I just got it. It is very graphically pretty and seems more open, the game mechanics seem much faster overall, but I fear the story is going to be lost/empty. Time will tell (pun?)
Its already noticeably more open to begin with. I liked the battle system before, but they've improved on it. Very much like the active switching of paradigms. I also like the improved crystarium system. Was confusing as first, but then I realized they just put all the roles into one line?
I'm only about two hours in so I can't tell much from a story standpoint.
Couple hours in as well and enjoying it. I liked FF XIII overall. The story was definitely lacking, but I liked the battle system and the length of the game was just perfect for me. Besides the story, the initial ~25 hours of linear story did get annoying. It appears the battle system is 'tweaked' not broken (thats good!) and it is more open-ended. I like the idea of the monster-catching as well.
Optimistic. Will post more after I get through 10-20 more hours.
I'm between 15hrs to 20hrs into the game... I don't know why everyone is raging about the plot/story being not as good as XIII and previous FF games... to me it sounds pretty good so far... but it does reminds me of Chrono Trigger... the game is pretty open and there are a good amount of side quests to throw you off... at first I was more concerned about getting all the treasurers and items... but now I'm more focused on maxing out my characters and getting the best weapons...I think the Archytile steps area is much smaller though and there was only one Long Gui (Dragon Turtle in chinese) to fight with this time (bummer - I was farming these suckers like crazy in FFXIII)...
Right now I'm trying to strengthen my party so I can get all the Chocobos to be part of my paradigm decks! Those Chocobos are HARD to beat! And alot of times they run away before you can finish the battle so its hard to capture them if you do survive or start doing well in the battle...
The story has been pretty good so far, I like it. Not awesome, but the best FF story in a long time.
Game mechanics are fun; the addition of the creatures as the third party member is really fun. Leveling them is pretty fun, and the natural attributes and ability to level-up was very creative. It allows some to be useful (i.e. powerful) early on. while others take more time and patience to get to a really high level.
I do lament the lack of playable characters though. Its great to be able to change-up the roles, but I would like another 1-2 playable characters to choose from. That's my only real gripe.
As far as graphics, the CG videos look really good and are impressive. The in-game videos, though, leave a little to be desired. The frame-rates are inconsistent, and there are a lot of slowdowns. Maybe I am just too used to a smoother (constant 50fps+) experience on the PC, compared to what the PS3 can produce. It's not 'bad', but I would take a little quality hit to keep it smoother.
I am glad they didn't ruin the good battle system from FF XIII, as I really liked it.
For those that have played the XS series on PS2, this game feels a LOT like that. Each area has a lot of dialogue and the exploration and battle systems are similar. Definitely not a bad thing, because I absolutely loved that series.
The length of the game, so far, appears just about perfect. Because it is a 'borrowed' world from XIII, the game doesn't have to spend a ton of time getting you into the world and understanding what is going on. I like that they assume you played the first game, and have a general sense of the happenings, characters, and organizations.
Time travel is fun stuff, and when it's done right it is a blast. I think Square/Enix did a great job on the time-travel mechanics and how that played into the story.
I will update again in a week or so, after I hit around 30 hours or so.
Seems a little silly to me. Can't play a game because there isn't a 'full closure' ending without any sort of cliff-hanger?
Personally, I think it makes the game that much better when sequels are planned to not end so 'neatly'. Otherwise every sequel feels like a forced extension of the story. 'Just as #1 ended, this SUPER-bad guy showed-up and things REALLY got bad...' You get the idea.
The story is fun so far, and there is (supposedly) 8 different endings. I plan to continue enjoying the game and decide for myself how I like the ending, not someone else.
First (in years) and last (forever) FF I ever played was VII. Was linear as hell. I decently enjoyed it, but no interest in repeating. And that's obviously what the core audience of these games wants. I'm just not part of that demographic and much prefer an open-world.
The games are also stylized like anime, jacked up on drugs and flashy and not grounded in any possible reality or earthly physics. Just isn't my thing at all, Western RPGs are where it's at.
First (in years) and last (forever) FF I ever played was VII. Was linear as hell. I decently enjoyed it, but no interest in repeating. And that's obviously what the core audience of these games wants. I'm just not part of that demographic and much prefer an open-world.
The games are also stylized like anime, jacked up on drugs and flashy and not grounded in any possible reality or earthly physics. Just isn't my thing at all, Western RPGs are where it's at.
Ah, geeze I got mixed up (because there are a thousand of the FF games). I just checked on release and system dates--the one I am actually referring to is FF X released at the end of 2001 on PS2.
Those seem like some fairly nitpicky gripes, nothing I would ding the overall score of the game for.
I'm not sure what you first gripe is - added complexity to what exactly, and how did these complexities affect the gameplay?
Adornments are there as just an extra collectible for people who enjoy it. If you don't then just ignore them - personally thats exactly what I've been doing, haven't bothered wasting any time on it and it hasn't affected the game play at all.
Regarding the dialogue options in the cut scenes, the are there for a purpose - many of them prompt different reactions based on your choices, and picking the correct answers can sometimes lead to extra rewards (some very minor, but others very major as well).
The sides quests do seem a bit forced, and thats largely because many of them aren't side quests in the sense that we are used to them from WRPG's - they really aren't side quests at all, as a great many of them HAVE to be completed simply to advance the story. The rest are just there for extra challenges and to give completionists something to spend do, which has always been a staple of the FF series.
-They jump you right in to the full battle system, so you dont have to play 20 hours to get more than 2 ATB bars and get access to some of the cooler abilities.
-Summons/Eidolons are gone - while I did like the cut scenes involved with them in the first game, and each one being linked to a certain character, I found them pretty much useless during battle, and many of the battles you had to fight to obtain them were more annoying than entertaining or challenging.
-Lack of playable characters. I absolutely hated Hope and Snow in FF13 (as in their attitudes and dialogue), so much that I refused to use them at all except during those stages of the game where you forced to. Still, I think they could have had a few extra characters to choose from (hopefully ones that weren't annoying as fuck) especially considering the limitations you get in your role abilities and the way monster roles work.
-To be honest when I heard that you would be using a monster as the third party member I was really unhappy about this feature. However, after playing around with the way it works, crystarium leveling, certain monsters getting certain built in attributes and many only having access to a small subset of abilities within their class, I think it worked out pretty well and I'm happy with it.
-More open exploration. FF13 didn't open up even a little bit until you hit Gran Pulse, and that was nearly the end of the game, and there wasn't much variety in the activities you could do there.
-Noel and Serah are considerably less annoying than the cast of the original game in general.
Things I dont like:
-The open world exploration makes it very easy to power level yourself too much, and certain monsters are WAY too easy to get them to ridiculously powerful levels. My personal problem was that I grabbed a Circuitron fairly early in the game (one of the early Yashcas Massif areas IIRC), and because he was an "Early Peaker" I maxed out his level the instant I got him. This guy has nearly 700 magic and 3k+ hp, along with an ability to that auto-casts Enthunder at the start of the battle for him against opponents known to be weak to lightning damage, along with Thundara and Thundaga (he doesn't get any other elemental abilities, but because of monster fusion its not hard to obtain all of the -aga spells for him so he becomes a complete beast). This is a point in the game where my characters are barely breaking 1k hp and have maybe 150-200 magic/strength. This Circuitron literally obliterates anything that gets in your way up until about Academia 500AF (which is near the end of the normal game I believe). I'm talking about the battle starting, he casts Thundaga, and insta kills all the enemies before you even have a chance to attack with your other characters. I've somewhat overcome this by simply not leveling Noel and Serah (they each have 250,000+ crystarium points and I'm just going to use them up in chunks as needed, but some kind of mechanic that would point you towards story relevant areas, and better balance around obtainable monsters could have completely avoided this problem.
-Lack of monsters with the MED role. I dislike micromanaging healing, so my hope was to mainly leave that role to monsters. Part of the reason I ended up overleveling myself so much was I was constantly running around trying to find a better healer than the very first one you get, but they seem to be few and far between compared to COM/RAV/SAB/SYN monsters.
-My other gripe is again with the openness of exploration. I got to a certain area (
Archlytte Step
) and thought I had to do a bunch of stuff here to progress the story, but in the end it turned out I just spent a crapload of time powerlevel myself unintentionally, and when I finally returned to the main story line, everything I fight is a joke. Obviously this is my fault, and something that is just an inherent problem in any game that lets you explore openly, but I guess my complaint is that there was no way for me to know I wasn't in a story-specific area while I was doing this.
-The story doesn't really start making sense until pretty late in the story line. I guess there is supposed to be a bit of mystery around whats going on, but
"change the future to get Lightning back and save the world!"
just isn't much development, and I got tired of hearing it over and over for the first 15 hours. At least in FF13 there was constantly development, twists, and changes to the story line as you went through it, even if it was kind of hokey.
-The accessory system is more annoying than it needs to be. I guess this one could be something a lot of people enjoy but I don't have the patience to bother with gathering resources for "delicate" and "durable" accessories and determining the best sets for different encounters. Also, just like many FF games, a vast majority of the accessories have little to zero value except under extreme and unique circumstances.
EDIT: I REALLY despise the "enter a rift and solve a puzzle" elements. They seem out of place (solving an anomaly in time by doing a silly logic puzzle?), and are either too simplistic or incredibly annoying (I'm looking at you pick the numbers around the clock puzzle). I don't dislike the idea of puzzle elements being involved in the game, but they should have been added as mini-games somewhere else in the story (Serendipity maybe?), and a lot more thought should have gone in to them. As it stands they are a real downer in the game and seem like they were added as an afterthought with very little effort put in to their design.
I'm probably missing a few things, this is just stuff off the top of my had. Also, I haven't finished the story line yet or completed all of the extra content.
I guess what I really want is for a bit of a mix between FF13 and FF13-2. I don't want to have to go through a 15 hour tutorial before the real game gets started and the battle system starts to really develop. I want more exploration than there was in FF13 and I want it available earlier in the game, but I don't want it to be spread throughout the game in a way that even if you do decide to do it, you don't accidentally end up so powerful that you could go beat the final boss before you hit the half way mark. I also want there to be an engaging story that unfolds and changes throughout the entire game, rather than these small revelations that only happen every 5 hours. Finally, and I know this will probably never happen in a FF game, but could it please be less anime-like where silly teenagers suddenly get burdened with the responsibility of saving the world and become imbued with demi-god like power over the course of a few days or weeks. I guess Snow from FF13 was supposed to kind of fill that role, being an older and more mature character, but his whole "RAWR IM GONNA SAVE THE WORLD CAUSE I DONT GIVE A FUCK AND I'LL PUNCH ANYTHING TO DEATH WITH MY FISTS" attitude was about as juvenile as it gets and a huge turn off.
TL;DR
All in all a very good game though, and I think a lot of people who didn't like FF13, especially those who couldn't stomach getting past the initial (very long) tutorial phase of the game, should really give this a try. Anyone who enjoyed FF13 even a little bit should really enjoy this one.
Ah, geeze I got mixed up (because there are a thousand of the FF games). I just checked on release and system dates--the one I am actually referring to is FF X released at the end of 2001 on PS2.
FFX had a few good points, but the silly minigames needed to get the ultimate weapons ruined it for me entirely. I will never forget the d*mn lightning strikes and chasing the 'blue' butterflies....D:
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