Alright, get ready because I have a lot to vent about this game.
[b]TL;DR: Terrible game, and you should play it.[/b]
[h1]Let's start with the good points:[/h1]
+ The character design and casting was overall good. Aside from Vanille that can't stop moaning at every step, the party composition is quite good. Each character is unique, recognizable and quite likeable.
+ The high-level story (and I insist on [i]story[/i], not narration) is alright. It's a classic journey to fight against an apocalyptic destiny, either for the world or your individual well-being.
[h1]Now for the long list of issues I have with the game:[/h1]
[b]- The PC port is a joke.[/b] Don't even think about playing this without community mods such as FF13Fix, and I highly recommend digging for more mods. Without it, I couldn't even select 1080p, not to mention crashes and instability. Even with fixes I got soft locks, freezes, and fights requiring X to progress simply not registering, forcing me to restart and redo everything.
[b]- The level design (or lack of it).[/b] The game is a succession of corridors. I SWEAR it's not an exaggeration. There is almost no branching ever, except in 1 chapter out of 13, but I'll get there. You never engage with your surroundings. You put your brain on auto-run and wait for the next cutscene.
[b]- The pacing is copy/pasted from start to finish:[/b] press forward, kill mobs, forward again, cutscene, rinse and repeat until a boss. That's the entire formula.
[b]- Character development is a checklist.[/b] They have a starting point, stay there until a "climax" moment, then suddenly become different, and that's it. I'll exclude Hope since he has a more gradual evolution, but once he reaches his climax, he's complete too. You'll notice when they reach that point because they start speaking just for the sake of it, with filler dialogue and clichés.
[b]- The narration (not the story) is probably the worst I've ever seen.[/b] If you don't open the codex and read pages of information that is never explained otherwise, you probably won't understand much. Right at the start, Fal'Cie, l'Cie and Cie'th are thrown at you with little explanation. Why going so out of your way to name it like that ? Are they actively trying to confuse players ?
Most side characters appear from nowhere, while the protagonists act like they have known each other forever. Most have little development beyond being throwaway characters necessary to move the plot forward.
[b]- The battle system has interesting ideas, but is dragged down by so many others.[/b] It feels like an auto-battler, or a mobile game with auto-battle enabled. It's a new take on ATB, but you only control one character at a time, and auto-selection is pretty much all you'll do for 99% of the game. There's little reason to manually input actions because auto-battle is good enough for almost everything.
So you sit there spamming A, hoping the monsters die before you do of boredom, because enemies have absurd amounts of HP.
Menus are slow and sluggish, hurting the pacing. If the character you control is KOed, Game Over. It's not even a gameplay constraint, since you eventually play every character individually, meaning this was a conscious design decision.
[b]- Paradigms are the most promising system. On paper.[/b] You assign roles to characters and create configurations to react to different situations. But the lack of QoL drags it down.
Switching paradigms completely refills everyone's ATB gauge (on a 12 seconds cooldown), giving you extra action economy, which is great. Except the first time you shift, you have to sit through a 5+ second cutscene where you lose control and nobody can act, defeating the entire purpose.
Multiply that by all the fights and the question becomes less "when should I shift?" and more "is wasting my time on this even worth it for random encounter #356?"
So you end up using the same paradigms forever: one to stagger, one to burst, sometimes one to heal, rarely one to tank or buff.
And you'd better remember your configurations, because the game won't. Whenever your party changes, all custom paradigms are erased forever. This happens often because the story constantly reshuffles your party. Sometimes cutscenes reset them even when your party hasn't changed, because why not.
[b]- The TP system is another good concept on paper.[/b] It's a resource kept between battles for powerful effects, recharged by acting with a full ATB gauge or getting high battle scores. But regeneration is incredibly slow.
Worse, if you want your AI companions to know the best actions against a target, you need to scan it, which consumes TP. So your only practical use for TP is scanning, and you barely experience its full potential.
[b]- Eidolons[/b] are basically summons. They can transform into vehicles, but only in fights. Why? Probably to try to sell toys, I don't know.
[b]- Sol items are yet another missed opportunity.[/b] These out-of-combat items provide strong buffs or allow you to stealth past enemies. You get a few during the first chapters, and then... they completely forgot they existed.
You barely loot any for the rest of the game, and they aren't purchasable until post-game. So either you know to grind them early, or you're stuck with a few uses for the next 30 hours.
[b]- Progression[/b] is presented as something close to FFX's Sphere Grid or FFXII. Then you notice they put the Level Designer (who had a lot of free time after making a couple hundred straight corridors) in charge of it.
It's yet another straightforward path of pre-planned upgrades, because apparently they fear the player making a single decision. On top of that, progression is capped at each chapter. You cannot over-level, you must stay within the rails.
The battle ranking system is another problem. You're evaluated on how quickly you clear each fight and getting 5 stars give you extra rewards. Sounds fine, right?
Except the target time scales with your party's estimated power, and it scales VERY BADLY. Near endgame, you basically can't get 5 stars anymore, especially with all the downtime mentioned above.
So you enter a vicious loop where getting stronger is a punishment: the stronger you get, the less likely you are to get 5 stars, meaning fewer rewards and less progression. [b]YOU ARE LESS EFFICIENT BY GETTING STRONGER.[/b]
[b]- Chapter 11[/b] is where they decided to go crazy and make an open world.
Now picture kilometers and kilometers of... not so much.
You keep the exact same structure, except going from A to B takes 5-10 minutes. You can look for chests, sure, but the main side activity is Stone Missions. You find a point that gives you a target to kill (no, there is no other type of mission), travel for around 10+ minutes to kill it, then do it again. And again. [b]64 times.[/b] Some missions unlock fast travel points, which is MORE than needed, but only specific ones. And of course you can't fast travel at will. You have to find one of those stones, which are quite scarce, to travel to another.
[h1]So yeah...[/h1]
Overall, this is the worst Final Fantasy game I've ever played, and probably one of the worst games I've played overall.
And yet, I see [b]2 big reasons to play it:[/b]
[b]1. You get to experience what NOT to do when creating a video game.[/b]
It's a brilliant live example of almost everything you should avoid when designing a game. It gives you a case study in how systems that look interesting individually can completely fail to make a good game when they interact.
[b]2. You plan to play Final Fantasy XIII-2.[/b]
I gave the sequel a fair chance, and I'm glad I did. XIII-2 fixed ALMOST ALL my issues with XIII and is, imo, one of the best Final Fantasy titles.
But you need the world's foundations to really appreciate XIII-2.
I would almost recommend watching a cutscene compilation on YouTube, but I think knowing where the game started gameplay-wise makes the journey much more enlightening.
