Does Final Fantasy XIII get better?

Well, i finally bought a playstation 3 for myself for Christmas and being a huge jrpg fan i had to get ff13 of course. I knew the reviews were not that great for it, but i assumed that came mostly from the general dislike for jrpgs most people over here seem to have. It also helped that my friend thinks ff13 is the most amazing game ever.

HOWEVER what i found was beyond my expectations… and not in a good way.

My current position is right after you get the ability to Paradigm shift which i admit is not that far in the game. So far the story has been of small interest and VERY poorly told (i’ve learned almost everything i know about the story from loading screen text and almost nothing from actually playing it). The bigger problem however is that Final Fantasy XIII has the worst dialog in any rpg i’ve ever played (maybe not counting ultra low budget ones). Characters are constantly saying stupid things as if they were in a bad imitation of an arnold movie. It is almost like watching a sci fi original monster movie the dialog is so bad.

It doesn’t help that so far every character is extremely unlikeable and pulled directly out of the Japanese Anime Archetypes 101 for Dummies book.

Does it eventually get better? Or should i just play bayonetta instead?

I enjoyed the first half (which puts me in the minority, at least for QT3), but am struggling to continue after getting to the part where it opens up, and basically turns into FF XII (a giant pile of somewhat frustrating boringness). I certainly wouldn’t say it gets better.

It doesn’t get any better. Our past thread on it:

Does it get better than it has been so far, to the point that you’re currently at? Yes. Does it get good enough that you should keep playing it? YMMV, depending on your JRPG tolerance, but probably not.

It gets better, but not enough that you should continue to play it.

You should play Bayonetta instead, though I hope you don’t plan to do so on the PS3.

I only have a ps3 and a NDS so yes, i do.

Ah, I sort of assumed you already had a 360. It’s at least playable on the PS3 now, though you definitely want to make sure to patch and install it first.

Holy crap. I played this via GameFly around the time it came out and was thoroughly bored…but for some reason I grabbed it over the holidays thanks to Gamestop’s ‘Buy 2 Get 1 Free’ deals, just so I could masochistically force myself to endure it in the hopes that it becomes an actual game at some point.

How long is it before the game becomes more than ‘run 10 feet, hit X a lot, run 10 feet, hit x a lot, cutscene, run 10 feet, hit x a lot’? Final Fantasy XIII makes Nier look like Ocarina of Time (which is not to slag Nier, a game I find legitimately enjoyable).

FF XIII is worth your time IMO if you like RPG battle systems. The story is eh (though I didn’t hate it like many here) and it’s linear to a fault, but the battle system is probably my favorite ever in a JRPG. It massively, massively opens up about 1-2 hours after where you’re at.

I borrowed this from a friend and played up to the Gran Pulse segment before Gran Turismo came out. Zero desire to go back and finish it up.

It doesn’t. Even Gran Pulse (where it opens up - houuuuuuurs in) is really just the same thing but you have a (boring) central area which the corridors branch off.

Did your friend recently experience any sudden and severe head trauma?

The story is mostly incomprehensible unless you read the notes in one of the submenus (events?) that summarize each story moment, as well as the notes in the character/npc and other world info database. This is really damn sloppy “storytelling” on Square’s part. Instead, if you play through the game without reading all these entries in the in-game database, you’ll often be left scratching your head and continuing to be annoyed like you already are.

As legendary as some of the sloppy writing and storytelling in FF8 was, FF13 completely blows that one away. You say that FF13 had the worst dialogue in any rpg you’ve ever played, and I’m sad to say that I agree with you. I’ve played some rpg’s with really shitty dialogue, but FF13 was by far the worst.

The combat system does get better the further you go, but that isn’t saying much either. While you can technically manually pick all your combat actions, that’s actually a poor use of the system they’ve put together. Instead, your main choices are typically going to be whether to switch paradigms, use an item, or use the “auto” command for that action. It does feel reasonably tactical via setting up various paradigms and timing the shifting of them and such for more challenging battles.

However, you’ll also run into key battles in the game where none of this matters, because the developers decided that bullshit random luck insta-death attacks made it more dramatic or something. While insta-death attacks have been a part of the entire FF franchise, generally you know you’re going to come up against them, and you have some way to mitigate them. That’s not always going to be the case in FF13.

I am a pretty hardcore jrpg apologist. There’s very few of them I haven’t enjoyed. And the FF franchise has been my favorite for a long time, and one of the few recipients of my “day one purchase sight unseen” designation. However, FF13 changed that.

I played through the entire game, and while I had fun at times, overall the experience wasn’t just a letdown for an FF game: I actually regret the time I spent on it. I wish I would’ve spent that time on another game instead. I did do some of the optional quests that come in later in the game (basically similar to the Hunt concept from FF12), and while they were easily the most enjoyable part of the game, it was too little to matter in the end.

For the first time ever, I didn’t keep this game after I finished it. Frankly, I didn’t even bother selling it; I gave it to another person on Gamers With Jobs who wanted to play it.

I consider FF13 as my biggest gaming disappointment of 2010, and that’s by a pretty wide margin. I would even consider it as a front-runner for my biggest gaming disappointment of the decade. The more time that has passed since I played it (bought it at launch and finished it over the course of about two months; busy job and family keeps me from the marathon sessions!) the less favorably I look back on it.

To get an idea of how much our jrpg habits may converge, Murbella, here’s some comments on others I love:

I have thoroughly enjoyed every FF game prior to 13. Yes, even 10, despite its shortcomings. My two favorite FF’s are FF6 and FF12, but 1, 4, 7, and 9 come very close behind. Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all, I love the Dragon Quest series, and I also thoroughly enjoyed Xenogears in spite of the second disc and horrifically slow text speed. ;) I didn’t care for Xenosaga, as it was far too plodding and overwrought for its own good, but I gave it three tries over the course of a few years before I finally sold it off.

I enjoy a lot of other jrpg franchises too: Lunar, Arc the Lad, Grandia (the first one is another of my all-time favorites), Persona (the SMT games), Suikoden, Golden Sun, and the list goes on. I’m a junkie, and I have a lot of tolerance even for the obligatory “cute” character they stuff into many of these games as a common Japanese storytelling trope.

So when I rip into FF13’s “characters” for their amazingly horrible dialogue and voice acting (my GOD I hated Vanille so very, very much), the poorly handled story (which actually had a lot of potential that they squandered terribly), and the god-awful music – keep in mind that this is coming from someone who genuinely loves the jrpg genre and its quirks, and I am actually amazed at just how much I’m growing to dislike FF13 the more I reflect on it. It’s a shame that Square-Enix wasted such amazing production values on such a shitty game.

Moms are tough.

This. I got almost to the very end and just stopped when I realized I was having no fun and had to get drunk every night just to tolerate continuing to play it (Brutal Legend, in contrast, is markedly improved when you’re drunk – Jack Black is suddenly funny). Play something else.

If you like cutesiness, Eternal Sonata.
If you like masochism, Demon’s Souls.
If you like strat JRPGs, Valkyria Chronicles.

AUGH I had scrubbed that out of my memory, now you ruined my efforts.

/cry

Ouch.

Well, back to grinding Demon’s Souls it is, then…bye-bye FFXIII!

Resonance of Fate is a nice pick as well if you don’t mind a weird story but like complicated and challenging battle systems.

I haven’t played that one but it’s on my shortlist to pick up sometime. I’ve read a lot of good things about it.

Actually, it gets worse, not better. So long as you’re in the infinite tutorial, you think there might be a chance there will eventually be a fun part to the game.

Then you get to the Plains of Infinite Kill Quests and you think, well, this is very dumb, but maybe there is more content elsewhere. Then eventually you discover that was it for optional content.

No side quests apart from go to the far side of the map and kill something, with the idea that, eventually, maybe, someday, you’ll be able to kill those turtle things and get an ultimate weapon you don’t need that will serve no purpose except to kill more turtle things. No minigames. Nothing to do whatsoever except continue the ride-on-rails path to the end in a stupidly implausible world with mostly idiotic characters.

Yeah, yeah, eventually all the obnoxious characters have an agonizingly transformational growing-up experience complete with insanely stupid boss fight, but they are still all extremely annoying.

The whole thing makes FF X2, revenge of the flower girls, seem like the pinnacle of role-playing. At least in X2, you could wander around, do what you want, and if you avoided using the killer-flower-doing-a-strip-tease-automatic-win-button, it was actually kind of fun.

XIII is just slow torture laid on top of an ostensibly promising combat system with nothing more than that. I thought XII was bad because of the poor character skill system, that moronic hunt system and because they got rid of the story half-way through, but in comparison, XII is ten times better than XIII.

In the words of a man wiser then I

“Some people say FFXIII gets good about 20 hours in… You know that’s not really a point in it’s favour? I mean you could put your hand on a stove for 20 hours and yea you’ll probably stop feeling the pain but you’ll have done serious damage to yourself”.