ff13 trilogy

So for this particular review its not just one or two but three games altogether as i want to keep things all convenient as well, as to really go in depth in honestly one of the most bizzare and polarizing jrpgs really ever to be done. 

Lot of the game was really meant to be what if advent children was a full game and well i rather advent children be the most iconic ff movie for the fans instead of it as a game if you ask me. 

This trilogy focuses around the crystal novalis arc of final fantasy in particular in the world of the gran pulse and the gods of course being evil and Lightning and company, to stop the gods from destroying and corrupting the world as well as discover the mysteries around the crystals too and how it all ties in together thats as simple as i can describe it.

The lore itself its a huge confusing mess like theres alot of stuff that just feels so pseudo intelectual that it just comes off as patronizing and contradictorial than really deep and engaging lot of the story is just missing context and lot of puzzle pieces that are difficult to place together due to how uneasy and unfocused the narrative is. 

The characters themselves its funny we went from final fantasy four beggining with more layred and complex characters final fantasy 7 refining the formula to now, the most tropey and annoying and just simply put bland characters imaginable. Lightining is pretty much long with Oreimo a huge factor in the dere type characters being a disaster for Japanese entertainment for years to come as just annoying abusive and outright misery incarnate if you ask me. 

Snow is basically Diet Beat from The World Ends With You all the charm beat had in the series all condensed into one idiot who just causes more problems than really solves anything else also Hope speaking of which is just neku without the loner asocial stuff and pretty much just the whiny annoying teenager of the 2000s trope at the time. 

Also Vanille was another typical bland ditzy girl nothing special here. 

Fang and Sazh were cool and Sazh had the best dub voice acting honestly in any final fantasy game and Reno Wilson has to be one of the best dub voice actors since Mel Blanc cause he made Sazh his own and he pretty much also nailed it as Black Barron in Madworld too. Everyone else localization and dub wise sucked too not making anything better too. 

The combat is pretty much well messy over the series with some variations to improve but really just takes lot of steps backwards as time went by. 

Also Vanille was another typical bland ditzy girl nothing special here. 

Fang and Sazh were cool and Sazh had the best dub voice acting honestly in any final fantasy game and Reno Wilson has to be one of the best dub voice actors since Mel Blanc cause he made Sazh his own and he pretty much also nailed it as Black Barron in Madworld too. Everyone else localization and dub wise sucked too not making anything better too. 

The combat is pretty much well messy over the series with some variations to improve but really just takes lot of steps backwards as time went by. 

A maximum of three characters may be used in battles, which use a variant on the series' traditional Active Time Battle (ATB) system first featured in Final Fantasy IV. Unlike previous games in the series, the player only controls the lead character while the remaining two characters are controlled by the game's artificial intelligence (AI). During battle, the player selects an action from the menus, such as Attack, Magic, and Item. Each action requires a specific number of slots on the ATB bar, which refills in real time to a set maximum number; this total size gradually increases throughout the game from two to six. 

The Paradigm system allows the player to program "Paradigms" in which the active party members have a specific role in combat, roughly akin to the job system of previous games. The player can only choose from a limited stock of paradigms set up outside of battle, limiting the possible combinations of roles available; this is the only way of directing AI-controlled party members. 

The roles consist of Commando, dealing physical damage; Ravager, using elemental magic; Medic, a role which can heal and remove negative status ailments; Synergist, which uses magic to strengthen allies by giving positive statuses; Saboteur, which uses magic to weaken enemies by inflicting negative statuses; and Sentinel, which has protective abilities and may take on enemy focus. 

In addition to a health bar, each enemy has a stagger bar (or "chain bonus"), indicating with a percentage starting at 100 the strength of attacks dealt by the player. When the chain bonus reaches an amount specific to the kind of enemy, they are staggered. Stagger increases damage massively by providing an instant boost to the chain bonus, and may launch the enemy into the air. Stagger is increased by a large amount by magic-based attacks, but will fall unless sustained by physical attacks. 

Each leader or controlled character can summon a specific Eidolon into battle. These summoned creatures include series staples Odin, Shiva, Alexander, and Bahamut, and newcomers Hecatoncheir and Brynhildr. 

When summoned, the Eidolon stays in combat while the characters accompanying the summoner leave the party. 

While an Eidolon is summoned, the player can trigger a feature called Gestalt Mode, in which the Eidolon transforms into a different form and performs different attacks while the summoning character rides them. 

The boss fights are hit and miss some of them are just time consuming damage sponges that pull off a lot of cheap moves. 

Also lot of summoning attacks and spam attacks too which just make things more annoying. 

So yeah the random difficulty spikes out of nowhere combined with how grindy combat can be as well as unecessarily complex the combat is that really just boils down to massive button mash its just a total mess overall.  The level designs for dungeons in later games aren’t any better either just confusing as shit. 

Also the story is on rails not so much for the later games but yeah initially it was in derogatorial terms an on rails rpg cause of how mega linear it was. Because of how linear it really there really isn’t all that much replay value other than maybe a few sidequests and challenge levels here and there and a sustainable economy to keep you all that engaged. 

But wait thats only just the beggining of the mess heres alot more from what i looked up online and through replaying it. 

The fact that Transformation Is a Free Action is not observed by the characters in-battle. The first time your party switches Paradigms in a fight, the camera zooms in on each of them and they strike a pose while the enemy is still fighting. Better make sure to switch to healing before you desperately need it (or better yet, switch once immediately at the fight just to get it over with, if you think it'll take awhile)- after that, it doesn't happen again, for that battle anyway. If you are thrown airborne, the camera will also not change. 

The characters will often try to turn on the spot to align themselves before they perform their actions towards their characters, which can lead to an ally dying before the healer can start casting a Cure spell, or an enemy's Stagger Meter fully draining because the character failed to attack immediately. 

Each character has its own casting or attacking animation, and all of them are variable by the speed of their animations. Because time is essentially the most important factor in battle, slow characters like Sazh or Vanille can take too much time gesticulating on the spot before casting their spell, which makes them vulnerable to being interrupted by an enemy attack. 

The AI script for defensive options is poorly optimized. When playing with synergists, they'll only cast one spell on you at a time, and they'll run the list rather than stick to what's most effective for the fight at hand. Medics will tend to spam cure magic when poisoned instead of using Esuna, then curing the lost amounts, and they will also prioritize healing living characters over Raising dead ones. The game's difficulty when you need an AI to handle the defensive roles can lead to Fake Difficulty because of it. 

Due to the player having no direct control over the party's movements, the characters tend to either stray too far from the enemy when using melee abilities, huddle too close to their allies, or worse the Sentinel working to lure enemy attacks, and inadvertently get caught within the enemy's area-of-effect attacks. 

Similarly the AI handling the buffing (synergist) and debuffing (Saboteur) roles will cast until their full selection of buffs/debuffs are cast, then sit around and do nothing. What it should do is start recasting already cast spells to refersh their duration. This greatly limits the ability of either role in the hands of an AI: 

For synergists this means that you will have to deal with your buffs wearing off multiple times during a boss fight. While simply annoying for offensive buffs it's downright deadly for defensive buffs, as being hit with a bosses hardest ability during the period that your defensive buffs are down can lead to an instant game over, meaining an AI synergist is basically signing up for Luck-Based Mission for any boss fight. 

Saboteur spells build up the break gauge, and thus a Saboteur could replace a commander as the role that builds break in your team if you lack enough paradigm roles to fit a commander in one. However, this strategy can only be used if you control the Saboteur since the AI Saboteur will wait around not casting anything after it's applied it's full range of debuffs, which allows the break gauge to drop back to 0 since the Saboteur isn't maintaining it any longer. 

One of the worst mechanics in the game, even for those who like the game, is, for the first time ever in the series, the entire party loses if the leader gets KOed. So if any battle has all the enemies decide to focus on your main character, make sure to keep them at full HP or retry the battle, or at least pray to God that the party member focused on isn't the leader. 

The Quake spell is the only offensive spell in the game that requires a consumable gauge (the TP gauge), which is better saved for things like Libra or summoning Eidolons. But Quake is the only way to deal Earth-elemental damage in the entire game, outside of summons. Fortunately, most enemies are not weak to Earth to begin with, but the ones that are, are often Demonic Spiders. And making use of (elemental) weaknesses makes up a big part of the staggering mechanic, which lets the party deal tons of damage. Fortunately, the sequel removes the Earth element entirely. 

Customization earns quite some flak for three reasons. First, money is exceptionally hard to obtain, as battles do not drop Gil and the best drops to sell are usually held by really strong monsters, making Weapon customization difficult to do as it requires a lot of money. Second, its system of balancing EXP Multiplier and points is rather convoluted. Third, nothing in the game hints at the target time for battles being lowered the higher upgraded your weapon is. So the player can inadvertently shoot themselves in the foot by making great weapons, but not finishing battles soon enough to get 5 Stars, which results in better upgrade material being dropped. 

While it fixes a lot of the previous game's mechanics in the battle system, the added monster catching aspect is sometimes one itself. It's basically a Luck-Based Mission on whether the player gets a Monster Crystal from fighting a monster. Sometimes, the Random Number God is kind and lets you get a crystal after one or two fights, other times it will force you to fight the same enemy at least a dozen times. 

The casino's slot-machine is based on actual luck, much like it would be in real life. No matter what you do, nothing really influences the chance of getting 777 and a nice pay-off - except for the machine's 'mood' - meaning the player could spend hours upon hours of dropping coins into the thing just to get a big enough pay-out to get the Lucky Coin fragment. And using the Auto-Play option for the slot-machine doesn't help much, either. Tie a rubber-band to it, go away for a few hours and check to see if you got lucky. 

Inability to outrun enemies in Academia 400 AF, since enemies never despawn unless the player enters a safe zone. While it certainly shows how oppressive the area is, the fact that you still can't outrun enemies even after finishing the story there causes massive annoyance if you have to re-enter Academia for any reason. 

The "Hands of Time" Temporal Rift puzzles. Do you suck at math? Yes? We have a minigame for you! Some of them have a time limit that will generate a new puzzle if it expires. And there are no fixed solutions, since the puzzles are generated, though this is mitigated by the fact that many solver applets are available. Of course, that doesn't improve the mechanic itself; it just makes it less annoying for those who don't like it. Also, there's a silver lining in that no Hands of Time puzzles turn up in the main story, so they're totally optional if you aren't going for 100% completion. 

Academia 500 AF, the final dungeon of the game, caused many gamers to bite their controllers in frustration. A massive maze comprised of floating platforms where you have to rotate certain platforms to make sure you go the right way. Oh and did I mention the Proto Behemoths lurking around the place? Have fun! 

Getting a complete bestiary - which means getting every rare spawing enemy (even with a Fragment Skill that increases their chance of spawning they still spawn very infrequently), along with resetting and running Academia 500 AF several times to get to that one platform that has a one-time spawn with enemies unique to it (and it's random which of the two spawns you get). It's even worse if you try to tame every tamable enemy. 

The whole game is a Timed Mission, with a hard limit of thirteen in-game days, and the clock never stops ticking. Take too long and you get an underwhelming Game Over. If you don't enjoy the high-stakes urgency, then you will hate being rushed when there is a world begging to be explored, as well as saved. There is a way to halt the clock for a few minutes, but you have to spend EP to to so. 

Synthesizing and upgrading Abilities. The higher an Ability's level is, the more damage it does, so one would want to increase their strength, especially against Chocobo-Eaters and Earth-Eaters. Downside: synthesizing means you need to have multiple of the same Ability to merge them, raising their points enough so that it's ready to be leveled up. So the player needs to grind monsters for the same Ability over and over, with/without save-scumming, to get enough multiples to merge. The worst offender is Elementaga, the highest tier of the four-elemental spell, which is only dropped by the Final Boss... on Hard Mode. Thankfully, there is a Last One accessory that doubles all item drop rates at the cost of gaining 0 gil for that battle, but save-scumming may still be required. 

The spawning of the Rare Forge, a traveling NPC, who sells some of the best garbs in the game. He spawns randomly each hour, in any of the four locales - with five spawn points per locale - and he cannot spawn in the locale the player's currently at. Looking for this guy on purpose will waste the limited time the game gives, so one can only hope to honestly just stumble over him at one point. And it's not uncommon to go an entire playthrough without ever knowing he exists. 

The combination of the facts that enemy drops change as the game progresses, together with the fact that there are limited amount of enemies (with two exceptions). It can make synthesizing certain abilities to high level a pretty huge pain, if you kill off the needed enemy type early into the game. 

The constant time limit. Every (in game) day at 6:00 you have to return to the arc (the hub). Even if you're in the middle of doing something, you WILL return to the arc. Maybe that's what the game's title refers to? And bonus points for Hope's constant talking, specifically reminding you that you have to return to the arc soon. 

There's no levelling up or Crystarium in this game; you instead gain random stat boosts for completing side quests only. The only way to increase your stats is to do tons and tons of Side Quests which devolve into Fetch Quests and hunting for 20 Bear Asses over and over again. One let's player noted that this system combined with the time system demands that the player somehow grind while avoiding grinding. Compounding this, as Yahtzee pointed out, is that with the worlds so big and massive and the fetch quests having almost no way to find them out aside from talking to EVERY single person to find out, that precious time gets wasted to do a quest that Lightning may not be strong enough to complete. 

Two regarding the final day - first is that there is a shop selling three very expensive garbs, that can also only be purchased here, and the shop disappears if you go any further into the final dungeon. Want to get all three garbs, and don't have enough money (and chances are, you won't)? It's Money Grinding time, using one enemy who actually does spawn in infinite numbers. The second is that there are several enemies who only appear in the final dungeon, with one of them only starting to appear near the very end of it - if the player wants to kill every single Last One for "Last One Standing" sidequest, they will have to mindlessly run around and grind enemies until said enemies run out. 

Lighting returns on the otherhand you’re really going to have to hustle its like devil survivor or pandoras tower with the timer mechanic 

Of course too theres the occasional padding and filler as well atypical of the average jrpg that just feels pretty much boring than anything else. 

Come to think of it now all the classess just feel the same at the end of the day just different moves but lot of it gameplay wise just feels the same to me at least. Then comes random encounters for the second game which is really taking alot of steps backwards when even shin megami tensei around the time was starting to introduce the sneaking up behind system and so did fire embem too with shadows of valentia getting remade. 

The art and music is great and I've always said that Final Fantasy 13 a late 2000s game well technically it is one since it came out in Japan before the west , still holds up even better than fucking lolcow wannabe movies like the shit soyny be doing these days. 

Lot of the game development’s mess actually apparently came from trying to handle a new at the time crystal tools engine meant for the crystalis nova games then came the luminous engine by the now merged to square enix cause of one fucking game thats now in landfills for and by normies called forspoken lol.  

Even the developers themselves admited that the game was messy and there was alot that could have been improved and guess who worked on this game? The same cocksucker who fucked up parasite eve to the point the series is now dead to this day sadly. 

Overall this entire trilogy was a disaster from start to finish. 

It gets 2 out of 5 stars. 

This subset of series really shoulda never been existent in the first place its fucked up so many square titles nowadays and has cause quite a stain that will never really ever go away and Nomura even to this day will never really let go of that mob styled ff game versus 13 to the point its had so many references and spirtual sucessors in some form or the other that its pretty much a meme like his zippers and belt fetishism. 

Yeah ff really deserves its rest and so does kh and dq as not everything square makes is meant to be obviously a best seller to the point its also another meme like how long their games take,resource and communication misamangment, how their hyperfocus of non triple a games leads them to losing so much money, wrong focus on things like dlc,lootboxes copyright claiming on youtube like a thot on the hunt for stds and nfts and they keep wondering why the fuck they keep losing money as theres only so much, that their store merch and ffxiv they can keep going to just keep being affloat. 

So yeah, if you ask me square and countless other companies i used to like but now not anymore cause of one part fandom another part countless dogshit buisness decisions really deserves to fail if you ask me.