Topic: FFXIII - 2 (Read 2136 times)

Pacobird · « **on:** February 13, 2012, 05:09:32 PM »

You have probably heard this already but this is really shaking out to be a formal apology for XIII, and it actually feels pretty natural; had I not actually played XIII my first thought would be that somebody at Square played Radiant Historia and said "oh, Atlus remade Chrono Trigger; maybe we should try to do it better."

It is trying to give me some reason to care about the characters before it makes them crash a train. Serah and Noel are not annoying yet. They might become annoying but considering this is presumably by the same people who wrote Vanille and Snow and they're now interested in giving the characters personalities that transcend their immediate motivations to go out and punch monsters, I am hopeful. The moogle has thusfar managed to avoid talking but youtube's telling me to watch out.

The music is awesome in a completely unexpected way: it sounds like Persona 3.

Your third party member is a pokemon, and you switch pokemon based on paradigms.

Most importantly, it uses the time travel macguffin the way time travel is supposed to be used: bring the audience to the same locations at multiple points in time or change them based on what the characters did in the past, so that not only do you get a chance to show off cool shit and give those locations personality but you also give the story some impact. Dr. Who: the JRPG.

So far it is the best non-handheld game Square Enix has made in a pretty long time. Probably FF12 if you liked 12 or DQ8 if you didn't. I am aware this is damning with faint praise.

It probably isn't a must-buy and if you are balking at a $60 price tag you can probably safely follow your gut, but grab it used for sure.

Niku · « **Reply #1 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:13:19 PM »

I am about two or three hours into the original 13. I do not have a raging hate on for it, I just started it, put it down, and haven't gotten back into it. Should I give that another go before bothering with 13-2?

Thad · « **Reply #2 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:19:12 PM »

Quote from: P. Birdy on February 13, 2012, 05:09:32 PM

Radiant Historia [...] oh, Atlus remade Chrono Trigger

waitwhat

Pacobird · « **Reply #3 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:26:15 PM »

XIII is a pretty bad game, and the only arguably good things about it, being the hands-off, strategic battle system and the visuals, are basically intact in XIII-2.

Reading a plot synopsis can help (the XIII-2 has a quick recap but I hate in-game recaps; would rather be playing this game) but so far the details of XIII aren't really any more important to XIII-2 as the details of X were to X-2. You could be doing literally anything for 50-60 hours and it would be better for you and the world than playing XIII; that XIII-2 really is such a dramatic improvement is all the more reason to move right ahead.

I want to measure myself here because I don't think it's a classic or anything. It is a very good Final Fantasy game that happens to fix a lot of problems with a really awful Final Fantasy game, which isn't hard to do.

It feels a lot like the transition from the first Xenosaga game to the third one: the third is actually a really solid, if not fantastic, game that probably won't change your mind about the franchise but definitely leaves you with the impression that a lot of trouble could have been avoided if they had just done this in the first place.

Pacobird · « **Reply #4 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:28:54 PM »

Radiant Historia is a grittier Chrono Trigger. It's getting a reprint next month due to popular demand. It has some neat ideas and the time travel gimmick is pretty well done (mostly because they don't get too ambitious about it) but the combat is kind of dull and the pacing sucks.

MarsDragon · « **Reply #5 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:45:32 PM »

Hm, Radiant Historia isn't quite the same as Chrono Trigger. It's more about switching between two different timelines than going back and forth on one. More Chrono Cross than Trigger. That said, you do have to time travel to do sidequests and stuff, (at least a few hours in) but it's not a huge part of the game.

Pacobird · « **Reply #6 on:** February 13, 2012, 05:58:22 PM »

It's a game about an ostensibly normal and powerless individual stumbling on the ability to travel through time and using it to save the world from an apocalypse that would indeed be totally unavoidable unless somebody were going to cheat to stop it. That's pretty much Chrono Trigger, which was way less personal and abstract than Chrono Cross*, and it's definitely XIII-2. The new protagonist, Noel, is the last living human on Pulse in his native future.

[spoiler]At least, that's what Radiant Historia wants you to think it's about for 95% of the game.[/spoiler] At any rate, the timeline-switching you're talking about is really just RH's conservativism regarding time travel that I mentioned. I think the important thing in evaluating these stories relative to each other is not necessarily how they use time travel but rather why they do.

*although honestly I'm not really sure I ever figured out what was actually at stake in Chrono Cross so I have a hard time making these comparisons

Smiler · « **Reply #7 on:** February 13, 2012, 06:11:07 PM »

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Soundtrack - Crazy Chocobo

Choco-rodeo~

Esperath · « **Reply #8 on:** February 13, 2012, 06:21:58 PM »

Quote from: Smiler on February 13, 2012, 06:11:07 PM

Choco-rodeo~

...Wow.

Nerd · « **Reply #9 on:** February 13, 2012, 08:16:06 PM »

I'm liking it so far, although from what I hear there's a lot of recycled palette-swapped areas between time lines, especially if you're trying to fill out the Radiant Historawhatever. I don't think saying "one hundred percenting a modern Final Fantasy game is tedious and only recommended for pyschopaths" is going to surprise anyone here, though.

Oh hey and Noel's not a complete douchebag and actually has a pretty decent reason for trying to be the over-protective hero type, that's nice. Unfortunately, he only has Serah to interact with regularly, and she's pretty much just a bland monologue machine with a freaky twig body.

Classic · « **Reply #10 on:** February 13, 2012, 08:41:15 PM »

Quote from: Thad on February 13, 2012, 05:19:12 PM

Quote from: P. Birdy on February 13, 2012, 05:09:32 PM
Radiant Historia [...] oh, Atlus remade Chrono Trigger

waitwhat

Don't believe that. Radiant Historia uses a neat time travel/parallel timeline thing that's pretty neat and generally awesome instead of retarded. It is a gimmicky kind of thing, but as said before, it is an awesome gimmick.
My tolerance for tedium is, I think, well-established. With that in mind, the combat was interesting enough for me to just get tired of it for the final dungeon. Combat is competent and plays to some of the (overdone?) themes of the game, but it's not going to be a revelation in turn-based combat design.

The game itself was pretty fun. Parish pointed this out on one of his podcasts, but the Player Character, Stocke is competent. He asks sensible questions and doesn't waste time asking about stuff he should know in-context. The game does hold your hand when it comes to new mechanics, but they trust you to explore and understand the story on your own. Which I liked after dealing with a glut of idiot protagonists.

EDIT:
Maybe Parish is better for describing a game than me. Here's his 1up review for the game.

PhoenixUltima · « **Reply #11 on:** February 14, 2012, 11:09:21 AM »

Man, I could hear that FFXIII-2 is better than Chrono Trigger, FFVI, and Mask of the Betrayer combined and I still wouldn't play it, because FFXIII was just completely absolutely godawful.

You know what I hated most about 13? It wasn't the linear "walk down a corridor" dungeons. It wasn't the character leveling system so linear they might as well have just made you level automatically. It wasn't the tedious "kill a hard monster" sidequests that open up near the end (if only because you can skip those, which I did after a certain point). It's the fact that every single character in the game, from the heroes to the villains to the inconsequential NPCs, all do the absolute stupidest thing possible at all times. Seriously, go through that game again (or don't, I won't hold it against you) and whenever anyone does ANYTHING, think to yourself "Is this nonsensical? Are the characters behaving like total idiots here?" and I guaran-fucking-tee the answer will be "yes". I'm not going to start giving examples, because if I did I'd end up typing out the entire goddamn plot, from the beginning of the 13 days flashback bullshit to the very last seconds of the ending cutscene.

I just can't bring myself to play a game with a base of that much stupidity, even if it is good by itself.

Pacobird · « **Reply #12 on:** February 14, 2012, 12:43:57 PM »

Caius is a pretty great villain but holy shit am I fucking sick of Liam O'Brien.

The Crystarium is tweaked in a neat way; rather than linear paths for each individual role, the characters (and monsters) each get one crystarium path, and each node gives you the choice of which role to level, and gives you a fixed amount of STR, MAG, or HP depending on which role you level. So if you, say, get Thunder at level 10 RAV, you would get Thunder once you'd leveled your tenth RAV node as Serah or Noel. The monsters only have one role each.

This WOULD give you some choice in terms of how to build Serah and Noel, except every other node is a large node, which gives an extra bonus based on which role you use to level it. COM gets +2 STR and RAV gets +2 MAG, and since you can cap all roles at 99 there's literally no reason to not have Noel level COM on every large node possible and have Serah level RAV on them (unless you're some sort of godless communist that hates min-maxing). It's still maybe more interesting than normal leveling...?

Monsters are more interesting, since you customize their skills by feeding them to each other but get ALL the skills (I think; I'm not clear on it yet) and each monster has a cap on the number of skills it can get, so you have to do some planning to make sure Awesome Monster X gets Awesome Skill Y without getting too many of Shit Skills A through M.

EDIT: Also, it's worth noting that I DID play Radiant Historia the whole way through, which at 30 is about the highest praise I can give an RPG, so I don't mean to sound like I thought it was bad. I just thought the combat was kind of dull (the mechanics are great and make the boss fights an absolute treat, but the random battles are WAY too long) and the game had general pacing issues. The characters are, on the other hand, great. I am probably alone in this but I actually especially liked Raynie and Marco, who are mopes and know they are mopes but are also professionals and are loyal to their commander, and the game actually treats them with a lot of dignity when it would be so, so easy to make them comic relief.

Brentai · « **Reply #13 on:** February 15, 2012, 08:25:20 AM »

If "I played it all the way through" is the metric by which RPGs are judged then I stopped playing FFXIII at 6 hours.

Pacobird · « **Reply #14 on:** February 18, 2012, 05:16:19 PM »

Smiler's entry is awesome but this is more representative, for the curious.

http://youtu.be/g7-tiypvCNo

Cthulhu-chan · « **Reply #15 on:** February 18, 2012, 09:34:55 PM »

shit yes, I love this track. particularly how it plays in an uninterrupted loop in AF300 Bresha.

Bal · « **Reply #16 on:** February 18, 2012, 11:21:48 PM »

What ever happened to Vs XIII? I have no idea what the hell is going on at Squeenix anymore with this FFXIII Brandstravaganza they originally had planned. Fortunately I also don't really care about Final Fantasy anymore. I mean, the last few games have been an MMO in XI, "the only way to win is not to play" in XII, and the Hallway of XIII, not even acknowledging the train wreck that is FFXIV. I just have no good will for the series anymore.

Pacobird · « **Reply #17 on:** February 18, 2012, 11:30:09 PM »

versus XIII is in development and is supposed to be some kind of cinema verite FF JRPG. Agito XIII is now Type-0, confirmed for an unconfirmed western release date and it is apparently HOLY SHIT AWESOME

Like, Type-0 is the crown jewel of the evidence that people point to when they say the biggest problem with SE is they have been using 100% of their awesome ideas this generation on handhelds (Tactics "Best Remake Ever" Ogre, competent Star Ocean ports, Crisis Core, Dissidia, DQIX, The World Ends With You), but I can't say for sure personally because I don't import.

Bal · « **Reply #18 on:** February 18, 2012, 11:37:55 PM »

Wasn't Agito for cell phones or something?

Pacobird · « **Reply #19 on:** February 18, 2012, 11:41:12 PM »

No, it's Type-0. It's an expansion on the ideas behind Before Crisis, which was a cell phone game where you ran around beating up Wutai dudes as Turks. Don't know if it was originally supposed to be cell phone, but it's a PSP game.

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Author Topic: FFXIII - 2 (Read 2136 times)