I was excited to play Final Fantasy XIII, only to be severely disappointed.
But it was worse than letting me down. It is an absolute disaster.
The only quality to the game is the beauty of the environment art. It is detailed and beautiful, making the world seem complex and interesting.
After meeting *any* of the characters within the game, you will know that nothing of the world is complex and interesting.
Each and every character is a cliché, with incredibly simplistic stories and lines. None of them are remotely interesting (only annoying), and all of them are extremely predictable. At first glance, the most annoying character has to be Vanille, who squeaks and breathes out "cuteness" at every single step. Just hearing her talk will make you want to punch the screen. But after a while you'll find that Snow is indeed the most horrible walking cliché of all time, with his "hero" lines and just general whiney complaining.
Most people would mention the graphics as one of the redeeming quality of the game. It's true, to a certain extent. As I've mentioned before, the environments are beautiful, even if you are not allowed to explore them at your leisure. But then we get to the characters...
While each and every character is a detailed piece of work, with high quality models and textures, all of them LOOK THE SAME. They all have perfect skin. Not one is unattractive. All the males wear cool clothing, while all the females have extremely skimpy ones. Not only that, but every female character is caricatured in a way that is not only ridiculous, but severely sexist. Women don't stand like that. It just doesn't work Squee. And why can't girls wear pants anymore? Why do they always have to be wearing practically nothing?
Many might argue that that's just the Final Fantasy way. They've been doing it for years, all those silly excuses. But the fact is that while the world changes, the Final Fantasy art has not followed. The artists are completely bound in their same looking characters, just with different clothes and hair-do's. It just DOESN'T WORK anymore. With the extremely realistic looking graphics, it just doesn't work to have the same character art copied around. They could do it when the graphics just didn't support anything else. But now it's just annoying.
With all that out of my system, there's still the biggest offender.
THE BATTLE SYSTEM.
My god, the battle system. All you have to do is sit back, press a button, and see the battle unfold before your eyes AUTOMATICALLY. Sometimes you have to change who does what before the battle. But generally? No thinking of yours necessary. The battles have never been so boring.
Now, they knew that it would be extremely easy to do that. So what did they do to fix it? They made it so that you could only control one character, and if that character died in battle, it's *game over*. Wow Squee. You thought of that all by yourself!? How original! /sarcasm. So because the battles were severely simple and automatic, they make you have to keep careful watch over those health bars, in the unlikely event that something hits you back.
Not only that, now you have a time limit. Been fighting this dude for too long? Then here's a 30 minute doom timer. Since everything has to happen so *fast* now. We can't have someone actually enjoying a complex battle. So overall, this game was a waste of my money, and my time. You might think that it gets better as you play. No. It gets worse.
Just don't waste your time. The game is awful. A shameful blotch on the Final Fantasy history. And they even made a sequel for it.