Final verdict: D-
Final playtime: 65 hours
Aight, listen up you dumb fucks. I just beat Final Fantasy 13, and the reason it took me so long is that this game is SO fucking bad that I had to take breaks constantly or else I woulda took four shits and died.
Yeah that’s right. That’s just how terrible this shit is. Where to even fucking start. There are just so many things wrong with this game that it basically overwhelms you with the sheer suck. It’s like it employs a strategy where it throws so many awful things at you that eventually you don’t even know what to complain about anymore because once this shit is through with you, you can’t even remember a world where things are actually decent.
As usual with Final Fantasy these days, the game opens with some ridiculous bleeding edge FMVs. We’ve already seen this before but FF13 takes it to the next level with the quality, the quantity, the length, and most of all the sheer pointlessness of it all. Watching these things it’s like the game is screaming to you “Oh please love me! Please be impressed!” If there is one word to describe this shit it’s ostentatious. Seriously, more than ever before these things have turned into a pure display of technical/artistic prowess and nothing else.
Square-Enix clearly has an enormous graphics department separate from the main division, probably with their own building, with much better pay than everyone else, better working conditions, benefits and resources. Oh yeah, resources. Watching all these cutscenes you can’t help but think FUCK, they sure must be wasting a lot of resources on this. What about the actual game? Of course, that’s naive. SE knows that actually making a good game doesn’t make it sell. So in that sense I guess they’ve got their priorities straight.
But really, the whole game is very visually beautiful. The characters are especially well done. The movement and facial expressions are noteworthy. And of course, as we all know, one of the most important graphical factors is how pretty the girls are. FF13 excels in this. It’s kind of funny how western developers seem to struggle with this while the japs make it look so easy. They’re just leaps ahead when it comes to making visually appealing characters for some reason. Other than that, the voice acting is also good.
Too bad that’s about all the good stuff I can say about the characters in this game. Because other than how good they look, I do not give two shits about these characters. They could die and I would just keep going like nothing happened. Main character Lightning is a frostyass bitch for boring reasons and then easily gets over it but she’s alright and at least she’s pretty. Really, that sums up my feelings on pretty much everyone. They’re merely alright. I feel nothing for them one way or the other. Well, maybe with the exception of Vanille. Vanille is annoying and fake as fuck. Seriously just listen to all the weirdass sounds she makes in battle. The fuck is that. Same goes with the story. Fucking boring, bland, generic bullshit.
But hey, I can deal with that if the game has other things going for it. Oh wait. The gameplay is even worse. First off, they’ve done away with levels. What? Why would you do that? Ok fine. At least we can improve our characters right? Well, aside from the fact that for the first 5 hours or so enemies don’t give exp. But once you can it’s all good right? Yeah no, except this game has a weird system where it only lets you improve your stats up to a certain point, and then you can’t anymore and you’re stuck with your exp. Then after a while the game is like “Ok, now you can improve you characters further” and by this time you’ve got a lot of exp built up so you easily max it out again and then you have to wait again for the game to let you go further. The FUCK is up with that. I don’t have to get into how there are better ways to handle leveling.
And guess what? Now there are only three stats. That’s right. There is only HP, strength, and magic. That is literally it. Talk about dumbing it down. Spells don’t even cost MP anymore, so there’s no need to ever worry about running out. And hell, even if you had MP, you still probably wouldn’t have to worry about anything because the game fully heals you after every fucking fight.
Next, enemies also don’t drop money anymore. What? Why would you do that? I literally cannot understand that. Why would you take out a traditional incentive to fight battles like that? Oh wait, you know why? Because now shops DON’T SELL SHIT. I am face palming at this point. It’s not a joke. Not only is the only way to get money to find it in chests or to sell stuff, but it’s also basically WORTHLESS because there is never any reason to buy anything. The things that show up in shops are the things that you have already fucking found before. God DAMN it, how much more can you strip the genre?
Oh, oh I see. By making the entire fucking game just one long straight corridor. You haven’t played the game if you think I’m exaggerating. You know what the pinnacle of exploration is in this game? A fucking fork in the road that leads to a dead end, and then you’re back in the main corridor. Streamlined experience? FUCK you. If I find whoever decided this was a good idea, I swear to fucking god I will END you. I tried to explore, god dammit I tried, but there is nothing.
Ok, so you’ve destroyed basically everything that makes an RPG. There’s no way you could do anything else right? No! Don’t fucking say it can’t get worse! For probably the first 10-20 hours of the game you just press X a lot to win. And even after that there is hardly ever any challenge. The battle system is actually decent, especially because after the abomination that was FFXII, anything looks good. However, again, you can only control one character even though the battles are basically turn based. Sigh. That’s another thing I don’t get. What is it with RPGs doing this these days? Sure, the battles in this are too fast paced to control all three characters but that just makes them worse. Again, streamlined isn’t always better. Just like making the game one big straight corridor makes it worse, so too does restricting you to only controlling one character when the battles aren’t even true real-time.
But you think that’s all? Ha! Not only can you not control your other characters in battle, but hell, for the first 40 hours (which is almost all of the game) you can’t even fucking choose your party! Nope. For almost the entire game you just go back and forth switching between characters and parties. For a very large part of the game you never even have a full party. So not only are you unable to explore, and only able to improve your stats when and as much as the game tells you to, but you also only use whoever the game wants you to, when it wants you to.
Ok. Shit. I’m sorry, 13. I didn’t mean those things I said. Please stop making this worse.
…SHIT. Next, they go and make almost everything you find in the game absolutely fucking useless. Take weapons for example. Almost every single fucking weapon you find is actually worse than the last one you had! WHAT. I don’t. No, I’m serious. That first weapon you start with? You’re not going to find anything significantly better for the whole game. You’re just going to find worse weapons, and then after like 50 hours you’ll find one that is maybe a TINY bit better. And that really goes for most items you find. Oh great, an amulet that gives me 10% resistance to poison. Oh what’s this? A bracelet that casts barwater on me when I’m about to die. THE FUCK is that point of shit like this. And the rest is just materials for the item upgrading system.
Which also sucks shit. Big fucking surprise. You feed organic materials to an item to get an exp bonus and then you feed it mechanical materials until it levels up. Now, that’s not the problem I have with this. The problem I have is that it’s useless. I didn’t upgrade shit and I never had any problems. I was still doing like 99999 damage with my low level weapons so what the fuck is even the point. You have to farm TONS to get the materials you need and it’s not even worth it. Oh look, I just wasted god knows how many days farming in a shit game for a fully upgraded weapon that gives me about as much strength as slapping on a few bracelets does.
It’s worth noting that after about 40 hours you get to an area that isn’t actually a corridor (and the corridor after that starts getting a few more forks). Here you can get a bunch of quests to hunt monsters like in FFXII, which is pretty boring but at least better than everything else right? Too bad by this point I hated the game too much to care. So fuck that. I’m not making the same mistake I made in 12 of doing all the side quests. This game didn’t even deserve to get bought, let alone played. Like, even if you pirated it you’re still getting ripped off.
FFXIII is terrible. It took some SERIOUS willpower to not give up and play something else, let me tell you. It was so boring it literally put me to sleep at one point. And all the other times I was almost catatonic. I’m pretty sure this game is an instrument of evil meant to steal players’ energy and siphon it to Square.
I would tell you not to buy this, but it wouldn’t do any good. It will still sell like mad and people will somehow, somehow love it because what sucks is the world. Fuck. I need to go into rehabilitation to get back all my stolen life-force or something.
Final Verdict: D-
Final Playtime: 65 hours