Final Fantasy XIII
Score: #fail
- The game seems to be centered around the concept of fail by incorporating a Retry choice which you can pull up in mid-battle to your liking, and you're parked right before whatever you battled. This, and you always start with full health/full party after every battle. So you like having to visit inns and access the menu after a battle to heal yourself? I find FFXIII's much more streamlined
- Your characters can't level up freely. There's a cap set between bosses. Even if you get "experience points", slowly (if you want to grind, you have to walk far away for the enemies to respawn again, and the linear areas in which you are confined are usually not that long), you can't use them until you've passed the boss, which is always x2 times more powerful and annoying than your characters, who repeatedly say the same phrases during battle without much thought on context. Don't like a little challenge in your game?
- The bosses love to have a surprise attack, and one of them loves to use a machine-gun with a crap sound effect that stands out too much, and once you've discovered the surprise tactic, it will find another way to surprise you. Takes the fun out of the game when it demands too much attention to itself. You're just a game. Get with the program. Isn't that every FF boss?
- Your NPC allies are completely crap at decision making when it comes to healing, and there's nothing you can do to change their behaviour, other than controlling healing yourself while they fight. Don't know what the heck you were playing, I never played healer EVER. The AI kept me healed at all times
- Enemies are, as usual, 100 % combat efficient with 1 hit point left. Just like every FF, let alone every RPG out there
- Upgrading weapons is boring. You really have no hint what you get, like it's meant to be sold with a guide to help you out. So, you waste a lot of materials on upgrading some random weapon. You basically get/buy/trade materials, and you apply them to your weapons/stuff to upgrade. I agree it was kinda cumbersome. Internet guide ftw
- The meaningless battles last way too long sometimes. You have one meter to fill; the stagger meter, the other is health. The stagger meter allows you to kill the enemies faster, but you need to solve some puzzle in how to attack some enemies "the right way" to get the meter to go up faster. Puzzles? You have 2 Ravagers and a Commando, fill the meter, switch to 3 commandos and poof. Nothing to think about.
- Most of the visuals are quite flat (using textures to show details rather than adding depth with geometry). Xbox 360 version?
- The visuals lag like hell sometimes. Especially when hairy people are in the scenes, obviously.--OK, grasping at straws here. Hairy?
- The sound effects are just weird in places. Sound design is kind of off generally. Don't know about this one. Never had sound issues
- In the menu system, there's a lag which has no visual feedback to indicate you have to wait, so sometimes you have to navigate back and forth to get where you actually wanted. I don't care if they spent months designing it; response time is paramount. Never had to wait. Again what version did you play?
- In the crystarium menu (where you level up abilities), a great deal of emphasis is on the visual animations, so again, you have to wait. You can press the button to speed this up/skip some parts, but it too will have some lag making you navigate back and forth. The other FF games already did this quite well, but these designers shut their brains off. Agreed
- The save point almost always makes the character controls confused. The character will seem stuck and you have to navigate away in some non-intuitive way. Yeah it was kinda wierd at first
+ Some of the music could be taken from Cowboy Bebop. Booyah
