Current Events > Playing FFXIII for the first time.

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's kinda weird how there is no exp at least so far, story is kinda interesting maybe.

I'm honestly only in the first "hallway", mainly playing the game while I watch my streams, I heard the game is streamlined to hell so it should be easy to focus on it and something else.

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I love how the tutorials are basically "look how little input you need, isn't this exciting and cinematic?!"

Something tells me this game is going to act like it's hotshit.

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I'm pretty sure I stopped playing that game the moment before it "gets good".

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Yeah, multi tasking will make a lot of it much less of a slog. If you care about the story there's a lot of required text logs to read though. The lore of the world is actually interesting but it's not presented very well in game. It's in the logs. Making sense of terms like L'Cie and stuff at least is necessary imo.

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CyricZ posted...

I'm pretty sure I stopped playing that game the moment before it "gets good".

I might as well make this a playthrough topic, I came into this with the least expectations, so I'm going with it until hopefully I beat because I just want to claim I played and beat all main final fantasy games.

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Jiek_Fafn posted...

Yeah, multi tasking will make a lot of it much less of a slog. If you care about the story there's a lot of required text logs to read though. The lore of the world is actually interesting but it's not presented very well in game. It's in the logs. Making sense of terms like L'Cie and stuff at least is necessary imo.

Final Fantasy stories already can be rather cumbersome to grasp, not looking forward to logs. >_>

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Good choice

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So I did the chain attack tutorial, that was certainly a mechanic?

Felt the same as a regular fight, maybe it will be more involved later but this game is really going hard on press X then heal, granted this is still the beginning but it feels more spammy(is that the word?)than other final fantasy games do early on.

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And now I'm playing as Snow, huh.

Also unicorn mart is a waste of time, all potions and Phoenix downs.

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the concept of the story is cool but it's told poorly using characters that have exactly one defining character trait each and not much else to them. most of the world-building is relegated to the datalog, so the game ends up feeling hollow if you never peek in there

the combat is polarizing, personally i loved it but it doles out the tools and mechanics that make it interesting at much too slow a pace, the training wheels only start coming off towards the end of chapter 9, which is like at least 20 hours in

Holy shit, every five feet there is a cutscenes, can I play the game for 5 minutes please?

It's like the game thinks I will lose interest.

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Turn off default auto-battle.
Turn off mini-map.

There is a lot of interactiveness to be had later in fights that auto-battle doesn't really prepare you for.
There is a crazy amount of detail in the world design that following the mini-map will gimp you out on.

It's a great game but holy shit does it try to make you not experience any of the fun you can have.

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I really liked the combat system
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So far the experience you're expressing in the first few hours of the game is the experience I had for 90% of it.

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The combat system is good when it finally let's you play with it. Unfortunately, like another poster said, it's seriously over a dozen hours in before it even let's you. The pacing is the games biggest problem. Eventually, you'll be able to switch party members out and gain access to more classes for each character which makes it fun to mix and match the paradigms. The fights get more difficult too.

But man it takes FOREVER to get there

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If it makes you feel better at all, everyone's complaints are spot on but most of them are addressed in the 2nd game in the series. It's a much better experience and has one of the best antagonists of the series.

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Jiek_Fafn posted...

If it makes you feel better at all, everyone's complaints are spot on but most of them are addressed in the 2nd game in the series. It's a much better experience and has one of the best antagonists of the series.

The music takes a drastic step down but I've heard that the sequel is improved. I've actually only played a bit of Lightning Returns but I've skipped the sequel. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised they didn't do a trilogy remaster yet.

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Have you fallen in love with Blinded by Light (the battle theme) yet?

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Strider102 posted...

Have you fallen in love with Blinded by Light (the battle theme) yet?

Also this, unironically
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The main battle theme is pretty good

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Why put yourself through this?

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spikethedevil posted...

Why put yourself through this?

I wanted to see Nomura's magnum opus in it's full glory.

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I think the battle system is really good (the music too). The issue is the repetitiveness. You do nothing but battle in the game and there's not that many interesting enemy encounter setups. You might be able to say the same about older FF games that the combat is repetitive, but those games have more than combat. Theres towns, pitstops, minigames, exploration, etc. FF13 either cuts those things out entirely or reduces them to near nothing and just leaves you with the battle system for hours upon hours. Add to that that it's not fully unlocked until like 20 hours into the game and it's full of dumbfuck systems to diminish your enjoyment and free experimentation, like how fucking dumb the weapon upgrade system is. Also when your interaction and choice outside of battle is non-existent, maybe that wasn't the right game to use a system that relies heavily on auto-battling and AI manipulation rather than full control. You have no agency outside of battle, and very little in battle. It's like a double whammy. So yeah, I don't even think that its admittedly great battle system works in the game's favour. It just becomes tiresome.

The system is improved in XIII-2, but it's almost entirely the same and its so much more enjoyable to play with because the rest of the game is not setup like XIII. Only downside is that it is quite easy compared to XIII's battle encounters. Though I haven't played the Colosseum DLC, cause lmao @ paying for that.

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Final Fantasy XIII is one of those games that's better than the fanbase makes it out to be, while absolutely living up to its poor reception.

I played it in like 2015, and since I got it for like $10 I played it with an open mind. It looks absolutely gorgeous, even with the blocky fingers, and while it might not be high art I value the game for its character writing and character relationships. There's this one dipshit from another forum who, whenever Lightning came up, would go on these rants about how much of an unlikable bitch she was and how she should have died halfway through the game without anyone commenting on it or objecting to it because of how much of a bitch she was. I can't stand people who flanderize characters they don't like by playing up their lowest moments and refusing to take character development into account.

I think the production values have aged pretty well, and I enjoy the characters for the most part. Even some of the shit that the fanbase tends to harp on as bad writing.

With that being said, everything the internet says about hallways is absolutely, unavoidably true. And the levelling is just the worst - get ready TC, because if you like to level your characters, you're about to get a cold, gloved finger in your asshole.

I'd go as far as to say that the way FFXIII handles levelling is a crack in the foundation of the game that nothing can really paper over. It's obscene.

The funny thing is that the sequel is a complete 180 from the first game. The stuff about the first game that's really good tends to be kinda lightweight or middling, but the stuff that was really bad in the first game has been fixed. So basically what I'm saying is that the aesthetic and character drama of the game is worth sticking with, because if you end up enjoying the characters and the world of XIII, you have another two games to play that are pretty great in their own way and which improve upon the first game immensely.

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neverwin posted...

I love how the tutorials are basically "look how little input you need, isn't this exciting and cinematic?!"

I quit the game when I was still getting tutorials on combat like 25 hours in.

Literally got into an area, got into a battle 'NEW TUTORIAL', shut off game and never turned it back on.

I remember jack-shit about the story too.

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Leveling is legitimately my favorite thing thing to do in games, so there is leveling?

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Yes, but it's bad and takes forever.

Imagine the sphere grid, but with 5% of the customizability, but it takes the same amount of time to use. That's the FF13 leveling system, at least for the good majority of the game. Also it's deeply unsatisfying when the game forces you to spend your hardearned exp to level physical attack for a character who literally can't physically attack just to advance their level tree.

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Yep. It's also extremely linear with no true customization until a ways in. That's the theme, if you haven't picked it up from these posts. The game DRAGS. It doesn't give you anything to go on for at least 20 hours


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neverwin posted...

So I did the chain attack tutorial, that was certainly a mechanic?

Felt the same as a regular fight, maybe it will be more involved later but this game is really going hard on press X then heal, granted this is still the beginning but it feels more spammy(is that the word?)than other final fantasy games do early on.

All final fantasy games are like that. Stop acting like it isn't

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I love the combat but yeah the story isn't told well

hope you like reading

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Makeveli_lives posted...

All final fantasy games are like that. Stop acting like it isn't

I didn't say it wasn't, aggressive much? I just said the game felt less varied early on. I mean most FF gave you a few spells here and there, this one not so much. Doesn't mean that won't change. I mean so far Snow feels a bit better to play than lightning even though blitz and hand grenade are very similar.

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The game only opens up in chapter 11 of 13.

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