Spoony Final Fantasy XIII review part 6.

[J is Justice]

spoonyexperiment.com/game-reviews/final-fantasy-xiii-part-6/

(language)

[Zaq "That Guy" Buzzkill]

So our heroes follow the bad guys entire plan with no plan of their own to save the world and everything ends via one giant asspull of a solution.
Some fantastic storytelling there.

[lionheart21]

*sigh* Where did you go wrong, Final Fantasy? Where did you go wrong?

[Clash, Never a Meter Maid]

Does he secretly like this game or something? I mean, damn.

[W?Y]

I have to thank Spoony for explaining how hands-off the combat system is in that game, because now I know there is literally nothing about it that makes me ever want to play it. It's designed with everything I either hate or just hate playing in video games.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}{Spoiler}"I will find the motherf***er who wrote this and take a shit in his wife!"

[Red Impact]

The combat I didn't mind too much, but I do think it really exposes a flaw hat's been in most Square games that don't employ the job system. You just end up spamming your most powerful abilities regardless of what you're fighting 90% of the time no matter what the game is, only having to make any real change in preparation when you're fighting a Marlboro or something that casts Lv. __ Death. This game does it for you, basically taking away the need to manually cast Scan to see if he absorbs anything. It sort of exposes Final Fantasy games in general, since unless you're intentionally handicapping yourself, once you've figured out the best way to deal damage, that's all you'll do.

But as far as the story goes? Damn... I can honestly say I’ve never seen a story fail so much on every single level as this. There have been stories that were nothing but cliches crudely sewn together. There have been stories with unlikable leads, there have been stories with stupid plot twists, but I really can't recall one where the heroes did absolutely everything wrong, fulfilled the villains plan completely, and still tried to make us think that they were heroic and successful along the way.

And it's a shame because, you know, they showed that they do still understand real conflict. Sazh and Vanille? That was promising. He lost his son because of her, he had every reason in the world to hate her. Snow and Hope? That was promising too. Hope acted like someone who was grieving, grieving kids might whine and not know how to say what they're really thinking. And for just a brief moment, we got the feeling that Snow truly understood the full breadth of his actions. It gave these characters more of a reason to stick together, it gave them a connection other than "you freed me from a cage so I will follow you forever." But what we get is such hand waving with no real payoff whatsoever. The characters never learn, they never truly have to answer for their themselves, them coming to grips for their actions is done in a rushed manner and never brought up again.

I'm not a hard guy to please when it comes to a story. I'll take a cliched story told well, but there's nothing at all that's satisfying with the story of this game. It's terrible storytelling that they try to cover with technobabble and just hope that the heroes being complete and total sheep is lost on an audience more interested on pretty and undefined technology. I can't believe this is the same company that gave us FF Tactics.

[Bad Moon]

Tell me again when it's up on Youtube, because that video player is ASS.

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

I like this whole series of videos and especially this finally but Jesus Christ I don't think I've ever seen such a blood-filled skit in any Internet video.

Jan 3, 2014 11:24:39 GMT -5 Zaq "That Guy" Buzzkill said:

So our heroes follow the bad guys entire plan with no plan of their own to save the world and everything ends via one giant asspull of a solution.
Some fantastic storytelling there.

Yeah seriously. I often explain my love of FF8 by saying it's a very good story that got poorly told, but THAT is a just plain bad story. It's a shame because there were some concepts that could have worked, the characters other than snow don't seem too bad from what I saw and my God visually it's gorgeous and has style and creativity to spare. This seems to be a general problem for Square-Enix these days as I felt the same way about the Tomb Raider reboot (except I hated the characters other than Lara and even her I didn't really like, I was just indifferent towards her).

Jan 3, 2014 11:31:58 GMT -5 lionheart21 said:

*sigh* Where did you go wrong, Final Fantasy? Where did you go wrong?

The craziest part is that Square-Enix keeps remaking and re-releasing their older, more successful games and they STILL don't understand what worked about those and why people prefer them over their MMOs and their hallways.

[Deleted]

Well, that explains what Brian was doing in Arizona a few months ago. Now the question of why Brad was there.

Jan 3, 2014 15:16:21 GMT -5 Bad Moon said:

Tell me again when it's up on Youtube, because that video player is ASS.

Probably already is on Youtube, it's already up on Blip and generally Spoony waits months to put stuff up on there.

[Deleted]

I almost can't even watch XIII get lampooned I hate it so much.

If I were on the original team, I'd have turned a sword on my ribs.

[J is Justice]

They can still make good games. I'm currently playing Bravely Default, which I'm enjoying.

[Sparvid]

Since he's apparently moving to a new place, I'm surprised he didn't trash more things he was going to throw away anyway.

[EvenBaldobombHasAJob]

what a freaking pretentious mess that game is. the sheer amount of faux-profound blathering's enough to make me want to stab my eyes out with a spork. it's like they knew the story was stupid so they just threw as many thousand dollar words into their word processor and hoped nobody would notice.

by the way, Square-Enix, congratulations for making Troy Baker, one of the best voice actors of his generation, annoying as f***.

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Jan 3, 2014 19:08:14 GMT -5 J is Justice said:

They can still make good games. I'm currently playing Bravely Default, which I'm enjoying.

Which makes it all the more baffling that they managed to screw up a franchise that seemed so fool-proof.