[Multiplatform] Official Final Fantasy XIII Thread

Originally Posted by Dark Nation

Well now, being that the game isn't the Wii, I'd say the chance of getting the game when it is released here in the States will be slightly higher, but since its Final Fantasy... well its still going to be hard to find at first I bet.

Almost all stories about games being hard to get hold of on launch day are fabricated by marketing departments to boost pre-orders. You might not be able to walk into a specialised game shop without a pre-order and pick it up on launch day but I'm willing to bet a supermarket with a games section will have a ton of copies sitting waiting to get bought.

As for the price, the actual day one selling price will be lower than the RRP, it always is. Every website will knock about a tenner off to make it look cheaper and the stores will quickly follow suit. The RRP for most new Xbox games here is fifty quid, sometimes more but none of them ever cost more than forty on the release day, and that's the really big franchises. Also, don't forget when you're doing price conversions that the dollar isn't worth particularly much internationally at the moment so foreign goods will cost you more. It might be worth changing the money to yen now though as the dollar is only going to drop by Christmas as more and more Arab countries decide to stop using it to trade oil.

As for avoiding spoilers, has anything actually surprising ever happened in a Final Fantasy game? They're not exactly famed for their deep and intricate stories are they?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by a lurker

This was hard to parse first thing in the morning.

For want of a comma, the complete structure of the sentence was lost. There's a kid's rhyme in there somewhere I'm sure.

How ya doing, buddy?

I hope they get the balance right between upgrades needing hard to find stuff or not. I mean, Dark Cloud always let you keep your equipment current without too much needles grinding, but Rogue Galaxy let you get all the best equipment three dungeons or so before the end of the game, completely destroying any challenge the game might have had.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I assume that 3/9/10 is the ninth of march? If so, that'll be a decent birthday present for me.

I watched the latest video on Xbox Live about this last night, the one where they announce the Leona Lewis track as the theme and talk to a few of the designers. The outdoors locations look a lot like most of Last Remnant so far but if that's real game footage they're showing then it runs a fuck of a lot smoother than Last Remnant. Worryingly from the video, one of the designers said the characters were the main focus of this game and we should expect a much more emotional story. That's exactly what they said about FFX before it came out and that's easily the worst FF game of the lot.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Quote:

With the weapon reform system, FFXIII looks like it will be changing some of the paradigms we've come to expect from Japanese RPGs. The idea of buying a weapon in a shop seems to be de-emphasized

Have these people never played Dark Cloud then?

How ya doing, buddy?

Or in fact Final Fantasy VIII, come to think of it.

FELIPE NO

I'd be surprised if they didn't change the PAL boxart to just the logo, given that every single FF game officially released over here has followed that same formula.

Not that it matters in the slightest, given that I'm guessing that everyone, likes me, stores their games on a shelf end-on, only seeing the cover for five seconds tops when they take the game out of it's case and put it away. I get more annoyed by games that don't have standard end panels (Bloody PS2 Platinum releases).

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Originally Posted by nanstey

And no pre-order incentives that I've heard of, either...

Why would they bother? Just writing Final Fantasy on the box is enough to guarantee they'll sell every copy in the shops on day one. Hell, if I was them I'd wait a month before releasing a Limited Edition, safe in the knowledge that there'd be a ton of idiots who already bought the game who'd buy it again if it came in a metal box with a cheap, plastic chocobo lumped in with it.

How ya doing, buddy?

What I got from those reviews is that the game is the linearity of FFVII, matched with a levelling system combining FFX's grid and FFIX and Tactics' weapons skills with a side order of Dark Cloud weapon levelling with a battle system refined from Last Remnant, FFXII and FFX-2, all wrapped up in a horrific mix of FFX shitty script and FFX-2's J-Pop visuals and soundtrack.

I don't really see that departing from traditional Jrpg "norms" is in any way a bad thing though. I suspect their aim was to appeal to a broader market and that's understandable. They know that fans of the series would buy it anyway, no matter what they did to the game so trying to reel in a few people who wouldn't normally buy an rpg but like games like Metal Gear makes perfect sense from a business point of view if nothing else.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Andrew Evenstar

This was the most anticipated game of all time for me. Note I've been playing Final Fantasy ever since FF 2 /4 was released... when I was 7 years old.

This is easily the most disappointing game of the series for me.

The first 25 hours (most of the game) you are walking in a straight line.

Walk > battle > cutscene > boss battle > cutscene. repeat.

No castles, no towns, no areas to explore. No NPC's to talk to really till about 18 hrs in at Nautilus. And even when you get there, it's still just a straight path through the town.

No mini games or side quests. It just seems the side quests are the hunts at the end of the game and that's it.

The crystarium system is just a copy of the Sphere Grid but just looks nicer.

In my opinion Square really fucked this game over. It could have been so much more. I can't imagine this game being what the fans wanted. I just want to finish the game so I can put it up on eBay. But I'll post a full review after I complete the game, which should be in a day or two. I'm about 27-28 hours into the game.

Final Fantasy games always send you in a straight line for the first half of the game. Sure, they might have a wider area to give the impression that you're exploring but it's nothing more than a wide corridor, there's never more than one exit at the end. It's never until you get the airship that you actually go exploring in pretty much all of them up to XII. The towns are just filler anyway and essentially, just a way to let players decide if they can be arsed to read variations on the same bit of exposition twenty times while they shop. If all the story is now told in cutscenes, there's no need for towns. All Square have done is admitted that their games have always been basically linear and cut out the fluff a bit, I don't see why there's so much crying going on on various websites.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Andrew Evenstar

The city of Midgar has more exploration than FF13

In Midgar you have the Shinra building you're forced to go through, which has one route, unless you count the stairs, a couple of shopping screens, the Honeybee manor you're forced to go to, the church you're forced to go to and so on. The only hidden thing is a piece of materia hidden in a playground.

What I'm getting at and where I think you're missing my point is that older Final Fantasy's have never really had any exploration, they've had complete linearity but through wider areas. Having to walk around for five minutes between shops isn't exploration, it's a mechanic designed to make the game seem larger than it actually is.

Now I've not played FFXIII so I accept it might lack the side quests of the earlier iterations but personally, I'd rather spend my time actually playing a game, rather than spending an hour walking around between shop menus. As I understand it, FFXIII has all the shopping in the save menu so you stop to save, do your shopping then get back to the action in five minutes, rather than a pointless hour trapesing about looking at the scenery.

If FF actually had any roleplaying in it then I'd agree that you need a bit of npc interaction and non-combat bits to round out the characters but the series isn't roleplaying, they've always had completely preset stories and characters so if you can cut out the bullshit aimless wandering about in towns and get the exposition out of the way in a few cutscenes then for me that's a good thing.

I appreciate that not everyone plays jrpgs just for the game mechanics and battle systems but if you're after a roleplaying experience I'd question why you were playing Final Fantasy in the first place.

In short, you're mistaking filler space for an exploration mechanic, but if that's what you like, go nuts (And you should probably play Sacred 2, it's at least 100 hours of pure filler).

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According to the GAME website, the pointless extra tat edition will set you back £60 whereas the just the game in a box edition is a mere £40. Whether £20 is a good price to pay for a soundtrack you've probably already downloaded, a small picture book, three postcards and a sticker is your own business.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I'd be amazed if it isn't DVD box sized. Can't find any info on how thick it is though.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Anyone who fancies public ridicule in the heart of London on Tuesday, there's apparently a launch event for the game at HMV on Oxford Street. It's hosted by Alex Zane and there'll be some of the game's producers there or something to sign your copy of the game. Of course it's easy to laugh but remember that the ten or so losers who slept outside the store on PS3 launch night took home free Sony Bravia tv's (And got a free taxi to avoid the muggers hanging around outside) so if there's a similarly poor turnout for this you might get some freebies if you turn up.

If the battle system is entertaining then I don't care about the lack of exploration. FF games all have retarded stories and any exploration in them is simply as exercise in making you walk around aimlessly to spark more annoying random battles to satisfy some weird kids' OCD desire to collect things in games.

No matter how poor the 360 version is technically, it has to be better than Last Remnant and that wasn't unplayably bad, plus I don't own a Triple, so it looks like I'm getting the 360 version although not for a while yet, I'm not paying full price for it when I have so many other unplayed games on the shelf.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Cadillacs

PS

Ha ha, you get most of those just playing through though and I didn't bother hunting any of the non-achievement rare monsters. I'd never got 1,000/1,000 out of a game before and when I realised I was on track to get it out of TLR I couldn't resist.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Meh, I've never managed to be bothered enough about FFVI to finish it on any of the occasions I started it. That's probably because I never played it as a kid though and so many games have been virtual copies of the thing since, to me it now seems really generic.

That's not to say it's badly designed of course, just that it isn't fun.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Oooooo Kaaaaaay.

You're right in that the first Final Fantasy game was expected to be the last the company made and it turned out rather successful and as such, they made a crap load more of them and will continue to do so. FFXII is awesome though, one of the best in the series. Some people don't like it because you don't get to endlessly press the X button during fights and because the story isn't about a slightly misunderstood young guy saving the world and getting it on with a next-to-useless-in-fights princess type. Those people are deluding themselves though and probably really enjoyed FFVIII like the bunch of massive homos they are.

There's nowhere I can't reach.