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

[Claire]

I won't say FFXIII sucks, because I love the game. I just hate how easy Orphan is after all the buildup to fight him, hes a letdown. Sure there are things that I dont like about the game like no towns, linear, easy last boss, but no game is perfect and I took FFXIII for what it was and I made the best of it. And I love the game, just my 2 cents.

 

[Linnaete]

So its official!

FFXIII sucked? Thats 2 in a row and people will not tolerate it much longer IMO.

It's not official. FFXIII is just divisive in terms of opinions. Many people enjoy it, others despise it. It's just a matter of opinion.

I belong in the middle somewhere. While I didn't love the game, I certainly didn't hate it either. I thought there were many good, entertaining parts in the game. However, I'm just disappointed by the superficiality of much of the game. It just seemed to be more graphics than actual gameplay.

I have to admit - I'm one of the people who marched straight into FFXIII with too high of expectations. I think a lot of people have as well. As a game of its own, I suppose FFXIII isn't too bad. As a FF entry though, it's pretty clear that it lacks aspects that have made the previous instalments really enjoyable and likeable.

As for FFXII though, I quite liked it. I really can't see how it sucks that much. It gained very positive reviews and a large fanbase. Again, opinions determine whether or not anything sucks.

 

[Gingerbread Lesbian]

1. No control of your 2nd and 3rd characters or at least the order of A.I. like FFXII's Gambit system.

I'm glad the gambit system is gone, I hated the fact in FFXII you could essentially let the game play itself with such a system.

2. If limiting user control to one character only, allow ability to change the characters during battle like, 8, X, and XII.

This did and didn't bother me. On one hand I grew accustomed to only being able to control one character but on another you should be allowed to switch to control a different character during the battle, especially when you want to do something with a certain paradigm and it wasn't part of your characters' specified role.

3. I NEVER changed my weapons. I upgraded them, but every weapon i found was virtually pointless aside from selling. The fist weapons you get end up being the best.

I agree on the first part that I never changed my weapon because I found it utterly pointless, by time you ever obtained a new weapon you'd already upgraded your current weapon and it was 10x better. However, I don't think the first were the best, certainly not with all characters, the only thing that annoyed me was that if I didn't have the guide then I wouldn't have had a clue which weapons were the best. The game just told you what your current attack/magic was for each weapon and not the full potential (unless I've missed something pretty big) so you'd have to upgrade all your weapons to ultima/omega weapons then all the way to being starred just to find out the max stats. That in itself takes far too long for every weapon.

4. No minigames or REAL sidequests like 6, 7, 8, 9, X, XII, or tactics

I liked the marks in FFXII, so having the missions in FFXIII to me was a huge plus.

5. The chocobo digging is a pitiful glimpse of an attempt of what 9's chocobo digging was. And no chocobo activities compare to the difficulty and fun of 7's breeding and racing. Even X’s chocobo trials were better.

It was just pretty pointless in general, I'd rather have had a faster Chocobo.

6. 3 of my Eidolons were only used once because 3 of my characters were never in my battle team and if they were, they were not the lead. Hell, Hope has been in my battle team since the beginning and he only lead twice, and one of those times was just to see what Alexander could do.

Amen. Only, I only ever used 2 Eidolons regularly; Odin and Bahamut. Once you obtained Bahamut I found the other Eidolons pretty useless and like yourself, I only ever used the others to see what they could do.

7. The world map is terrible, even if the plot IS about exile and isolation.

The one thing I didn't actually mind was the design concept. I didn't mind not having towns, but having played NieR, Dragon Age: Origins etc, the lack of NPCs did grind on me.

8. Seriously if i have to fight one more f***ing adamantoise.....

Again, this was annoying as it was pretty much the only way to obtain items that you could sell for decent gil. Once you maxed out the crystarium system, pretty much every other monster is useless, which is quite sad.

9. "Holy" has been in EVERY SINGLE FINAL FANTASY GAME except this one

This is one thing that didn't actually bother me.

10. So.... when someone turns to crystal their crystal form is nude. but when the awake they are still wearing clothes. There are many ways to do nudity and creatively not show "anything."

I think this was done for special effects, at least with

Spoiler

Vanille

otherwise there was not much logic to it.

11. So… I don’t get to fight Titan?.... That’s a crushing blow to this game.

DLC maybe? It wouldn't surprise me. Then again, I thought you should be able to defeat all the Fal'cies.

12. Being strictly linear maps, the fact that you can hear the nearby treasure chest eliminates all the need to search every last corner. If there is a stray path, 9 times out of 10 there is a treasure at the end.

I think the only place this didn't occur was the Archylte Steppe D:

13. Seeing as how several major enemies can inflict massive amounts of damage to my entire party in a single hit, why then won’t a medic class continue casting Curas after 90% health? The A.I. switches to casting single cures 1 at a time. WHY?!!!!! JUST HEAL ME AND BE DONE WITH IT!!!!

That never happened to me.

14. The Crystalarium allows no room for character personalization like such great FF titles like……all of them.

I thought that, and with FFXII too where all characters could do virtually the same thing.

15. There was not a single puzzle or riddle to figure out. Trajen’s Tower is the closest the game comes to making you actually think but even that was handed to you with detailed instructions.

The yellow arrow on the map pretty much told you where to go at every point in the game, and the big map was worse. It would specifically pinpoint where you needed to go ;_;

16. Im going to make the argument about no Towns for 2 reasons. The first being that even when Sazh and Vanille are nearing the parade, the town is still boring and LINEAR. AND At this point in the game you’re not known fugitives yet. The second reason is questioning why they couldn’t just put on disguises. I mean, the people of Cocoon didn’t appear to be very smart. They probably wouldn’t have noticed. Snow on the beach was about the closest it got.

The whole towns thing didn't bother me, it would have definitely improved the game but it was only the lack of interaction with NPCs that bothered me about it.

17. No Gravity Magic

Didn't bother me.

18. No Flare, Meteor, or any related massive damage Magic attack.

Again, didn't bother me.

19. Seriously?.....a save point around every single turn?

This however, did annoy me. I don't understand the logic behind it. It was like trying to make up for the lack of save points in FFXII where you'd spend literally hours playing before you came across one. In FFXIII it's just battle-move-save-cutscene-save-battle-move-save for at least 12 of the chapters.

20. The battle with Orphan consisted of Orphan doing the same move of taking me down to 1% life then allowing me more than enough time to fully heal and attack for 20 seconds or so then repeat. So disappointing.

Orphan was a dreadful last boss. With the right amount of levelling the only difficult part was if it cast death, and with the right items you could make that have minimum effect. Then the last stage, well...we won't go there...

BONUS: The game is so incredibly easy it’s insulting

This pissed me off to no end. In all the previews it mentioned how FFXIII was one of the harder Final Fantasy titles, at what point exactly? Even the last mission of the hunts which was supposed to have the hardest boss in the entire game was a walkover with the right paradigms.

 

[Paradoxum]

I just don't believe SE's excuse when they say they can't do towns because it's "hard" to do in HD... what about Oerba? it's basically just a town with no NPC's (and looks rundown of course)

and what about when you're on Eden? it's a city! they can easily do towns and such...

although I don't really see how anywhere in the game a town would have fit in, though. perhaps there could have been one last remaining human city somewhere on pulse left standing, but that would prolly screw up the ending where humans move back to pulse from cocoon.

I can name a ton of things I didn't like about FFXIII, and even more that I think could have been improved or done better / in a different way, but I still really enjoyed the game and it's probably my favourite FF now.

Now SQenix just needs to get that FF7 remake out... argh

 

[Altair]

I agree with pretty much everything that you said. Sometimes i would just summon the edilons cause i was bored, never really needed them except when i didn't pay attention once, and two of my guys ended up dead.

And YES the amount of adamantoise really got on my nerves.

Also i agree with the cyrstarium that it should allow you to develop your characters the way that you want to.

 

[Floating_Redness]

Ummm... That should be 21 Reasons and not 20: The Soundtrack. I've already mentioned this, but, what I would like to "say" is that XIII's is the second-worst Soundtrack of the recent - F.F. VIII Upwards - Soundtrack as it did not sound like a FINAL FANTASY Soundtrack.

With the great job SQUARE ENIX (S.E.) did on XII, many people will have set their standards for XIII pretty high - and quite rightly so. However, I think all S.E. cared about in this game was the Effects of the game, rather than the Storyline, and it seems to me that this is the way all games are going since the effects have got better, but that doesn't mean they can just forget about the Storyline of a game! I mean, a six-year-old could have done XIII. We wait about two years for XIII to come out, but, the way it has been done, S.E. could have completed the game overnight, if you get what am getting at, so you would expect something better after a two-year wait!

I hope the next FINAL FANTASY is better; SQUARE ENIX, take note...

 

[-KJ-]

I agree with points 1. and 15.

Point 1: I was dissapointed that I coul'nt control all of my characters during battle. But thinking about it the battles are so fast-paced that before you have finished entering all commands for your characters, you'd probably be K.O'd, especially when battling with harder bosses.

Point 15: This was dissapointing for me also, as I was expecting more puzzles and side missions as in previous FF's. I think the fact that there was hardly any made the game less playable than the other FF games.

 

[ANGRYWOLF]

There are people playing FFXIII on the Tantalus network if anyone wants to watch.

shrugs.

Supposedly managers at Square have told employees not to concentrate on the game's storylines.

shrugs.If true it makes the games a lot more shallow and a lot less interesting.

 

[Oliver Queen]

1. No control of your 2nd and 3rd characters or at least the order of A.I. like FFXII's Gambit system.

Yeah, I would have liked to control your other characters in battle. I didn't really use the gambit system, but if they made it more like any other FF, where you actually pick what your guys do, then it would be better.

2. If limiting user control to one character only, allow ability to change the characters during battle like, 8, X, and XII.

I thought that was kinda stupid as well. Party leader dies=game over? I had battles last me 25 seconds because of this.

3. I NEVER changed my weapons. I upgraded them, but every weapon i found was virtually pointless aside from selling. The fist weapons you get end up being the best.

I actually didn't upgrade my weapons for a while, so I had found better stuff before I actually started.

4. No minigames or REAL sidequests like 6, 7, 8, 9, X, XII, or tactics

Didn't bother me all that much. I enjoyed doing the missions.

5. The chocobo digging is a pitiful glimpse of an attempt of what 9's chocobo digging was. And no chocobo activities compare to the difficulty and fun of 7's breeding and racing. Even X’s chocobo trials were better.

Yeah, that was bad. Even if there was something to do besides use them to get to the high places and occassionally dig up something, it would have been better.

6. 3 of my Eidolons were only used once because 3 of my characters were never in my battle team and if they were, they were not the lead. Hell, Hope has been in my battle team since the beginning and he only lead twice, and one of those times was just to see what Alexander could do.

I actually used my eidolons alot in a pinch. They were real life-savers and they looked pretty cool.

7. The world map is terrible, even if the plot IS about exile and isolation.

C'mon. The world map wasn't THAT bad. Yeah, it could have been better, but I've seen worse.

8. Seriously if i have to fight one more f***ing adamantoise.....

I'll agree with that. The fact that the hardest thing to get meant you had to kill infinite amounts just to get 1 was pretty lame.

9. "Holy" has been in EVERY SINGLE FINAL FANTASY GAME except this one

Didn't really bother me.

10. So.... when someone turns to crystal their crystal form is nude. but when the awake they are still wearing clothes. There are many ways to do nudity and creatively not show "anything."

I was a bit unsure on this as well. Tbh, how they did it was lame.

11. So… I don’t get to fight Titan?.... That’s a crushing blow to this game.

It would probably be a 7 phase fight if you did fight him.

12. Being strictly linear maps, the fact that you can hear the nearby treasure chest eliminates all the need to search every last corner. If there is a stray path, 9 times out of 10 there is a treasure at the end.

9 out of 10 of those was a component of some form, so how else are you gonna upgrade your shit.

13. Seeing as how several major enemies can inflict massive amounts of damage to my entire party in a single hit, why then won’t a medic class continue casting Curas after 90% health? The A.I. switches to casting single cures 1 at a time. WHY?!!!!! JUST HEAL ME AND BE DONE WITH IT!!!!

I've had that problem as well. Most of the time, though, I would be as a medic as well, so I would essentially quick heal and change again.

14. The Crystalarium allows no room for character personalization like such great FF titles like……all of them.

There WAS personalization in this one. Send everyone through a different role instead of whatever you want. Then everyone has a role.

15. There was not a single puzzle or riddle to figure out. Trajen’s Tower is the closest the game comes to making you actually think but even that was handed to you with detailed instructions.

Some of those puzzles get pretty difficult to do without help. It didn't bother me that much.

16. Im going to make the argument about no Towns for 2 reasons. The first being that even when Sazh and Vanille are nearing the parade, the town is still boring and LINEAR. AND At this point in the game you’re not known fugitives yet. The second reason is questioning why they couldn’t just put on disguises. I mean, the people of Cocoon didn’t appear to be very smart. They probably wouldn’t have noticed. Snow on the beach was about the closest it got.

Even though they weren't known fugitives, they wanted to hide so that they wouldn't be found out. Why no disguises, I don't know.

17. No Gravity Magic

Didn't bother me.

18. No Flare, Meteor, or any related massive damage Magic attack.

Didn't bother me either.

19. Seriously?.....a save point around every single turn?

How else would you upgrade your stuff to compete against the enemies?

20. The battle with Orphan consisted of Orphan doing the same move of taking me down to 1% life then allowing me more than enough time to fully heal and attack for 20 seconds or so then repeat. So disappointing.

You got lucky. He did that to me, then attacked about 5 seconds after that.

BONUS: The game is so incredibly easy it’s insulting

EASY??? I don't think so. Maybe if you spent the whole beginning grinding and spent 15 hours in each place to become a badass before the end. I found the game to be challenging at times.

Hey, maybe if you send your feedback to SE, they will change the game for you.

 

[Linnaete]

Supposedly managers at Square have told employees not to concentrate on the game's storylines.

If that statement really did come from SE, I think it emphasises the sheer sorry state of the company nowadays. As evidenced in Final Fantasy lately, it may be that they have prioritised visuals as a primacy over everything else. FFXIII demonstrated that rather well. It was just one massive cinematic march from start to finish and compared to its predecessors, the game was just conspicuously lacking on the gameplay front.

Granted, FFXIII's story isn't terrible. It certainly isn't the best either. It does have its shining moments, as well as its ugly moments. But it is a rather average storyline, suffice to say. I fear for the franchise if visuals do continue taking precedence over the other, more important aspects. A good story and a good cast are important aspects that bring appeal to Final Fantasy for many people. It shouldn't solely be graphics and CGI.

 

[Gingerbread Lesbian]

Supposedly managers at Square have told employees not to concentrate on the game's storylines.

shrugs.If true it makes the games a lot more shallow and a lot less interesting.

Doubtful. It's probably nothing more than a rumour. Square-Enix just don't have any decent leading writers or scenario directors thus the story quality plummets. Final Fantasy XIII was a step up from Final Fantasy XII in terms of storyline and character development since the latter pretty much had neither, Final Fantasy XIII's just happened to be boring and uninspiring.

 

[ANGRYWOLF]

I believe it ...
shrugs..
You can believe whatever you so choose.

The proof is in the last 2 FFs...

shrugs...

We can only hope Versus is better.

 

[Killer64]

The one thing I HATE about FFXIII is that the game doesn`t let you overpower your characters like the other FF titles. If I could overpower my characters in that game I would make Barthandelus look like a joke but nooooooo .He casts doom on me,which from my past experience in FF XIII is incurable, and I still have never defeated him yet. By the way, the Barthandelus fight I am talking about is the one before you complete chapter 9 and get to the halfway point in the game.

 

[-KJ-]

I know I have already posted in this Thread but I’d like to respond again in FF13’s defence.
I agree with a couple of the points made but overall I think FF13 is one of the best games in the series so far and has been overly criticized in my opinion.
I could go on all bloody day about this so I’ve just commented on a few main points.....

1: The battles are so fast paced that if you had control of all of your characters, you would be KO’d by the time you have entered all the commands for your party, especially with high level mark mission and boss battles. I personally like the new battle system. It allows you to think quickly and makes other FF battle systems feel slower than a retarded snail.

2: Changing weapons can give your team a massive advantage on the battlefield. You just need to be smart about what accessories you pair your weapon up with. Vanille’s Pearlwing Staff for example, when upgraded to the Nirvana, is 696 points more effective (for magic) than Binding Rod – Nirvana. So really the first weapons you get don’t necessarily end up being the best.

3: Want a REAL side quest? Try the mark missions – there’s 64 of ‘em! As for minigames, there are lots of secret areas to unlock – most of them lead to rewards. It’s just a case of whether you can be arsed to find them. And if you’re a hardcore FF gamer, then you will.

4: Why only use Eidolons once when they can revive and restore HP to an entire party that is in trouble?

5: If you wanna talk about repetitive battles, FF8 has to be the worst in that area for me. FF13, in my opinion, has a good variety of monsters to fight. And you can see them on the battlefield so you don’t have to fight the same one if you do some clever manoeuvres.

6: You don’t really need any “massive damage magic attack” when you have a saboteur to cast imperil, which reduces elemental resistance. I’ve defeated numerous tough enemies in seconds using the imperil spell. It saves a lot of pissing about.

7: I think the game took a different direction by not including many towns to explore, which is good for those who don’t want to fanny about and get on with the story. Don’t get me wrong, I like exploring but this gave me more of a direct “feel” for the storyline rather than wandering off for ages forgetting where the bloody hell I am.

.....Think I should stop there before I get too carried away like.

 

[Nephele]

i don't agree with the 19th point. Due to the lack of time, i seriously need to save at every corner and turn. The battle system has flaws but it was unique, think of it as a lazy FF where u only control one character and let the rest work for u. But yeah, i would like to work those eidolons more. But over all, i think the battle system of FF13 is better than 12. Imo, it has a great storyline and i like it.

 

[C2]

i find ffxiii to be easy and hard.

but here is something i dont like at all, jeez i mean if you died you retry at the same dang place instead of going back to the savespot.

 

[Noiseman]

Ugh, just this "game", it was terrible, nothing more than eye candy; uninteresting plot, characters with zero depth, overly repetitive (and easy) battle systems, linear gameplay, and there was nothing in the game that really made it an RPG, they might as well have had made it a platformer that only requires walking.

And to explain my points;
All the characters are boring...They all fit some kind of cliche and had no real depth to them and I wouldn't say having a 'deep, dark (and cliche)' past really applies as depth. I felt like every single character was seven previous FF characters thrown into one, no one was original.

As was the plot, it also seemed 'thrown together' and there was no real point or proper explanations for everything. In this game stuff just 'happens' that's it, there's no reason behind ANYTHING or at least no real reason and when the game tries to explain why things happened as they did, it always felt like an excuse-like someone had a basic idea for the ending and went, "Now how to fill it out..." and ended up just piling a bunch of nonsense to together in hopes of making a structural plot.

As for the gameplay, I kept reading/hearing people say how hard that bosses were and that the game could get difficult and etc. etc., but that's mainly only because there's no way to over level, which is stupid, why play an RPG at all if there's no REAL point leveling up, that's always been part of the fun. Not to mention they seemed to have taken the Sphere Grid from FFX and watered it down, turning into something that was not only utterly pointless but gave you no freedom to build your characters. And to support my point that they game was still easy, all you'd have to do was fight, fight, fight, heal, fight, fight, fight, heal, fight, fight, fight, HEAL, etc. etc. etc. etc.

And why not just leave it on autobattle after scanning the enemy? Because after that point you didn't even need to play.

*EDIT: I forgot to mention the fact that you can only control one character at a time; on the battle field I had wished you could say to your 'team' (since when don't teams work together?) "Get off the dang field if you're not going to do anything!"

Okay, and I have heard/read a lot of people say that the gameplay is linear, and it was. What they heck was up with the maps? Oh sure they give you one open field in the whole stupid game, but even then, who cares? For over 50 hours of gameplay you're going through that same map with a different color scheme and background, but essentially it's all the same.

Finally, this was not an RPG and the creators single-handedly made me hate JRPG's for a while. Like I said before, this game might as well have been a platformer with no jump command and all you do it walk and fight repetitive battles and monsters until you reached the 'hard' battle at which point you scan the enemy set it to autobattle then walk away and make yourself something to eat.

What Square Enix tried to do was fix a system that wasn't broken.

I'm pretty sure that all these points have been made before, but I just felt like throwing out my two cents.

*EDIT: Maybe I only hated this game as much as I did because I rented it with high expectations (even though I kept telling myself it was going to be horrible) and when I played it I was thoroughly disappointed (and yet expectant).

 

[kensai_D]

I dislike the linearity and how long it takes to get to a "free roam" (per se) environment (30hrs, seriously?). Plus I find the game has ridiculous difficulty curves at times, and the fight with

Spoiler

Barthandelus at the end of the Palamecia

I found unbelievably difficulty. I still haven't finished the game, it's far from the best Final Fantasy out there (FFVI/FFVIII IMO) but I don't hate it. Each to their own nonetheless and I can see where the arguments come from.

P.S. Oh, I do miss the shops.

 

[ShinkuHiro]

I really don't understand why people take the time to make such long complaint posts. If I hated something that much, I would just sell it and move on instead of coming on a forum to complain. I guess I'm the only person who likes Final Fantasy XIII enough to call it my favorite game.

 

[-KJ-]

I really don't understand why people take the time to make such long complaint posts. If I hated something that much, I would just sell it and move on instead of coming on a forum to complain. I guess I'm the only person who likes Final Fantasy XIII enough to call it my favorite game.

I totally agree with you but people are entitled to their own opinions I guess, though I think people have been overly critical about this game. It's one of my favourites in the FF series so far.