Yay, I've finally finished the wild ride of FF13! It's taken me just under 2 months of playing almost nothing else. I feel comfortable in saying that it's my second favorite experience with the Final Fantasy franchise, with only FF Tactics narrowly beating it out.
I don't really feel up to writing a proper review or a larger list of thoughts, so I'll just jot down a couple of things so I can look back and remember why I liked this rather divisive game.
The world built in this game is my favorite of all Final Fantasy games. I absolutely loved the exploration of what would happen if people stopped aging for 500 years and no new life could be born. Consequently, Lightning Returns was one of the rare JRPGs where I actually cared about doing the side quests. Which was good, since that's the way you level up lol. Also the voice acting was rather hit or miss.
The combat system is also excellent. Learning enemy patterns and jumping between costumes to pull out the right attacks or blocks/dodges/counters at the perfect time is very rewarding. Again, it's good that I felt this way, since you'll have to fight quite a lot if you want to continually freeze the timer.
Oh yeah, the timer. It was cool in that it gave you the sense of urgency you'd want with this type of story, but also a little annoying at times. In the end, I had more extra days that I just threw away than days I actually needed, though, so the negative aspects were largely mitigated.
You get to play dress up a lot and that's been a favorite thing of mine in video games since I played City of Heroes back in the day. RIP.
The main story was a little thin, but I liked it. None of the twists were particularly surprising, but it was what I was hoping for. It was also very cool to see how all of the main characters were affected by the horrible fever-dream of a world. The ending was completely over the top, but in the best and most thematically appropriate way possible. I loved it. I loved this game.
Edit: Oh yeah. Excellent music again. Not quite as striking and varied as XIII-2, but definitely something I'll turn throw on from time to time while I'm at my computer.
I don't really feel up to writing a proper review or a larger list of thoughts, so I'll just jot down a couple of things so I can look back and remember why I liked this rather divisive game.
The world built in this game is my favorite of all Final Fantasy games. I absolutely loved the exploration of what would happen if people stopped aging for 500 years and no new life could be born. Consequently, Lightning Returns was one of the rare JRPGs where I actually cared about doing the side quests. Which was good, since that's the way you level up lol. Also the voice acting was rather hit or miss.
The combat system is also excellent. Learning enemy patterns and jumping between costumes to pull out the right attacks or blocks/dodges/counters at the perfect time is very rewarding. Again, it's good that I felt this way, since you'll have to fight quite a lot if you want to continually freeze the timer.
Oh yeah, the timer. It was cool in that it gave you the sense of urgency you'd want with this type of story, but also a little annoying at times. In the end, I had more extra days that I just threw away than days I actually needed, though, so the negative aspects were largely mitigated.
You get to play dress up a lot and that's been a favorite thing of mine in video games since I played City of Heroes back in the day. RIP.
The main story was a little thin, but I liked it. None of the twists were particularly surprising, but it was what I was hoping for. It was also very cool to see how all of the main characters were affected by the horrible fever-dream of a world. The ending was completely over the top, but in the best and most thematically appropriate way possible. I loved it. I loved this game.
Edit: Oh yeah. Excellent music again. Not quite as striking and varied as XIII-2, but definitely something I'll turn throw on from time to time while I'm at my computer.