Oh boy, where to begin? I played this game for the first time in 2010 on my PlayStation 3 and hated it. As a Final Fantasy fan, who wants to play all the mainline games eventually, I’ve tried it again a few years later. Still hated it. In 2023, 13 years (what a coincidence?) later, I bought the PC version to give it a final try. I installed some mods because without them the game has severe performance issues that never got fixed. After a bit of fiddling around everything ran smoothly with my DualSense 5 controller in modern resolutions. The game still looks great. The artstyle and music are probably the biggest pros of the game.
Friends were preaching to me that “it gets good after 20 hours”. I’ve never made it to the 20 hours mark before, but this time, I finished the game after 50 hours. Was it worth it? No. The game does not get “good” after 20 hours. Will it get better? Well, not really. It just trades incredibly narrow corridor levels against a somewhat confusing open-ish world structure. The world is still barren and empty and uninteresting. There are no NPCs, no towns, no points of real interest. Just random enemy mobs roaming the lands. Some that will one-hit you without warning. And speaking statues that give you MMORPG-like quests.
But these aren’t even the greatest issues of the game. The story is a nonsensical mess that throws gibberish at you at a maddening pace. The characters are bland and boring. The combat system is mostly automated where you give roles to each character between fights. Then you can change between these roles during combat. It’s complicated and messy and hard to follow. But basically switch to healer and defender roles when low on health and to offensive roles when at full health. There are also roles to buff your team and weaken the enemies.
Then there are both the trash levelling and crafting systems. Levelling works through points you invest in a sphere grid like structure. But this time it is almost 100% linear. It also is visually extremely confusing. But basically you just follow a linear line and unlock new skills and permanent attribute upgrades for the characters. There is a limit per chapter. Only through beating the next boss you advance into higher tiers of the grid effectively capping the maximal power you can achieve per chapter. This leads to another problem of the game: Stupid difficulty spikes. Normal enemies are mostly easy, but some of the bosses demand some very specific strategies and setups which can lead to trial and error and a lot of frustration.
Another way to get stronger is the crafting system. And this is yet another strike of idiocy in terms of game design. Another convoluted mess of a system that I won’t explain in detail here. Just google it if you plan to play the game and don’t want to mess up your weapon crafting and grind forever for materials.
All in all, Final Fantasy 13 is easily the worst mainline FF game I’ve beaten. Even the massive disappointment that Final Fantasy 16 was is better than this mess. The only game worse in the series might be Final Fantasy 2 which I have never played too far. But that also came up with some let us call it "interesting" systems for an RPG.
Friends were preaching to me that “it gets good after 20 hours”. I’ve never made it to the 20 hours mark before, but this time, I finished the game after 50 hours. Was it worth it? No. The game does not get “good” after 20 hours. Will it get better? Well, not really. It just trades incredibly narrow corridor levels against a somewhat confusing open-ish world structure. The world is still barren and empty and uninteresting. There are no NPCs, no towns, no points of real interest. Just random enemy mobs roaming the lands. Some that will one-hit you without warning. And speaking statues that give you MMORPG-like quests.
But these aren’t even the greatest issues of the game. The story is a nonsensical mess that throws gibberish at you at a maddening pace. The characters are bland and boring. The combat system is mostly automated where you give roles to each character between fights. Then you can change between these roles during combat. It’s complicated and messy and hard to follow. But basically switch to healer and defender roles when low on health and to offensive roles when at full health. There are also roles to buff your team and weaken the enemies.
Then there are both the trash levelling and crafting systems. Levelling works through points you invest in a sphere grid like structure. But this time it is almost 100% linear. It also is visually extremely confusing. But basically you just follow a linear line and unlock new skills and permanent attribute upgrades for the characters. There is a limit per chapter. Only through beating the next boss you advance into higher tiers of the grid effectively capping the maximal power you can achieve per chapter. This leads to another problem of the game: Stupid difficulty spikes. Normal enemies are mostly easy, but some of the bosses demand some very specific strategies and setups which can lead to trial and error and a lot of frustration.
Another way to get stronger is the crafting system. And this is yet another strike of idiocy in terms of game design. Another convoluted mess of a system that I won’t explain in detail here. Just google it if you plan to play the game and don’t want to mess up your weapon crafting and grind forever for materials.
All in all, Final Fantasy 13 is easily the worst mainline FF game I’ve beaten. Even the massive disappointment that Final Fantasy 16 was is better than this mess. The only game worse in the series might be Final Fantasy 2 which I have never played too far. But that also came up with some let us call it "interesting" systems for an RPG.