Caltrops - Final Fantasy XIII





	[quote name="Noi Dau Don"]In FF12 you had a lot of mobility in terms of character development and setting that you just. do. not. get. in FF13. I realized this early on and wound up spending a lot of time panning around the scenery, taking it all in with the idea that I wouldn't be able to see this part of the game again without replaying it. Characters, too: you are always limited by the crystarium openings and by the available weapons and items for sale. All of this puts a ton of pressure on you to play the game at a particular rate (relatively fast for grindan jerks like me) and at a particular tension (until VERY late in the game, there will never be a point at which you have a substantial advantage over the enemies.) So it's very much like playing through, say, an anime series. It's like you're the hero and you face the hero's challenges with the hero's limitations in a 52-episode series. In a way this is kind of cool if you can sink into it and live the dream. But after FF8 (which blew levelling apart front to back, so that you could structure your character development within the world however you wanted) and FFX (which allowed for breathtaking dominance to be built into as many or as few characters as you had patience for -> high replayability) and FF12 (which, as I don't need to tell you, had a boss hog levelling system that was fun and interesting to fuck around with on its own merits)... FF13 just doesn't offer that. It's a beautiful game, it's a joy to play in a lot of ways, but it's almost more like an exquisitely beautiful front end on a simplified and rail-y text adventure game where you can't really make wrong decisions. I keep coming back to these less-and-less interactive forms of entertainment as touchpoints: it's more like an anime, more like a book that you play, like an unchallenging text adventure. If you're not going to get high on the aesthetics and enjoy the characters as though you were watching a favorite show, I don't think I can recommend FF13 to you. You're better off replaying FF8, 9, X, or 12, or Chrono Cross. <font size=-2>FWIW the playable characters are all stereotype-evading in one way or another. The hardass bitch shows vulnerability and growing maturity, the cute little girl is an admitted liar, the whiny young boy grows up sooner rather than later, the bespoke hero-type gets his comeuppances hard and fast, etc. What they really dropped the ball on: the villains. Cid Raines The Antagonist, for example, is a bishounen of convenience; the Big Bads are all sort of incomprehensibly distant, like the Q. I found it really difficult not to fall in love with the main heroine, Lightning - she's sort of half Princess Ashe, half Ridley from Aliens. The Black Guy has a bad case of Magic Negro Disease, but he's also growing on me. While he gets played for some uncomfortable slapstick, it seems to mostly be tied to his age rather than Googly White Eyes Rolling Around On Black Face. I do kind of resent that he's the most middling character in every possible way, but it's worth pointing out that he's more magic/support-oriented than Powerful Tanking Meat. Also his frocobo is fucking adorable.</font>[/quote]