Personal Oppinions [NO SPOILERS PLEASE]

[clief101_]

Well, as promised, i said that wen i played this game that i would jus point out some things about the game. I still dont know alot about it, ive played it for about 4 hours game time and its still introducing features of battle to me.

It is turn based (jus for you therath) however u still only control 1 character. There arnt lvls in this game for your characters, but there is a system like the sphere grid in it that uses CP. Im glad that its still introducing the battle system to me, because if it told me all at once id be overloaded with too much info. It is a very fast and kinda complicated system (best of luck therath).

I do find that wen u r running around the map, its too close to whoever ur controlling, and the camera is a lil dodgy, but i do like the way in which u go into battles and some extra stuff with that.

All in all, i am realy enjoying this game so far, i still havnt been shown everything, nor do i have access to everything yet (like i dont know how to lvl up weapons....??)




and a not just for therath, its about lighting, u may not want to read it so if u dont, ill leave a gap in the post for u.










Lighting is sooooooooo cold hearted so far XD

[Gumdrop]

Got the game on Tuesday and am now in chapter 11/22+ hours in, I think that speaks for itself really.

The combat starts off as piss easy and stays that way for the first four hours, but later on it gets really harsh! If you don't pay attention, even for the regular encounters, you will often get game over. It isn't that hard to master the system though so that's something, but this is still by far the hardest of the modern Final fantasy games.
One cool thing is that the encounters are easy to avoid most of the time, even though the monsters that spot you come rushing towards you. Also you can make up for skipped battles by upgrading your gear so you don't get that usual grinding-levels-feeling that comes with harder games (so far anyway).

As for the story, it starts off reasonably well, but nothing too exciting, still enough to keep you wanting more though and it improves rather rapidly. Later on in the game the chatty bits start to get really good I thought and left me wanting more all the time. There's a lot of focus on what each and every character is thinking and feeling, it feels like no character is left out development wise.

I'm sure everybody knows already that this game looks FANTASTIC from the trailers, but if you ask me they don't do it justice! This game makes Uncharted 2 look ugly if you ask me :p For some reason though Square are still bad at water, haha. Seariously. There were times when I had to look twice to see if a video has started or not whilst the characters were talking.

I like how this game feels as though they've tried to steer away from a lot of the usual ways of the JPRG and try more new things, even more than they usually do, but at the same time they managed to keep that Final Fantasy feeling. The huge amount of items referances helps in that department.

Sound ~ Think a lot of people aren't too keen on the music? I really like it, but at times it seems to blend in a little too well and becomes backgroundy. Not sure if that's really bad since its always the background music that does that...:)
I like how the background music in this FF has some singing in at times! The new Chocobo musics are my favorite by far now.

One pretty sweet thing about this game though is if you unlock the harder/hardest trophies you're rewarded with free FFXIII character themes for you PS3 :) some of the icons are pretty cool too I thought, the backgrounds look the same as the character wallpapers for the PC.

One thing a lot of people might take issue with though is that the game is VERY linear, even more so than FFX, but personaly this isn't really a problem, in fact I'd even go as far as to say its a plus since you don't have to do things like spend ages looking for some npc.


A few bad things;

Vanille's voice actor is terrible and at times in battle she makes some very questionable sounds.

Some of the lines are pretty naff, but that's mostly Snow's fault!

It does get pretty darn hard later..I've been two-shot off regular monsters before.

If your party leader dies then you get game over and you can't change who the leader is until pretty late on into the game :/

My score 8.5/10 at the moment.
I would give it a little higher, but I think they went a little over the top with making sure the people who complain the series is too easy happy. And that lowers the enjoyment at times :/
There are some other things I take issue with, but no spoilers are allowed so I won't say.

[darkshadow2247]

I'm about 3.5 hours into the game, a little beyond the introductory phase. So far, I like the game. Gumdrop has given a really in-depth review that covers pretty much all bases that I've reached, and I pretty much agree.

I have to stress the battle system though. It's great system in my opinion, controlling a single character and assigning roles to the other two in party. If you don't pay attention, even on mobs, you will die. I say again, if you don't pay attention, even on mobs, you will die. I haven't wiped as of yet, but there was one time I came incredibly close. I potion'd up and switched to a medic just in the nick of time.

I will also stress what gumdrop said about the party leader dying. If the leader dies, you all die. Therefore, keep plenty of potions on hand and don't hesitate to swap out a damage dealer for a medic. It may prolong the battle, but the mobs in the game are so unforgiving.

[Gumdrop]

Cheers ;)

Don't worry. It will happen :p Unless you're a machine of sorts I guess. Don't be afraid to put in more than one medic. For some bosses I even used three just to keep up with the abuse that was being hurled my way. Of course that is slightly risky in itself as some bosses will cast Doom on you if you take over 20 minuets to kill them! Its probably always better to have two medics and one dps or two medics and one buffer.
Forget two medics and one sent, that's pretty much hardly ever needed.

As usual there's a lot to do end game so no worries there. You can return to most areas and the more you do of the endgame the easier it becomes to travel around.

[clief101_]

i do like the fact, that wen u die, u can retry and it puts u jus before that battle. i guess they did this because of how easy it is to die in this game..ive actualy lost count

[Gumdrop]

Yeah. Imagine if they didn't include the ability to retry? I think I would have stopped playing ages ago :p

Getting a bit frustrated with the end game extras/quests. It seems like evrything is either from doing a mission, of which there are far to many, or upgrading your gear and to get the ultimate gear you need drops that will take you forever to get, unless you're crazy rich and can afford them from the store.
I enjoyed end game at first, but doing the same thing, more or less, over and over is always going to get tiresome. I liked doing the end game on all the other FF games so this is a shame really.
Also all the big hidden bosses seem to come from missions so you don't have the fun of tracking them down. I found a hidden Ochu that was a bit on the mean side, but you fights those again in missions so he was hardly special.

[clief101_]

uve actualy stopped playing for a while...ive been kinda powerleveling in chapter 11...getting a bit repetetive jus going missions and stuff

[Gumdrop]

Leveling in Ch.11 is a very good idea though, I didn't bother my first play through and found the rest of the game pretty tough going.

[clief101_]

i went forward a bit, and the monster were hard..not unbeatable, jus hard, so i decided to go back to the plains...unfortunalty i havnt been playing it...im not in the right frame of mind to powerlevel if uno wat i mean

[Gumdrop]

Sure do..I know the feeling well :p
If you have a lot of patience the Adamantoise (those are the ones with the spikes around their feet are the daddy ones) can be killed by Vanille's Death spell. The chances of it working are tiny, but if you call her summon they fall over so you have more goes at trying to kill them with it. Ignore the adamanchelid's tho.
When they die they give 40,000 cp and have a small chance to drop the material that morphs a weapon into an ultimate weapon (Trapezohadron). Also the Ingots that they drop sell well so your patience does pay off :p

[clief101_]

where is this? im currently working my way through chapter 13...im still trying to sort out the first bit lol, ive also all most finished everyones main 3 crystarium, im on the last 1 of their main (like ive completed lights commando and medic now on her ravager) but only up to level 9 on the grid thingy :) i think im still high for where i am

[Gumdrop]

In that area thats kinda like the kalm lands in 10. You can get back there, but not until the end of chapter 13.
You're very high for where you are, both times I finished the game I hadn't even finished one role. Before you start to farm them though you will wanna get yourself the Growth Egg accessory (it doubles the cp you get at the end of every fight).

[clief101_]

well awsum!! lol, yea the calm lands kinda area :)

ill play it again today and probably get to the last boss

[Gumdrop]

Cool. Good luck! The growth egg is from mission 55 btw in case you don't have it yet (also the mark can be killed by death, but the success rate is really low as usual >_>). You gotta do one of the missions before it to unlock it, but I forget which one :/

[wysper_hollow]

it's been a while since i played this game, and it get's a pretty good rating from me. the story is a little h0m0 for me, so i've spent really only as much time playing it as it took to beat it. i skipped by most of the missions and stuff, though i plan on playing again when i have nothing else to do. i'm suprised i didn't see a thread about XIII-2 in here... i hope that, at least, has some more oomph in the dialog. battles make up for the gay parts.

[clief101_]

No-one really here anymore to make a XIII-2 forum to be honest mate.

Anyway, i've since finished this game since i last posted in here. Was heaps over powered for the end of the game (without doing any missions or anything) and had the most trouble with the second last boss lol.

I cant be bothered getting Ultimate weapons in this game (the only one i haven't been bothered to) because it is just too repetetive for me.

[dappa]

so far so good, i'm a few hours into the game and at the part where your party has crash landed a ship into a old junk yard, with lots of old robots and machines walking all over the place.

I find the battle system a bit too fast paced sometimes, and I agree with what everyone else is saying that you must watch the health of your leader as some of the enemies can be unforgiving if your not careful, I got wiped out once as I got lazy and just kept hitting auto battle and letting my party attack lol.

Overall a good game so far

[Phoenix Flame]

The game play was good for this one. The only downside (as with many Square games), is the repetitive nature of getting all of the ultimate weapons and rare marks and stuff. Its fun to play through, but other than defeating all of the marks I don't think I'll do everything else there is (like I did for FFX.) The new battle system is a welcomed treat though - I'm looking forward to how they progress this when it comes to XIII-2.

[clief101_]

I loved the fast pace of the battle system. The marks just became too repetitive, i never did them, save as XII. The story was strong, and character development was better in this then XII aswell

[dappa]

It took me along time to get really into this game but now I have the hang of things and now i understand how the computer controlled ai works I find the battle system a breeze, I enjoy setting up my characters for certain situations.

I'm on chapter 13 at the moment and have done most of the marks which I have enjoyed doing, recently got owned by a mark which consists of 3 tonnberries so am grinding a bit and getting all the ultimate weapons.

I like the battle with the adamantortoises and adamanchelids , i'm farming them at the moment for the rare items they drop which are needed for ultimate weapons, yet to fight the shao long gui and long gui versions of these tortoises yet which I hear are harder.

[dappa]

one pet peeve of mine on this game was the slow tedious way it took to upgrade your weapons but they improved on that on ff13-2.