Easily the worst Final Fantasy game that was ever made and I say this after the disaster that was FF16's combat system. 40 hours of punishing corridor gameplay until the game finally opens up to a single area smaller than one of the main fields out of Tales of Zesteria. The combat system is a complete joke of non interaction that somehow is too slow but also too fast while you wait for your turns to charge. You're forced to suffer a "paradigm shift" animation every time you want to change what your ai team mates do and which abilities you have access to, but it also refills your ATB gauge every 12 seconds; imagine the slog as you play combat after combat after combat in a long endless corridor with no branching paths until the very end of the game.
This could have been surmountable: at least there was a story somewhere in the mess that was Final Fantasy 16's atrocious gameplay, but the real sin of Final Fantasy 13 is that it delivers what is, admittedly, an interesting world through the lamest, most drawn out melodrama with two of the franchises easily most unlikable characters. It takes 9 chapters of basically nothing, which clocked for me about 30 hours of pure pain, for even the characters to figure out what they wanted to fight for.
I want you to imagine having to suffer through the biggest jerk in all of Final Fantasy, Lightning, as she emotionally lashes out with physical violence to other characters like some 15 year old incel misogynist's caricature of what women are. If I was a conspiracy theorist, then I would assume Lightning was created as a way to get everyone, including other women, to hate women. By the time she finally calmed down, 10 chapters and 40 hours into the game, I felt compelled to build a dimensional portal into this fictional universe just so that I could slap her on the behalf of the long suffering cast.
Then there is Hope, the kid who blames his mother's death on the real main character Snow because...? Leaving aside the fact that Snow is completely blameless in this kid's mom's death even going so far as trying to save her, the fact that the kid will not let this go and acts like a psychopath (again) 10 chapters into the game plotting revenge is excruciating. Instead of world building, foreshadowing, maybe the introduction of a cool nemesis, I sat through hours and hours of dialogue of this kid Hope being an edgy loser crying about how powerless he is and how it's all the best character's fault.
The other characters, luckily, are fantastic, but that just makes it that much more annoying when the good characters have to deal with the worst characters constantly and just let them act like insufferable karens, for lack of a better word.
The story makes no sense, unfortunately. "Perfect government is actually shady!" might have been the tag line [spoiler]but that is dropped in favor of everyone is just being puppeted by uncaring machine gods which you must then go and kill[/spoiler]. Typical "our advanced plasma cannons, guns, and air forces are completely useless!" is subverted [spoilers]40 hours in when you learn this is all part of the machine god's collective plan to annihilate all human life because something something that will bring back their own creator maybe.[/spoiler] No foreshadowing at all of course; in fact the actions of said big bads before this imply a completely different goal [spoiler]such as when Sazh's son is turned into a lu'cie by the gorge fal'cie to protect it. You later learn that the stated goal is to destroy the world by killing these god machines which will somehow summon back their creator, maybe. They just sort of assume that's what will happen. If that's the case, why would you make lu'cie to protect yourself? Isn't the goal to crash everything? The hell?[/spoiler].
I understand Japanese so I played in that; your mileage will vary. I am given to understand that people hate the characters Snow and Vanilla, for example, in English, but they were great in Japanese. Those two are basically the main characters; the cover girl, lightning, might as well not even be in the game for all she actually matters to the plot.
Anyway, the combat system is famously bad and the actual game with the real combat system unlocked doesn't actually begin for you until 40 hours in. Even with all your options available to you, it is a simple and maddeningly boring combat system that, as I said, is both too slow and too fast. Too slow for the amount of battling you have to do and too fast to actually input commands so the only three things you end up doing are selecting "auto attack" 99% of the time, pressing the "paradigm shift" button so that your character can unlock different abilities in combat (you can't just heal or cast magic, you have to be in the right "role" for it) as well as get a full atb charge every 12 seconds, and finally select a special command like summon an eidolon or perform the game's version of limit breaks. That's it. The battles are an absolute slog and the game is PACKED with them. Look, I can weather the original Final Fantasy's encounter rate no problem because the battles are fun, but this is just torture even at the end game with everything unlocked. Ah, I didn't touch on that enough: you will be playing with a gimped battle system that slowly unlocks options (such as the aforementioned paradigm shift) slowly as the game moves forward. It drip feeds you elements of what is already a PAINFULLY simple combat system.
What were they thinking? At any rate, if you are in the mood to run through all of the Final Fantasy games after getting the bug because of FF7 remake or even the recent 16, this is the one to skip. Go watch a plot summary: you will be far better off. I've done my time so now I feel I'm allowed to play Final Fantasy 15 properly this time.
