Another update in my chronicling of my playthrough of the Final Fantasy games.
I decided to say fuck it and assume Square's never going to release FF13's games on the PS5, so I just bought a PS3 controller and dusted off my PS3, and popped that bad boy in.
That's the only game I'm going to be talking about here, but I'll stick to the format from the earlier posts.
Final Fantasy XIII
Is this a bad game? No. Is this a good game? I have no clue. I'd say this is a frustrating game. I really enjoy the characters and story -- to the point I'd say it might even contain some of my favorite story moments across the entire franchise -- and I think visually it's one of the coolest games in the franchise, especially in regards to the CGI cutscenes, which are just gorgeous to watch and part of what pulled me into the story so hard. But then you have the gameplay, which I think does a disservice to the entire product. It was like getting whiplash, constantly bouncing between watching one of the coolest cutscenes I've ever seen in my life, where two Shiva sisters combined and transformed into a motorcyle...to returning to movement that's so clunky you can't even walk in a straight line. I thought I had just bought a bootleg, busted controller by accident, because I could not believe the movement could be so bad in a PS3 game. Then you have the amount of grinding it takes to unlock CP (terrible abbreviation choice btw), to the accessory upgrade system, to some boss design choices, to everything about Chapter 10. I've never been more frustrated playing a Final Fantasy game than I was playing this one. It was just fucking awful to play through some of this game. Which is a shame, because again, I really enjoyed the story, and even outside of a few moments, the gameplay itself wasn't super obstructive to my enjoyment for a good part of the first half of the game. But yeah, I just have no real desire to hop back into this game again due to how finicky the controls are. But to end on a positive note, I will stress again I really enjoy the narrative. All the characters had their little character arcs and bounced off each other well -- with the Sazh and Vanille stuff being my personal favorite -- and I'm always a fan of when all the party members feel involved in the story, which is the case here. If I was just going off the story, I'd give the game an 8/10 -- cuz I do think it kinda dropped off in the second half when it stepped away from the more grounded, emotional, character-driven stuff and focused on Barthandelus and the fal'Cie stuff, which was kinda hard to parse at times. But due to the gameplay dragging the entire experience down, I'll just give a 7/10.
Now I'll probably play both the sequels since my PS3 is already out. I heard they have better gameplay, but I guess we'll see.
