i am surprised to say i really like this game. it felt like a shitty cashgrab at the beggining, ngl. but honestly, what surprised me the most is just how much better this game is than ff13. like in the following ways:
- literally all open world, non linear. i skipped a bunch of the story in episode 3, had to go back and do it lol.
- the battle system is still amazing and fun. the monster collecting aspect is pretty fun too, plus there is a whole lot more options for party customization here.
- the crystal level up system is now actually pretty cool. it has multiple pathways for each character, i can make every character a fighter, black mage, white mage, buff, debuff, tank, literally whatever i want. and then choose a monster with it's own role. it has layers of interesting combinations and new stuff to try out.
- tons of sidequests and exploration. exploring the timeline is really fun, seeing how places evolve, or how they were in the past, really adds a lot to the story and mood of the game.
- you don't need to read the datalog (aka giant wall of text in the menus) to understand what's going on, for the most part (lol)
- the music is fucking goat, all battle themes are great and feel unique to this game. i even like the metal chocobo song, i get it's cheesy as hell but come on, it's just a bit of cheese.
- the story progresses naturally, shit's easy to follow, understandable.
- the art direction is still fucking great. some amazing environments here, and time traveling through weird, surreal scenarios really shows what the FF artists can do.
of course, not everything is great. the plot is still horribly cheesy, and the dialogue still sucks hard. look, it's not much worse than ffx or ffx-2, but there's still some gems like this one at the beggining of the game:
"Become an arrow through time and speed your way to Serah."
- Lightning (wtf?? why is the wording here so odd??)
lightning probably has the worst lines of all, literally all of her dialogue feels either out of character or just plain stupid. thankfully she doesn't appear much in the game lmao.
"That time was lost; yet time continued onward. Divine Etro. Go peacefully to your rest. I will stand guard over your legacy."
- Lightning (completely out of character lol)
there's also all this bullshit about a goddess of time, which was introduced completely out of nowhere. not to mention how they retconned XIIIs ending to squeeze a bunch of sequels, sleazy motherfuckers.
the story usually makes sense as well, thank god. starting this out i honestly thought this was gonna be a mess, like giving a complicated time travel storyline to the ff13 writers, who literally had to put exposition dumps in the game menu to make up for the shitty pacing and explain core plot concepts. surprise: nobody wants to read a wall of text after every boss fight lmao.
but this game, honestly it just works here. literally never had to read the datalog, this played like a normal rpg. you and your party do stuff, and the story advances there. shit just works.
also, the PC port is by far the worst console port i've ever played. if the game sucked, i might as well have been scammed. i experienced everything here: awful fps dips, constant slowdowns, graphical bugs, hours of messing with the graphics driver and fanmade fixes to actually get this game to work. it's just a mess man. definetly skip the pc version, go for ps3 or xbox 360, unless you have a fairly beefy pc (i have a 4th gen i5 and a gtx 1050, decent setup, and still had massive slowdowns, even if the game did run at 60 fps most of the time).
but, even with all the story woes and the AWFUL port, this game is still pretty good. just a fun experience, like an ffx or ffx-2, not mindblowing, but a good final fantasy game and a great jrpg for sure.
- literally all open world, non linear. i skipped a bunch of the story in episode 3, had to go back and do it lol.
- the battle system is still amazing and fun. the monster collecting aspect is pretty fun too, plus there is a whole lot more options for party customization here.
- the crystal level up system is now actually pretty cool. it has multiple pathways for each character, i can make every character a fighter, black mage, white mage, buff, debuff, tank, literally whatever i want. and then choose a monster with it's own role. it has layers of interesting combinations and new stuff to try out.
- tons of sidequests and exploration. exploring the timeline is really fun, seeing how places evolve, or how they were in the past, really adds a lot to the story and mood of the game.
- you don't need to read the datalog (aka giant wall of text in the menus) to understand what's going on, for the most part (lol)
- the music is fucking goat, all battle themes are great and feel unique to this game. i even like the metal chocobo song, i get it's cheesy as hell but come on, it's just a bit of cheese.
- the story progresses naturally, shit's easy to follow, understandable.
- the art direction is still fucking great. some amazing environments here, and time traveling through weird, surreal scenarios really shows what the FF artists can do.
of course, not everything is great. the plot is still horribly cheesy, and the dialogue still sucks hard. look, it's not much worse than ffx or ffx-2, but there's still some gems like this one at the beggining of the game:
"Become an arrow through time and speed your way to Serah."
- Lightning (wtf?? why is the wording here so odd??)
lightning probably has the worst lines of all, literally all of her dialogue feels either out of character or just plain stupid. thankfully she doesn't appear much in the game lmao.
"That time was lost; yet time continued onward. Divine Etro. Go peacefully to your rest. I will stand guard over your legacy."
- Lightning (completely out of character lol)
there's also all this bullshit about a goddess of time, which was introduced completely out of nowhere. not to mention how they retconned XIIIs ending to squeeze a bunch of sequels, sleazy motherfuckers.
the story usually makes sense as well, thank god. starting this out i honestly thought this was gonna be a mess, like giving a complicated time travel storyline to the ff13 writers, who literally had to put exposition dumps in the game menu to make up for the shitty pacing and explain core plot concepts. surprise: nobody wants to read a wall of text after every boss fight lmao.
but this game, honestly it just works here. literally never had to read the datalog, this played like a normal rpg. you and your party do stuff, and the story advances there. shit just works.
also, the PC port is by far the worst console port i've ever played. if the game sucked, i might as well have been scammed. i experienced everything here: awful fps dips, constant slowdowns, graphical bugs, hours of messing with the graphics driver and fanmade fixes to actually get this game to work. it's just a mess man. definetly skip the pc version, go for ps3 or xbox 360, unless you have a fairly beefy pc (i have a 4th gen i5 and a gtx 1050, decent setup, and still had massive slowdowns, even if the game did run at 60 fps most of the time).
but, even with all the story woes and the AWFUL port, this game is still pretty good. just a fun experience, like an ffx or ffx-2, not mindblowing, but a good final fantasy game and a great jrpg for sure.