just beat this again for the 3rd time. i never beat games more than once so there's clearly something that works enough to constantly bring me back to this weird, divisive entry.
the combat system in 13 is so fucking good. maybe when the game came out it was percieved as very 'hallway, press a to win', but as time went on and the game got a PC release and the game's detractors actually bothered playing it, it's pretty obviously far more complicated then that. rather than picking skills to use on enemies like every fucking game ever made, you pick "general party makeups" that can autofight - a bit like a hyper-focused corner-cutting version of the Gambit system introduced in Final Fantasy XII. but if you do NEED that more optimal gameplay, fuckn pick Fire. go for it! pick your skills manually. bosses, specifically later game ones (it's a hard sell), end up feeling like strategy games a lot, with scenarios like "oh if i just had someone debuffing with this specific party I'd be taking less damage, meaning less time healing, meaning more time doing damage, meaning yadda yadda
another problem people have is that the opening 20 hours is effectively a tutorial for the open world expanse of Chapter 11 - Gran Pulse... yea maybe. sort of. I think it's more just the fact that the ungodly grind of it all is the result of people not knowing cheeky little exploits you can use to make everything a bit less shit. you can grind for buffing items for like 20 minutes in Chapter 2 and make your next 100 hours a little bit less fucking awful. you can use the 'stealth' buff item to sneak past enemies, then re-engage them in combat, retry the fight and you've successfully snuck past the encounter without using your Deceptisol. cheeky. good fun.
the plot starts off good, characters are great. real. but as soon as you get to like chapter 10, and the general plot starts to sort of reveal itself it starts to come apart at the seams. random concepts and bad guys start to get introduced beyond a 'vignette' almost 20 hours in. and that 20 hours might SOUND like "half of a 40 hour game" but its more like 80%, because you spend the next 15 hours playing 'the game' ie. the open world bit before returning back to linearity. and I like the linearity but the open world segment is undeniably light on plot. like there's zero plot.
whatever, ignore the plot. who cares. ff13 is one of the most interesting combat experiences in an RPG outside of like Resonance of Fate but where RoF fails in dense complexity, ff13 succeeds in simple complexity. i don't know if that makes sense. i think it makes sense. it's very more-ish though. one of my favourite RPGs.
the combat system in 13 is so fucking good. maybe when the game came out it was percieved as very 'hallway, press a to win', but as time went on and the game got a PC release and the game's detractors actually bothered playing it, it's pretty obviously far more complicated then that. rather than picking skills to use on enemies like every fucking game ever made, you pick "general party makeups" that can autofight - a bit like a hyper-focused corner-cutting version of the Gambit system introduced in Final Fantasy XII. but if you do NEED that more optimal gameplay, fuckn pick Fire. go for it! pick your skills manually. bosses, specifically later game ones (it's a hard sell), end up feeling like strategy games a lot, with scenarios like "oh if i just had someone debuffing with this specific party I'd be taking less damage, meaning less time healing, meaning more time doing damage, meaning yadda yadda
another problem people have is that the opening 20 hours is effectively a tutorial for the open world expanse of Chapter 11 - Gran Pulse... yea maybe. sort of. I think it's more just the fact that the ungodly grind of it all is the result of people not knowing cheeky little exploits you can use to make everything a bit less shit. you can grind for buffing items for like 20 minutes in Chapter 2 and make your next 100 hours a little bit less fucking awful. you can use the 'stealth' buff item to sneak past enemies, then re-engage them in combat, retry the fight and you've successfully snuck past the encounter without using your Deceptisol. cheeky. good fun.
the plot starts off good, characters are great. real. but as soon as you get to like chapter 10, and the general plot starts to sort of reveal itself it starts to come apart at the seams. random concepts and bad guys start to get introduced beyond a 'vignette' almost 20 hours in. and that 20 hours might SOUND like "half of a 40 hour game" but its more like 80%, because you spend the next 15 hours playing 'the game' ie. the open world bit before returning back to linearity. and I like the linearity but the open world segment is undeniably light on plot. like there's zero plot.
whatever, ignore the plot. who cares. ff13 is one of the most interesting combat experiences in an RPG outside of like Resonance of Fate but where RoF fails in dense complexity, ff13 succeeds in simple complexity. i don't know if that makes sense. i think it makes sense. it's very more-ish though. one of my favourite RPGs.