Final Fantasy XIII

I really wanted to like this. When I originally saw this title closer to its release I thought it was so cool looking and interesting, but as it stands, this may be the biggest disappointment I've ever played.

This game is boring, to put simply. I've found that I can tolerate games that annoy me, but I cannot stand a game that bores me. It's been memed to death about how this game is just a hallway simulator, but I think it's worse than that. Even a "hallway simulator" (or more accurately, linear games) can be interesting if there is enough variation and evolution throughout. The issue with FF13 is that it's the most drawn out experience you could possibly imagine. Gameplay mechanics are introduced too slowly, you're stuck with a party of 2 for far too long, every single area of the game is simply too long, I could go on. Every single thing lasts 3 times longer than it should, and what is currently here is not interesting enough to last this games asking length.

The battle system is actually the larger issue compared to the world design I'd say. It basically revolves around constant micro-management of your party by switching your paradigm. This is genuinely quite fun during boss fights or occasional encounters, but the amount of depth offered is quite limited, and every single fight is simply far too long. Once you have solved an enemy and know what to do, that's it really. Except this game will have you fight the same enemy at least 20 more times with tiny variations that don't really matter before reaching any sort of new gameplay.

People often call Chapter 11 the turning point for the game, due to it opening up it's world design and being less linear temporarily. However, seeing as I don't enjoy playing for more than like 30 minutes at a time due to the battle system, and the only thing you can really do in this game other than walk around is fight things, this was actually probably the worst part of the game! (This game also just really wasn't built for a more open world, walking around is very slow)

The story is... fine. Me playing over such a long period of time (due to me being bored and needing breaks) probably didn't help, but there are just so many terms to get your head around to make sense of what's going on. I ended up having to recheck the summaries right after cutscenes happened and that is not really a good thing. I would also say some story arcs overstay their welcome a little bit, but really that's par for the course for this game. I do enjoy these characters a decent bit at least.

Now, the 2 things I will praise this game for are the graphics and music. Every single area (before I got tired of it), I would be mesmerised by the visuals. It holds up incredibly well from the PS3 even today. However Square messed up and compressed the cutscenes a decent bit on PC, so without mods they're only passable in quality. The music is also fantastic and I will definitely be listening to it going forward even if it'll give me slight PTSD by making me remember about how I actually played this. However Square messed up and made some weird localisation choices. For the English version of the game they removed and swapped songs around to avoid English players hearing any Japanese lyrics. This is stupid and the soundtrack I ended up hearing in-game is straight up missing some of the best songs.

Finally, the PC port is bad. Like, it's playable, but even with the FF13 Fix mod this PC port was very annoying to deal with.

So, um, where was I going with this? Uhhhh, just don't play this for your sake

Review taken from my Backloggd page.