You hit all of the disappointments right on the head with this review. Combine unlikable characters with all of the above and you're just piling disappointment on disappointment. I mean I can't be the only person who wanted to punch Hope in the face and tell him to grow up.
1/10. I raised an eyebrow.
I can see why the long hours, forcing patience in the player, would be frustrating. For me, and my brother, though, 25 hours was worth it. I'll be honest and say that I didn't even notice how much time had passed. I'll be even extra honest and admit that by the time Gran Pulse came into play, it was no longer 25 hours being clocked and more like 62. I'm a bit compulsive, and once those points were accumulating, you bet your bottom dollar I was farming for hours per day. By the time Snow made his grandoise entrance, he had over 141,000ish pts to spend, and I think with some thousand left over.
The only problems I had, were:
The MAP. I don't have a very good sense of direction, and I adore maps that don't move upside down or around on me. This map wasn't one - I'm talking about the Gran Pulse one. Sure, I still had my point of destination, but when I was Marking, the yellow icons became irrelevant. Afterwards, I just memorized the landmarks, which after 20 hours, I did manage.
DEATH TO LEADER via DEATH spell, even when in a paradigm characters with Raise, even Medics, causes all to die. It upped the difficulty, I'll say that. So... a half-in-half thing for me.
Some cutscenes, or most of them in-game, the characters would 'quiver' on-screen, like the framerate was too high. I don't know if it was my PS 3, my game, or what, but either way, jarred me from about every 2/5 scenes.
That was about it, but the thing is, I can understand why some people found no enjoyment in it. You brought up good points.
I must be easily entertained. I really don't doubt that I am - I'm forced to watch Treehouse shows on tv when my little nephew is over, or I'm babysitting, and lately, EVERYTHING has been turning out to be refreshing and awesome.
The voice acting I loved. Lightning's VA did wonderful - she had a deep, husky woman's voice, it suited her. Fang's, too. With Snow's, I was waiting for him to say, "I'm gonna blow you away!" but the association with the VA's voice did not deter me from enjoying his work. Hope's grew on me after Vestige - at first, I thought, his voice was pretty deep for a fourteen-year-old, but I got used to it. His VA did nice, too, I thought. Vanille, I'm sorry, I tried to like her, but all she was useful for was taking down Adamantoises with Death spells. Sazh's was delivered... well, the way I suspect SE thinks all black men talk. I really don't know what runs through their minds. For being stereotyped, the VA did wonderfully, I hope he was paid well - instead of focusing on Sazh's words, I focused on the character's personality that the VA shined light on.
I didn't mind the characters. Who I did not care for was Serah. I suppose the game TRIED, via flashblacks, but I could not dredge any sympathy up. I found the young woman (who looks like a scantily clad 12-13-year old, leading me to wonder about Snow's taste being pedoish, but found out she was 18 or something) to be an annoyance. "Oh, she's been kidnapped! I'll save her!" The player finds her lying asleep on the floor. Whatever. Kidnapped, my bum. I know what's the real deal, I beat the game, after all, but I still could care less for Serah.
I agree completely with what you've said. I loved the battle system in Final Fantasy X, even when I hated the storyline. (Which incidentally, gave me enough playtime for the game to win me over, but that's another story.)
Final Fantasy XIII is just... dead. I think the problem is the inherent clash between the real-time battle system and the menu system. Why input the commands yourself when the AI can do it faster and better? It requires almost no concentration besides "shift Paradigms when your health gets low." (I will admit that I had fun during one boss battle, but that was the limit of my enjoyment.) And really, playing a video game should not feel like a chore. I want to be able to enjoy myself when I play games. It's why I play. Not to get a to-do list and stare at some pretty animations for a while.
This would be excusable if the characters or story were any good, but they are all grating and flat. (And NO, the epiphanies that don't change them whatsoever every half an hour of game time DO NOT HELP.) Sazh won me over eventually (but only after he tried to kill himself, for some reason), but it's simply not enough to carry the entire plot. (Which had some truly terrible decisions as far as I'm concerned. The "we have to kill the all-powerful deity thing" twist loses its charm after every single time in the series.)
I really did want to love this game, and I really hoped it would be better than XII was (which had the same problem in the battle system, but wasn't quite as bad in the character department due to Balthier). But after this I don't think I'll be buying another Final Fantasy game.
Anyway, that got way more rambly than I meant it to. Good review, sir and/or madam reviewer.
Is Square Enix loosing it's mojo?
VIII is far from the worst FF game. IMO, II, V, XI and XII were worse.
"VIII is far from the worst FF game. IMO, II, V, XI and XII were worse."
I actually liked V to a degree. The story was pretty bland (save for Galuf's heroic sacrifice), but it featured the best use of the job system IMO, and was just fun to play. XI isn't that bad, either; it's just a very outdated MMO compared to World Of Warcraft. I agree about II and XII, though.
"VIII is far from the worst FF game. IMO, II, V, XI and XII were worse. "
read: "every FF I didn't play when I was a kid is bad"
I want to see someone do a speedrun of this game. If I had a PS 3 controller with autofire I could just use duct tape on the 'up' button and set X to autofire and that would give a good approximation.
The review itself wasn't detailed enough - the reviewer talks about the flat characterization and generic plot without giving examples or supporting evidence why the plot is flat or the characters generic. Also, given that this is a video game review, might I request that the reader be spared the melodramatics in the first paragraph ("But alas, it was not meant to be")?
There's nothing wrong with generic characters.
^There's nothing right with them, either.
Groovy.
I was agreeing with the review up until you said that VIII was worse. IMHO, II, III, V, XII, this game, and those stupid MM Os were all a heck of alot weaker than VIII.
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The magic is lost
Final Fantasy XIII is...well, just a hard game for me to review. I really wanted to love this game. I wanted to recapture the things that made me fall in love with the franchise, from Final Fantasy VIs story to Final Fantasy Xs gameplay. But alas, that was not to be.
The gameplay is radically simplified. In all honesty, you can't just hit X and win every fight; only about 99.9997% of them. The only real control you have is with the Paradigms, and while it is fun to play around with them at first, odds are you'll find two and three that'll carry you through the game. Leveling is like a straightforward version of X's Sphere Grid; once again, it's fun at first, but after a while you start to see how confining it is.
And confined is the right term. A game can be an RPG without shops or towns (old school dungeon crawlers, anyone?), but FFXIII is virtually lifeless. There are no memorable NP Cs to speak of. The environments look pretty in screenshots, but are totally dull when running through them. The "straight line" dungeons are just...a bad decision, all told. I can understand mainstreaming a game, but this is beyond that. It places accessibility ahead of actual fun.
But what really kills the game is the pacing. The plot itself is woefully generic, albeit with brief flashes of creativity, and even that could be forgiven if told well. Here, you don't understand anything until about the fifteen hour mark. The nonsequential flashbacks are a neat thought, but once again, they suffer from poor writing and rather flat characterization. There is some genuine development, but once again, that's twenty hours in. The game only gets halfway decent at the infamous 25-hour mark.
Just to clarify: a game can get better later on. Both Persona3 and Persona4 took about ten hours before their stories got interesting. Heavy Rain muddled around for two hours before you took a rusty sawblade to your pinky. But 25 hours in inexcusable. Basic design dictates you show your best work first, and don't start sliding downhill until the last five hours. Oh, and the game does slide downhill for the last ten hours.
Like I said, I wanted to love this game, but it just couldn't make it. It's not the worst in the franchise (VIII), but it's glory days are long gone.