[Multi] Final Fantasy XIII - Game Discussion (Possible Spoilers?)

[SinisterDeath]

Played the game for about 6+ hours yesterday.

 

First things First.

Do NOT sell your Components!

 

I like the combat system. Its still part old-school FF, but its got that fast paced & combo-like part of FFX-2. Your team-mates do there own thing, so it makes the combat even faster than FFX-2.

They've taken hints from other RPGs, where you get your equipment from the world, BEFORE they become available in the shop. (meaning you don't have to spend alotta money to get them) But if you miss out your going to be paying a pretty penny.

 

Beginning of the game is definately gear-based, after a certain part of the game, where you can actually 'develop' the character, Gear which has become sparse, is almost replaced by the Crsystalis system.

Then, BAM they throw you a wammy, an Upgrade system!

This has so many possibilities to it, Upgrade an Weapon from lvl 1 to 99? or save all those materials, and gill for upgrading your 'ultimate weapon'? (For all I know, it costs 20x as much to upgrade.)

 

The shop system so far is definately designed around making the game Faster.

But at least it also makes it possible to get more Potions and other stuff, during dungeon crawls which was impossible during previous FF games.

Most FF games you had to make sure you bought just enough potions, and used them wisely to get to the final boss, and then pray that the last save near the boss isn't more than a few fights away!

Now you can just buy potions as you need them, and humanoid monsters drop them like candy!

Did I mention the loot system actually makes sense?

 

Monstesr drop.. Parts of themselves.

Humanoids drop gear, credit, belongings.

 

Something thats been asked for ages.

Why is a rat dropping a Bastard Sword 5x its size?

 

Plot wise.

The games Okay, I'm holding judgment on it until it gets further into the story, The data-log at least makes it possible to understand wtfs going on, in the context of background. I'll have to wait a bit longer to see if my predictions about whats going to happen are going to happen, or if the games actually going to suprise me.

 

Characters.

Lightning is okay but in-game she kicks-ass damage wise.

 

Sazh (the black guy with the chocobo in his fro)

He's the obvious comic relief character.

they say he's a pilot, but from what he knows, it sounds like theres more to him then that.

He goes from serious to comedic like a bi-polar chick.

 

Snow.

Serah.

Okay, put it simply, Serah's 18, But she' looks 12. Snow looks like a pedophile, and he proposed to this girl that looks 12. they are in love! they are your emo lovey duvvy couple in the game. I find him to be the most annoying, as they are focusing the story... all over the place, and there focus on Snow, is his 'love' for Serah.

Serah isn't exactly a 'playable character', so I can let you who haven't played it guess about her.

 

Hope.

He's slightly less annoying than snow.

Hope is a... 15 year old kid, His mother helped Snow fight the 'bad guys', and died saving Snows' life. She told snow to bring her son home.

Hope is concusmed with rage over snow letting his mother die.

Escentially he's the 'emo-my-mother-died-its-your-fault' character.

What makes him less annoying than Snow is, he's actually developing as a character, as the story goes on. Though his motives remain the same, how he goes about them are different... Ussually involves less whining, and more doing.

 

Vanille

She was on thet rain with hope, watched him as his mother went off with snow, and pretty much guided him into confronting snow, even though Hope was to torn? to confront him.

She's awfully cheery, has something that reminds me of a british accent that slips in and out.

Alot of people find her to damn cheery, but if you actually pay attention to the story, you'll know its a Front.

Now, theres two aspects to this character.

She's the character who doesn't know anything about cocoon, where they are 'all' from.

She claims she doesn't know anything because she slept in history class (to the older-black guys amusement as he keeps going 'wtf are they teaching kids these days?')

But I think they are strongly hinting theres a completely different reason why she doesn't know anything.

 

Either way, its a setup to allow you the player, to get an explanation about whats going on, without breaking immersion. Makes more sense than explaining to a dwarf in dragon-age origins, how there government works, or how there class-system works.

 

Eitherway, I don't find her nearly as annoying as most other people. Really in terms of who I like most to least its lightning, Sazh, Vanille, Hope, Snow. :P

 

The Chococobo.

Theres a piece in the datalog about him.

"They say something about, know one knows his name because he hasn't told anyone, becuase doing so could possibly shake the very fabric of reality; That Or Sazh just hasn't named him yet."

[cfin5256]

This went on my list of must-haves the moment it was announced. Can't wait for payday.

[Spiffiness]

So far this game has been epic! (On Chapter 9 now) The environments are gorgeous from chapter 3 on, the characters are interesting, and the battle system is crazy fast! I'm actually finding it much harder (i.e. I'm dying much more often) than previous Final Fantasy's, mainly because as soon as the main character gets KO'ed it's game over, and it can happen in a blink. Strategy is also really important because it can mean the difference between taking a few minutes and 15 minutes in a battle (and getting 0 stars).

 

Upgrading is sort of a difficult decision. I started upgrading weapons only to find better weapons with bonuses later on, so I feel like I just wasted a whole bunch of resources. BTW, to get the ultimate weapons for each character, you just have to upgrade any weapon to tier 3, but the stats for it will vary depending on which weapon you upgraded from.

 

Oh, and my character preference is:

Fang > Lightning > Sazh > Hope > Snow > Vanille

 

I can't say that I hate any of them, though, like I hated Vaan in FF12. They all have their reasons for being the way they are.

 

In terms of usefulness, it's Lightning > Fang > Hope=Vanille >Sazh > Snow.

 

 

[SinisterDeath]

I'm not sure where to place Fang, I find her less annoying than Snow and Hope.

Hope has gotten better, but I still place lightning, sahz, above vanille, hope, snow, but I still actually like vanille more than hope. I'll probably place Fang around Sahz/lightnings place. Those 3 are pretty much fighting for '1st and 2nd'.

 

Wheres this info you got on Tiers? Official Prima Guide? I need to get it..

[Imperium]

I'm on Chapter 9 as well at present. I don't plan on upgrading for a while.

 

Can't wait till I can choose my party although it might be a tough decision at present.

 

In terms of usefulness I would disagree as where I am Fang isn't that useful (only really has slow) which makes snow better as he hits harder in commando and has more health.

 

Some of the others are hard to quantify really as they all have several spells I like. At present I am thinking I would take  Lightning, Snow and Hope.

 

With Lightning mainly Ravager, Snow Commando and Hope Ravager/Medic. This might all change though depending on if you can learn skills from other people. Need Haste from Sazh....

[Spiffiness]

I just read about the tiers in various forums because I was trying to figure out the best way to upgrade. The basic weapons will max out at a certain level and then you have to use a special stone to change it to the next one. I'm just going to hold off on upgrading I guess, until I figure out exactly what I want out of my characters.

 

Actually, slow can come in handy because it's the only thing a lot of enemies are vulnerable to, at least at that stage. And also, Fang gets dispel pretty early on which is useful against those huntresses that cast all those enhancing spells on themselves. The thing about Snow is he lost his hand grenades and doesn't get Blitz for a long time (I finally got it recently). Blitz is really great for crowds of enemies. Right now my party is Lightning, Fang and Hope, but I might switch it up so I can get Tri-disaster for certain enemies.

 

I'm on chapter 11 now, and holy crap! I got owned by a Behemoth King...and I ran out of Phoenix Downs :'(

 

 

[SinisterDeath]

Yea, the difficulty curve goes way up after Chapter 10.

I ended up running from the majority of the monsters just to proceed. They were actually harder than the next boss!

 

I've found the only way I can defeat some of the upcoming enemies, specially the groups, and a mob called Phalanx, was to sneak up on the mobs, cast an AOE asap on every mob to stagger them instantly. Then through a Bahamut on there asses! It'll ussually kill the phalanx, or almost kill him, and every other situation like that.

 

With Auto-battle they made the desicision process easier, but they somehow a whole new level of 'strategy' to the games.

 

As for components and upgrading, I'd still upgrade the first set of weapons you get with abilities before you get the stagger lock weapons.

Aka axis blade, and that healers staff.

I'd upgrade those suckers.

I finally found out that the cap level for those are around 21-28 or so. Which makes leveling them up a bit easier...

I know I read somewhere to get the bonus XP up to 3.0 before you give them 'real' exp. Then its practically 1 perfect conducter per level. ;)

 

My real issue right now is gil!

There is no gil to be had!

[Imperium]

I read that you get more gil in chapter 11 and heres a link about weapons and level of exp.

 

Yeh if you use creature items (claws and the like) they put the + modifiers on.

 

http://ff-13.info/category/weapons/

[Spiffiness]

Oh, man, I'm trying to 5-star the missions on the first try so I don't have to come back and do them again later if I want the trophy, but it's so hard... I managed to get up to mission 4 and beat it with 4 stars, but that summoned monster slowed me down. :'(

[Imperium]

I have the joys of that yet to come.

 

I am still in chapter 9 as I haven't had time to play much

[Spiffiness]

Yes!!!!!!!!! I just starred Ultima Weapon for Lightning! I hope it was worth the amount of gil I spent upgrading it...

 

0 stars for the chapter 11 boss  :'(

[Paxam]

I'm just at the end of Chapter 7, stuck on the boss (Havok something or other)... It's impossible to me.

 

I don't really get the equipment system. Does it matter what I use to upgrade stuff, or is everything just a numeric xp value?

 

I'm not sure what I think of the Crystarium bit. It's a nice change from 7-10, but switching paradigms is a bit annoying. And having to develop each character in three directions (though, not suffering from a lack of CP or anything).

 

Some of the mobs are insanely hard. Those bikes that do 'Gatling gun' in chapter 7 with hope and snow... how are you meant to five star those?

[Spiffiness]

Just wait till you get to the boss on chapter 10... :o

 

For upgrading, use organic materials to raise the bonus, then use the high xp mechanical components all at once. There is at least one website that has a list of all the point values for bonus accumulation. I also found an Excel spreadsheet that calculates the amount of xp required to * any weapon so that you don't waste expensive components. I don't have the links any more, but I'm sure Google will help you with that ;).

 

The thing that I hate the most about paradigms is that they have to animate each character's switch the first time you do it, which eats up precious time, especially when the enemy is staggered. Other than that, though, I really like the strategy involved in creating and using them in battles.

 

I don't really remember what I did in chapter 7, so I don't know if I managed to 5-star them. I hated that part because using a sentinel in a 2-man party means hardly any damage is being done. Kind of a poor way to introduce that paradigm, I think.

[Paxam]

The only possible way to survive against those bike things is to switch to Medic/Sentinel when they do the Gatling Gun, wait it out, then try and switch back to a more offensive paradigm. Hope can't do enough damage to make a dint in the thing, and if you've not just got the bike thing but also a couple of soldiers, you just need to be lucky that hope takes out the soldiers first as a Ravager while Snow uses Provoke.

[Elend]

I'm at the end-game right now and have been for awhile. Completing all the missions I can. Oh, and maybe it's not the end-game, but it sure feels like it with the whole world opening up and side-quests suddenly existing for me.

 

Difficulty spikes but then it curves down a bit once you realize that Hope and Vanille are really useful for most stuff. Protect/Haste/Faith/Bravery/Shell/En+element all on one character in Hope and Vanille has some really nice Medic abilities. Both are awesome Ravagers for offense, too. I almost never have Snow, Fang, or Sazh out anymore. :(

 

For bikes I basically staggered them as fast as I could then they seemed to not gatling gun. I may be thinking of a different chapter bike, though.

[SinisterDeath]

It disapointed me by how small that 'open world' area is. I was expecting alloooot more. But I do know there is tons of content there.

 

After the world opens up, its almost just a teaser, as everything is insanely hard. Best best is to litterally continue on,plow through the main story, and get to the final area. (Orphan) From there you have two options.

Teleport back to the open area, and level up some, do some missions, get to 'max level', or Beat the game, and get the option of going back there after you beat it. However, there are some REALLY good powerlevelling options in the end-game, that can only be done, before you beat it, but after your able to teleport back to the open world. Once you beat the game, your supposedly dumped into the 'room' that you can teleport to, but you can't go back to the end-game area, its closed off. However those monsters aren't easy, so I'm leveling me up so Ican go easilly powerlevel off of those guys, before I beat the game, to go back to the open world, as well as the fact that beating the game has this nice aspect of unlocking hte final tier of your leveling system.

[Spiffiness]

There's a Cie'th really close to the end that gives 32000 CP and can be defeated in about 1:30 minutes or so. He's at the shaft part, just go up the hidden elevator on the left, fight it, come back down the elevator to the save point and repeat. I wish I'd levelled up the extra paradigms there, too, since the adamantoises are probably a lot harder to farm, and most other monsters only provide a small drop in the enormous cp requirements post-game.

[SinisterDeath]

There is some merit to farming other creatures, particularilly for the components used to upgrade weapons.

 

In the guide (I bought it) theres an item you can farm, simply by upgrading certain items to max, deconstructing themfor 1+ of the items, selling htem, then basically creating 2items to max level with all the Cash you get from it.

2 becomes 4, 4 becoms 8, 16, 32, 64...

[Spiffiness]

Which item is that? Money is always in short supply in this game...

[SinisterDeath]

Which item is that? Money is always in short supply in this game...

 

I don't have the name with me at the moment, but I just read the info in the guide the other day.

 

I believe it stated, you get 3 of the items from deconstructing Kains Spear/Lance, which is the 'ultimate' weapon for whats her face...

 

Basically the item it self costs something like 1.5M to buy to make Kains Spear, but when you deconstruct it, it gives you 3. But they don't sell for 1.5M some closer to like, 500K. But it also gives you 30 or so other items that sell for around 250k.

 

And since you need 1 of those items to upgrade into Kains Spear, this might be the same upgrade component asthe others,  I don't know off hand, but if you play your cards right, buy exactly what you need to, you can make a Kains Spear/Lance, deconstruct, then build a new one, for 1/10th the cost, Deconstruct, build another, while turning a profit.

[Elend]

Well yesterday I finally got of my lazy bum and beat FF13. I did it w/o expanding entirely into the main three roles for each character, but it was really close. I used a party of Lightning (useful as always), Snow (dead weight to the team at the end of the day; Vanille or anyone would have been a better pick here), and Hope (Probably my MVP to be perfectly honest, though Lightning's damage was awesome to have).

 

I enjoyed it but not as much as something like Final Fantasy 6. I prefer it to 8 and am putting it a bit below 7 in my mind; good, but not amazing. 4 and 6 are still my favorites. I dislike the lack of side-quests compared to previous games. To make it a bit clearer, I liked it when I had an airship and had to find obscure areas on a map for them. The stones just didn't do it for me; way too generic. I had great difficulty navigating as well since the area names in the big open world just meld together in my mind, making the teleporting less useful to me.

 

On the positive side of this game I think I can safely say that this is the most difficult Final Fantasy I have ever played. I no longer just bashed my way through and found myself having to react to even minor combat situations or face death. I think the battle planners and designers need to be given a large pat on the back, along with the composer and graphics team. The story was very good and unlike a lot of other people I had no issues following it. Perhaps it's my constant manga reading. Visually this is the most gorgeous game I have ever played, no surprise. The music was very good and I think it works. The voice-acting was surprisingly awesome for the most part, my one complaint being Vanille, but I think that's largely due to the archetype being represented requiring an extremely "girlish" voice and that's why it's so high-pitched.

 

The maps I have no real complaint about except I can't think of anything awesome I found in a dungeon that I would want to go out of my way for. I just remember back to things like Lunar or earlier Final Fantasies, not exploring a dungeon fully could make you miss out on some great stuff.

 

Here's hoping Versus 13 corrects a lot of the errors in the game and becomes the true FF13 title for the PS3, with the current one being rather mediocre for the series as a whole. From what I understand a lot of stuff will be making a comeback in it but it'll keep the amazing graphics and have a more Kingdom Hearts oriented battle system.

[Spiffiness]

That seems like a fair assessment. If they keep FFv13 exclusive, I think it stands a chance of being even better in the graphics department since they'll be able to optimize it to the PS3's strengths. The art direction for FF13 is great, particularly in the outdoor environments, but graphically Uncharted 2 beats it except for the pre-rendered movies.

[Elend]

I'm only worried about how long Versus will take. We've been hearing about it for awhile now but there hasn't been anything new visually for awhile (why didn't someone smuggle in a camera when they actually showed some gameplay graphics last year?) and only an interview or two have said much about it. I was really, really hoping to see a late 2010 release but now I'll just hope it isn't a 2013-2014 release and coinciding with Final Fantasy 14 or some crazy thing like that.

 

Graphically, everything I have seen suggests it is the superior game. Unfortunately, there is precious little to actually see :(

 

Apparently an airship and a worldmap do exist in Versus 13 according to an interview with developers so that's a positive step. Here's to hoping that it goes the classic route that we haven't seen since 9.

 

 

[SinisterDeath]

Yea, FFXIII really could have used an Airship instead of just that one large play field imo. Though in technicality, an 'airship' world space, and the large open area in FFXIII are really about the same size, its just an airship make sit look larger...

 

now if they had an air-ship, + several smaller open areas, and Dungeons on the air-ship world, that would be freaking awesome, unfortunately that would probably take 3 blu-rays.