And the game doesn’t “open up” until you’ve beaten it and are actually capable of doing most of the Hunt-things, which are just as boring as Final Fantasy XII (which was an awful, awful, AWFUL game whose cultish following doesn’t make any sense to me in the least).
And by the time you’ve beaten it, you won’t care. I know this because I actually did beat the game.
Or should i just play bayonetta instead?
Not on the PS3, no.
Go buy and play:
-Demons’ Souls. It’s nowhere near as hard as its fans tell everyone it is. Masochism is trying to play through FFXIII after you’ve decided you hate it, not getting used to Demons’ Souls. Just don’t play it like Devil May Cry on Easy and you’ll be fine.
-Resonance of Fate. Post-apocalyptic steampunk wire-fu gunslinging RPG with a figure-it-out-yourself story and all kinds of weird side mechanics. ie, it’s a game made by the people who did Valkyrie Profile.
-Nier. Great game that got panned as a result of reviewer remorse for Final Fantasy XIII. Textbook case of how “gaming journalism” doesn’t deserve the “journalism” part.
Consider buying/rent:
-Valkyria Chronicles. It’s overrated, but still enjoyable if you can shake the notion it’s some brilliant design miracle.
-Disgaea 3. Do you like number-crunching mix/maxing kind-of-strategy RPGs with a sense of humor and a slew of side mechanics? Can you handle late PS1-era 2D graphics without feeling the need to go to a forum or write a GameFAQs review to bitch about it? Grab Disgaea 3, which is bound to be cheap by now.
It does get better, but not enough to be worth sticking with. The battle system gets pretty fun, and there’s plenty of eye candy and nice music, but the story stays awful, and several major systems are very poorly designed.
Well, the worst two RPGs ever made are clearly Lionheart and Star Ocean IV.
But FF XIII is up there as one of the worst things ever done by Square-Enix, possibly only exceeded in badness by FF XIV, because at least FF XIII has nice graphics and the combat gameplay seemed kind of interesting for a while.
It’s hard to really explain what I love about FFXII so much. It’s very much more than the sum of its parts. I was expecting to loathe it as much as I ended up loathing FFXIII, but then it came out, I played it, and it just immediately clicked with me.
I can certainly understand why so many people dislike XII, and anytime I recommend it to someone I do so with big caveats as a result. ;)
FF12 is the best game in the series. The only other acceptable answer is FF6.
-Resonance of Fate. Post-apocalyptic steampunk wire-fu gunslinging RPG with a figure-it-out-yourself story and all kinds of weird side mechanics. ie, it’s a game made by the people who did Valkyrie Profile.
Better than FF13, to be sure, but so by the numbers it put me to sleep. Can’t recommend this one to anyone.
-Nier. Great game that got panned as a result of reviewer remorse for Final Fantasy XIII. Textbook case of how “gaming journalism” doesn’t deserve the “journalism” part.
Uh…what? This is the most nonsensical interpretation of why a game got middling reviews I have ever seen. Game reviewing is not the X-Files, sometimes a game just fails to catch with the people reviewing it. “Remorse for Final Fantasy XIII”? Lunacy. Most people barely even realized it was a Square-Enix game.
P.S. - Reviewing things is not journalism
-Valkyria Chronicles. It’s overrated, but still enjoyable if you can shake the notion it’s some brilliant design miracle.
It is scientifically impossible to overrate Valkyria Chronicles.
Completely true. FF13 is on my backlog list but I really can’t see finishing it ever. I think I got 3 hours into it and nothing clicked for me. Usually by that point there’s something that grabs me.
Also, I haven’t clicked on your link since I’m at work, but I’m really hoping that’s a link to the dialogue in Arc Rise Fantasia.
I echo the Final Fantasy XII recommendations. I like it so much I talked about it with Tom for ninety minutes on one of the podcasts here. I think it’s their best game despite the problems with it. It’s not perfect, but it’s my favorite and their best.
If you’re looking for a Square Enix RPG on your DS, you could do much worse than The World Ends With You. Wonderful little game.
I never had to force myself to finish the game like I had to with FFXII. I guess it’s because the battle system of XIII is actually fun once you get through the overly long tutorial. Still as far as RPG’s go, it’s pretty shitty.
FFXII had a battle system? All I recall was a screen with CASE statements and pushing a little boy and two bots around a desert for 40 hours while reading a bad Japanese rehash of Star Wars. Except Chewbacca was an improbably proportioned bunny-woman.
No, you’re right, combat in much of FF XII was trivial for any normal foe, excepting a few hunt foes and optional things. Moreover, you gained all the most important skills and powerups midway through the game, so there was nothing to look forward to after that.
I didn’t do any of the silly ultimate things in this game, just a modest number of optional things that were reasonably convenient to do, and I think in the final boss fight I didn’t take any damage at all. It was just 15 minutes of looking at his awesome FX not hurting me and slowly pecking away at his ridiculous number of hit points.
But the first half of the game, before you get all uber and before the story completely disappears and they forget about everything except “next dungeon this way” isn’t bad. The characters are vastly better than the ones in FF XIII, and you feel like you are in a world instead of a ride on rails. Then, apparently because they fired the original creative director halfway through, all that cool stuff vanishes and you are just going from one place to another mechanically annihilating everything that stands against you.
I just got a 360 a week and a half ago and FFXIII was one of the first three games I bought (courtesy of the buy 2 get 1 free deal at gamestop). I played through Fable II first, and liked it pretty well, despite it being a much smaller game than I expected. Now I’m playing FFXIII. I’m about 7 hours in and I really like the combat system, the frequent dialogs are a little annoying, but I’m most bothered by all the redundant button presses I have to do to advance. Maybe I was just spoiled by XII, but I find the need to press A twice to get out of ever post-combat screen really obnoxious. Especially since I can’t do it strait away and have to wait a second or two before it will acknowledge the button press. The whole notion of switching to a battle screen is absurd when the game is clearly using the same level and models as it was during navigation, so why waste my time bluring the screen before switching to combat…
I also really hate having to press a button after loading a save but before it actually loads. Same silly UI crap that bothered me about The Last Remnant. If I’ve elected to load a save and I’m to the point where there is no option other than to finish loading that save, you don’t have to stop and wait for another button press to continue doing what I’ve already asked.
I still think FFXIII has a much better combat system then it gets credit for, but it does so much else wrong that I can’t blame people for just tossing the entire thing in the bin. It’s not the worst game on the market. It’s not even in the top worst JRPGs published on the 360/PS3 by Square-Enix this generation (thanks Star Ocean and Infinite Undiscovery and FFXIV.) It’s still pretty damn flawed.
Resonance of Fate is a much better game. Its biggest problem overall is that a lot of the best parts of the mechanics don’t really shine until you reach higher difficulty levels or harder areas. It’s still very well put together, although the plot is completely incoherent.
Valkyria Chronicles is a really nice combat system that is utterly ruined by the atrocious scoring system and poorly-balanced abilities. The mechanics that are interesting and fun to use are the exact opposite of what the game expects you to, and all the most optimal tactics involve blunt-force tactics that are the opposite of fun. You can kinda shoehorn VC into a fun game, but it involves intentionally limiting yourself so much that it feels pointless and the game nukes your score and rewards for it anyway.
Hold onto your potatoes, because there’s no way to sugarcoat this one - Bayonetta is one of the most dramatic Face-Offs we’ve ever had to do. On Xbox 360, it is a magnificent game, as our import review testifies. On PS3, it looks like an Xbox 360 exclusive that has been dragged unwilling, kicking and screaming across the divide.
…
The crux of the matter is that the PlatinumGames team has created a game engine that targets all the things that the Xbox 360 architecture does well, to the point where it’s almost as if the core development was on similar lines to a first-party exclusive. Indeed, Bayonetta is technically more ambitious than many of Microsoft’s own titles this year.
As it is, the layering of transparencies, the sheer amount of them all over the screen, plus the added overhead of post-processing - it’s the sort of thing that you shouldn’t really be making central to the game experience in a multi-platform release, because the PS3 hardware just doesn’t compete in this regard. Short of completely rewriting the game in the way that Tecmo did for the PS3 rendition of Ninja Gaiden 2, Bayonetta is always going to have problems. Even if the overdraw (transparency upon transparency) levels were reduced, the sheer amount of effects on-screen at any given point is never going to favour the RSX.
So, if the conversion work is disappointing, how about the game itself as a whole? It’s fair to say that the performance you see in the PS3 demo is pretty much akin to the game running on its very best terms: it can get a whole lot worse. Just enough of the magic of PlatinumGames’ insane Xbox 360 original has made it across to make it an enjoyable experience, but it’s still a bit like watching Star Wars on DVD and then moving across to VHS; once you’ve been spoiled with the superior version, you can never go back. It’s also difficult to recommend the game in this state when PS3 owners have the likes of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Devil May Cry 4 as potential alternatives. They might not have the sheer conceptual ingenuity of Bayonetta, but they don’t have the compromises either.
…
I don’t have a PS3 so I don’t know if patches have alleviated some of the issues since that face-off.
That’s an overreaction. If the alternative, buying an X360 to play Bayonetta, is not going to happen, playing it on a PS3 is still an excellent experience, despite occasional framerate stutters. Telling people that they should not play Bayonetta is bad advice in my book, as the game’s brilliance crushes the annoyance under its giant hairy heel.
