Ffxiii Wasnt Good

Fair enough - it seems that your problem lies with the perception of the amount of freedom given to the player then, which is fine of course. What was the deus ex machina in FFX by the way? I thought it actually was very cleverly constructed.

All I have to say is.. I hope you don't expect SE to release the old traditional turn based FF's anymore.. When was the last time they actually did release a turn based game? Action RPG's are more popular (sadly) so You'll either have to get used to these game play mechanics or move on to another series. (not really directed at anyone.. just /random)

Also, 13-2 got a perfect score from famitsu so I'm really excited to see how it turns out.

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Agreed^ 10 was the start of the nosedive, XII was a single player XI and gameplay was fun, but the story was just way boring.

I completely disagree there. Let's just use X as an example. Early on in the game when you pick up Lulu, you're already learning about elemental weaknesses, and how to choose the best ability for the situation. When I noticed that Tidus was just behind the enemy in the queue I'd switch over to quick strike and jump ahead. I rarely used the overdrives on trash mobs, and planned their use during boss fights.

Now if you need a defense down instead of planning your strikes with Auron, you pop in a saboteur and have the computer auto-battle until its all debuffed. You scan once and the computer takes care of whatever elemental weaknesses you need from then on out.

Some of the late game boss battles aren't ideally fought on auto-battle, but the majority of the game is, and that doesn't make it much fun.

Lost Odyssey did this.
And that held virtually no tarnish on it's overall quality.

I find FFX a difficult one to argue against here since I consider it the best turn-based battle system in the series.

At the same time, the fact that encounters in 13 almost require proper use of debuffs/buffs is a strategic leap forward in the series when normally they're almost optional, with things like Haste actually making it a complete walkover.

The use of the stagger gauge adds a sense of momentum to the battle which is often exciting.

That was actually my main problem with LO :( that and it was absolutely incredible for its first disc and then became very generic and combined with the random encounter frequency/duration, I got bored :(

Luckily Mistwalker retains most of the staff from Squaresoft that walked out during the merge. Still waiting to see if The Last Story will ever hit US shores or not.

Also for me Zelda retains it's brilliance in diverse gameplay, fantastic and moving score and even making unique and interesting aspects to what essentially has been a repeating story for 25 years.

LO.
My soul.
IDK if I'll ever be happy again.
Great game though.

The stagger was a nice element to battle, but sadly felt like too little too late. A gimmick to add something new to what were otherwise ordinary battles. If they could combine other interesting and unique aspects to battle other than elemental weakness and other simplified ways of subduing your foe, it would be nice.

For example, let's consider the Ochu and their many tentacles. Perhaps you can stop it's ability to use status ailments when you cut off a tentacle or something of the like.

Just brainstorming now.

The stagger gauge is the one other place I felt a little strategy come in. When you found the proper abilities to get the stagger in the right position for particularly hard mobs, and you timed it perfectly for a great attack, the strategy seemed to come back to the game. The rest of the time though meh; choosing my actions on trash mobs almost exclusively came down to forcing an early aoe on preemptive strike battles so could make them go by quick.

one of my favorite things about classic ff was roaming world maps and coming across random towns that may just be extras..you dont need to go there to complete the story but its fun to have different places to explore. (ff9 was probably the perfect ff..not exactly classic but it incorporated everything good about the classics)

now I can live with the straight-line-ness that was newer games like ffx but atleast that game had a good story to go with it otherwise it probably would have suffered 13s epic fail. Voice acting at the time was new (and maybe not so great) and they had the upgraded graphics to make it oo and ahh at the time.

I liked ffxii but It was like SE gave up story for more interactive gameplay and better voice acting (it also catered to my internal ffxi player). Which were 2 things I liked about it but I did feel the story was not meeting my needs.

ff13 was lacking in explorability and story. All it had was the shiny. Which to me was boring. The only characters remotely interesting were Saz and Fang. The game was just overboard with shiny battles and I was bored of the same ol backdrops and machinery..definitely not a game for me.

What strategy have trash mobs required in the past?

Quick strike, elemental weaknesses, armor break on the armors and stone beasts (w/e they were called in X). Wakka and Lulu for birds. Rkku stealing from chests (or was that lolx-2?) They weren't grand plans that I orchestrated but I felt there were right and wrong choices enough through the game to make a proper choice more often than not.

There were definite points of just grinding, but at least there were a fair amount of instances where one attack was better than another.

Some mobs in 13 (almost) require staggers, some are aoe prey, some require a more singletarget approach, some are difficult without proper buffs/debuffs (Gran Pulse random encounters onwards are pretty challenging without grinding in my opinion!) - enemies in 13 aren't homogenised.

You're right! My complaint isn't the enemies are bad, it's that the computer can make all the right (or at least passable) choices for you for the majority of the game. In fact in a lot of instances the enemies were more entertaining than in earlier games.

I dunno, maybe I was just over-leveled for a good portion of the game, so I didn't really need to worry about the trash mobs.

I'm not sure if it's just a necessary evil of the system - if the AI was really poor, would you say this was an improvement or a bad thing?

Paradigm Shifting is something the computer can't do and while you may say that just having to Paradigm Shift to beat simple encounters isn't very much strategy, it honestly is about as much strategy as any trivial encounters in either game.

FCK YEH HALF LIFE!

Try fighting Vercingetorix and saying AI from paradigm shifts is enough.

For sure, and I thought paradigm shifts brought in good strategy when they were needed.


I never said the entire game was mindless :)

will never be released

Wow I go away for a bit and come back to tons of fanboy rage. I should have expected that.

If someone does not like a game, then they don't like it.

No amount of rage, insults, or w/e you say will convince them otherwise.

It's all relative to that person.

I'm just pointing out why I thought the battle system could have been better. I don't think there's anything wrong in pointing out the inherent flaws/strengths in a game.

Agreed, not fighting, just pointing out opinions^

It's not really a flaw because it worked. It's just different from what you expect with Final Fantasy. But turn based ATB is too slow and uninvolving for the average gamer, so SE obviously tried to make things a bit more action orientated to appeal to a larger audience.

lost odessy was amazing

That's true. I can see saying things like, I didn't like this game because of w/e. It's the replies to those opinions I was referring too. (Not talking about you either)

Not amazing enough to spell it right apparently!

losté odèsié

Actually this may not be entirely true.

Nintendo officially denies Miyamoto's plan to step down within Nintendo

All of this, there was a prequal book relased in Japan (I googled it at one point and found a translation) that had a bunch of shortstorys that helps to clear up some of the characters and give you an idea of whats going on in there head. Lightning inperticular I found was humanized alot.

As far as liniar goes that depends on your definition of liniar. If there are not varied outcomes to multiple sub plots then to me that is a liniar game. X-2 is a good example here because with each chapter the CSs and sometimes even the continuation of the quests change based on your success or failures. One of the best accessories in the game I think I remember you having to bomb pritty hard in the one quest line to obtain so even though the start and finish of the game are the same the inbetween can change and that 100% complete is no longer actually 100% as a result. Lets be fair here, I can't speak for earlyer then 7 (playing 5 now) but by the time you wen't and did the sidequests and stuff you were 70-90% through the game anyways.

Someone pointed out the long production time but it's kinda understandable all things considered... Look at the original trailers and the final product. There original combat system which they showed in the first trailer was turned into a CS. The sceen where Lightning and Hope are surrounded and snow comes to the rescue, Fang and Hope didn't exist and Snow was using a gun. They had to redo a whole bunch of the game it seems including the combat system which idk much about making games but pritty sure thats a really heavy bit.

As for no chilling out in towns... You are high profile fugatives, you faces have been brodcast to everyone and the world beleaves you are evil and going to destroy them. If they had allowed you to free roam the towns, chat up the randoms and click through everyones random stuff for potions people would be complaining that it's unrealistic for you to be able to do so while so hunted.