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I've got a terrible fondness for this game. I can't help it. I love the battle system. I love the character dynamics. I even love Snow. That's how bad it is. I don't think even I can defend the lack of variety in the gameplay, though. What Final Fantasy XIII does, it generally does fairly well: it looks and sounds great, it's got nice cutscenes (with the exception of all the ones where a character goes 'goodness me, I've just realised what fundamental flaw has led me to make all these poor decisions; better explain it at length, aloud, just in case the player didn't catch it'), it's got an engaging and strategic battle system (once it actually lets you use the thing). But those are literally the only things that it does; it's nothing but cutscenes and fighting, with maybe two hilariously half-arsed attempts at minigames. When it tries to open up a bit, all it really does is take away most of the character interaction and leave you with nothing but fighting. All that said, I don't care. Somehow I still love this game. I'm enjoying the Let's Play so far, and I'm looking forward to more!
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Apr 2, 2014 09:40
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 08:17 |
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ApplesandOranges posted:What if you apply that logic to Squall, who's just a few years older and also gets an unhealthy amount of pressure and stupidity dumped on him in a short amount of time? To be fair, Squall's spent half his life in training to be a mercenary, and even then he doesn't exactly handle things well; he just does most of his freaking-out internally. Hope's an ordinary kid. He's probably the XIII character I personally like least, but I can understand why he reacts so badly. I actually don't mind the gradual way concepts like fal'Cie, l'Cie, the Purge, Cocoon, Pulse etc. are explained in-game; having a big information dump right at the beginning would have slowed things down horrendously. Although I'll admit that 'fal'Cie' and 'l'Cie' are terrible, terrible names.
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Apr 5, 2014 09:42
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Phelddagrif posted:Take a look at the script: There's actually a fair amount we can infer from the sections you've quoted: Sanctum is some sort of organisation that employs soldiers to protect civilians. They're in favour of the Purge, which involves sending people to Pulse, which is some sort of unpleasant place; perhaps the people they're sending are in some way a threat to the civilian population at large? 'Domesticated peacekeepers' is self-explanatory: they're domesticated creatures used to keep the peace. There's a lot that's unclear, but we've got just about enough to understand the situation for now: some sort of military organisation has packed a load of people onto a train, ostensibly to get them away from the general populace but actually to massacre them all. Every line about fal'Cie or l'Cie in this chapter is unhelpful nonsense, though. You're probably right to say that the script gets bogged down in all these concepts. Just about every Final Fantasy game confuses the hell out of me; I suppose I'm a little too inclined to forgive XIII its opaque beginnings because I was so relieved that the central storyline, beneath all the jargon, turned out to be relatively simple.
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Apr 5, 2014 12:13
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Sydin posted:So since you can apparently only control one party member directly, how good is the party AI once they have more things to do than spam attack or use potion? The AI's pretty good, but it does like to alternate attacks if it can. That's not in itself a bad thing - if you're facing an enemy that's weak to fire and water, casting Fire-Water-Fire is more visually interesting than casting Fire-Fire-Fire, at least - but if you're facing an enemy that's weak to only fire and your Magic and Strength stats aren't too far apart, the AI will want to alternate magical fire attacks with physical fire attacks. The animations for switching from a magical to a physical attack and back again are a lot slower than those for performing several magical or physical attacks in a row. It's only really an issue if you're intensely aware of every half-second wasted in battle, though.
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Apr 7, 2014 19:14
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To be fair, all the party characters having been in Bodhum on the eleventh day isn't a coincidence in the way that, say, 'all the important characters grew up in the same orphanage!' might have been; the characters ended up in their current situation because they were all in the Purge, and they were Purged because they were in Bodhum when the fal'Cie was discovered.
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Apr 29, 2014 10:58
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 08:17 |
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I'd like to point out here that Artix should get a hell of a lot of applause for the technical work he's done on this chapter. Having no Let's Playing qualifications other than a distressingly unironic love for this game, I somehow managed to bring an entire swarm of audio issues with me. Artix quietly and uncomplainingly cleaned up my track, removed various annoying noises (jokes about my voice at this point will be grudgingly tolerated) and made sure I was actually, you know, audible (for the most part; I fear there were points at which nothing could be done). He deserves respect, admiration and competent guests, and I am extremely sorry that I can offer him only two of these things.
Rith fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Jun 1, 2014 |
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Jun 1, 2014 07:39
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