Post your ff13 review here!!!!

I went into FF13 with 0 expectations, they were very very low since all I heard by everyone was that the game sucked, despite the game receiving high reviews and selling millions of copies worldwide. I started playing it, was hooked. Beat it and loved it and decided to never ever let anyone tell me a game sucks without trying it for myself.
I felt the battle system is the fastest and most fluid exciting battle system to date I would love to see it mix with FF5's job class system so we could have a fast battle system like in FF13 but with a lot of jobs and stuff to choose from like in FF5 and maybe even switch in battle with other job classes or something... who know *cough* FF16 *cough*

At first I though Vanille and Hope were super annoying and I only cared about Lightning and Snow. Then when Fang came along she became one of my favorite characters in the game. As the game went on I grew to like Vanille and even Hope a little too. Sazh is great and along with Vanille he has probably one the darkest stories in this game and Vanille's especially help you understand why she acts a certain way so you stop hating on her... or at least I did after I learned all she went through. Still think Hope was too annoying early on and he kept it up too long even though I understood where he was coming from I wish he would just get over it already. Thankfully, in the sequels he is a much better character. The game is also one of the most challenging of the main series FF games in terms of difficulty in the main storyline. Sure games like FF10 might have bonus bosses that are hard but FF13 has normal enemies that can kill your party in just a few seconds. I enjoyed the game and felt it became very strategic as it went on and paradigm shifting on the fly and having all sorts of stuff set up is a lot of fun.
Fang and Vanille obviously have a relationship and at first you think its just a good friendship but as it goes on you can see they clearly care about each other more than that and it seems to be on the level of love, or at least that is how I interpreted it. What did you guys think?

I understand that people pick on FF13 for being a hallway but coming from FF10 I feel like FF13 is just a continuation of the FF10 hallway and at least FF13 has a large area near the end whereas FF10 for the most part is all a linear path to the end but at least it had towns lol. FF11 and FF12 received complaints for being too big and open so I can understand why they felt they needed to make the game less open for exploration.

My biggest annoyance is that just like all the FF games since FF9, this game is missing an airship that you can fly around and some people might say the story is one of the weaker ones but I still enjoyed it and I made sure to read EVERY datalog as soon as I got them in the game so I felt like I did a lot of reading and understood the story and a lot of people I knew never even bothered to read them so I then helped them understand some stuff which they missed.

I enjoyed the variety in the areas and some places like Taejin's Tower even mix up the gameplay a bit and add in puzzle elements and stuff which I thought was a nice change and something that all the older FF games did a lot.

the CG cutscenes are amazing and still look good today and I really liked the final cutscene and thought it looked really cool and explained the FF13 logo which is also cool. Not gonna lie I was among those that got emotional the first time of my playthrough when My Hands by Leona Lewis started playing and Fang and Vanille saved the world by turning into Ragnarok. I understand if you guys hate that part or the song though

That brings me to the music and where FF12 failed was that it didn't have enough memorable music like FF10 did. I think FF13 has a lot of memorable and great tracks and the boss themes and battle themes are some of the best ones and some of the music that plays in different areas like Pulse are really good too. I enjoyed the musical score for the game a lot even if Nobuo Uematsu wasn't involved.

I beat the final boss on my 2nd try. Took me like 8 times to finallly beat Cid Raines lol and no I didn't use the cheap method...
FF13 is also the biggest FF for the 10-16 year old demographic and for many kids it was their first FF so it was an important game in the history of FF for all the new fans it brought into the series.
I feel that many haters of this game probably just played a little and never arrived at Gran Pulse before they gave up or they probably just allowed internet hate to influence their opinion without giving the game a chance.


My ranking is (still need to play 11 someday and waiting for HD version of 12 so they are missing)

FF7
FF5
FF9
FF6
FF10
FF13
FF3
FF1
FF4
FF8
FF2

Gameplay : 8 Good, though i only played for an hour maybe 2 at a time, i have a feeling if i played for long stretches it might have gotten tedious. You get some cool moves like "Army of One" and the Summons were cool just didn't use them as much because game-play is so quick that to select moves you lose time which hurts your star ranking in the end more then the moves help.

Characters: 8 They characters all start off crappy in my mind other then maybe Sazh, but about midpoint chapter 6 they grew on me. Hope still grates on me kinda, though i think it is because his voice actor is Phineas for the Phinease and Ferb show, my nephew loves that show and watches it all the dam time.

Story: 7 Good story, ending felt like it was thrown together though. A lot of stuff that happened seemed rather random as well, like those statues in the tower that help you(why would they?) or how those robots who were trying to kill you in the tunnel just decided to save Hopes life and stop Atamos, and many other things that the only explanation is "just because". I had hopped as well that once we got to the Pulse city would see people sadly this was not the case, game felt widely empty :-(

Music: 3 I can not believe this soundtrack won an award :-( so bland i literately enjoyed listening to Lightnings footsteps more.

All in all i put it at 7.5 out of 10 Not the best but decent in it's own right. Put if dead center of all the FF games i have played. Currently Platinuming it so i am sure i will get alot more time to enjoy it ;-)

Overall: 7/10
The story at times felt forced to advance the plot. I don't think the story in itself is bad. Many of the characters have really believable struggles, however there comes a point in the game where the Ron Burgundy meme for "that escalated quickly" applies very well. There were many touching moments but I don't think they were assimilated into the whole game very well. The characters were hit or miss for me. Hope was hopelessly (heh) annoying, but all of the others seemed fairly reasonable and believable. The gameplay WAS fun, but for me the problem is that I cannot force myself to really enjoy this game a second time. It's definitely a different style than the par for the series: it basically just moved the control from what actions you take to what jobs you take, then you auto-battle. The scope of the enemies was one of the better features, especially on Gran Pulse. I think the music for the most part was pretty solid. I can't recall specific tunes like I can in the more memorable soundtracks, but it seemed pretty ambient when it needed to be and pretty emotional when necessary. One of my least favorite FF games, but I like it more than 12 at least, and it's not necessarily a bad game. It's just not my type of game.

FF10>7>8>X-2=9>6>4>13>12