point in time and 3 or 4 chapters after that scene we NEVER SEE AGAIN. That moment could have been used for so much more, like “why does everyone hate Pulse?” or “what do the fal’Cie in Cocoon do again?” They had a perfectly good moment, and a perfectly good character to ask the dumb questions and unload all the exposition they needed, and then they wasted it with info that, if it’s useful at all, won’t be pertinent for well over a few chapters later. And they could do it without blowing her cover any more or less than they already did.
Pick roles for each character and let them pick the actions, deal with the status effects, and stand in the way of all the AoE attacks?
Seriously. What do you actually do while directing a battle? You change roles occasionally when you need to buff/debuff/heal, and you spam your best attack that hits the enemy’s weakness. I’ll say this: The battles aren’t always EASY, which does avoid the boredom trap for certain types of people, but that’s due in no small part to the handicaps imposed by the battle system, which leads some people to frustration. A system with more control for the end user would likely result in those battles being much less challenging due to the removal of the restrictions imposed by the way the game works. So they’re well crafted within their ruleset, but their ruleset is inherently frustrating.
It’s a FINAL FANTASY game. Why are we -here- if not for the depth and complexity of the characters and story? If you don’t want to watch a game that plays like a movie (which I would argue, this one ALREADY DOES, so what could they have lost?) then you are playing the wrong game.
This is completely beside the point. My issues have NOTHING to do with the order of events or how things are revealed from a timing perspective. The exposition and narrative should be inside the game, not in some sort of digital handout that you have to flip open every time something happens to understand WHY it happened.
I liked them too - after about 10 hours of barely putting up with them. The point is much as Tycho from Penny Arcade put it - I’m all for characters improving as the game goes on, but does that mean they need to start as wretchedly unlikeable? (Except Sazh, who is actually pleasant from the get go.)
It’s not the VOLUME of cutscenes - I would, in fact, argue, that the game already has too many - but how poorly they are utilized. See Jragon’s post for a cold, hard example.
If they wanted a game that didn’t play like a movie, they failed utterly, because you could hardly have designed a more cutscene heavy, linear experience. So why didn’t they TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE STRENGTHS of what they chose and show us the characters and tell us the story instead of saying “if you want to know, it’s all there in the datalog”?
Actually, I went in with a very open mind. I really quite LIKED the last FF game I played. (Well, except for the battle system, but that’s sortof irrelevant since I already knew this battle system wasn’t going to be anything like it anyway.)
I really wanted to like this game. For many, many reasons, not least of which is that I feel the genre needs a shot in the arm - a really strong game that makes everyone go “Yes! I know those characters! I like them! That story rocked! Now I remember what was good about this genre!” and this game… is not it. At all. If anything, I’m guilty of wanting too much from this game… but it’s been in development for a REALLY LONG TIME and has made HUGE SACRIFICES upon the altar of its vision, and yet… it really has nothing to show for it.
Bent on disliking it indeed. Just because the noninteractive combat system bores me and I actually take issue with how badly the story is told, suddenly I was bent on disliking it. Please. Just because I recognized the warning signs early on and wasn’t excited earlier in this thread doesn’t mean I had my mind set on hating this game. Heck, if I actually WERE bent on disliking this game, I think I’d dislike it a lot more.
I’ve yet to actually play FFXIII, but my issue in general that I’ve been realizing lately is that ALL of the FF games are like this (and most other JRPG style games I’ve played), regardless of whether you have full control, turn based or not. Every battle boils down to this pattern. Spam attack, use the weakness if there is one, switch to heal when you get low on HP. There never was any real strategy to it, it was just reacting to each specific enemy. I’m not surprised they have come to make it mostly automated because would you really do much different if you had full control? The FFXII gambits really made me realize “wait, this is what I’ve been doing in my head all along”. If my battle decisions can be replaced by a simple algorithm, am I really doing that much? I can’t really enjoy RPGs much anymore, because when I start spamming attack to get through the random battles I get bored and give up. Just sitting there watching the computer fight for me isn’t fun either (I never finished FFXII).
I would like to see a system that is more strategic, yet still fast paced, that is more about how you use the members of your party as a team. Like a mix of RTS and SRPG with a little MMO. Short 3-5 minute battles, but quick enough where you have to decide and act quickly.
I would definitely endorse some more sort of ‘team based’ attacks, though another way to approach it is to do more control of space - tile based SRPGs are good like this because it means that you can shield your wimpy characters behind your tougher characters, which is something you can’t do in your traditional “everybody line up and hit back and forth” environment (which is fundamentally what FF13 still is).
Action RPGs tackle this from a different angle by giving different attacks meaningfully different physical properties - an attack that knocks down, or that launches into the air, or that chains easily into another attack, or whathaveyou - which helps to prevent spamming of one attack over and over. They also tend to allow flimsy characters the option of at least running away from something that’s trying to kill them - Tales games allow swordsmen-type characters to use stuns/popups/knockdowns to keep enemies away from more fragile types of characters who may be dealing out a lot more damage. (Or who may be patching up the damage from the big hits.)
Ultimately, FF13’s role-based system actually works AGAINST it from a strategic perspective, because your characters, fundamentally, aren’t very specialized. They’re not as completely blanderized as characters in previous FF games (I’m looking at you, FF12) but still fundamentally, every character can do at least 3 things perfectly effectively. This means that if you need healing, you might as well switch to LOTS OF HEALING, or if you need damage, you can easily switch to LOTS OF DAMAGE, whereas in games with more rigidly defined “class” roles, it requires a lot more effort and strategy recover from area damage, or to amp up your own damage output for a ‘burst’ effect. Since the FF13 characters are so flexible, it’s harder for there to be real synergies.
Oddly, the genre that actually does fights BEST and that a lot of console RPGs could learn from is, bizarrely, the MMORPG - big boss fights in modern MMOs like WoW or LotRO or even newer Everquest stuff has a lot of VERY CLEVER mechanics behind them. A boss that you can’t kill until you destroy all four of the ritualists who are creating a shield around him, or a boss who cycles through several different ‘stances’ that make him more vulnerable to certain things at certain times, or a boss who calls for reinforcements halfway through the fight - or every 30 seconds. This sort of design, while it still pretty rapidly gets stale in a genre that is basically dependant on doing all content many, many times, would be a breath of fresh air in the relatively bland school ‘encounter’ design in console RPGs. Tales of Vesperia dips a toe into this area a little bit with some of its fights (and moreso, with some of its achievements) but doesn’t really take it far enough - though it does have one of the best battle systems of any current gen RPG, and -does- feature relatively specialized characters who, at best, do about 1.5 things well… which is about what you need for good role-based synergy without being so locked into a single role that there’s essentially nothing you can change about your strategy.
I just borrowed it from my neighbor a couple days ago and I’m only five or six hours in and have pretty much lost interest. I’ve done nothing but run down one corridor that whole time to essentially get from one cutscene to the next. What’s the point of the map? I’m really not liking the combat at this point either. The fact that you can’t control any positioning yet enemies use AoE attacks is utterly ridiculous in this day an age of RPGs. I’ll give it a little more time but I’m disappointed so far. I probably shouldn’t have gone from God of War 3 right to this.
To be fair, the game does NOT make its best showing in the first 5 or even 10 hours.
Also to be fair, it’s positively embarassing how long the game takes to ‘get good’.
To continue being fair, neither of your complaints, capeo, changes in the slightest. The whole game consists of running down corridors and fighting things between cutscenes, except for one area that is essentially a wide plain with monsters on it. You will continue to get annoyed by your party members standing still in a clump while monsters hit you with AoEs. You’ll just get more options for what to tell people to do in combat. And the characters will become less irritating.
Oh, Chapter 11 is just precious. Half of the things on the field I can’t even kill, and one of these is blocking the way to the next main quest objective. So I get to grind sidequests for a while until I can kill it, apparently I can’t get my components for upgrading my weapons until either farther in this chain (mission 8) or the next main quest objective so I’m stuck with level 1 weapons (well, Light has a level 4) as well.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I actually enjoy the story I’d have given up here.
I’m also having a little trouble with my team composition, I’m torn between Light, Fang, and Vanille, or the first two and Hope. Snow seems useless, sadly, and Sazh just seems to not be as good at Commando as Light or Fang, but not as good of a Ravager as the others either. Vanille and Hope seem to heal about the same at least, I guess it comes down to whether defensive spells or offensive spells are better. I should probably stick with Hope since King Behemoths can almost oneshot anyone in the entire party if it decides it’s going to spam heave.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you can buy components to upgrade your weapons from either the “Creature Comforts” or “Lenora’s Garage” shops accessed through any save point. You probably don’t have a ton of gil, but if you sell any of the components designed primarily to be sold (Credit Chips and Incentive Chips, for example), you can pile up a decent amount of cash. Then buy a bunch of Claws/Oozes/whatevers to increase the multiplier to x2 or x3, then buy a bunch of high-price components from Lenora’s Garage and pile them into your weapons at x3. I’m still two chapters back of you, but I have Fang’s primary spear upgraded to level 20-ish and lightning has two swords (one for when I use her as a Ravager and one for when I use her as a Commando), both at Level 14. If your weapons aren’t upgraded at all, that’s probably why you’re struggling so much with the enemies in Chapter 11.
Regarding party composition, Snow is a very solid sentinel - having more HP than Fang and generally seeming to have higher defenses - and having a sentinel is pretty key for hard fights. He’s offensively nothing to write home about, but that’s the tradeoff.
Sazh is apparently a good synergist and saboteur, but those classes tend to be ones that you swap into for a couple of seconds, let the character snap off some buffs/debuffs, and then switch out, so it’s not necessarily a good area to be specialized in. I hear he gets very good weapons too, but I don’t really know.
With regard to story, do they ever mention, in the actually GAME, why Vanille keeps apologizing to Sazh?
Also, make sure you do the WALL-E sidequest to get some materials that give huge XP. Combine with a 3x multiplier and you can have some sick weapons quickly.
See, I was following a an upgrade guide which said not to start upgrading until chapter 11 (and I didn’t have any trouble up until then anyway), and to only upgrade with Perfect Conductors, Superconductors, and a couple other things from R&D Depot (which I just unlocked). The conductors don’t become available for purchase from Lenora’s until you get to the cave, but early on I wasn’t even strong enough to kill the King Behemoth fighting the mumblegrumble (big white kitty thing) near the entrance. I did up to mission 14 (heh) last night and now I can pretty easily kill one, so I can easily do a sneak attacked one at half health.
It wasn’t really that I couldn’t kill anything it was just that I was trying to kill King Behemoths and failing miserably. I’d say that I’m actually doing well since I can do most of those Undying (I think that’s what they’re called) in one or two tried. Switching out Vanille for Hope helped a lot.
Because she’s Vanille? I dunno, it seems perfectly in line with her personality to me.
[spoiler]I mean, she’s a serious wreck, between becoming Ragnarok some hundred odd years ago and killing tons of people to feeling wholly responsible for his son’s crystal stasis*. On top of that she’s a a kind, gentle person so she probably feels the dissonance with her actions and her personality and feels incredibly bad because of it.
She does mention at some point that she lied about forgetting her focus to Fang, so she feels responsible for the incident because she could have prevented it by telling the truth.[/spoiler]
I tried and failed once, but had no problem sneaking past them and avoiding the battle completely. When I see one next, I’m pretty sure I can handle it.
The moral of the story is…don’t follow guides. Just play the game.
That doesn’t make any sense. Why should she apologize if she hasn’t done anything? But you see, she has, but they never TELL you, let alone show you, unless you open the datalog. So, so bad.
Weapon guides are the only guides I really use with JRPGs because of their… issues with ultimate weapons. I’ve heard the horror stories, especially with the “three chests” thing from XII. Sometimes I use sidequest guides, just for when things become missable though (I prefer the ones without walkthroughs). I do think that chapter 11 was pretty good advice though, since you can’t really reliably get gil until then, and most of the other components are worth more in cash than they are as experience.
This one was actually clear from the cutscenes as of one or two cutscenes into 11.
[spoiler]In two cutscenes they show her encountering Dahj in the plant, and in the second one I recall her telling Fang that she didn’t think it was a very good idea, so it makes sense if she felt responsible for not stopping it after she got to know Sazh.
In addition, I believe in one of those voiceover narrations she does she indeed briefly mentions that she lied about forgetting her focus to prevent more bloodshed. I’m not as certain on that one, but I’m pretty sure that she did.[/spoiler]
Took me a few days to get back to the thread, my apologies…
The active time battle gauge is part of it, but I was also thinking of some of the more general trends. The game still uses the traditional names for spells and some items which is familiar, (esuna is a catch all spell for removing debuffs, shell protects against magic, “protect” works against physical attacks, phoenix down resurrects party members, potions heal etc…), with three tiered elemental spells, (ex. Fire, Fira, Firaga…). Monsters, enemies, and especially bosses generally have specific weaknesses that have to be exploited to deal with them effectively. All the party members are particularly suited to fill certain roles. (Fighter, Mage, Healer, etc…) I know that these systemic traits have entered JRPG’s as a whole and aren’t specifically related to Final Fantasy at this point, but I, (along with most gamers I would imagine), first encountered these in FF games and I still associate these systems with the franchise. The role switching system also strikes me as an extremely streamlined version of the job system in FF5 and FF Tactics. The “on the fly” switching however is a new twist on it, and a welcome one at that.
That said, I agree with your criticisms regarding character placement. When placement on the grid matters you need to have an active way to influence that, if not control it outright. (Outside of “attackers move forward”.) FF13’s system feels sloppy and incomplete.
I haven’t picked the game up in over a week, but I remember fighting the ‘Anima’ boss. I didn’t even know at the time it was a proper fal’Cie. Was this spelled out in a cutscene? Am I really that inattentive? Don’t answer that.
Your breakdown of the basic ideas behind fal’Cie and l’Cie, and Pulse and Cocoon, is greatly appreciated Jragon. I wasn’t even aware that there were two different kinds of fal’Cie. (One aligned with Cocoon and one with Pulse.) That completely eluded me somehow. It throws the characters into a somewhat more understandable light.
It was spelled out pretty clearly in the cutscene immediately before you kill it. I think someone (Snow?) even screamed something about “you’re going to try to kill a Fal’Cie!?”
Anyway, I do have some more info on the whole “may be mechanical” thing. They’re “kinda sorta” spoilers, it’s all stuff not really revealed until later in the story, but it’s not plot relevant (no shocking information). Basically stuff that should have been in the datalog at the very beginning. Either way, own risk etc etc:
The fal’Cie and humans are both living organisms, but the fal’Cie are more powerful. That said, aside from the whole “technically living” thing they still resemble giant machines as you’ll understand as you see more of them. Fal’Cie do have computer-like roles, however, at least on Cocoon. There are fal’Cie tasked with growing food for people, generating electricity, producing artificial sunlight (etc etc) and while they exert an amount of free will, they can’t out and out defy their objective or work in any way that directly sabotages it. So they’re organic computers I guess.
Missed edit:
Do you know what could benefit this game immensely? A tactics system like Dragon Age had. The AI is competent at healing the right things (and such) but not as much as I’d like. For instance, if you switch into a role like Medic/Sentinel/Synergist. The AI will automatically buff Sentinel, Himself, and then the Medic, even if the medic is your primary striker/damage dealer and you’re only in medic while you buff (ergo, the Medic needs the buff faster than the synergist). Just the ability to tweak these settings to a small degree would make the battles a lot more tolerable. They could even fix the spacing issue, “if enemy on field is capable of AOE, spread out 10ft” or something would be enough control while still allowing the fundamental battle system to stay in place.
Just finished the main storyline, going back now to do the quests, ectc.
I haven’t upgraded anyone’s weapons at all, but I didn’t have any real trouble with any boss fights until I hit Vanille’s Eidolon . That one, I had to go grind for a while till I’d capped both their crystal trees for all 3 main jobs.
But yeah. I still can’t beat the big turtles yet, but I’ve got the little ones without tusks down easy.
God this is the most boring game ever. It feels like a 50-hour-long, partially interactive movie more than a game. Occasionally you get to run in a 1D line and tap “A” repeatedly.
Yet I’m still going to finish it because I’m a stubborn completionist like that. And I didn’t even pay for it, I got it as a gift. I mean the graphics are pretty and all, but the trite, bland storytelling kinda ruins it.
The FF series has really taken a nosedive over the past couple of franchises. RIP Final Fantasy. You used to be good once.
I thought the combat improved immensely in the “post-game” once your characters are all leveled up. Some of the mission fights are very difficult, needing many rapid optima changes to survive. There were a few cases in which I wanted to kill the ally AI (especially since I was coming directly from XII’s gambit system), but ultimately I adjusted to it.
The two major issues I had with the game were the ultimate ending of the story (I’m used to being underwhelmed by the endings of FF games but usually they do a better job of making the rationales of the characters clear) and the upgrade system. Chocobo racing and lightning dodging were annoying, but at least they depended on skill of a sort. All you need to upgrade your items in XIII is an obscene amount of gil which takes hours of grinding to get (yes, I suppose you could use drops, but apart from a couple of items that would be far less efficient). This was the first game I ever got all the trophies for and it definitely wasn’t worth the time needed.
Just play the game.