Did you bet on Duke?

To be honest to beat Cid like that (one of the tougher story bosses for sure) is some great paradigm strat on that dudes part. And I don't get the hate on the auto-battle. FFXII's gambits were very similar allowing you to stratigize how you want by switing gambits and I don't remember anyone bitching as much back then.

I never really saw the difference from hitting auto-battle on FFXIII and just mashing attack over and over in so many other RPGs to deal with random battles.

Just out of curiousty have you actually played the whole game Baal?

I've played through like half of it before I stopped caring. I hate FFXII too, I'm not gonna be a hypocrite about it and the main difference is that was a boss Ellis, not a random battle. If it was a random battle it'd be a different story (In my case, at least) but a boss should require strategy, tactics and you actually being able to sit there and play the game, not throwing the game on CPU Mode and having it play itself for you.

Quote :

you can't call something a failure because it automatically does what you said it should do, even more so when it's an option and you can still choose to do everything on your own...

The game heavily suggests you should use it though and if you don't use it then you are pretty much gimping yourself out. This is the same problem with Social Links in Persona where they're not required but the game is absolutely hellbent on making you use them and showing you the tedium of not using them. FFXIII has a feature that allows you to not play the game and it heavily advertises it, THAT IS BAD.

You must have be a little confused, shifting paradigms is pretty strategic. The only reason he was able to auto battle that boss like that was becasue he had a great set-up (This was one of the few battles I actually died on) and timed his shifts perfectly. I'd consider that strategy and tactics but I guess you got a different opinion on that.


And I'm not saying that FFXIII is an end-all, be-all kinda RPG, but its a good game. Expecially when you consider that the amount of good RPG's this generation is significantly lower than previous ones. I was dissapointed by it. I expected more but the end result is a good RPG all things considered.

the only time i used ti was for regular battles along the way...

besides, if you really played it, you should know that auto-battle doesn't always choose the most effective attack or spell...

doing everything yourself actually is a benefit (as far as bosses go), cause you can choose the most effective spells and attacks, and you'll do a lot better and faster job than auto-battle ever will...

Ellis wrote:

You must have be a little confused, shifting paradigms is pretty strategic. The only reason he was able to auto battle that boss like that was becasue he had a great set-up (This was one of the few battles I actually died on) and timed his shifts perfectly. I'd consider that strategy and tactics but I guess you got a different opinion on that.


And I'm not saying that FFXIII is an end-all, be-all kinda RPG, but its a good game. Expecially when you consider that the amount of good RPG's this generation is significantly lower than previous ones. I was dissapointed by it. I expected more but the end result is a good RPG all things considered.

Paradigms as a whole just dumb down the game further. All characters are restricted to a select few so you are limited in what you may like to do with your party members. Most of the preceding games allowed you to pretty much mold any character into what you wanted them to be, and allowed you to direct what abilities they would learn.

But hell, I guess that's just my opinion.

See this is where if you actually played the game it would change your view a little. Every character can be any type of job. Once you get to chapter 11 and the linearity stops, side quests open up, all the characters can be molded however you want and the paradgrim selection is expanded greatly.

That's near the end of the game.

chapter wise yes, but gameplay wise is about 60% of the way through the game, if that

the last 2 chapters are probably as long as all the other ones combined

Ellis wrote:

chapter wise yes, but gameplay wise is about 60% of the way through the game, if that

That's still bad because it's more than half of the game, Ellis. This stuff shouldn't be immediately accessible past the halfway point you should be given your choices before it.

Besides everyone knows the only thing good about FFXIII is My Hands.

Ellis wrote:

Expecially when you consider that the amount of good RPG's this generation is significantly lower than previous ones. I was dissapointed by it. I expected more but the end result is a good RPG all things considered.

FFXIII is NOT a role playing game no matter how you spin it. You're welcome to enjoy the damned thing if you must but don't pretend it's something it's not.

Quote :

Gamers are largely dissatisfied not with the openness of its latter portions but with the stiflingly linear nature of its first chapters. In many ways, this controversy is simply a sign of changing tastes within the gaming public, but it also reflects on just how far FFXIII strays from the classical concept of the RPG.

According to producer Yoshinori Kitase, though, that's absolutely what the FFXIII team was aiming for. As far as Kitase is concerned, FFXIII isn't even really a role-playing game. "We didn't really intend to work within with the RPG template," he says. "We wanted to create a new game, even a new genre. The way we look at it, there's isn't a certain format that we have to keep to and build a game around. Rather, it goes the other way around. We create a game and, depending on what works or doesn't work within that game, it ends up reflecting different staple elements."

http://www.1up.com/previews/final-fantasy-xiii-rpg


Besides there are quite a few great current generation RPGs to suit just about any taste: Kingdom Hearts BBS (gameplay), Witcher 1&2, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect, Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, Lost Odyssey, Fallout New Vegas, Mount & Blade, Deus Ex 3 (unreleased), Alpha Protocol (mainly for story) and Divinity 2: DKS to name a few. You can take your pick, I'd say that just about all of them are objectively better than FFXIII. Maybe a little less than PS2 era, yes, but it's nothing to scoff at.

Guess I shoulda specified. I meant JRPG (it plays more like that than it does any other type of RPG). and you can't say it isn't an RPG. Just because it isn't a genereic RPG template doesn't mean it still isn't part of the genre. What kinda game is it then Neo?

Heavy Rain's kind of game.

Interactive Cinema or whatever.

That's just stupid.

It was a joke.

One day you guys will be cool like me.

Instead of arguing, I'll post this again.

Once again I'll have to go through the fucking battle system to prove how much it sucks.

Sigh.

In a traditional RPG, which translates to ROLE PLAYING GAME, you play a role. You play a role in the sense that you control the characters' actions and decide their decisions. All in battle, of course.

Is this prsent in XIII? No, strike one. In XIII you control the main character (which you can't even change up till the end of chapter 9, might I add) and that's it. Auto-attack is the preferred way of attacking, because manually selecting attacks is a pain to do every ten seconds.

That's right, kids. Every ten seconds. Because unlike in traditional (turn based) RPG's you don't spend time deciding your attacks, instead you have about 5 seconds to quickly make up some battle commands to attack.

Rinse, repeat. It's a bitch to do.

And worst of all, you only control ONE character. You can only point out a generalised direction the CPU needs to take. But changing parapligms gets annoying after a while and the shots of characters changing their stance ruins the flow of battle. Not to mention the times when Hope heals the wrong character, the character that is not me, after which I die. Well done.

Well, at least I can decide some things outside of battle an- uh oh.

It's just a straight path.

There is nothing to do.

Until chapter 11, of couse, but you're already bored before that.

Even Kingdom Hearts 2 had some diversity to it. Here it's just walk straight past, look at pretty graphics, fight, use a strategy that always work, rinse repeat and this is what the entire game comes down to on the worst levels.

You run down a corridor. It looks amazing and you get a sense you're in a fantastic location and you really want to explore it. You can't. You continue down that corridor, occasionlly picking up trasure chests. Eventually you run into a monster. You fight it, defeat it and get 3, mebber 4 stars. Infuriated you find something like it and fight again, changing your strategy a tiny bit to make yourself faster. After a few fights you eventually find the fight system that works for you and you will use that in pretty much every battle even remotely similar to the one you first fought and gain 5 starts every time. In fact you'll gain them with robotic precision as the computer does most of the work for you and all you have to do is get the timing of the Paradigm switch down. So in all of the game I've been running down pretty corridors, repeating button presses and eventully I started to feel like I was playing DDR. I'd just memorised a series of button presses and was using them on every fight and I rarely got less than 5 stars. Same with the bosses, you work out a strategy and button press away!

They forgot one thing though.

MAKE THE GAME FUN.

What's the goddamn point of a boss' gigantic HP which I take hours to deplete with little to no effort because I figured out his attack pattern and have found a way to counter them.

That's not fun, that's not rewarding. That's time wasting bullshit that only delusional FF otaku fanboys think is a great battle system.

I mean where's the IMMERSION?

In any of the old school ones if I just got hit with a powerful attack I'm thinking "Oh shit, where's my white mage, need white mage, everyone's on 5hp where's my white mage no fuck off knight go defend or something, i need a white mage, oh shit he's charging up, gonna die gonna die, better use an x-potion or something, last saved 3 hours ago, shit shit shit"

In XII "Just got hit, life's low, switch paradigms, spam A, spam A, spam A, spam A, all better, switch to attacking mode, better be faster on those button presses if I want to get a high score."

There is nothing enjoyable about the fights.

They are repetative.

They are annoying.

They take anywhere from 1.5-8 minutes for very little reward.

The locations are depressing.

The music is grating.

I have no desire to level.

And yet, I've spent a lot of time leveling the past few hours.

And since they've designed the game as such, despite having spent significant time and money leveling myself and weapons, with no stats EVER really giving you an advantage in battle and it being merely a game of attrition, I have no desire to continue.

It is a bloody waste of time.

As are all video games.

BUT AT LEAST THEY'RE NOT AS BORING AS THIS PILE OF SHIT.

Rot in fucking hell developers.

everything you said about the battle system can be undone when you manually play though


ok, so you think it's a bitch to select things manually, that's your problem, not the game's... i had no trouble with it, cause i actually took the time to familiarise with the system so I can execute everything how I want and do it pretty fast too... and that's when it really gets fun.

but you wouldn't know obviously.. I mean, if auto-battle doesn't suit you or you think it sucks, did you even ever consider to invest some more time into manually battling instead of sticking with auto-battle?

Really? That post went bad with the first thing you said Kaio. It's pretty obvious you haven't invested much time into the game. Sure there are problems and many lay in what you said in your post but you know how bad you're exaggerating most of it. It sounds like you guys are just hating it for the sake of hating it.

Eevil-Psycho wrote:

everything you said about the battle system can be undone when you manually play though


ok, so you think it's a bitch to select things manually, that's your problem, not the game's... i had no trouble with it, cause i actually took the time to familiarise with the system so I can execute everything how I want and do it pretty fast too... and that's when it really gets fun.

but you wouldn't know obviously.. I mean, if auto-battle doesn't suit you or you think it sucks, did you even ever consider to invest some more time into manually battling instead of sticking with auto-battle?

That's not true at all though, if you play manually it's just as bad, if not worse, because you're stuck trying to rush out a set of commands from muscle memory every 10 seconds that the computer would input much more efficiently if you just hit autobattle, it's like a glorified quick time event that lasts 11 hours.

Boss fights will still take fucking ages to complete regardless of how you input commands because, at heart, they're just really badly designed. I almost got to the end of the game and gave up (I checked a walkthrough and I was literally a room away from the final boss) because I just wasn't having any fun whatsoever; as a person who often deliberately watches/plays bad movies and games for laughs that's saying a lot.

When a game has shitty mechanincs you don't get to say "well that your problem lol" just because you liked it anyway, it only serves to make you sound like a hugely arrogant fanboy.

Ellis wrote:

Really? That post went bad with the first thing you said Kaio. It's pretty obvious you haven't invested much time into the game. Sure there are problems and many lay in what you said in your post but you know how bad you're exaggerating most of it. It sounds like you guys are just hating it for the sake of hating it.

I'm not exagerating anything. I played up to the world "opened up" (yeah, one big fucking field whatever). If you don't understand what's inherently wrong with FFXIII, the you don't understand the essence of playing a videogame.

You seem to be over looking what I say. I'm not trying to say this game is a masterpiece, just like you shouldn't be making it out to be the worst game of the generation. I get you don't like it, thats cool and you don't like it for some valid reasons but there is no need to make it seem like its unplayable. You don't seem to understand what it is to play a video games if you think that just becasue you didn't like a game its terrible.

This topic got really pretentious at one point.

I'll get it.