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.