Final Fantasy XIII (2009)

apprehensive camaraderie: the forging of emotional bonds, openhearted declarations and buried pains colliding interspace — intermittently punctured by swift, brutal state violence

its biggest strength lies in how it draws people as they walk the deadly stretch before them. their wishes & rage against the system forming a violent storm: desperation, hopelessness, defiance — vengeance. it all registers as something raw and believable. it made my heart swell.

sing each minute you've been frightened; every hour that you've lost sleep.
sing for all your friends and family; sing for those who didn't survive
but sing not for their final outcome; sing a song of how they tried

I bought this game on Steam sale some time ago and I didn’t know what to expect when I started playing. I started off looking forward to experience another instalment of FF franchise as I am always eager to find out how each game from the series mixes familiar elements to create a new system.

At first I was very pleased with the new combat system. It reduced micromanaging and all the least fun aspects of turn based RPGs, like healing up after battles or remembering how to attack each opponent. Assigning roles to characters gives them an outline on how to act from battles and it works really well most of the time but on the other hand, it feels like simplified FF12. There are also some trick battles where you wish you could choose their actions more precisely and the game lacks the feature to do so.

The game is only about battles and this fact makes it feel as work at times. I don’t complain about linearity in games but FF13 feels even more linear than FF10 where most locations are corridors. Here, the whole game is a corridor and there’s really no point to backtrack, at least before postgame. There are no real side quests, cities or villages or NPCs. You just push forward and beat enemies one by one, just to buy another character upgrades, which are limited so that you don’t get too powerful too early and to further cripple your party development, weapon upgrades are not really possible for most of the game and you can’t shop for anything either as you barely get any money. It feels like a longest introductory section ever or a PS3 Uncharted game stuck in a turn-based RPG’s games body rather than a real RPG game.

The game finally open ups shortly before the end, in the 10th chapter or so, where side-quests make their appearance. Don’t get your hopes up, though! All of them are to go to certain places and slay certain monsters, so you get to do the same thing you’ve been doing since the beginning of the game, plus, you have to run around and find the quests pretty much yourself because the interface for browsing them so useless, it prevented me from pursuing them. It is also not worth to grind too much because the fights are more about the strategy than the stats and grinding can’t save you from the difficulty pikes anyway.

The only reason to grind could be perhaps upgrades system, which allows you to use enemy drops to enhance your party’s gear. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well yeah, but I find the execution horrible. You must spend lots of drops to achieve final upgrades. By using certain items, you can make upgrading process faster and cheaper but the game does not hint you which items should be used and punishes for using the wrong ones. It doesn’t show you what will be the results of upgrading either. It is the most unclear system I have ever seen and without a guide from the internet, it fees like a lottery. Furthermore, you can only upgrade weapons until they get a star next to their names and to upgrade further, you need special items, which names or ways to get are not revealed to you in game.

Another lacklustre aspect of the game is storyline and storytelling. I’m not a fan of Nojima’s work but I try to give him a chance every time I play a game where he was involved. At the beginning, it is a bit better when it comes to characters and their motivations than in his previous games but it gets worse as the story progresses. At the beginning I could take the characters seriously but by the time when a coconut fell from a palm tree onto Hope’s head, making him awaken his summon, it was pure slapstick comedy.

The storyline is pretty much FF10 adaptation, but all these dumb ‘Cee names make the it difficult to follow and perhaps that’s why they tried to push Datalog section so hard. They made an option in the menu whey explained the meanings of all there nonsense names as well as descriptions of events, characters and their feelings. On one hand, most of the games have such module these days and it is useful when you take a break from the game but on the other hand, FF13 displays icons to make you read the description of a cutscene you’ve just watched, as if they gave up on using cutscenes for storytelling and needed a wall of text to tell you what they were meant to say.

The best aspect of the game are for sure graphics, the PC version looks amazing even 10 years after the release. There are however downsides in this department as well. They were going for a cinematic look so hard, they made the camera move inertly. If the game wasn’t a straight corridor, this would have made it unplayable but luckily it didn’t disturb me for the most of the time.

Once I beat the game, I grew so tired of it that I uninstalled it immediately after beating the final boss. There’s no way to make me pull through the post game content. I might pick up XII-2 some day though, as I heard it is better than this one.

Poor story, gameplay, leveling, and combat decisions count up to one of the worst mainline Final Fantasy games I've played in my life. Why can't I control every party member, but I can control their actions? Why is just the party leader controllable but the auto-combat assigns the best possible combo anyways in a given situation? Why are there so many easy enemies, but stronger enemies and bosses have high HP/defence as a "difficulty"? If anything, just tedious.

Sorry to the 2 XIII fans but this truly is a game that is half-decent, but a bad Final Fantasy game.

This was my first Final Fantasy as a kid, so maybe I'm biased, but you know what? Fuck it, I love this game, and I'll die on that hill despite everyone else hating it. I remember crying at the ending when I first finished it, so that says something.

I fully accept that a lot of the criticism for Final Fantasy XIII is valid and understandable, but I maintain that a lot of it isn't - it became 'cool' to hate on XIII because everyone did back then, it was something you ragged on for Reddit upvotes, and the more it happened the less anyone was inclined to even give it a fair chance. They'll point to characters being insufferable with a complete lack of empathy - I remember the absolute brigade of loathing for Hope, a grieving child who just watched his mother die in front of him, and people calling him immature and annoying like the entire point of his arc wasn't to show him growing and healing past that. If I'd seen my mother violently killed in front of me at 14 years old, I highly doubt I'd have been as collected and capable as Hope is. I also remember everyone dragging Vanille's Australian accent and calling it fake, despite her VA being Australian.

The graphics are gorgeous, the character designs are excellent (which includes the background NPCs - have you seen Yuj?), the soundtrack is beautiful. I don't find the story convoluted or hard to follow at all, and honestly I don't fully understand where that criticism comes from; I actively enjoyed going through all the datalog entries and seeing how they changed and updated as I progressed the plot, but I didn't feel that I needed to read them in order to follow the basic events happening in front of me. As for the linearity, sure, it's linear - but linear doesn't mean bad, and it's no more linear than Final Fantasy X was. The only difference is that FFXIII doesn't disguise it. If you worship FFX as the "last great mainline title" but dismiss FFXIII as a "hallway simulator"...

The characters are perfectly likeable to me. My personal favourites were Sazh (I could talk for hours about how genuine and funny and paternal he is, and how much I love where his story goes throughout the game - that one scene with Vanille was chilling, even as I rationally knew he couldn't have done it), Snow (yes, I found his heroic bluster endearing), and Vanille (I think she's sweet and surprisingly complex). Another shoutout to Yuj, too - it may mostly be his character design that caught my eye, but I always enjoyed him popping up through the story. I love Serah, too, but that's mostly based on sequels, so I'll leave my thoughts on her for when I get to reviewing those.

My only real criticisms of the game are the lack of hub towns and the inability to choose your own party members for the first portion of the story (I forget how many chapters it takes to unlock).

As minor side notes, I love how the Crystarium level up screens look, and the sound design is great - I love the way your footsteps sound as you run across the crystal surface of Lake Bresha.

Let me preface this by saying this game (sequels included) is unbelievably pretty. Even for a game so old, the visuals are stunning and greatly appeal to the eye. Unfortunately, the gameplay and the story do not always match the visual beauty. I first tried to play this game all the way back in 2013 on the PS3. The linear path that the game forces you to take was almost more than I could stomach (I'd just played FF12, which goes the complete opposite direction). In response, the game was shelved for 7 years. Fast forward to 2020 and I gave the game (and the series) another go.

A Fascinating Cast

Okay, so this cast of characters is pretty great. Each character brings a unique personality to the story and I really appreciate the way that SE tried to make the personalities feel unique and genuine. The cut-scenes give a fun and inviting glimpse into the relationships that develop between these characters and you get a real sense that they care about one another as they face the challenges in the story. On the flipside, some of the dialogue is weird and disconnected. Characters respond to comments or provide body language that feels out of place and makes everything feel slightly weird or awkward. These moments weren't frequent, but there were enough of them to keep me slightly off balance when watching the interactions.

Learn or Be Destroyed

Seriously. The combat in this game will punish you with extreme prejudice if you don't learn the nuance of the mechanics. You can build your team to your playstyle (I often used Lightning, Fang, Vanille/Hope) and be successful, but you better understand how to use each character their various techniques or the game will reprimand you with a sound beating. This is 100% true of bosses, but in later chapters of the game, this will also be true for trash mob encounters. Setting up the right team, using the right group of Paradigms, and understanding how to stagger in the right moment is crucial. It also doesn't hurt to make sure you spend your points wisely when unlocking skills and stat boosts in the Crystarium. Master all of these things and your team will be devastating in battle. Fail to grasp them and it will be a painful slog from chapter to chapter.

Tenacity Wins

For me, the stunning visuals and the story were enough to propel me to the end of the game, but this title is not for the faint of heart. If you like open worlds, customizable characters and gameplay broken into variety, this is not the game for you. Most of the levels are linear and even when you hit the "Open World", it's not that open. There are no towns to visit, no real side quests of note and nothing to distract except maybe the hunting system, which is just more fighting against difficult opponents. A lot of the game is walking down the defined path, fighting increasingly difficult mobs, hoping to git gud before the chapter boss.

Worth It?

Yeah, despite all the pain points in this title, the overall story of Lightning, her sister Serah, and their cast of friends is epic and amazing In my humble opinion. If you love the tales that Square-Enix is known for weaving, it's worth playing the trilogy. This game sets the stage for a truly epic outcome at the end of Lightning Returns and I did not regret the time I invested in traversing this difficult series. It just takes a while to get to the end.

2/5

Played this on steam, with some graphics mods.

Tried to play along with Every FFnFF podcast. They were great.

The game, less so. Story is not interesting and not paced well. I was not able to care about any of the characters. Interesting battle system but not very satisfying to succeed. Progression systems are completely uninteresting. There is also no variation in gameplay. Overall probably my least favourite of the FF's I have played, unfortunately.

This game released in 2010? Maybe my brain is broken, but these graphics seem almost on par with the PS5 version of FF7R that I played recently. It definitely seems to share the exact generic-villager-NPC character model that hasn't been updated in Final Fantasy games since FFX.

Also.. people hate Snow? The reskinned Vaan/Tidus generic-K-Pop-boy Hope, sure -- I'd get that. But, my boy, Troy Baker? The pinnacle of videogame voice talent, Troy Baker?

I flipped through my guidebook and realized I am actually nearing the end of the game, because so much of Gran Pulse is meant for post-end game stuff.

The method for upgrading the items has finally clicked for me, but it is SO expensive. I do find it a bit annoying that the game pushes you to sort of pick 1 item to start upgrading, but then keeps giving new weapons even this late into the game. But, if I was replaying this anytime soon I would probably just save my money until I got the items that I knew I wanted to upgrade.

After my break, I am back on this game. With so much of the game opening up a lot of the strategy and need to grind level a bit is popping up. Not necessarily a bad thing, but every fight for a while has been hard!

I think I have a team I like, but I wish I could use Eidolan for more then just my party leader :/

About 18 hours in now. I am loving the development the characters are going through. Many characters who start off pretty annoying are having epiphanies that really feel earned over the hours spent with them.

I am really amazed how well written all the characters are, the only standout that I still am not sold on is Snow. Special props to Sazh for being such a fun and nuanced character.

What I loved:

• Fun battle system, I really like the paradigms and the way characters specialize in different things (and even the ones that specialize in the same areas still employ/learn them differently). Difficult battles require the right team, right paradigms, and good timing to win.
• The characters are great. Well fleshed out and unique. Very over-the-top as you'd expect from a JRPG, but still human.
• Visually stunning for a PS3 game. Seriously holds up against modern games still.

What I didn't love:

• Story is super complex and can't be picked up from dialog alone. Instead you have to read through a database of files to understand what happened. I still need to go back and re-read through the datalog as I'm actually not sure what happened in the end.
• Some boss/Eidolon battles are rage-quit inducing. Even with well leveled characters, equipment, and the right battle team and paradigms you still may lose to certain bosses more than you win. Unavoidable one-hit deaths can be really frustrating.
• The game rarely opens up. For me it was probably 35 hours of running through hallways (narrow map, no choices).

Overall I still really enjoyed the game.

I am about 9 hours in, and remembering why I really like this game.

Normally I prefer turn based combat; however, there is something about the combat of this game that flows incredibly well.

The visuals for it are stunning, I cannot believe it is as old as it is. It makes me extremely sad that when I first played it, it predated me having an HDMI cord or a nice tv, so I didn't get the full effect.

I know a major complaint of the story is that it's confusing, but I wonder if some of that is because it is trying to use more elegant narrative devices to tell it's story. Rather then front loading a lot of details OR going for a stereotypical plot, FF13 tries something I really like. Story beats trickle in, as we are forced to confront challenges to the party. Details about who the characters are, are left vague, and slowly filled in during flashbacks and them talking with each other. Honestly, I think it's pretty brilliant storytelling.

I'm really excited as I vaguely remember some of my favorite scenes are coming up and cannot wait.

So update maybe... 13 hours or so into Final Fantasy 13, here's a party member tier list at the point I'm at rn, just finished chapter 6.

S tier: Sazh. Man is all character development, the most grounded out of all the characters, and very useful in combat. Kind of turns into the comedic relief when he's hanging about with Lightning.

A tier: Lightning. She's Cloud, but girl. She's badass and seems to be going through an arc with Hope.

B tier: Hope. A lot of people think he's annoying but he's literally just a kid who lost his mom, driven by rage. I fuck with his arc so far.

C tier: Vanille. I don't know what she's doing here. It's pretty obvious she's from Pulse. I imagine I'll get more on her soon, but I don't get her motivation yet. She's kinda growing on me.

D tier: Snow. He's going to be important soon I guess. Haven't used him in a hot ass minute, with the story just reminding me that he exists every chapter.

So I realized what was up with Vanille's voice that I thought was odd. Her voice actress Australian, and I've literally never heard an Aussie Kawaii Girl. And... Speculation ahead if she's from Pulse (which I'm led to believe is a sort of underworld to Cocoon) like I think she is, that's the funniest fucking casting decision I've ever seen and I hope everyone from Pulse is Australian.

Some more thoughts, I really wish there was a town or something to visit and flesh out the world some. My main 3d FF experience is with Chipcheezum's fantastic let's play of FF7R and that had so much worldbuilding in just the little things like NPCs standing around blabbing to each other so the lack of any friendly NPCs kinda hurts.

The way that literally every single combination of paradigms has its own name is so cute and I love that.

Eidolon battles are rough and feel more like puzzles than battles. I appreciate the save points before hand.

Combat is actually very fun now that I'm getting the hang of switching paradigms and not just rocking one medic and one to two bruisers.

Overall I'm pleasantly surprised by this game and will probably play the sequels. And hey, lots of people say this is the nadir of the series, so nowhere but up to go from here lol

The plot of Final Fantasy XIII makes no sense. I was trying to figure it out the whole way through, watching every cutscene, skimming through the in-game encyclopedia, and reading additional material online. I'm still lost. Final Fantasy games are always a hard nut to crack, their worlds existing unto only themselves. In every iteration you are expected to digest an entire new universe of mythos, history, geography, etc. Final Fantasy XIII might just take the cake though. By using similar non-words like Fal'cie and L'cie as names for its central ideas, it is just inviting confusion. Not necessarily bad, but pair this with the fact that the main characters are a bunch of non-communicative anime stereotypes and, well, what you end up with is one of the most annoying and nonsensical plots ever to grace a JRPG. And that's saying something for the genre of games that is perhaps best known for its overwrought, melodramatic, and honestly, loony teenage-angst-meets-the-sci-fi-apocalypse yarns. (Xenosaga anyone?) I don't want to let this be the only sticking point of this review though because it's not all bad.

The battle system in particular, is extremely engaging and well done. It is at once, simpler and more complex than any Final Fantasy battle system to come before, and is fast, frenetic and usually satisfying. But the thing is, it had better be good because in this game, it's literally all you do. Gone are the mini-games, sidequests, optional dialogues, villages to explore, etc of previous games. In XIII, it's all about battles. You travel down a series of lovely corridors, occasionally picking up loot out of a treasure chest, you run into an enemy and then you battle. Then you sit through a cutscene where these emotionally dysfunctional kids try to figure out what's going on while spouting out a dense jargon peppered with agonizing catchphrases. (Let's create our own destinies you guys!)

I do have to say that this game took me over a year to complete. I played it off and on and that may have made the plot seem even more incoherent than it actually was. I'm saying that for the sake of fairness, but honestly, there's really not anything that made me hungry to keep playing. And it really is a shame, because I was ready to love this game. I really was. I would say up until the half-way point, I was pretty into it. Many RPGs start out restrictive and branch out later into the game. This one, as an intentional design choice, keeps the player exactly where they are supposed to be at all times. Had this game's narrative been more entertaining, I wouldn't have even minded. But if you are going to feed us a lousy anime story, don't make that the main course.

Es la segunda vez que intento pasarme este videojuego y también es la segunda que lo dejo a medias. La primera vez fue a las 25 horas, un poco triste por lo que pudo haber sido y no fue y en parte un poco a gusto con algunas mecanicas de juego. La segunda fue a las 11 horas, un poco más mosquedado y con ganas de desahogarme escribiendo un buen tocho (aunque lo lea solo yo). La gente tiende a describir este juego como lieneal y pasillero ( yo entre ellos), pero el concepto, creo yo, no solo se aplica a lo lineales que son los mapas sino a todas y cada una de las mecánicas de este juego. Esto es lo mas Anti-JRPG que me tirado a la cara. Un juego donde no se puede farmear (que es una de las bases del género), las batallas no significan nada ni para nosotros como jugador, ni para los personajes dentro de la narrativa. Creo que es un juego de su época, con una Square Enix subida por los cielos y con una prepotencia desmedida, era cuestión de tiempo de que alguien le bajara los humos o , en este caso, ellos mismo se cayeron con el peso de su arrogancia.

MIS PROBLEMAS CON EL JUEGO:

- Progresión: Es muuuuy lineal y se nota mucho más cuando en el género en el que estás es el "JRPG". Los presonajes no son los que suben de nivel sino que son las armas y las habilidades (Crystarium). El problema viene en la forma que quiere el juego que subas esos niveles. Volviendo el juego aún mas lineal que los pasillos que recorremos durante las primeras 30 horas de juego, me explico: En este juego las batallas son por turnos como tradicionalmente se hacía en la saga , pero ahora, curiosamente al ganarlas ya no te dan experiencia y dinero sino que simplemente que te dan puntos de experiencia para el Crystarium, que se usan para subir posteriormente las habilidades y de forma lineal ya que el juego va desbloqueando niveles del Crystarium mientras avanzas por la historia, volviédo los combates inútiles e impidiendo una de las bases del género com lo es el FARMEAR experiencia. ¿Y el dinero? JAJAJA. Para ganar dinero en este juego tienes que vender cuanta mierda te encuntres en el juego porque no hay otra forma (al menos yo no la vi). Lo gracioso es que es muy importante para avanzar ya que con dinero compras los objetos para mejorar las armas y sin estos tus armas son insignificante, durando nada en un combate contra el jefe de turno. Me he visto más de una vez atascado en una zona ya que no tenía el dinero para mejorar las armas y como los combates no te lo dan pues... FUCKED!!

... Aún tengo muchos más problemas con el juego pero no me quiero alargar de más sino ni el yo del futuro querrá leer esta basofia. Apesar de todo lo malo, un par de cosas no me desagradaron. Los combates, aun siendo lineales, dan mucho juego con las barra de vulnerabilidad en enemigos (que luego mejorarían en el Remake de FFVII) y las formaciones que se pueden crear en base a las habilidades combinadas de los protagonistas. Eso al menos convirtió los combates en algo divertidos (aunque igual de innecesários y repetitivos). La historia no me disgustó del todo (aunque la terminé de ver por Youtube) y seguiré defendiendo a Lightning como una buena protagonista y de los mejor que ha diseñado Nomura en su vida (ok no XD, pero me gusta mucho). No soy persona a la que le guste de fijarse en lo malo de [ inserte cualquier cosa ] de hecho , cuando me paso algún videojuego suelo centrarme en sus cosas buenas y ver si estas son capaces de hacer que pase por alto según que fallos (por eso FFXV me gusta mucho). En este caso no he podido hacer la vista gorda ya que los fallos de Final Fantasy XIII opino que no son obviables, estan muy presentes cada hora de juego.

This game has always had a kind of unfortunate reputation. Of course not without reason, as FFXIII is definitely on the subpar end of the series. But before I dropped it I found more interesting things under the surface that save the game from ultimately being considered as bad as it is.

For starters, I think the combat is genuinely well put together, using stagger and elements entirely built on encouraging and utilizing this stagger system. It ends up being a more fun to utilize system than most FF games beforehand, with ATB 'charges' actually used to good resource effect. Some of the boss fights end up becoming sorta elegant puzzles in terms of figuring out which paradigms to use at any given point.

The music is also rather well done, and the aesthetic has actually aged rather well, with many delights visually in store. Granted, the color palette is a tiny bit washed out, and upscaling doesn't do it the best either.

But ultimately, FFXIII fails to be a fun to play gameplay-focused game, because the vast majority of enemy encounters are worse than even FFX's, with countless easy to win battles and stagger combos bordering on brainless. Auto-battle makes things even more revealed, literally showcasing how some elements are so easily optimized. The game probably in the latter end gives you more fun tools in store but after several hours I can say it didn't go much further up than its use of Paradigms.

The story and characters are also complete trash dumpster fires, of which is a no brainer now but needs to be said. There is no excusing this writing, especially when if you actively look into the super interesting lore it makes the ruined potential here more overbearing. Dialogue is completely unnatural and delivery is awful, characters are asinine and simple, and major worldbuilding threads are handled with just as much care as a cat makes around a shelve of vases.

Skip it and move on to the rest of the trilogy, which I'd 100% argue is way more worth your time than this. (4.5/10)

Final Fantasy XIII is not a good game. The story is poorly delivered and makes little sense unless you refer to the Datalog. The characters constantly speak in non sequiturs. The first TWENTY hours is a series of hallways mixed with tutorials. Side characters are introduced, only to quickly disappear or reappear after dozens of hours. The CGI cutscenes feel out of place introducing gameplay ideas, settings and environments not found in the actual game. The item upgrade system is barely explained but necessary to pursue. The latter half of the game feels like a giant waste of time with optional monster hunt quests and regular enemies with ridiculous health pools. The whole game lacks a solid vision and feels like a combination of several rejected Final Fantasy games.

There are some good parts to this game. The presentation is absolutely gorgeous. The environments pop with color and detail that few games truly succeed in. The graphics are still impressive even after 9 years of the PS3 release. The music doesn’t reach the highs in the series but the main theme and its’ multiple remixes are enjoyable to listen to. And then… there’s the gameplay.

The gameplay is an evolution of the Jobs system found in FFX-2 called the Paradigm system. The Paradigm system allow each character to dynamically swap from 6 roles while in combat: Commander (phy dps), Ravager (mag dps), Sentinel (tank), Synergist (buffs), Saboteur (debuffs) and Medic (healer). The game is mostly automated. Your 2 party members will always use skills based on their paradigm role and the character you control is mostly going to use the Auto-Battle choice. I found the system quite fun as it cuts out the boring bits of RPG gameplay such as healing characters that are low in health or treating characters with status ailments. I would switch to a healing Paradigm and let my characters do the work. This game emphasizes the importance on the strategic team decision making and character building over selecting individual moves and skills.

I cannot recommend Final Fantasy XIII even at its’ best moments. The story and characters are a complete disappointment. The optional quests were boring. The whole game felt like a complete waste of time. This is my least favorite Final Fantasy and I think is even worse than the hot garbage that is FFX-2. There is something wrong, when my most memorable part about this game is not the story, not the characters but the Paradigm system.