Final Fantasy 13 (PC) (Computer)
User Review

Name: Final Fantasy 13 (PC)
Item: Final Fantasy 13 (PC)
Rating: 6.2
Author: CathyRina

VartioArtel · Jun 27, 2015

I would take this seriously... if it didn't overexplode all the bad parts. Not overplay them, nah, it overexploded 'em.

I'd go into details, but the phrase "haters going to hate" wouldn't describe it to this guy. His review's a lot of insults and exaggerations but little content. He seems to have completely missed or misunderstood the storyline going on. (And that's no pope).

NOTE/EDIT: I am not saying the game's perfect by far, but by roughly... I think it's chapter 2 or 3, there's a number of side paths. While it's mostly one hallway admittably, it's more akin to a 3D version of most NES/SNES games - one giant hallway in most buildings/dungeons with a few side rooms. And when you get outside the place is free and wi- wait a minute why aren't we chewing about FF4 again? Babel's almost entirely one giant bloody hallway (...that for a couple years I had memorized to the step)

CathyRina · Jun 27, 2015

VartioArtel said:
I would take this seriously... if it didn't overexplode all the bad parts. Not overplay them, nah, it overexploded 'em.

Trust me I did hold back. I didn't mentioned the Eidolons or how the whole L'cie premise, by not telling people what their focus is, is stupid.
I also wanted to focus on Chapter 11 more because it's in my opinion by far the best chapter but thanks to a bug I lost motivation to keep doing these missions.
I agree that I underplayed the goods of this game but keep in mind I'm still a rookie Reviewer and am still learning how to write better.

VartioArtel said:
I'd go into details, but the phrase "haters going to hate" wouldn't describe it to this guy. His review's a lot of insults and exaggerations but little content. He seems to have completely missed or misunderstood the storyline going on.

I did say that the story makes much more sense if you read the Datalog. The thing is in a videogame you shouldn't have do that to understand what's going on.
I wanted to care about whats going on with Rosh or Raines or even Team Nora. But the game does so little with these characters that I couldn't.
There is a reason why the cast of main characters was this small in FF13-2 and why Neol and Caius had direct relationship with each other and why the supporting characters were mainly characters that were already featured in FF13. They also improved the gameplay by adding blood damage and by making many optional bosses through the Colosseum and DLC.
I will be reviewing FF13-2 at some point but certainly not on PC. By that my writing skills might improve enough for me be more neutral.

VartioArtel said:
NOTE/EDIT: I am not saying the game's perfect by far, but by roughly... I think it's chapter 2 or 3, there's a number of side paths. While it's mostly one hallway admittably, it's more akin to a 3D version of most NES/SNES games - one giant hallway in most buildings/dungeons with a few side rooms. And when you get outside the place is free and wi- wait a minute why aren't we chewing about FF4 again? Babel's almost entirely one giant bloody hallway (...that for a couple years I had memorized to the step)

I don't remember FF4 well so I won't comment on that. But the thing is Hallways aren't bad unless the're done wrong. Look at FFX for example. That game was full with hallways. However the levels had much more stuff to do for the player. Not to mention you could go and play blitzball if you get tired of the story and resume whenever you want. And sure Blitzball was a flawed minigame but there are people who enjoyed it. The thing is that there is so little variety in level design that after 10 hours the game felt like it dragged on for way too long. Then Chapter 11 happened and I was glad I was playing the game. After Chapter 11 I really didn't cared about Chapter 12's level structure and Chapter 13 wasn't a hallway, it was a really good final Chapter from a gameplay perspective.

Keep in mind that the score is only so low because I'm reviewing the PC port. On Consoles I'd probably given it a 7/10.
I'm sorry if I upset you. It was not my intention. I just stated my subjective opinion on the game and did a poor job at it.

Hyro-Sama · Jun 27, 2015

Hallway Generator XIII sucks. This is a generous score, if anything.

codezer0 · Jun 27, 2015

I had a friend give me try to give me this game for free on the 360. But I couldn't even bring myself to put it in its disc tray and forever have the stain of that game on my profile.

roseputter · Jun 28, 2015

I played the first few chapters on my laggy laptop and still enjoyed it, until I got a PS3

I'm not a massive FF man, but this game does seem to give less of a Final Fantasy feel from what I know... too much mech maybe

Either way, I resonate well with this game and enjoy it's characters and gameplay, which is all like one long cutscene!

endoverend · Jun 28, 2015

Final Hallway 13

chavosaur · Jun 28, 2015

Another fanASTIC review Xros, I love reading your stuff~

Dan_Tsukasa · Jun 28, 2015

This game took a while to grow on me, and by the time it did I really liked it, but mostly for its lore/world, I still dislike most of the characters even now, X-2 might have had shoddy characters and a silly time travel plot, but the gameplay was much better.

I'd like to touch on a few points here though.

The form of attacks are chosen automatically for you so you don't have much to do outside of pressing the confirm button really often and occasionally changing the strategies of your team. There's really not much challenge to it.

For the majority of the game I'd agree with this, there are one or 2 story centric bosses that require a little more strategy but thats it for the plot.

The hunts however, those require strategy, several in particular will destroy you even if you've got maxed crystarium, top stats, top weapons and great items, they take quite a lot of strategy and are difficult, but they're optional, so much so that you could finish the game without even knowing they existed.

The Crystarium is your means of leveling your characters. It's very similar to the Sphere Grid in FFX but much more limited and streamlined. I found it to be okay but leveling all six classes for all six characters is a really heavy grind.

The crystarium as a system is pretty solid, quite comparable to the sphere grid, but for such a long time you're forced into certain paths, I think the game would have faired much better if you could chose your own path from early on, people would have quite different gameplay experiences based on what they chose to learn, plus those who like to master EVERYTHING could do and have an easy game, FFX still put barriers up fairly often, but I think it did it in a smarter way than FFXIII, FFX's didn't feel linear even when it was, X did well with the illusion of options, XIII didn't bother lying to you at all, even to make you feel good.

I don't think that having to grind everything for every character is a gripe honestly, think back to any JRPG, in order to learn all the moves and spells required grinding, because its optional, you didn't need to do it, i still did but yeah.

My biggest issue with the system is that characters got points whether they lived, died or even if they weren't in your party, meaning the first few minutes of switching characters you'd just spend jumping about the crystarium levelling everyone up each time.

For example you can notice some CGI-cutscenes that render ingame character models with higher textures and more flashy graphic effects which gives you the illusion of not being able to tell if what you see are the graphics or CGI cutscenes

I understand what you were trying to say here, but I think it needs rewriting, you can't say some of the CGI cutscnes were disguised not to look like CGI cutscenes, it'd be better to say that some of the ingame cutscenes use higher quality models. It doesn't give you the illusion of anything though, even on console its very clear whats pre-rendered and whats not.

Though even this sort of gets my back up, because thats what almost every game does, Tomb Raider, Gears of war, FFX, FFXII, even the later FFXIII games, I can think of few games that don't do this honestly. Why waste memory on details that you just don't see during the gameplay, it'd slow things down and just be pointless. On PC its not so much of an issue but on console the logic was perfectly sound, and is the reason the majority of games do it.

They also used a lot of 2D panorama pictures for their surrounding, which looks blurry when viewed upclose on a PC. Giving you the illusion of not knowing if what you see are the graphics or prerendered 2D image

They certainly did, though I'd say the vast majority of them aren't noticeable, nor can you get upclose to any of them, I'm curious what ones you managed to get super up-close to, and how (if its just normal gameplay or if you toyed with camera settings for example).

I'd say the plot in this game is actually good, but its told terribly, it could be really engaging if organized properly, I think part of the issue is that you're meant to be as confused as the party are, but due to all the terminology, for ages you're more confused than they ever are.

He is your stereotypical pope who wants to burn everything to revive a god while using his religious position to not draw any suspicion.

Except that he's also one of the gods (I'm using this term losely here). Its not about reviving a god at all, its about opening the doorway to the realm the god resides in.

In short he wants to cause so much destruction in 1 moment that the souls of the departed cause a rift to open up as they pass on into the afterlife, this is very similar to Sephiroth in FF7 and Kuja in FF9, except neither of those 2 are gods created by a larger god and abandoned like unwanted children who just want to see their mother again.

Though it was a good review, quite in depth and deserved an indepth response.

CathyRina · Jun 28, 2015

Dan_Tsukasa said:
My biggest issue with the system is that characters got points whether they lived, died or even if they weren't in your party, meaning the first few minutes of switching characters you'd just spend jumping about the crystarium levelling everyone up each time.

That's a non issue in my opinion. I was more frustrated with the game over when the party leader dies even though 2 other characters are still alive. I believe they fixed that in FFXIII-2

Dan_Tsukasa said:
They certainly did, though I'd say the vast majority of them aren't noticeable, nor can you get upclose to any of them, I'm curious what ones you managed to get super up-close to, and how (if its just normal gameplay or if you toyed with camera settings for example).

I was probably unclear about this. I meant that on consoles you're far away from the TV so you won't notice that there are 2D panoramas. On PC you sit like a meter or so away from the Monitor so you can see the blurriness of the 2D Panoramas very easily.

Dan_Tsukasa said:
Except that he's also one of the gods (I'm using this term losely here). Its not about reviving a god at all, its about opening the doorway to the realm the god resides in.

In short he wants to cause so much destruction in 1 moment that the souls of the departed cause a rift to open up as they pass on into the afterlife, this is very similar to Sephiroth in FF7 and Kuja in FF9, except neither of those 2 are gods created by a larger god and abandoned like unwanted children who just want to see their mother again.

No, that's the retcon that was made for FFXIII-2 to turn the series into a trillogy. Originally FF13 wasn't meant to be a trillogy but Square got a little budget problem after FF14 sucked so they decided to make 2 cheaper sequels. At least that's what my Square Enix fanatic friend claims. In FFXIII alone Barthandelus plan was to revive the god (or better said the maker) so that he can build a new, better world, or at least that's what he admits his plan is. It's a pretty nice Metaphor for what FFXV is. I don't remember what exactly they retconed but I'll look it up once I do my FFXIII-2 review.

Dan_Tsukasa · Jun 28, 2015

XrosBlader821 said:
That's a non issue in my opinion. I was more frustrated with the game over when the party leader dies even though 2 other characters are still alive. I believe they fixed that in FFXIII-2

I was probably unclear about this. I meant that on consoles you're far away from the TV so you won't notice that there are 2D panoramas. On PC you sit like a meter or so away from the Monitor so you can see the blurriness of the 2D Panoramas very easily.

No, that's the retcon that was made for FFXIII-2 to turn the series into a trillogy. Originally FF13 wasn't meant to be a trillogy but Square got a little budget problem after FF14 sucked so they decided to make 2 cheaper sequels. At least that's what my Square Enix fanatic friend claims. In FFXIII alone Barthandelus plan was to revive the god (or better said the maker) so that he can build a new, better world, or at least that's what he admits his plan is. It's a pretty nice Metaphor for what FFXV is. I don't remember what exactly they retconed but I'll look it up once I do my FFXIII-2 review.

You might be correct here. I just remember reading a lot about the worlds lore, and its history (from the datalogs and also from the released novellas etc) If you remember that all the other Fal'cie on Pulse are doing thing because they're searching for Etro (the Maker) it actually makes perfect sense. Ie: The fal'cie that digs a lot is digging around searching for Etro, no longer is it just terraforming like its supposed to.

FFX-2 did retcon the originals ending (which I really disliked it doing) but it didn't change any character motivations or anything, those were still mentioned in XIII itself and in various interviews with developers and so on. I remember getting really into the lore (because the game has fantastic and massivly underutilized lore) and this really stood out to me (and helped the game make a bit more sense honestly). The only retcon FFXIII-2 bough was to the final few seconds of XIIIs ending, nothing more. Anything else is a different timeline and doesn't reflect what happened in FF13 at all.

They're tasked with finding Etros Gate by Lindzei (which is mentioned in FFXIII by vanile in a datalog or something), this is just the games biggest problem, all the motivations are there, all the logic is there, but you're expected to read all the novellas and the short history lesson they provided back in 2011. And also I realized I'm wrong, Etro is actually dead, however she resides in the land of the dead, where the souls go, so I guess it is reviving her by pulling her out of the land of the dead afterall.

GameSystem · Jun 29, 2015

I'm playing through XIII-2 on PC at the moment, so I understand the control issues. They don't fix them either. If you want to remap the buttons, you have to download and install "vJoy" which is a virtual joypad, and then download and run "ujr" which is a tool that takes your actual controller inputs and maps them to the virtual joypad. It's working for me pretty well. If you want to know what the button layout is to fix XIII, let me know and I'll post a picture. Also, I'm glad that you aren't going to play XIII-2 on PC. It's horribly ported. I get 9-15 FPS in the overworld and ~20 in battle. My FPS used to be 4-6 until I downloaded a user made patch that fixes something in the game that purposely limits your FPS. Two times the game liked me and I hit like 50 FPS in Oerba and the Steppe. You have to be super far away from NPCs though.

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