Ponn01 said:
I can't understand people bitching about not being able to directly control all the characters or the auto option for your leader. I just want to scream YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG! Thats why you all are losing so much and complaining about enemies and bosses. The system is in the paradigm shifting and for once in a RPG having to utilize ALL your classes. All those buffs and debuffs that people never use and just hit the fight button repeatedly with the occasional lighting or ice doesn't cut it. It makes battles interesting again
I haven't read a post so full of bizarrely inverted garbage like this before in this thread, and I had to comment. Inability to understand why people are bitching about being unable to control their characters for the first time in a series in over twenty years and twelve installments is your problem, not ours. It is more than just a rare personality quirk in a small percentage of gamers; it's a fundamental and annoying shift in gameplay, and a higher percentage of players (in my opinion) should be upset by it, but that's up to each player. No sense trying to convince people to dislike something, but being unable to understand why we're pissed about being out of control? Come on. It's a goddamned video game, not a movie.
To comment on your second point, yeah, I'm complaining about the game, but hell no I'm not losing. I'm not doing anything "WRONG". I'm steamrolling through battles by doing precisely what Square wants you to do, at least for 90%+ of the first half of the game; mash auto-battle, and switch to specific paradigms for the rare battle where you have to or essentially face certain death (re: Sentinels and Gatling Guns). I agree, this is about as bad as the rock-paper-scissors gameplay that made FFX kind of boring too (Wakka for flying creatures, Lulu for elementals, etc.) So no, we're not 'doing it wrong', we're doing it exactly right, and we're bored to tears, but we love Final Fantasy, and want to desperately get to the gold that everyone says awaits us at the end of the tunnel-coloured rainbow. We're justified in whining a little about the 20 hour-long assfest that stands in our way, especially after waiting four years to slog through it.
I don't understand why people aren't excited about this, you aren't just smashing x button to fight, you have to think and strategize your battles with staggering.
We're not excited because everything I've bolded is entirely wrong. You don't need to think at all for 90% or more of the battles. You literally DO have to just mash autobattle, with two paradigm shifts (COM-RAV, to fast-chaining RAV-RAV, to whatever you want, Five Stars) and the speed and flow of the battles kind of mandates that the most efficient way to play, that is, the "best", five-star way to play this game, at least for most of the first 20 hours, is in fact, to auto-battle.
I'm immensely pleased that other dissenting voices are appearing the thread and aren't afraid to call out the problems in the crowned heir to one of gaming's royal franchises. Props to amirox and the others, great points all around.
Things like being able to set gambit-like priorities for your AI-controlled (yes, AI-controlled) characters, being able to switch leaders on the fly, and a massive alteration in pacing, to better offer the player choices earlier on in regards to direction and party construction would dramatically improve this game. The reason many of us are puzzled by XIII is that the solutions to so many of its problems are in its own predecessors, which handled such obstacles gracefully, and often in creative ways. If you value these things, XIII can't help but feel like backward step in a number of ways.
I must also add that it's utterly
ridiculous for anyone to suggest that we, as players, aren't properly grasping the awesome world design, characters, history and plot of the game because we totally missed out on checking the datalog. You kidding me? As others mentioned, 'don't tell me -- show me". It's a game. It shouldn't even be just "show me"; it should be "let me show myself". There are a million awesome ways to expose me to the awesomeness of Cocoon, Pulse and their various locales, especially with the masterful visual flair of this game behind them. An in-game text encyclopedia is a complete failure to capitalize on that, and is about as solid a way to cripple the strength of a story as whatever happened on disc 2 of Xenogears.
People advising others to hold on and wait it out till Chapter 11 to properly evaluate the game are way out of touch with this argument and the average gamer. Sure,
I'm going to wait it out. It's goddamned
Final Fantasy, I love it like a firstborn! :lol But if I, the ridiculous fanboy, am this bored and sick of the game, how is the average RPG player or gamer that doesn't have the same allegiance to the series going to react to your insistence to trudge through 20 hours before getting to the meat of a game? I mean, that's twice the length of something like God of War III. They could play two awesome games in the time it takes to get to the meat of this one. Why should they waste their time? It may well be worth it for those of us who have lived and breathed Final Fantasy in years' past to endure the first half to get to something familiar we love, but that's not going to cut it for the gaming audience at large. So that argument's not going to work, and no one should be criticized for negatively evaluating their $60 purchase on a "measly" 15-20 hours of gameplay. That's a long, long time.
There are good, solid ways to defend this game, and there's certainly nothing wrong with enjoying everything great about it, but don't rag on intelligent gamers for being disappointed with glaring gameplay flaws in this crusty jewel of a game. I use the term jewel because in fact, there is much to applaud here. I dig more than the odd cutscene's direction, I dig the stunning visuals, I dig the battle soundtracks, and yes, somehow, I bizarrely dig the rare fight that requires some quick thinking.
