Final Fantasy XIII [SPOILER THREAD]

[stray]

There's only one character I really feel like expanding and that's Vanille. I need another Synergist + Ravager + Medic like Hope. Small preference... I don't really dislike Hope. At least not anymore.. he's gotten cooler. But Vanille's better.

Anyhow, Light, Fang, and Hope are the best team, power wise. I'd rather replace Hope with Vanille. And maybe often change Fang with Snow, who has a boatload of hitpoints more than Fang --- but Fang seems to dish it out faster than Snow in Commando mode. Snow and Sazh for some reason seem kind of slow as Commandos.

Light is perfect as she is as a balanced Commander/Ravager.. I just hate manually playing the Medic role.

[Quinton]

Yeah, I *hate* manual medic.  The AI does a much better job.

[Yegolev]

That's a relief.  I keep thinking I am getting old.  I have even set auto-action as default, although I feel dirty.

[Draegan]

I just played through the crystal forest level where Hope and Lightning get to be friendly and Hope's "Project Nora Phase One Complete" statement come through.   

I have my default set on auto as well.  The trash mobs don't take much though and I can just hit X.  The only time I manually input attacks is when I see a clump and use Blitz.

Started using upgrade and got Light's weapon (I chose the one I was using at the time) to level 9 and it's a beast.  It really stands out when playing other character how much overpowered it is.  Thank you Rasix (I think it was you) for going over briefly the upgrade system.

I'm hating this part of the story because you only have two people in your party and sometimes combat just takes way too long.  Fun game so far.  Work will suffer due to being up until 2am last night.

[stray]

I liked that part because both characters sort of become more a little more complex. Before that, Light was a hardass.

Some trash mobs start getting a little tough, to the point that you want to avoid some. Not that they're all hard, but some have a crapload of hp, switch modes, heal... and some of these tougher ones don't even give much xp to bother.

[Draegan]

Story wise it's fine, I agree.  I just want a full party so I can kill stuff faster instead of sitting watching my APB fill up and everyone standing around.

[Rasix]

So, I just beat up Pope Fal'Cie Redux.  I'm guessing if I want to really max out my characters and get ultimate weapons I'm going to have to back track and hang around Gran Pulse somemore instead of jumping on the ship?  That seems like a somewhat longish trek back.

[John Difool]

So, I just beat up Pope Fal'Cie Redux.  I'm guessing if I want to really max out my characters and get ultimate weapons I'm going to have to back track and hang around Gran Pulse somemore instead of jumping on the ship?  That seems like a somewhat longish trek back.

After you "beat" the game you're given the opportunity to continue playing. There's also two convinient warp portals for Eden and Gran Pulse at the point where you start the post game play. I hadn't done more than two or three of the stone missions during my story playthrough so the PG+ (post-game plus) has been pretty entertaining

[Rasix]

Faultwarrens end bosses are just ridiculous.  I think I'm going to port back to Oerba and just finish the game.

The strats I've read for them are just stupid, either relying on "Lucky Break" or Death.

[John Difool]

Faultwarrens end bosses are just ridiculous.  I think I'm going to port back to Oerba and just finish the game.

The strats I've read for them are just stupid, either relying on "Lucky Break" or Death.

The Titan missions are pretty difficult. I was able to finish them with my post game party but I can't imagine beating them without the benefit of the extra Crystarium stage you unlock after "beating" the game. I suppose you could cheese some of them with Vanille's Death spell but others are immune to that (hello Attacus!). The B mission against the giant Cactaur is rediculous. I don't see how I'm going to beat it without seriously leveling all the alternate roles for my characters. Even with the Growth Egg that's going to take a long time :/

[Elerion]

This game has the dumbest ending of any FF, ever.

It was fun though, thanks to the excellent combat system.

[Rasix]

This game has the dumbest ending of any FF, ever.

Unpossible.  Now I have to have to finish.

[Ragnoros]

Finished this up over the last few days.

tl;dr - Game was fun. But JRPG plots are "Not for me".

The combat was fun. Obviously nothing groundbreaking, but fun. I was not super thrilled at the fact that everyone shared the same pool of skills. I would have preferred some more variety.

While the game was obviously beautiful, high production values, polish, etc. It really didn't feel cohesive at all.

The game basically amounted to: walk down a hall, kill some shit, watch your party banter about something stupid. Rinse & Repeat. Throw in a few FMVs and some forgetable and pointless antagonists (Lets make the main villian the Pope for no apparent reason!) and I guess you can call it a day.

Having said all that, actually finishing it means it must be better then 8, 9, & 12. Because I never did finish them.

[Draegan]

I almost finished 12, but then my brother in law stole it.

Anyway, I just started chapter 10, as in, I saved as soon as I beat 9 and havn't played since.  Is there any good grinding to be had?  I heard chapter 10 is awesome for it.

[Ard]

I beat 12, I wish I hadn't.

I'm up through chapter 11 now, and rapidly losing steam.  At this point I might as well push on to the end, but starting around chapter 10, the pacing of the story went all out of whack, and I'm starting to lose interest now that even random encounters are taking multiple minutes.

[Rasix]

I almost finished 12, but then my brother in law stole it.

Anyway, I just started chapter 10, as in, I saved as soon as I beat 9 and havn't played since.  Is there any good grinding to be had?  I heard chapter 10 is awesome for it.

That's chapter 11.  10 is the Ark but 11 is Gran Pulse, which has about 33-36 side missions that can be done before moving on towards the end.  Some of the later missions will probably require you to beat the game and unlock the last round of upgrades since there's a lot of HP you can get from that.

[Draegan]

Just hit chapter 11 and did one mission.  I found a video about CP/Gil farming in Chapter 11.  Apparently there is a spot in the NW section of the map that lets you get 6600 cp per fight.  I think I found it, it's two mobs attacking it each other but I didn't try it because I head off to bed last night.

Are there any good strategies for after hitting Ch11?  Grind to point X, or a decent set of items to grab or something?  I hate missing stuff.

[Rasix]

You can't really miss anything since it gives you a clear game save when you beat it.  You can return to Gran Pulse after completion.

[Draegan]

Yeah I know, but I'm not going to go back.  But I want to do some of the cool stuff a long the way.

[Rasix]

Well, you should be able to do some of the initial Faultwarrens missions, so that leaves you being able to do missions up to around 40.  The end chain of those (trial of the titan) will kick your ass.  Of course, if you do all of them up until Oerba (mission 28) as you advance, you won't be missing much, but you can teleport back and do those handful remaining before it gets too hard.

[Draegan]

So I finally took a few hours and finished the game tonight.


Fuck. What a dumb story.  I had to read something on the internet that summed it all up

I mean the trash leading up to the last boss was harder that the last boss.

I spent 20-30 minutes on the 2nd last boss.  The one that can randomly KO people.  After 30 minutes of fighting, I have him down to like 20% and he KO's Lightning.  Fuck.  Game Over!  FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!

So I start again and this time Van lands a poison.  Really guys?  Poison?  He dies in 5 minutes to fucking poison?  Fuck you.

The ending was cliche and predictable I suppose.  I really wish I understood the story because it was fucking just not explained at all and I could be assed to read a datalog on my TV from my couch.

Shit game.  


Fuck FFXIII.

[Litigator]

There is an accessory called the Growth Egg that doubles your CP.  It is the reward from mission 55, and you can get it at the end of chapter 11.  The stone is in Oerba village.  The monster is in an area off the highland, that is accessible by Chocobo.  It is very powerful, but you can kill it with Vanille's death spell.  

I got this, and then I ran around for a while killing the Adamantoises with Death to get trapezohedrons.  So when I went back to do Chapter 12, my characters were godlike and the rest of the game was easy.

I ended up looking at a weapon upgrade FAQ because there's nothing intuitive about that system, and the alternative was to just save, do stuff, and then reload and try other stuff to see what worked best.  I really hate using FAQs for video games, and one of the things I really hate about Final Fantasy is game systems that are arbitrary rather than logical.  I also think it sucks that it isn't clear what a lot of the weapons do, and you have no idea when you start upgrading a weapon what you're going to end up with.  I'm also not a fan of having lots of missable stuff that you would never know about unless you look at FAQs.  

According to the internet, the most efficient way to upgrade weapons is to farm gil and buy lots of the same items.  You buy 36 of the same kind of cheap organic material, which gives you a 3x multiplier, and then you use a stack of mechanical components to level your item to level * in one shot.  Once you are at a point where you can farm a lot of gil, the 50k gil Ultracompact Reactor is the most efficient mechanical component, providing more exp per gil than anything else in the game.  Also, once you get one Trapezohedron, you can level a Vanille or Fang weapon to Ultimate level * and then dismantle it for three traps.  This is much more efficient than buying traps for all your characters if you like ultimate weapons.  

But farming gil for ultimate weapons eats a lot of time farming, and will provide you with so much CP in the process that the end of the game will be fairly anticlimactic, especially if you have Growth Egg.  Someone mentioned the Orphan fight taking half an hour.  It took me like five minutes because my characters were all 'roided out.    

I get kind of OCD about these games, and when there is an ultimate weapon that I can obtain, I want to go get it.  It's a shame that the process of getting the weapons in this game is repetitive grinding; it's worse than the planet scanning in ME2.  

Also, the story makes no goddamn sense.  


I think this Final Fantasy had a really good combat system, and I thought paradigm shifting felt much cleaner than the automated command list from FFXII.  But the whole JRPG concept is feeling a little threadbare.  The removal of towns in favor of the datalog and the shops in the save points was really a concession that towns in these games have always been nothing but places to sell junk, buy goods, and get clumsy expositional infodumps.  The distillation of the game world into a series of linear hallways really exposes the illusion of past "free roaming worlds" that gave you little freedom other than the possibility of choosing which order to do certain quests, or the freedom to wander around aimlessly getting into random battles.  And the long static cutscenes feel archaic.

Playing Final Fantasy XIII really makes me appreciate how earth-shatteringly good Mass Effect 2 was.  The game world felt organic, the narrative was driven by complex characters rather than vaguely-defined lore-gods, and there was a real sense of player choice in story outcomes.        

  

[Segoris]

Don't know where to put this for those on the fence about buying or waiting for a lower price, but $30 for FF13 at Kmart. Just add to cart and  the price is reflected. No limit on the discount.

PS3 Link at Kmart
Xbox Link at Kmart

I just tested them both, ps3 still working, xbox was showing out of stock. That seems to be hit or miss all day though according to the woot comments. I'm looking for other games that may have this discount, not seeing anything yet.

[Draegan]

The story in this game is terrible and confusing.  You have to do a lot of side reading to get it.  I think I posted something a few weeks ago from another forum that explains it.

[Rasix]

Yah, it's pretty bad.  I'm surprised they went with this story when putting out this game.  The entire game hinged upon pushing the narrative forward at the cost of other elements, but did so with a story that had people scratching their head if they didn't pause and go read up.  Hell, even the character motivations and interpretation of their situation didn't make much sense most of the time. 

It was a great attempt at completely plot driven JRPG, they just picked a really bad story to implement it with.

[Velorath]

They've been pretty terrible at telling stories since FFVII.

[Litigator]

Yah, it's pretty bad.  I'm surprised they went with this story when putting out this game.  The entire game hinged upon pushing the narrative forward at the cost of other elements, but did so with a story that had people scratching their head if they didn't pause and go read up.  Hell, even the character motivations and interpretation of their situation didn't make much sense most of the time. 

It was a great attempt at completely plot driven JRPG, they just picked a really bad story to implement it with.

If the story had been better, the game would have been better, but a story that plays out in almost exclusively in lengthy, noninteractive cut scenes feels pretty antiquated when compared to newer methods for building narrative into games. 

[Draegan]

I read every data log up to chapter 4-5ish.  I still didn't understand things.  I thought the story telling was fine in 9, 10 and 12.

[Lum]

FF12 had a good (if totally derivative) story until 3/4 of the way in, and then when they tried to switch over from the Empire vs plucky Rebels storyline to gods and pawns it all fell apart. I've heard that, not coincidentallly, a lot of the FF12 developers left 3/4 of the way in!

FF13 has no story. It tries to have one but it has no beginning, end, or narrative other then OHCRAP RUN. What exposition exists is more often then not nonsensical.

Since this is already a spoiler thread, my problem with FF13's 'story' in a nutshell:

I still don't know wtf the last boss was supposed to be other than "generic evil god-like thing with a pseudo-hymnal soundtrack". The fact there was no post-game "here's what the hell just happened to you" quest journal update is probably not a coincidence.

The game killed off 2 of my characters at the end. OK, I hated one of them but I sort of liked the other.

There wasn't much of a resolution past the immediate end. OK, I get it, Cocoon looks like the Yoshitaka Amano concept art at the title screen now. Clever, ha ha. But... what happened to everyone? What happened to the society you were supposedly saving?

No explanation for so many things introduced throughout the game, even in the endless quest journals. Why the hell is everyone in Gran Pulse dead? Did they kill each other? Did Cocoon kill them? Who knows. All through the end sequence crystal shards are floating in the air, and characters remark "Hm, this could be meaningful!" Never explained. At the end, 2 of the supporting cast are returned from crystal stasis. No explanation why, or why the 2 cast members who just WENT into crystal stasis weren't released. What, did they trade places? Who knows.

But the biggest problem I had:

The ENTIRE game is set up as you resisting your fate and the manipulation of the 'gods'. You're told that your fate is to kill Orphan, the "AI" energy reactor that powers the world that humanity lives on, that you will destroy the world, and that nothing you do can change that. You bravely rebel! Screw people telling us what to do, screw "gods" manipulating humanity and pulling the strings behind everything, we're going to be masters of our own fate, we're going to transcend our curse, we're going to find the people responsible for this and KICK THEIR ASS!

So, of course, the end game boss is you killing Orphan and destroying the world, literally doing everything that you were manipulated into doing by the 'villains' throughout the entire game.

Either this is a very dark, Asian view of free will or someone *really* did not think this through. I strongly suspect the latter.

[Draegan]

I'm impressed you remembered that much.  As soon as I was able to say "I beat the game", I wiped everything from memory.

[Phildo]

So, of course, the end game boss is you killing Orphan and destroying the world, literally doing everything that you were manipulated into doing by the 'villains' throughout the entire game.

Except that they managed to do it without accidentally summoning the even bigger god that was supposed to reboot the world.  I think.

[Litigator]

FF12 had a good (if totally derivative) story until 3/4 of the way in, and then when they tried to switch over from the Empire vs plucky Rebels storyline to gods and pawns it all fell apart. I've heard that, not coincidentallly, a lot of the FF12 developers left 3/4 of the way in!

FF13 has no story. It tries to have one but it has no beginning, end, or narrative other then OHCRAP RUN. What exposition exists is more often then not nonsensical.

Since this is already a spoiler thread, my problem with FF13's 'story' in a nutshell:

I still don't know wtf the last boss was supposed to be other than "generic evil god-like thing with a pseudo-hymnal soundtrack". The fact there was no post-game "here's what the hell just happened to you" quest journal update is probably not a coincidence.

I'm past the point where I think it's my fault when something confuses me.  I'm smart, and I understand how stories work.  You do too, and so do most people here.  If something baffles me, it's because it's a shit story that makes no sense.  Whatever Orphan is supposed to be never had an explanation.  The model was kind of cool looking though.  

Also, space-pope was just a horrible villain.  His motivation made no sense.  His plan made no sense.  I don't even understand why he wanted to end the world.  

The game killed off 2 of my characters at the end. OK, I hated one of them but I sort of liked the other.

There wasn't much of a resolution past the immediate end. OK, I get it, Cocoon looks like the Yoshitaka Amano concept art at the title screen now. Clever, ha ha. But... what happened to everyone? What happened to the society you were supposedly saving?

It looks like they got evacuated and went to Pulse.  I don't know what happened to the other Fal'cie.

No explanation for so many things introduced throughout the game, even in the endless quest journals. Why the hell is everyone in Gran Pulse dead? Did they kill each other? Did Cocoon kill them? Who knows. All through the end sequence crystal shards are floating in the air, and characters remark "Hm, this could be meaningful!" Never explained. At the end, 2 of the supporting cast are returned from crystal stasis. No explanation why, or why the 2 cast members who just WENT into crystal stasis weren't released. What, did they trade places? Who knows.

None of this was coherent.  I think that everybody was supposed to end up dead, and somebody chickened out on the bummer ending at the last second.  I thought that crystal stasis and cieth were the two options, so there shouldn't be a happy ending for these characters.  The only compelling thing about these characters is that they struggle against the demigods even though they are doomed regardless of the outcome.  If there's a way out their fate, needs to derive organically from the story.  The game is like sixty hours long, so it's not like there was no time to make sense.  I'd overlook the holes in the mythology if there was an emotionally satisfying conclusion, although I was never really emotionally engaged in the characters.  

But the biggest problem I had:

The ENTIRE game is set up as you resisting your fate and the manipulation of the 'gods'. You're told that your fate is to kill Orphan, the "AI" energy reactor that powers the world that humanity lives on, that you will destroy the world, and that nothing you do can change that. You bravely rebel! Screw people telling us what to do, screw "gods" manipulating humanity and pulling the strings behind everything, we're going to be masters of our own fate, we're going to transcend our curse, we're going to find the people responsible for this and KICK THEIR ASS!

So, of course, the end game boss is you killing Orphan and destroying the world, literally doing everything that you were manipulated into doing by the 'villains' throughout the entire game.

Either this is a very dark, Asian view of free will or someone *really* did not think this through. I strongly suspect the latter.

I'm fine with the characters getting duped by the bad guys.  It makes sense that they are forced inevitably to their focus despite the fact that they want to resist it.  The problem is that our only explanation of what is going on is the expository speeches the bad guys make before turning into boss monsters, and they're apparently lying most of the time.  

I think they went back to Cocoon because the evil pope said he was going to engineer the fake Pulse invasion to dupe the Sanctum military into destroying the world, but that turned out to be bullshit, and he was just trying to force Fang and Vanille into a room with Orphan, which is the real thing that ends the world.  And then that happened, but the world didn't end for some reason, and it was really pretty.

Personally, I'd have bought Fang and Vanille using Ragnarok to stop the end of the world, if doing that turned them into Cieth for failing their focus, and left the rest of the party in crystal stasis, since their focus was to get Fang and Vanille to Orphan.      

[Ragnoros]

We do love a train wreck, don't we.