I bought this game on its release date but only started playing it last week. What started as a great looking game has become repetative and boring. The game is incredibly linear, it's beyond a joke. I know the game is supposed to open up more when you go to Grand Pulse but to be honest, I'm bored to tears now. I'm 11hrs into the 2nd disc and have only just got to the first town, which again is linear in itself with no real exploration or shops to check out. The game consists of cut scenes, followed by some linear travel, followed by a battle or 2, followed by reading new log entries (which tend to repeat the same thing over and over again). This pattern just continues, so far for over 26hrs of game play. Unfortunately I have lost my interest in the game.

I thought this game would be a good follow up to FF12 which I thought was great, areas opened up for exploration, different towns to wander round, side quests to pick up. I mean I haven't even come across a side quest yet. Personally I think square Enix has lost the plot over the past couple of years, with what I consider to be poor efforts i.e. Infinate Undiscovery, The Last Remnant and Nier. I can't comment on on Star Ocean (which I've heard is good) as I haven't played it and I'm hesitant to waste my money on another square Enix title.

I know someone will say I'm just bashing Square Enix, which I am because they deserve it but it's just my opinion you don't have to agree. I mean I was one of those that actually liked FF8 and that got a real bashing.

You might get looks when you have the cat girl in the skimpy clothing appears on screen when playing Star Ocean last Hope...

... :shrug:

If you were going to wait this long to play it, why'd you even get it on release? You could have waited even just a few days after release to have the opportunity to read some of the reviews for it, the majority of which are just as ticked off as you about how linear it is. I'm not saying you deserved it or anything, but maybe this will show you to wait until you read the reviews of a game before buying it, no matter who makes it. I admit that I'm going to get Fallout: New Vegas and Portal 2 on release day, because I trust the developers, but by the sound of your post it seems like you didn't trust Square Enix all that much anyway.

Yeah FF XIII is a rather underwhelming---my main gripe with the game is that it seems to follow FF VII: Dirge of Cerberus gameplay----"Fight three guys watch a cut scene, Fight four more guys--put the controller down completely".
It got so bad I had to skip a cut scene (I don't care about the Firework scene---to quote Monty Python "GET ON WITH IT"). :snoring:

If only it were just Square Enix doing this to their games. A huge chunk of games these days are just sequences of "Go down this path killing stuff, kill a boss, then watch an unnecessarily long cutscene". It's like they're going back to how games were during the NES days, only with a lot more emphasis on the video part and less on the game part.

Hell, Square's games have followed the same pattern: Started off primitive and simple, moved onto much more complex and content-filled games over the years, then slowly went back down again to primitive. The only real difference is that the graphics are much better.

Give me back the games that tested my mind as well as my reflexes and stop giving me "Press X here to win" piles of insulting rubbish.

I got it on release because I had seen a review on TV and had looked at gameplay footage plus I was always going to get it as I am a FF fan, although 10 was one of the worst games I've ever played but they made up for it with 12. You think I wasted my money, you'll love this then I also got the strategy guide, which I haven't even opened yet and doubt I ever will.

Heck bring back the days of Point and click games Like Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Kings Quest and Police Quest (mostly because I like watching "Ways to Die (put name of game here)" on YouTube. Some of the death scenes in those games crack me up) .

I have heard FF13 didn't look like a fun game to begin with :shrug:. When I heard it being called corridor crawler and Marathon simulator I decided to not play it/get it at all. One of my friends played it and he didn't like it at all, and him being a FF fan since nr 1.


Ohhh, Must hurry and beat Star Ocean 2 and 3 then.

No offense to any Star Ocean fans, but you know things are getting bad when those games are getting recommended. Even I liked Star Ocean 4, and I'm willing to admit that's mainly because the standards for gaming have gotten so low that I'm starting to appreciate the games that I'd otherwise never even want to touch. The voice acting was horrid, the combat got old fast, the item synthesis system was a tedious joke, and the difficulty levels were some of the most shallow I've ever seen, yet I liked it. It was actually a breath of fresh air compared to what I was usually playing on my Xbox 360. :shrug:

Hell, I even liked Infinite Undiscovery. I thought it was Star Ocean 4's superior (Mainly because of a much better synthesis system and, while not perfect, had fun real-time combat). Well, at least I still love the games that rightfully deserve it, like Deus Ex and System Shock 2 and the like. And I don't hate all modern games, as I thought Fallout 3 was the best fps/rpg hybrid since..well, Deus Ex, and I thought GTA4 was nice (Though I'm biased there because I have an immense hatred for previous GTA minigames and always wanted them to make a more realistic one).

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/14/

I saw on Youtube that Square Enix's explanation for less than favorable reviews in the west was because western audiences don't get that they're trying to tell a story and are not just plonking your character into the middle of a sandbox. This is a pretty poor explanation in my opinion, I mean trying to say we don't understand where they're coming from as if we're simpletons

I wanted FF13 so I was going to get it for my birthday which is next month, luckily some HMV stores have console wired into the store so you can play one of the games they have for sale. FF13 was there so I waited for about 10 mins then quickly got onto it as soon as the guy before me went. I started a new game and after watching a cutscene for about 5 minutes I finally played it. Then I got bored whilst i was fighting this huge robot thing (its the first enemy) so I put down the controller and now I'm getting Pokemon HG for my birthday instead :twirl:

I recently read an article, in GamePro I think, it might have been Game Informer, where the developers wanted a linear game so that they could unfold the story they way they wanted to. They even wanted to limit your exploring of the towns. So, what you hate about the game was intended. Not that I agree with it.

I'm not really sure what games those were, unless you weren't talking about Square's games anymore. I've never played a Final Fantasy game that wasn't "Press X to win" and unbelievably simple. In fact, Final Fantasy XIII probably took more effort on my part than Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX combined.

As for Final Fantasy XIII, it was absolutely gorgeous and very fun to play. Second best combat in any Final Fantasy, the first being X-2. It's story wasn't a bad concept, just poorly told, which is something I can oddly overlook this time, because I still got the gist of it and enjoyed it. The characters were pretty weak, aside from Sazh, Dajh, Fang and Vanille - Still liked Lightning the most though, and Snow was just awful. All in all, not the best Final Fantasy (IX still holds that crown), but good nonetheless.

Also,it was no more linear than Final Fantasy X in my opinion, and no one had a problem with that.

You seem to put their published and made games into one bag. Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean are made by tri-Ace, totally different thing. Can't comment on IU since I don't have a 360, but SO4 is very, very fine.
FFXIII on the other hand had stupid characters, a plot full of holes and was so linear that it resembled a pretty (very pretty actually) hallway. Most folks who say it opens up at one point seem to hide the point that this part is maybe five to ten hours of gameplay - after that it's back to pretty hallways. I really liked the open areas in FFXII, that you could walk - if you wanted to - from one point in the game world to the other end of it. The story might have been a well-hidden Star Wars ripoff, but at least the characters didn't make me want to put hot pokers in their eyes. Plus there was a lot to do that wasn't just busywork like in FFXIII. And I could control whoever I want. Yay.

BTW, I really liked Nier. It was a very nice mix of classic western and eastern RPG elements. Though I'm very glad I didn't get that medieval dream of Liefeld as a main character. So friggin ugly.

I was talking about games in general.

And as for FFXIII, the big problem was that Square gave up on even trying to make the game seem non-linear and just went "Here, walk down all these one-way paths, watch the characters fight your battles for you, and then watch a really long cutscene full of fan service and flash". It's like Square doesn't care anymore. They know even if their game was a visual novel, they'd still make a fortune off the name Final Fantasy alone. And unless people start to really complain about it, they'll just keep getting away with that. :shrug:

Edit: And please, don't counter with something like "All Final Fantasy games are like that", because that isn't true in the slightest. Past FF games had side quests, bonus content, minigames, customization, exploration, and plenty of dialogue. In comes FFXIII and nearly all of that is stripped. Gone. XIII isn't even in the same league as X, let alone the SNES/PSX ones.



And therein lies another reason I think XIII was so successful: The graphics. I'm quite convinced that the graphics alone kept people interested enough to not only go through the game in its entirety, but also tricked them into thinking they like the game itself. I'm not saying you're one of those, but I hear a lot about how good the game looks.



Eugh..Like I said, I liked Star Ocean 4, but only because I was surrounded by so much garbage at the time that it felt like quality. But if somebody were to ask me if it's a good game, I'd say no. Hell no. It's damn near bottom of the barrel even by JRPG standards.

Part of it is that the Japanese youth still puts so much trust into the concept of elder authority. Famitsu might be the magazine that single-handedly keeps Final Fantasy alive. Though there's some good things, recently they've been actually discovered to have been bribed and lost a lot of trust. Plus, the Japanese hardcoe gaming market has been changing rapidly the last four or five years as Japanese games relied more and more on profit outside of the island. Part of the reason Squeenix tries to justify everything that's wrong with "us and our western standards". We liked their games for what they were. But that Japanese oddities and peculiarities are what gamers (or fans of Anime and Manga) outside of Japan like, and that this is what draws them to it, is a concept really hard to handle for Japanese people. They're odd that way, yes.


I've seen your reasoning and I don't agree with it. The story is nice, the characters are interesting, the item creation is as usual for Star Ocean not necessary (but I don't think it's this bad, tolerable if a little random and sometimes grind-heavy)... Well, a fine game. Translate that to "it's so little better than okay that it's better than average". ^_^

Agreed completely Though i'd like to add that it suffers from the same problem as XII, too much combat parts between the story parts, you lose the focus to the story that way. I still haven't played a Final Fantasy i hated and i'm getting Versus XIII

Haven't played it myself, but most comments I've seen are that it's a weaker installment than 2 or 3, at least.

Don't they understand that you don't need to put the game in a train tunnel to tell a story? All they succeeded in was making a great looking game repetative and boring by removing the aspects of an RPG that tend to break up play a little.

My only gripe is the end boss

Other than that it's a perfectly good game IMO

I'm a story person myself so freedom doesn't necessarily mean much to me

In any case we do have a final fantasy topic going so you can put all your gripes about FFXIII in there and discuss how you like FF [insert number here] better because [insert explanation here]

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1086247-unnofficial-final-fantasy-thread-iii/page__p__15835414&#entry15835414

[quote name='RedViv' date='03 June 2010 - 03:22 PM' timestamp='1275592951' post='16004155']
You seem to put their published and made games into one bag. Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean are made by tri-Ace, totally different thing. Can't comment on IU since I don't have a 360, but SO4 is very, very fine.
FFXIII on the other hand had stupid characters, a plot full of holes and was so linear that it resembled a pretty (very pretty actually) hallway. Most folks who say it opens up at one point seem to hide the point that this part is maybe five to ten hours of gameplay - after that it's back to pretty hallways. I really liked the open areas in FFXII, that you could walk - if you wanted to - from one point in the game world to the other end of it. The story might have been a well-hidden Star Wars ripoff, but at least the characters didn't make me want to put hot pokers in their eyes. Plus there was a lot to do that wasn't just busywork like in FFXIII. And I could control whoever I want. Yay.

I'm glad I've given up on the game then. I might have given it another go, in the hope of it opening up but you point out that the open areas are pretty limited.

The only JRPG I like this gen is Resonance of Fate, which is an awesome game.

Yep, let's do that.