20 reasons why Final Fantasy XIII is not a good Final Fantasy game

just my 2cent here: FFXIII should be considered an artwork; not really a game. Beautiful music, landscape; nice characters; and an AMAZING story with lots of original content.
It has its own mythos and stuff. For any artist FFXIII is like a huge pot of win.
I regard FFXIII as high as I do with ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.
 
Ghastly said:
I think it's the complete lack of balance in difficulty that actually makes this game so frustrating. When you're not battling something that's so painfully easy you don't even have to watch what you're doing (there was a period where I was painting my nails while I fought. Just kept hitting 'x'), you're battling something that can wipe the floor with your ass in just a strike or two.

It's annoying.
Click to expand...

I definitley agree with that. I found it to be the same. One minute I would be playing against an easy enemy, and then next minute a medium-hard one. Then there's all the grinding, which is only truly effective if you fight something extremley difficult to beat.

Oh yeah, already commented on the artwork.
 
Sullivan0930 said:
1 reason why i loved it.
1. my opinion.
Click to expand...

I second that one.

Sure its a lot different from normal final fantasy..thats one of the reasons I like it. Now I have beat almost all of the games excluding spin offs and number II, I have to say this battle systems was refreshing and awesome looking to the max. Also I found the first play a lot harder than almost all final fantasy games...I died more on this game, and its very easy to lose focus and admire the beauty. Most games I rush through the normal battles to get to the story...but this game I enjoyed and had fun with the normal battles "and" enjoyed the story.

I have said it before and will say it again. Play this game with japanese language and english subtitles....the original voice acting is freaking awesome sounding.

I do credit that it was a little too linear for my taste....but you take the bad after the good for the best experience.
 
Last edited:
I stopped playing this game within the first 3 hours. I've played FF's 7-12. If you asked me, I could sum it up in one word: linearity.

When did it become fashionable for RPG's to have zero explorative value? Seriously. I want choices, diversions, side quests. I will come back to this game at some point, but I was seriously underwhelmed.

Thank you, OP, for confirming my suspicions about the rest of it.
 
I can see why people complain about the linearity of XIII and not X. This game was very good with aesthetics and I actually did enjoy the battle system (playing around the retarded AI makes things more of a challenge. For example trying to get poison on an enemy quickly while relying on Light or Hope). I DO think that people who find these battles challenging are either not leveling or don't understand their paradigm's. But I think that the battle system is something that all upcoming FF's should DEFINITELY take into consideration because it is fun, engaging, and the camera angles make the usual grinding much more enjoyable.

That being said, I do find the endgame (which is my favourite part about FF's) to be HORRIBLY lacking. The mark missions looked like a daunting task until the next thing i could remember I beat 64 with no extra leveling or difficulty. I have ~70 hours clocked and there is NOTHING else I can do, and that is sad for an FF game. The linearity is another thing. People find it to be the worst part of XIII, I honestly don't mind it as far as the story goes but when you have two portals that lead to essentially the Calm Lands and a highway... things get old fast.

I don't hate this game, I actually really love it and enjoy it, but it is hard to see things that Final Fantasy's have brought to the table time and time again just disappear. Like, Airships, Mini-games, Real Character Customization (The effect base stats have on this game makes playing characters other that Light and Fang pointless), World Maps, Superbosses (for people that argue Omega/Ultima in FFX you've gotta be kidding me), HIDDEN Treasure, Like/Relate-able Characters, Doors, and so on.
These are all flaws, nothing more. They won't make me throw my disk at the wall, or slam my head on a table because I can't breed different colour chocobos. I find this to be a beautiful and very good game, I just wish that they would have put more into it and I think this might have something to do with it being the first one also available on a different console.
 
Worst FF Ever?

Now I might get hate for this, but in mine and a majority of the FF Fan world, FFXIII is the worst ever. First of all, there is hardly any exploring or world map until 3 discs later on and then you're at the only real best part of the game. Major exploration and secrets aren't really possible until the grasslands, and you get quests off floating stones. There isn't exactly a world map so there isn't a choice to say 2ooh, where's this creepy cave lead to? Is there a secret weapon in here?" etc. Also, Moogles are a minority, as the only ones you see are the art in the online shop. And that's stupid, we aren't on ebay with monsters and creatures, and thus we should be able to talk to real people. Also, the game has you without freedom as it makes you having to go through the storyline, not giving the choice of wanting to see stuff. Oh, and I hate Lightining; she's just more or less the female version of Cloud and Squall, hence her name. She moans and moans, and wants to be the best as well as showing off. There are plenty more bad points, but now I'd like to say the good stuff.
Storyline is brilliant, and it's amazing. Battle is good, and so is levelling up and making weapons. The giants and the grassland is epic.
Aside all this, hopefully XII-2 will fix all this and live to expectations, and I'm looking forward to it, really.
 
ff13 sucks, and is quite possibly the worst game to have ever been made, next to battletoads. this is clearly a fact. :trollface:

I would have found the game far less insufferable if battles were not so ridiculously long and boring. It was worse than being on a Disgaea Map with 50 Druids that just wanted to take a crap on your completely nonexistent bonus bar.
 
I seem to be one of the few people who actually quite like the story and its characters. :( I know it's not quite as complex as the story in previous FF games, but one could argue that it maintains its focus and doesn't deviate.

I wouldn't necessarily argue that there's a complete lack of side-stories or twists in the plot... I felt that these were just integrated into the main plot quite nicely.

Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if FFXIII-2 had been planned from the very beginning. I think the XIII collection is meant to be a set of less complex games which, together, make up a whole. It's a new approach to story-telling from SquareEnix, and I do feel it's positive. They've provided us with many single, independent stories before. Now they're trying something different. They're creating something expansive!

Why do I like the characters? They're dedicated to one another and they DO develop over time. We learn about them slowly, in the same way we'd learn about other people. Furthermore, we have to make connections and learn about most of the characters through subtle hints, again reflective of real life and how we understand real people. They are not a set of clearly defined characters, no. We are left to do some interpretation. But is that a bad thing? Personally, I don't think so. :)


Now...the gameplay... I do agree that it didn't match up to the gameplay in VI, VIII or X, the three FF games I enjoyed playing the most... I would have liked to see something like the Sphere Grid in X. The character development was a bit too linear and restrictive. However, it was not entirely unlike the stat development in most FF games, which I have found to be linear too... You level up and the stats generally develop themselves; YOU, the gamer, are in charge of how quickly this happens and how you use armour and weapons to bump up certain stats.

The game wasn't necessarily easy... I think I'll address the point about being able to 'retry' each battle. In this the game provided the option. If you wanted to have 'Game Over' after dying in battle, you could have selected 'no' after 'retry?' and could have restarted your game. It didn't FORCE you to pick 'yes'. ;)
 
Well, I personally have my own weight scales that I judge games with.

I'll play just about anything as long as the story as entertaining, it doesnt really even have to make sense. For me, Story and Characters take a much less important role than solid, functioning gameplay mechanics.

So, I write it off as terrible if I do not like the gameplay because the characters and story do not matter if the game is not good.

A story of a game can be as great as you want it to be, but you have to keep in mind that you are developing a game, not writing a novel. If you are going to make the gameplay the worst thing about the game, you'd be much better off writing a novel.

I feel like this was definitely addressed in the trailers of Final Fantasy XIII-2, but I am still upset that I paid 60 USD for something I hated in it's entirety when I could have bought a new GPU or motherboard etc...

My disdain for FFXIII comes from more than my dissatisfaction. To me, it's an example of Square Enix's incompetence and what we should expect from them in the future. It's release as it was, was simply just a betrayal of my trust.
 
the storyline was great, and most the characters were cool, except Lightning in my opinion. Still, having to pay £40 for something that must've been passed as an experiment should be considered a fraud, but I'll let it pass as long as XIII-2 doesn't dissapoint.

PS: Snowe reminds me a lot of Zell from FFVIII, and Serah's like Selphie.
 
Wow why does everybody have to bash on Vanille... i mean yes the noises she makes and everything about her can get annoying but im sure everybody knows somebody like tht indirectly or directly... she is very energetic and uses tht energy to hide her problems and im sure everybody here has times like tht... the game was all out great... it completely discribes life and humans and our urge to protect and also the urge to carry out revenge... its an every day kind of thing... i will agree tht hope kinda pissed me off a bit but tht was just because i knew the truth about what happened to his mom... and also the fact of that its very liner is just like all the ff games except XII... if anybody wants different they need to play something like Elder Scrolls
 
I see some people saying that the hate for XIII is too much or that it happens with every FF game. But I have loved every FF game since VII. Some more than others but I liked them all so much I continue to go back and play them again often. I'll never go back and replay XIII, it was so awful. Not as a game on it's own, but as a FF it's the worst I've played.

Some say that the world map was just as linear in FFX but it wasn't as bad, at any point in the game you could make your way back to besaid if you wanted(up until Macalania Temple and by then your airship's just around the corner) and when you got the airship you could revisit anywhere you wanted. XIII sweeps you past some beautiful open scenery, some really lovely places and then you can't do anything, you can't go anywhere, you can't see those places again. I got my hopes up when they arrived at Eden only to have them crushed straight after, the only place you can revisit is Pulse which is just a field with nothing in it and a more linear halls with pretty pictures in the background that you wish you could get to but you can't.

Some say that the Weapons in VIII were just as bad, well no they were actually worse, you could go the whole game without upgrading a weapon once in VIII and not miss it. However, the Junctioning system by which you upgraded your characters was so good and so free it completely made up for pretty much not having weapons. In XIII you can pretty much only level one weapon up since the first time you get a new weapon the first one is already much better than it and you have no way of knowing if the new weapon would end up stronger. The leveling system is just as linear as the map, no freedom in either case which sucks.

Which brings me to my next point. The leveling system. Some people compare it to X. It's absolutely nothing like X. Yes, it has sphere things connected by lines that light up once you've been over them but that's where the similarities end. It's completely linear, you go where you're told to, it's pretty much just a staircase with a couple of things to collect on the way. So freaking boring it's unbelievable. And yes, eventually you're allowed to expand but then it just ends up that everyone is exactly the same. Plus what's the point of changing their role when the role they're in at the begining is always the one they're most suited to? X's sphere grid was amazing, my favourate leveling system of all the FF's I've played. So good, especially since you could choose between two sphere grids, the beginer one and the expert one, which let you do whatever you wanted right from the begining - it was a godsend, you could literally make Lulu into a powerhouse and have her little doll do more damage than Auron, same with Yuna. And at any lv sphere you could switch them onto a different route, you could have four mages in your party if you like Mages, or three white Mages and nothing else but fighters. You could have someone who was just nothing but magic and new both white and black. I can't even go into how much XIII is nothing like this whatsoever.

And I did find the game very easy. I never put in any effort to level up or anything since the game did everything for itself anyway, it was like watching a realy boring movie with battles in between. The only boss that was hard was Barthandelus the third time you fight him. Nothing else was chalenging at all. The last boss was such a waste of time I could hardly comprehend it. There might as well not have been a final boss. I mean, where was the hateful villain that all the FF's have? Sepheroth? Seifer? Kuja? Seymour? Vayne? Barthandelus I guess was meant to be that hateful villain but I honestly felt no hatred towards him at all...what was it he did? I mean...they spent the entire game doing nothing but giving you cutscene after cutscene and what was it for...

Too much cutscenes and by the end of the game I wondered what all that story was even for because I still felt nothing for any of the characters. Why? Why?! I always get into the FF stories and get to like the characters. I should have cared about what happened at the end but I didn't, I really couldn't have cared less to be honest. So what were all those really long 'story' filled cutscenes where there surely should have been character development as well as plot development? I must have missed it because to me the characters were exactly the same all the way through, they may as well have still been strangers by the end for all the connection I felt between them. These were people who shared nothing but the company of each other through the whole game, where was the connection, the friendship, the comraderie? This sucked extremely badly, even more so because there was nothing in the game to make up for it. I like a good story and that's why I like FF, I may not have liked some things in previous games but the story always makes up for it, and if it didn't(found XII a little boring) then the gameplay, world map, leveling system, makes up for it. Not in this case. Both the story and the rest of the game were equally bad.

Yes, the graphics are beautiful but more often than not it was just frustrating that you could see all this huge world but can't go anywhere in it. The characters were pretty but did I care? No...I go back to play VII, VIII and IX all the time and their graphics suck in comparison, but it doesn't matter, because for me what makes a game good is the story first and foremore and the gameplay.

Xx..xX
 
Last edited:
I wanna know the complaint about the music is. I heard the soundtrack was bad, but So far I've listened to 10 songs from it on youtube and it sounded decent to me? can anybody elaborate why this particular part of the game was bad?
 
I enjoyed playing it and most of the complaints most people have didn't bother me to much. I do agree with nr 11 on the list. The first time you see Titan you immediately think that will be a though fight, at least that's what I thought. I was hugely disappointed when I found out I didn't actually got to fight him especially because none of the enemies are really hard to beat.
 
Final Fantasy XIII is one of the greatest Final Fantasy games ever and number 3 behind I and III.

The Worst Final Fantasy is XII, good but not Great, Vayne was by far the most bland main villain ever, the majority of the villains are not main villain calibur.
 
I dont need 20 reasons to know that XIII is crap.
Just the story and gameplay completely kill this game. The above poster seems like a Troll so i will just ignore it.
 
Kharnij said:
I think they're just super fanatical. Not necesarily a troll.
Click to expand...

Just because they really loved the game doesn't make them necessarily "fanatical". Sometimes, fans of FFXIII or FFXIII-2 HAVE to be fanatical just to get over all the hate that it receives, since the common trend is to insult or debase the fan's standards of gaming when they mention they like it.

I for one loved both games. I'm not going to sit here and defend them for their gameplay, graphics, or music. They appealed to me, and that's all I can say. But it's kind of depressing to read the hate that FFXIII when half the people hating on it can't properly make a damn argument.

:hmph: Sorry, just throwing my two-cents in.
 
MagicMasher said:
Just because they really loved the game doesn't make them necessarily "fanatical". Sometimes, fans of FFXIII or FFXIII-2 HAVE to be fanatical just to get over all the hate that it receives, since the common trend is to insult or debase the fan's standards of gaming when they mention they like it.

I for one loved both games. I'm not going to sit here and defend them for their gameplay, graphics, or music. They appealed to me, and that's all I can say. But it's kind of depressing to read the hate that FFXIII when half the people hating on it can't properly make a damn argument.

:hmph: Sorry, just throwing my two-cents in.
Click to expand...

I was saying that they're fanatical based on some of their other posts on the board. Not just off this particular post they made.
 
Kharnij said:
I think they're just super fanatical. Not necesarily a troll.
Click to expand...

He only posted "FFXIII is the best FF ever" he didnt explain the reason so i labeled him like that, in my post i said why is crap if i just had posted "FFXIII is crap" then i would be the one trolling .

Either way i detract for that after further seeing his posts, sorry.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top