Help me finish FFXIII

OK so I picked this up as something on the side to do. I read everything saying it was linear, however just finished chapter 4 and I am bored to tears. The story is great and I love a couple of the characters but you follow this lil tiny trail and the environments to this point are sorta kinda dull. Tell me it gets better as the game progresses. I have never disliked a FF game until possibly now if something doesnt give soon.

Good luck. I got to chapter 11, read the strategy guide and saw that the brunt of the non linear stuff will be done after you beat the game.

...
...

OK. I couldn't bring myself to finish the game. I just lost all drive or care for the story and gameplay. I really didn't enjoy the item system at all. It's like they took a shortcut and didn't want to make a huge gear side to the game. Very disappointing. They need to make the next single player FF as good as FF1-FFX. Go back to its roots.

I've heard that FFXV is supposed to return to the medieval era as the original I-VI & IX were set in, but that is just hearsay for now.

As for FFXIII, I will admit it was trying to keep entertained by the sheer linearity of the entire adventure, well up to ch11, then from ch12 til the end. Chapter 11 is an extremely huge field to explore, nothing like what you've seen yet, with some 64 additional trial/quests to do that get harder and harder to complete. Some were just astounding how difficult they were to succeed at.

However I'd suggest sticking with it as the story really is quite good, one of SE's post FFVII's best. Do spend a great deal of time in Chapter 11 though and really beef up your characters as I found that early into the next parts it became near impossible to continue from just leveling off random encounters. I had to back-track a great deal to the Chapter 11 area to re-lvl my characters to proceed at one point!

And not to ruin the ending, but you had better have the characters you use near or at the highest tier of advacement if you wish to defeat the final series of bosses...they are not a joke!

And am I the only one who wanted to punch Lightning in the face? Her and hope I cannot stand. Snow is my favorite follow by vanille ( sorry I like perky)

your not alone in this. I got bored with the game after chapter 3 and I haven't picked up the game again since. That was like 1 week after it came out I played a few days then stopped. It just wasnt for me. The only FF I've never finished

Qwalen Masthead wrote:

And am I the only one who wanted to punch Lightning in the face? Her and hope I cannot stand. Snow is my favorite follow by vanille ( sorry I like perky)

I actually really liked Lightning, and loved the perky Vanille...didn't care for Snow, Sahz or Hope much...and the other woman Fang was awesome!

As you can guess I played with and beat it with Lightning, Vanille and Fang, besides the many periods you're forced to play with other characters.

Snow got on my nerves at first but grew on me. Kind of like the movie 9.

I just chalked this up to another game design experiment that didn't turn out to well for the FF Franchise. Much like FF8 and FF10 in my opinion. The draw system in FF8 made me almost want to quit playing the game and the story/characters in FF10 were completely forgettable (C'mon! Your main character wants to change her name to something that sounds like a weapon and you go with "Dagger" completely ignoring the name "Kris"?! Well luckily they let me fix that shit. Only time I ever changed a character's name).

But if you think about it, they just did FFXII and that game is nothing if non-linear if you are talking about game play. So the next version they tried the the opposite side of the spectrum and went completely linear. To be honest, as far as combat went I found FFXIII's combat system to be highly enjoyable. The story was decent if not as moving as FFX, FF6 or FF7. The characters were developed fairly well and none made me want to kill them by the end. Well. Maybe Hope. But only a little.

When it is all said and done, the next iteration of the franchise will most likely be nothing at all like this one. Unless Square-Enix has finally realized they much rather be a movie company than a video game company and just release FFXV: The Movie. How they fucked up "Spirits Within" amazed me.

I believe you should be referring to FFIX, not X...hehe Never played XII yet, but would like too, but without access to a PS2 I doubt I will anytime soon, as all the money I acquire from now til FFXIV's release is going into a new GPU, purchasing XIV and monthly payments thereafter.

I really liked X myself. After VII it was my favorite.

Khalus Akuhei wrote:

I believe you should be referring to FFIX, not X...hehe Never played XII yet, but would like too, but without access to a PS2 I doubt I will anytime soon, as all the money I acquire from now til FFXIV's release is going into a new GPU, purchasing XIV and monthly payments thereafter.

Correct. I meant IX. See. The game was so forgettable that my mind just instantly assumes I couldn't be possibly talking about it.

i loved IX =/ i loved pretty much every ff game so far to date except for 8 but even then i still enjoyed it a little but mostly for the cutscenes

8 was my favorite. Mostly due to the love story, music and setting. Yeah the draw system was a nightmare, but I still loved this game.

I have a love/hate relationship with XIII. I thought the music, the battle system, and the story were all rather good, but I got bored with the linearity, and the dialog was rather poor at times. The first twenty hours amounted to one really long tutorial, too, which sort of annoyed me.

Chapter 11 was fun as hell, though. I wish the entire game had been so open. I feel that the game had the potential to be one of the great Final Fantasies, but the developers squandered that potential. I still feel that it's worthwhile to beat, though. And post-game is pretty great, too. Finally being able to kill those tortoises was gratifying.

Despite its flaws, it was a more memorable game to me than XII was.

I'll tell you what I told everyone else I talked to about it: stick with it. It gets better. I am not a fan of starting a narrative in the middle, as I'd rather experience a story in the correct order and get to know the characters, so that I care about what they do or what happens to them.

The way this game tells the story, you don;t really get to know all the characters until about twenty hours in. Now from that point, I was really into it, and couldn't wait to play it to see what happened next. I really didn;t mind any of the characters except for Venille; she couldn't decide if she was going to use an Aussie accent or not for most of the early parts of the game, and I'm not a big fan of the standard perky pedobait character, though obviously it's a popular archetype in Japan.

Yes, the game is linear, until you get to the point that it opens up, and at that point you need to do some grinding to power up enough to finish the rest of the game. It gets rough towards the end...

In interviews, the developers stated that this is the new direction they're taking things for the rest of the series, so expect more linear stories from them.

Sarcastic exclamation: Yay.