Final Fantasy XIII (2009)

So I like to give chances to games I heard were bad, I'm in an anime mood, and the sequel just dropped on Gamepass.

I am playing Final Fantasy XIII. It being a hallway walking simulator is not an exaggeration.

I do like the combat, sometimes. It's pretty high octane for something that just barely isn't turn based. It's a very pretty game for a 360 game. The story makes little sense about 6 or so hours in, and I doubt it will any time soon. The lack of "downtime," so to speak, going to a town, talking to an NPC, really hurts the worldbuilding and makes it seem haphazard. The characters... Eh? I like Sazh the most, even if he's a caricature. Lady Cloud is fun (I've got a soft spot for my grumpy anime lads and lasses out there), Snow is boring, Hope is just kind of there, and Vanille is probably very cold and has a very strange voice direction.

It's pretty mindless so far, not particularly great, but definitely not a pile of shit, as I've been led to believe. Little boring, gives MGS a run for it's money in the cutscenes dept, doesn't seem super deep. It's alright so far. To be fair, I am playing it on Gamepass, for "free" so I imagine if I was a super fan, bought it day one for sixty bucks, I would be incredibly disappointed.

LMAO!! Two Years After Microsoft’s Promise, FFXIII Finally Comes To Game Pass

Of course I bought it a couple months back, and of course it's now hitting Game Pass.

No regrets though, I thoroughly enjoyed replaying it and I'm happy I own it. I won't complain if they bring XIII-2 and Lightning Returns to Game Pass, however.

This is why I seldom buy anything for Xbox, because it all comes to game Pass. It's the one console I own that is almost entirely designed upon the concept of renting games.

OK that's it, i'm joining the dropped-ffxiii-club. Halfway through chapter 7 i decided this is the last chapter i'm playing (mostly because i'm a sucker for them steam achievements), and near the end of chapter 7 there's this huge ship that you have to fight and it was beating me so bad i figured i had to lose that fight same as another fight earlier in the same chapter. nope. Turns out the ship just came out of murder town and stole the recipe for whoop-ass while it was there. I'm not enjoying the gameplay so far so i won't give the ship a second shot, i'll just finish watching the story on youtube and move on to Yakuza Kiwami or Metro Exodus.

Almost 20 hours in and i decided to change the voice language to japanese, so now one of the two things that i've been disliking about the game is solved (can't do anything about the weapon upgrading system though, sadly), but then i got to fight against flanitors and i'm hating it again. How do you kill these things? i'm just running past them or using deceptisol to avoid them.

Edit: nevermind, i just managed to kill a couple of them, but they're VERY annoying.

Back in 2010 I was playing FFXIII and made it to the Barthandelus fight and got my ass handed to me. I was having trouble figuring out the best paradigms for the fight and it wasn’t going well. I took a break and decided to revisit it in a couple days. A few days later my PS3 wouldn’t start up. I ended up having to send my console in to Sony for repair (turned out to be a faulty BlueRay player). Sony instructed me to remove my HDD before shipping if I was worried about data loss. So I did. However they had to completely replace my unit with a new one and given PS3s encrypt their jar drives using an encryption code specific to each unit, my hard drive wouldn’t boot. I had to wipe and start from scratch. Sadly I didn’t yet have cloud saves and I foolishly thought hanging on to the HDD was enough to secure my game save files. I was wrong and was forced to start FFXIII all over again.

I bring this up because last night I beat Barthandelus, bringing me to the anniversary of the time I lost all my PlayStation game saves.