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I think Final Fantasy XIII was the next natural step after Spirits Within and the Kingdom Hearts clusterseries - I've become convinced that Square-Enix wants to get out of the video game business entirely and focus on making movies, but people don't seem to be particularly interested in their movies, so they make interminable movies with interactive bits and sell them as games. FFX was the last main-series game that kept to most of the traditions of Final Fantasy gameplay - FFXI is a MMORPG, FFXII is a single-player MMORPG, FFXIII is a zero-player MMORPG, and FFXIV is back to just being an actual MMORPG. They're giving the players less control and delivering more cutscenes and more story instead of gameplay. FFX at least had the ability to move both directions through the corridor, people to talk to along the way, optional quests all along the way, and some degree of control over how the characters improve - to the tune of letting you turn Rikku into a White Mage or a powerful attacker if you got the right sphere early enough and chose to abandon her standard role and build her up using someone else's spheres. FFXIII at most lets you choose to skip certain upgrades if you don't want them at the time. I don't think it's a particularly good story, either, even when you understand what's going on as well as anyone ever can. There are still too many parts that I find confusing, even after they've been explained by someone who cares a lot more about the game than I do, and I think the way they chose to tell the story by explaining most things long after the player needs to be able to understand them (if at all) only hurts the presentation. They seem to have focused on the impressive cutscenes for promotional material and then filled in whatever they thought would explain why the flashy cutscenes are there. I suppose they're okay at building detailed worlds with complex politics, but they're not very good at explaining how they work well enough to appreciate what's happening when you can't wait to get back to playing the video game you bought for your video game console to play with a video game controller.
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Apr 3, 2014 03:14
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Rith posted:There's actually a fair amount we can infer from the sections you've quoted: And while we're sitting there trying to puzzle this stuff out, there's more story happening at a pace that's hard to follow even if you're paying attention. Mixing action with exposition is a problem if you expect people to be able to take it all in at once, and that's when the exposition is actually clear and using terms that the audience can be expected to be familiar with. The move to spoken dialogue has hurt Final Fantasy in a big way - in the quoted example from VII, those lines are on-screen for as long as the player needs to read them. In XIII, everything moves along at its own pace. While you could put clues together to figure some things out given enough time, there isn't time. The game is throwing all these unfamiliar concepts in your face and then charging onward with the plot.
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Apr 5, 2014 16:54
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Rita Repulsa posted:actually so far I don't know what you do in this game besides fight battles, upgrade, and listen to a bad story. There doesn't seem to be the little minigame kind of thing that happens in other games like blitzball or triple triad or snowboarding or something. That's pretty much it, I think - there's one scene early on where you do something fun for a minute or so, and a chapter that plays more like other Final Fantasy games. Otherwise, I don't remember there being anything aside from battles, cutscenes, and roughly linear corridors.
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Apr 5, 2014 20:42
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Admiral H. Curtiss posted:The problem with the health refilling mechanic in this game is that the game designers did not follow the logic behind it to its conclusion: Without any attrition mechanics and any major fight-to-fight customization options, it is completely pointless to make the player fight the same enemy group multiple times. And yet they do. I can't imagine how you'd grind enough experience to level up your characters sufficiently if you could only fight any group of enemies once. Oh, wait...
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Apr 6, 2014 15:17
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"Let's not get our hopes up." And then Vanille immediately gets Hope to his feet, and nobody even tries to make a joke. Rated 1, unsubscribing. The formula for the score isn't really that complicated - the Points Per Second value depends on the enemy formation, and the Target Time depends on the party's skills and stats compared to the enemies' - if you manage to completely outclass an enemy, I think it's possible to have a Target Time so low that the opening animation of the fight takes almost the whole time, and anything other than a single attack that wipes out all the enemies is only worth three or four stars. You start with a base score of 10,000, and the difference between your fight time and the target, positive or negative, times the PPS value for the fight, plus twenty percent if you had initiative (I've never calculated whether the displayed PPS value incorporates that or not), is added to that. The result determines how many stars you get, and the only thing I don't know offhand is the exact cutoff for each star level. I'd say these early battles are a good introduction to the battle system if the battle system they were introducing you do bore any resemblance to the Final Fantasy XIII battle system. I guess it's there to teach you how to auto-battle, although I believe I saw a Manual selection in this video. Personally, I went with manual the entire game aside from a few moments when I really needed to act faster than I could select abilities, and I think the result was at least slightly more engaging than auto-battling the whole way through. I still wouldn't do it again, though.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:36
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Nihilarian posted:Isn't Sacrarium a Sacri, Sacres, Sacrulen, Sacrum. But close enough.
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Apr 7, 2014 19:26
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Admiral H. Curtiss posted:IIRC the Librascope is actually better than Libra, because Libra reveals part of the enemy stats (and can be used multiple times to get more) while Librascope immediately reveals all. Librascope also covers all enemies in the battle, while Libra only hits one enemy at a time.
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Apr 17, 2014 23:42
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Instant Grat posted:You mean the game that let you pick your own leader from the very second you had more than one party member to choose from? Yeah there are a number of things these two games do not have in common Moreover, the game that didn't even hit you with game over unless your ENTIRE PARTY is dead - even if all the active party members die, you just go into the menu and switch in whoever's still standing, and even toss the dead ones Phoenix Downs even though they're not on the map. One of the worst things about FFX was that even though it really was an improvement to let you hot-swap characters mid-battle, it just underscores the fact that the rest of your party is standing right behind you, ready to jump in at a moment's notice... but if three party members ever die at once, the others just shrug, toss aside their full bag of revive items and forget all knowledge of Life spells, and go wander off to get killed by Sin eventually.
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Apr 18, 2014 23:36
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How about "Elementalists"? "ELE" is radically different from any of the other abbreviations, and I believe every attack they have is some sort of elemental attack, possibly with very few exceptions at the end of the game when they're trying to make people care about the battle mechanics.
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Apr 26, 2014 12:44
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FFX had a main character. I'd love to end my post there and just leave you all to think about that, but no, I will elaborate because that's also kind of my point. I think some people complained about the way Tidus used the "I've been affected by Sin's toxin and can't remember basic facts about our world, like the existence of Sin" thing as an exposition magnet for the first half of the game or so, but remember the effect that it had - it provided exposition and details about the world, through the perspective of a single character. FFXIII might not be so dense if the story focused on one character, such as Lightning or Sazh, and had them either explain things to people as they encountered them or have things explained to them, as appropriate. (And yeah, even FFVII had Cloud explain as many things to people as they had to explain to him along the way, so your main character doesn't need to be a complete moron or an outsider to make that work.) The story of FFXIII jumps from protagonist to protagonist far too quickly to give the player any solid sense of the world they're in, and nobody stops to explain concepts at any point along the way until after you're supposed to have used your understanding of those concepts to follow what's been happening until that point. There are stories that reveal key details at the end that change your understanding of everything up to that point, and then there are stories that just don't make any sense at all without Cliff's Notes. I don't think it helps that the story is as convoluted as it is, and there are plenty of things that I don't remember EVER being explained (leading me to believe that the explanations likely don't exist at all and are just "because"), so I think the writers needed to make it as easy to grasp what's actually happening as possible. The shaky-cam action scenes don't help at all either. That's the point in a movie or comic book where I stop paying attention and just fill in "something happens" until it stops happening and I can try to guess what the something was based entirely on the aftermath. It's not that hard to make a scene where you can tell what's happening by looking at it. Or maybe it is, and that's why so few stories bother to do it. Still, in the end, if there were one character we were supposed to be paying attention to, one character whose perspective we got in full, then we might get more out of this story. Well, maybe not THIS story, but the one that would result from such a decision.
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Apr 27, 2014 13:23
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It's the spirit of "that one combat mechanic that was supposed to be amazing and revolutionary, but you hate it so much you declare the Final Fantasy series dead forever until you find yourself waiting in line for the midnight launch of the next one". The only part I won't spoil for you is the name.
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May 7, 2014 02:46
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Hope: *casts Fire on an enemy* THIS IS OPERATION NORA! *casts Fire* THIS IS OPERATION NORA! Lightning: Hope, it's dead. It ran out of HP seven rounds ago. There are still enemies alive way over here. Hello? Hope: *pulls out the knife and starts stabbing the dead enemy over and over* OPERATION NORA! OPERATION NORA! OPERATION... OPERATION... It turns out to be a commercial for Operation, the board game.
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Jun 1, 2014 21:48
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Kurieg posted:I think that's supposed to be their magitek drive or whatever future science they use to justify using magic without being a l'cie. If so, it would be a really handy thing for a l'Cie to have. If they can keep their brand hidden, they might be able to deceive anyone who sees them using magic. "No, look, it's just a stolen Magitek drive! I'm totally not a l'Cie! I've never even MET a Fal'Cie, or even an Eidolon!" Then Odin descends from the sky and says "You called, master?" and the whole thing is ruined, and it's a waste of 3 TP to boot.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:16
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Ditto Folklore. I posted about it over in my thread last month. Why are LPs suddenly associated with buying music for the first time since the 70s?
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Jun 11, 2014 01:01
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SC Bracer posted:The music is 10/10 but the lack of singalong isn't. I told Artix not to mute me but he insisted. Honestly, it's probably for the best now that I think about it.
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Jun 21, 2014 12:36
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Yet another example of a mechanic that would potentially change how you play the game and make it a bit less "Press X to win" if only the game ever bothered to tell you how it worked.
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Jun 28, 2014 21:00
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Microcline posted:It's kind of funny that this happens given the massive amount of money and effort that went into ensuring that the opening was loud and pretty, and the conventional purpose of in medias res. If our narrative doesn't need to start at the beginning and the game gets interesting later, why not start there? I don't think anyone would read through 20 hours' worth of datalogs to get the background information for a 5-hour game.
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Jul 6, 2014 13:35
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Ztarlit_Sky posted:For all the issues the game has, the parade fight looked pretty impressive. Very nicely animated. I don't think anyone's ever complained about the graphical quality of FFXIII. Squenix has put a lot of work over the past few decades into making sure that their graphics, the one thing that's guaranteed to be obsolete by the time the next game comes out, are cutting-edge for their time. The parts of games that tend to endure and form criticisms years later are the ones they don't seem to care about.
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Aug 11, 2014 12:14
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:So does everyone being together mean we can finally choose any party we want? Yes! Provided that you want to choose the party that the game gives you. Otherwise, no, you can't have the party you want.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:57
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Alraune is actually another name for the mandrake plant, as I learned from a completely unrelated LP.
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Oct 2, 2014 00:09
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The Fal'Cie Dahaka, you say? At least we know it has a water weakness and won't bother us if we don't disrupt the flow of time.
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Oct 13, 2014 14:37
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Wild Knight posted:As is I think it's really silly that everyone indulges her super-cool nickname. I think Bart here is the only one to call her Claire in the whole drat trilogy. Nobody would buy a game called "Claire Returns". Everybody would buy a game called "Final Fantasy XIII-4: This Game Is Terrible, Please Do Not Buy It", but that's beside the point.
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Dec 6, 2014 04:14
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Artix posted:At this point, any hunts except Tonberry will be shown off in the postgame. That particular one is on my list, but I think he might be out of our reach at the moment because of his damage output. I still have to plan a route for how I'm going to show the postgame stuff, so I'll give it a shot once I start recording again. That's one of the few postgame hunts I actually managed to pull off.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:24
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My impression was that the "grenade" was actually a self-destruct remote for the Proudclad. In that case, he could have thrown it, but it wouldn't have accomplished anything.
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Jan 5, 2015 03:55
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My strategy for Tonberry was to use Tri-Disaster (I think that's the paradigm with three Ravagers) and get it staggered and launched before it could use the really strong attacks. I just couldn't beat it quickly otherwise. I have no idea what I was doing wrong.
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Jan 8, 2015 04:53
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I believe the Jabberwocky/Bandersnatch fight is a heck of a lot easier if you bring a few party members who can use both physical and magical attacks... so you're actually fighting effectively rather than trying to find a strategy that works with an arbitrary set of characters.
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Jan 10, 2015 04:31
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Lightning/Hope/Vanille was pretty much my party through most of the game. Granted, I left several hunts uncompleted because they were too difficult for me, but I figured that was the point - some of the ones in that circle seemed pretty prohibitively difficult even after beating the final boss.
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Jan 28, 2015 03:22
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mateo360 posted:Speaking of Collector's editions, can anyone spot the problem with mine? You've put a picture of a trademarked rug on the Internet? Better hide that before the cops get there.
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Feb 14, 2015 16:56
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