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I'm wondering though, did anyone think that maybe the linearity and/or lack of towns makes sense with the story, which some people don't understand yet? I mean, in FF10 it made sense not to have a world map. Just saying...
It doesn't make sense for them to buy things online. And actually, most fugatives run to crowded places because they're less likely to be discovered (needle in a haystack).
agreed. the game is being dictated by the story.. if people want a game that's not linear, has many towns, etc. then they should find another game
Well I'm glad other people enjoy the music. I guess I'm just more fond of how Nobou captured the mood of the place you were in and what was happening in the FF's he composed. Also, FFX had one of my favorite game soundtracks and that one wasn't Nobou either. This one just doesn't up to this point have something that blew my mind.
Ironically, the joker who you hope SE never hires again is the same man who made one of your favorite game soundtracks.
At least this review is from someone who actually own the game. However FFX was linear i spent over 200h and that was my second playthrough, why? well because it had some sidequests like the finding the extra aions and defeating the dark ones and you could create some cool weapons plus collecting the main characters ultimate weapons(i think) which wasnt that easy.
The game just had much you could do that didnt stray from the storyline too much, like that monster camp where you could fight monsters harder than the final boss was just pretty fun (though a little weird). How hard would it have been implementing some of those things in FFXIII? It never hurts giving the player optional things to do. And FFXIII seems to have next to none fun optional things to do.
And the one that stated that maybe it took them too much time creating the engine, well FFX also had a new engine but that didnt stop them to give it a good story and enough of fun sidequests.
The battlesystem seems to be okay but so far the best battleystem SE has ever created is the one from TLR, it wouldnt work so good with FFXIII but something as innovative would have been welcoming.
I could really go on for ever stating my disappointments but well at least there are ME2 coming and DA2 is yet to be played and that new JRPG with guns looks fun.
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Originally Posted by Hynad
I think you should consider leaving and never come back.
No towns? but what about that place with the fireworks,you know where snow and serah were at? can't you run through that like in the trailers we saw.I've only seen the beginning of a stream of the game so I'm not too clear on it.but I think that counts as 1 town.
Bah, I want to work more on this writeup before I post it, I want to also explore the sidequest and discover more before I post it up, Back to mroe play
Ironically, the joker who you hope SE never hires again is the same man who made one of your favorite game soundtracks.
Guess he peeked early and fast?
I'm on chapter 12 now, and I'll do a bigger write up earlier tomorrow and my final thoughts on the whole experience.
The quicky of it is, the game DOES improve vast amounts Ch 11 and onward. It's just a shame it takes nearly 40+ hours to get into the meat of this game.
I'm on chapter 12 now, and I'll do a bigger write up earlier tomorrow and my final thoughts on the whole experience.
The quicky of it is, the game DOES improve vast amounts Ch 11 and onward. It's just a shame it takes nearly 40+ hours to get into the meat of this game.
I think you'd greatly enjoy the rest of his soundtracks as well. I personally think he's an extremely prolific composer, and even if you don't like this particular OST, I recommend not giving up on the guy too son.
There are Uematsu soundtracks I haven't been terribly fond of in the past, but we all know the guy can compose like a beast.
I personally like this soundtrack a lot, but I can understand someone not feeling like it's their cup of tea.
Really? I love how straightforward the game is about it being strictly about the characters and the story. I can live without a town here or there if the plot/characters make up for it. Granted, I can't say anything until it is out in English (or in subs) but it sure does seem like it. By the way.. there is tons of lore in the game. It is just not the normal stuff. Sure, there are the two Chocobo themes but..
Spoiler:
There is also a store dedicated to Gilgamesh. The monster hunts include Jumbo Cactuar and Ochu and Marlboro and Adamantoise. The Fal'cie are all old FF summons (Anima, Kjata, Titan, etc.). The town known as Palumporum. There are TONS of FF throwbacks.
And the music is all taste. I think that this soundtrack is the best that Final Fantasy has had yet, and greatly prefer Hamauzu to Uematsu. (What, with the best battle theme yet, The Oath, Chocobo Themes, the fun songs that include singing, Lightning's theme, Vanille's theme, etc. The list goes on and on.)
why are u so complaining about linearity and citys i dont get it, i mean come on, every ff is linear and i love it cause u play the game like reading a book or like watching a movie, ff10 didnt have any towns exept luca and it was linear as hell, every ff is made like that, i mean ff9 and ff8 are linear too, afcorse u could go everywhere but at the end the story is the same what ever step u took, im glad its not like a freakin world rpg games, u can just feel the diference, ff are more concetrated on the stories and characters and world rpg are concentrated on medievil crap or something like it with to much side quests and 2 or 3 different endings that are not that different.........
like i said in another thread the story and the characters are the main thing in ff series, ff10 didnt had any towns exept luca and it was linear, every ff is, its like reading a book or watching a movie and i love it, not like every other rpg crap!!!
I think you'd greatly enjoy the rest of his soundtracks as well. I personally think he's an extremely prolific composer, and even if you don't like this particular OST, I recommend not giving up on the guy too son.
There are Uematsu soundtracks I haven't been terribly fond of in the past, but we all know the guy can compose like a beast.
I personally like this soundtrack a lot, but I can understand someone not feeling like it's their cup of tea.
To my surprise you are right. I'm at the final dungeon right now, and from Ch11-13 it's like a totally different game soundtrack with great mood setters, and memorable themes.
I'm just so baffled why SE decided to do what feels like 10 chapters of filler, and then a whole different FF game from 11-13. Chapters 11-13 should have been spread out throughout the full 13 in terms of content. So much good stuff is in here and it will be a shame when reviewers in the west murder this game in review scores due to the fact they'll never get past 25 hours worth to make a final judgement.
To my surprise you are right. I'm at the final dungeon right now, and from Ch11-13 it's like a totally different game soundtrack with great mood setters, and memorable themes.
I'm just so baffled why SE decided to do what feels like 10 chapters of filler, and then a whole different FF game from 11-13. Chapters 11-13 should have been spread out throughout the full 13 in terms of content. So much good stuff is in here and it will be a shame when reviewers in the west murder this game in review scores due to the fact they'll never get past 25 hours worth to make a final judgement.
Hahaha, I'm glad you've been swayed. =) That doesn't happen too often.
I'm on chapter 9, and you're just making me anticipate the rest of the game even more.
Well it's been a crazy ride so far with this game. What started out as a massive love fest has slowly dwindled down to a lot of hate and dislike. In the first 5-10 hours I would have given this game a 9.5/10....now after what must be like 40 some hours It's barely hitting an 8 in my book and here's why.
1) I'll start off easy here by mentioning music. This games soundtrack is by far the least memorable of any FF game. I can hum in my shower at least 5 diff tunes from any given FF game from 3-12, but this game maybe has 3 even worth liking.(Battle theme, Choco theme, and a voiced choco theme) The rest is really really poor. If I was at SE I'd never hire this joker to do a soundtrack again.
2) Graphics. This game is great looking. There are some low res textures like grounds, and the use of repetitive dungeon lay outs, and of course the old invisible walls you bump into to stop your movement, but aside from that it does look amazing. This is the least thing to complain about with this game.
3) Battle system. What started out as awesome, fun, and challenging to keep up with is now really meh. The BIGGEST mistake in this game is Auto-Battle function. They simply should have NEVER put it in. It makes the game more watch, and less play. It takes out the strategy elements and need to keep up commands quick. It just detracts everything fun about this system. I try to avoid it, but the game is so dull now to me to just keep things going even I use it...it's hard not to use it when some fights the monsters are seriously just sponges you have to tediously chip away at. Another problem with the battle system is with the Optima Change. The very first time you ever do it in a fight it always takes forever to regain control over your party members. So they are stuck in a 3+ second loop where they get wailed on to watch this animation play, but whenever you do it after that it takes .5 seconds to swap. SE needed to catch this little problem early on. Also to note with the battle system is until Chapter 11 you really don't get much to experiment with.
4) The leveling system. Wow wtf were thinking? They made us wait till chapter 11 to finally be able to mix it up and make whatever characters we want whatever classes we want? The first 10 chapters I was always over flooded on CP, because it was easy to fill out all your roles to max cap at each point. There was no experimenting either. You just level whatever the characters main role is, then take care of w/e ones you want after till capped. It's the very ghetto mans Sphere grid and a ton more time should have been put into this.
5) Weapon,accessories,items,stores...Money is a rarity in FF13, and it's really needed in order to purchase the right items to level your equipment. Without it you are screwed. To make it worse the only time I have found a great place to grind monsters in order to do so was in Chapter 9 aboard the airship. Nowhere before and nowhere after yet have I been able to do so. The items dropped by monsters go away fast, and generally won't level your gear as fast as the bought items from LENORA's shop. Mobs SHOULD have dropped gil after fights. It's a no brainer SE. :/
6) Summons are 100% worthless. I don't know about anyone else but I do NOT use my summons. The times I lost a fight a few times to a tough random enemey in Ch 11 I tried sicking a summon on it next try and what I learned is they are 100% not even 1/10th as effective as just fighting with your 3 party members. In conjunction to this complaint I want to mention....where the hell are Limit Breaks? This game could have REALLY used them for this battle system. I loved in FFX doing Aurons, Lulus, and Tidus over gauges because they were all different and kept you on your toes with button inputs, stick rotations, button timings, etc. It would have fit perfectly to do just that in this game too, but again SE has dropped the ball BIG time.
7) Everyone's biggest complaint...Linearity. Wow SE just wow. No puzzles in dungeons, no maze like dungeons, no towns to visit to get side quests, and then NO side quests till CH11. The only side quests I've found are god damn hunt quests in this one area. Find a stone, go kill a mob, find new stone, kill new mob. Where did the creativity juice go? It's not that hard to incorporate the types of side quests found in something like FF9 in this game. It had plenty to do aside from the main story to have fun and fill up time. FF7 was notorious for its sleu of mini games and this game NEEDED this to break up the monotony of run, fight, run, fight, cut scene, run , fight, cut scene, etc. I LOVE FFX, and that was the most linear FF up to 13. 13 takes it TOO far. You need to keep the games pacing different.
8) Story. This is probably what is saving this game right now from me just stopping. I know 0 Japanese so I can't pass judgement on if this story is good or not. I like the characters, and I have enjoyed watching them in action. It SEEMS like this is a good story from what I've been watching, but who knows? I sure hope the story is good since it was clearly the main focus of this FF...and if it wasn't then wtf was the focus of this FF overall? What I can mention is that like in part 7 of this rant, is pacing. The story should have been paced out with different things to do between more cut scene and fighting. It just makes no sense to make the player do the story the way they want u to play it for 35+ hours. It's inexcusable if you ask me.
9) The lack of some classic FF lore is saddening too. Moogles make an appearance as just a picture for a store at the save point. That's all as far as I know. Cid I won't even go into on weather he's great int his game or not, because a certain cut scene in Ch10 I believe it was has me scratching my head on wtf happened. Waiting on translations to know what went down there. I really wish Choco riding would have been a focus too, but it seems FF13's idea was "dump all the spare parts into Ch11"... and Choco landed to be rided there.
That's all that I had to get out there for anyone who might want to know more about this game...or would like to contradict what I have stated. I'm all up for a fair discussion. If you really like the game, and read everything I had to just say can you explain how or why? If it's the story, then that must really make up for the things I have found just disheartening to say the least. I hope once the full cut scene translations for the whole game are up I can grow to appreciate the game for what it is more, and not what it could have been, but right now I'm just wondering how SE could have dropped the ball this much....
I agree with some points but disagree with others. Im not that far through but here's what I RECKON D:
- Some of the music is really good. Others like the music that goes on and on the waterscape (?) is fucking terrible.
- Graphics go from being really nice to really shit at times. Mostly it's the hair tbh, some peoples hair like Lightning's looks awful in the lower graphics, whereas someone like Sazh or Serah's hair almost always looks pretty good.
- I like the levelling system. It's pretty straight forward but there's nothing forcing you to make anyone be anything specific apart from earlier on when you could make certain people attackers etc. If you want to make Lightning a healer and Hope an attacker then you can, eventually D:
- Can't say much about the weapon customisation since Im just picking and using items completely at random, but I agree that there arent a huge amount of weapons. I've been stuck with this ugly as fuck sword for lightning for ages.
- Much prefered FFXs summons but I dont mind these. They're only really worthwhile if you break the enemy first, I've found.
- I also agree that running in a straight line for ages in the same place that looks the same gets a bit boring, but I don't remember it being all that different in other Final Fantasy games. I've never thought "ohh I wish there was a slightly different looking path I could go down"
- I like the basic plot but as I don't know Japenis I can't say much about it really. D: The whole l'Cie running away from the government thing is good imo.
As for towns as well, so far I haven't been able to freely explore anything like a town, but to be honest if you're paying attention to the story then there really isnt any way you'd be able to run about skipping through the streets when the whole world is trying to kill you. I don't think there's been a situation like that in an FF before, not that I can think of anyway.
Oh, and I don't understand the auto-battle complaints. If you don't like it then just don't use it. There's a setting that sets the hand to automatically point at Command instead, so just use that if you have such a big problem with it. Tbh I can see auto battle being really useful when you need to do some grinding. I also don't see the difference between pressing auto battle and having the game choose attack attack attack when other FFs you'd be doing the exact same thing by pressing attack...
My biggest hate in this game is the splitting up of party members. I know its a story thing, but at least let me change who's the leader. I couldn't figure out how so I assumed it doesn't let you until later on. I really think you should have freedom of who's the leader at any point, especially as the game doesn't let you control people individually.
This is why I am playing through slowly with the translations posted on the walkthrough board. Yeah, if you burn through a 40 hour RPG in a week without understanding what's going on you are going to get bored. Story plays a big part in a game like this.
@soraeon: while i completely agree with your point, FFX had more towns then just Luca. Besaid, Kilika, Bevelle, Zanarkand, and Luca.
My big deal with the linearity of the maps is that, if no one had pointed it out, would you really have noticed? Using FFX as an example again, I looked through my guide book, and all the maps look pretty much as straightforward as they do in FXIII. Same with FFIX, and when you stop to think about it, FFVII. You really have never been able to stray from the pretty straight path that the game sets for you, so why is it a problem now? Maps have always been pretty linear.
