[Multiplatform] Official Final Fantasy XIII Thread

Originally Posted by Pangalin

Explain to me how it harms anyone for a game to be on multiple systems.

Well because kids who can only afford one console and have a weird, desperate desire to confirm that they picked the best one, can no longer use the game as an argument gambit against their equally tragic friends who bought the rival console.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Shenlon

wow this is surprising. I invested on the ps3 thinking it would have some nice exclusives and here I am now being kicked in the crotch by it.

So you bought a console based on your assumption that certain games wouldn't come out on another console? That's fair enough, if a little naive given that pretty much all the big games are multiplatform eventually these days but I can follow your line of thought. What I don't get though is why it's a kick in the crotch that they're going to be available on other consoles too. It's not going to reduce the quality of the game and you'll still be able to play it on the console you bought so what's the problem? Unless of course you wanted to get a 360 to play Halo but went for the PS3 for FFXIII but now you could have got a 360 after all in which case, gutted, you better get saving up for a 360.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Shenlon

No it's not going to reduce the quality of the game of course but lets just say you bought an xbox because you heard and everyone assumed that the most popular game in the console, Halo, is now going to be exclusive to the 360 (which it is) BUT they suddenly announce that the game is going to come out for the ps3 as well.
Now let us just say that you originally wanted to get a ps3 but was overwhelmed by the hype of halo. Now you have your xbox and ready for halo, but guess what, now you hear that halo is coming out on the ps3 which is the system you wanted first. (and of course all hypothetical thought is in past tense)
Granted, that this is what just happened to the ps3 with FFXIII but what if other titles such as white knight story, god of war 3 (Which is doubtfull seeing as its a sony game), and other ps2 sequels which were once exlcusive to sony now all coming to multiplatform when your original assumptions were that they would be ps3 exclusive and thought "alright, i can only afford one console at the moment, let go with the one which has exclusives I'm familiar with and I know I'll probably enjoy"

Well that's fair enough then. I actually did buy a 360 to play Halo originally so GTA and now FFXIII coming out for it was a big bonus for me.

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

You're missing her point, Mush. Lurker wasn't questioning buying a console for the games that are already out and also looking forward to future titles, she was asking why some people are claiming to have bought a PS3 on the launch day specifically so they could probably play FFXIII three years later.

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

Originally Posted by Hindman

You speak as though you think I was trying to imply something.
I wasn't.
I was being a dick for no reason.
There's a difference.

I wouldn't do that again if I were you.

You're not very good at it.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by INDIGO-2

The blonde beanie biker boy's name is Snow Villiers, apparently.

Shouldn't that be Snow Virriers? Wasn't the annoying fag in Suikoden IV called Snow too?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I think it depends how racist you're feeling.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by GRUN-3

I didn't want to say anything, but goddammit, the man has a zipper on his glove.

It is starting to look like they finally came up with a character design worse than Zel off of FFVIII.

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Originally Posted by Pangalin

What does Shadow even have to do with anything? This guy is clearly the Square's Idea Of Comic Relief character. He will do and say intentionally ridiculous things and generally distract us from whatever maundering SAVE THE WORLD plot it is that we're supposed to give a shit about. This type is exemplified in previous titles by Yuffie, Selphie, and Quina among others. Uptight internet jerks hated all of them, too.

Booyaka!

I think he's going to be more of a Zell or Wakka than a Selphie or Rikku, i.e. fucking annoying and useless in combat. I'll laugh if they make him sound like Willie Green in Dolemite though.

I don't know why anyone thinks the combat looks complicated though (Although this is a Final Fantasy thread so I shouldn't be surprised). From what's been posted here, it looks like you have a maximum of five commands available in combat which you pre-select although some commands will take up a couple or more slots. So "Attack" will be one, "Item" will be one, "Defend" will be one but "Magic" might be two and "Summon" three, meaning to use more powerful stuff you sacrifice flexibilty. Then you can perform a certain number of actions in your turn based on those action's time cost and the speed of your character. It's probably a bit like XII's, simple on the outside for idiot fanspawn with a bit of depth once you get into it.

I almost gave up on the series after the FFX trainwreck but actually, I thought FFXII was an incredible game. RPG's are all about the game system rather than the characters for me though so the generic Square party doesn't really bother me too much, as long as the voice acting isn't too annoying.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

But there's no need to bother with that if you're junctioning properly. If you can be arsed to keep his hp low and endlessly enter the same move combinations then you can probably be arsed to use your GF's abilities and drawing from monsters to have everyone junctioning Firaga and Blizzaga right after the fire cave at the beginning. Once you've got 100 Firaga's junctioned to your strength stat, the entire first two discs struggle to throw a fight at you you can't win in a round or two of plain attacking.

Plus, Zell looks and sounds like a fucking retard.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Heh, they are all pretty shitty, yes. I don't remember any bosses in FFVIII that were so hard as to require a different setup though, even Omega Weapon was just an exercise in using Aura and Lionheart over and over until it died.

That's actually something that'd be nice to see in FFXIII, fights that are hard for reasons other than being under-levelled. I'm not optimistic though, having beaten that ridiculous 6,000,000 hp dragon thing in FFXII mainly by setting up the gambits, getting into the fight then playing on my PSP, checking in every 10 minutes or so to see how they were getting along.

I know FF games are designed for mass-market appeal but does that neccessarily preclude any complexity in the battle system? I can't think of any FF fights off the top of my head that require any cunning rather than just more levelling-up to beat with the possible exception of throwing a phoenix down at the undead Indian thing in FFVII and even he ain't exactly tough to kill doing it properly.

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

I see your point but to be honest, going in at a lower level is more a matter of luck rather than neccessarily coming up with a great tactic to win the fight at that level. There's never enough depth to the options to do much else than bludgeon your way through, especially since most FF bosses are immune to status effects which is pretty much the limit of most FF's departure from attack or blast with a spell.

I used to play through a FF game once just straight through then go back and monster it the second time, did that with 7, 8 and 9 anyway. It's not so much powering up the levels that matters as it is accessing higher rank spells or skills. Once you realise that it's even possible to get Firaga's at the start of FFVIII, you then realise how quickly you can elevate your party to demi-god status and just kick the shit out of everything you meet. You also start wondering what the point is, given that there's so little that's actually tough to beat in the game anyway. FFIX at least limits your powers to the weapons and stuff you pick up so forcibly slows your advancement that way, although it is possible to hang around killing pointless monsters until you learn the attached skill every time you find a new one.

I forget which it was but one FF game had a fruit machine style attack where once you learned the timing, you could hit lucky seven every time and win every fight without trying. That might have been X-2, I can't really remember.

I liked the combat in FFXII because although people complained the game was playing itself, I found that far preferable to just selecting the same old menu commands over and over and over. At least with FFXII, you had the option to build some pretty complex gambits to cover every eventuality. For me the fun was seeing the genuine extent to which I could make the game play itself, having every imaginable situation covered by my gambit setup.

I'm actually never too bothered about collecting everything in an rpg, until I get near the end and realise that I've collected most stuff without realising it. I killed all the big dragons in FFXII but I wasn't upset that I missed the Zodiac Spear. For me the fun of rpgs is understanding the system and maximising the numbers. Suikoden is a great series for this, not much beats the joy of working out you can get Antonio the chef to dish out more damage than Pesmerga if you set his runes up properly and even though they're pretty much game-breakers, the first time you fire off the Master-pupil attack or stick the permanent berzerk rune on Oulan and realise the extraordinarily powerful move you've found is what playing rpgs is all about for me. Certainly far more so than talking to every character in the game and searching every nook and cranny of every level for secret treasure.

As such, FF games probably aren't for me and in fact, I hated FFX which is an entirely superficial game. FFXII was great though so I'm hoping there's some depth to the combat in FFXIII, both in the range of enemies arrayed against you, the options available to you to kill them and the customisation and tinkering you can do behind the scenes.

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

I absolutely agree that using the right spells on the right bad guys is a big part of it but again, I find FF games a little limited in that respect too. I mean like you say, if it's a machine you use lightning, if it's an ice monster you use fire and especially with the more recent iteraions, most of your party have access to the powers you need, plus, and FFX was the worst example of this, you can switch in different members on the fly to deal with things. Fighting a bird, switch in Wakka, fighting a slime, use Lulu etc.

Compare this to Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call (Nocturne over there I believe) where it's not just a case of using the right power to maximise your efficiency in killing things but often a case of using the right powers to simply survive. You often have to carefully tailor your party simply to get through certain sections, even down to the specific skills you breed onto your demons since they get so few each and because the game throws quite varied and equally deadly enemies at you in each section. Added to that there's probably a boss at the end of the section who needs a completely different set of skills and with no Cathedral available to tweak you party's skills and it can be a nice challenge to build a team that'll get you through. This is true right up until the end until you're using the Trumpeter, Metatron and Beelzebub, all with Pierce and Megido spells but that point of gamebreaking comes literally when you're done and even then, beating Lucifer can take some doing. The plot in SMT is fucking ridiculous and badly explained but I absolutely love that game, for the depth of the thing far more than anything else. To be fair, I never really got into FFVI. To the point I got, it was so far, so generic and I lost interest each time I tried to play it.

I think there are signs that Square are trying to innovate a bit these days, what with FFXII being quite a departure from the series in terms of both system and to a lesser extent story and characters (Yes you played a young, annoying guy with too many belts on but he wasn't some epic "Chosen one" and wasn't generally perceived by the NPCS as the main character in the game) and with the amount of resources they've pumped into Last Remnant. Japanese companies seem more and more to be appreciating the Western audience (Kojima announcing he was going to sack everyone and start from stretch with a more west looking team and design philosophy for example) and whilst there's a danger of this just meaning some less Japanese looking faces in the games, one hopes that it'll actually manifest as some deeper or at least different plots and a bit more complexity and depth over sheer volume of collectibles. It's a bit early to say how FFXIII fits into this though.

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That said, I really liked the first Kingdon Hearts game, mainly I think because it's just such fun. It's a platformer really though, not an rpg (Which is why I didn't like the sequel so much, they took out most of the platforming). I played FFVI after I played IX, in fact I got it on the PS1, mainly because it cost like £10 and came with a demo of FFX (FFVI never came out over here on SNES or if it did, I was too busy playing Killer Instinct to care).

Don't get me wrong here, I do like the FF games (Except X, X can go suck a dick, I rather enjoyed X-2 oddly enough though) and I'm a sucker for big budget production values in games and I'll probably end up buying this one after the price drops a bit and I've finished my rpg backlog (Fallout 3 to start after Last Remnant for starters). I'll be interested to hear a bit more about the combat system between now and it's release though, rather than just bitching about the silly characters.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Timberwolf8889

But it certainly looks like it'll be better than the colossal failure that was XII.

FFXII was an awesome game. I'm rather concerned that they mention FFX so often when talking about this game because that really was a crock of shite.

Also, his descriptions of the characters read a bit like descriptions of pretty much every final fantasy character since VII, if not before. Lithe woman who's tough to handle - Tifa, Quistis, Freya, Lulu, Fran. Athletic over-enthusiastic bloke who shouts a lot - Cid, Zel, Steiner, Waka, Basch. Perky, annoying upbeat girl - Yuffie, Selphie, Eiko, The one with the swirly eyes, Penello. Young guy with troubled past and a bit moody - Cloud, Squall, Tidus, Vaan. They're basically saying that the main party is the same cookie-cutter collection of archetypes they've used over and over for years only with a few more buckles and zips and stupid haircuts this time out.

Let's face it, this is shaping up to be yet another incredibly mediocre piece of Square story-telling that once you've got bored of looking at the pretty graphics, will only be saved by the gameplay mechanics and from what the guys are saying in those interviews, they've taken a step back from the really interesting battle mechanic of XII and gone back to the generic as fuck press the x-button ad infinitum while your mix-and-match generic characters pull off the same attacks over and over again of X.

I know XII's battle system was a little hands off but given the choice between pressing the same button over and over to watch the same attacks over and over or not pressing anything and winning the fight through good gambit set-up, I'll take XII over X every time.

How ya doing, buddy?

The mechanics of X's fights were dull as fuck though. For perhaps the first island you'd bother switching in Wakka for flying monsters and Lulu for slimes and so on but soon after that, they all became such a generic bunch of inter-changable, nothingy annoyances that it made no fucking difference at all who was in the fight anyway.

They need to actually make the characters a bit different for this game to be in any way interesting. FFIX managed that to some extent, although again by the end it didn't really matter who was in the fights, there was at least a pretence of tactical thought about it. FFVII you could piss around with the materia a bit which made up for every single character being identical except for the limit breaks. FFVIII was as superficial as X, especially once you realised that with GF powers you could have everyone loaded up with 100 Blizzaga and Firaga spells the first time you left the garden, giving you thousands of hp and 255 strength. At least in XII, there was a bit of thought required to set up the gambits so you never had to interfere. By the end of that one there was very little in the game my team couldn't deal with on auto-pilot which some would say was a bad thing but I really liked the way I'd organised their AI routines to be able to deal with all the different kinds of monsters without needing me to press anything. As I said, if you're going to have battles that require zero thought, I'd rather they also involved zero button pressing rather than endlessly tapping the X button as in previous FF games.

I appreciate that not every game can have the tactical depth of SMT:Nocturne or Last Remnant and that games like those tend to be a bit tougher, thereby alienating the vast majority of Final Fantasy fans who are the kind of idiots who fill up the GameFAQS message boards asking banal questions that are answered on the second page of the instruction manual, but if you are going to have a battle system as old as the hills (Which XIII's is looking a lot like at present) you need to have something else to keep people interested, normally a fantastic plot or great writing.

It's possible that Square have managed to raise the writing and story in this game somewhere above Harry Potter And The Evil Corporation Who Are Exploiting The Natural Resources Of The World With Potentially Disasterous Consequences For The Poor People And Oh Look They're Messing With Demons And Shit And At Least One Member Of The Main Party Is Somehow Related To The Bad Guys but past experience would suggest that that's unlikely. They had a go at something a bit less facile in XII but a lot of people said it was confusing or boring or there weren't enough bad guys walking out of flaming buildings looking menacing and emo at the same time and from what I've read of XIII in this thread and elsewhere, it's looking like a return to the moral sledgehammer of VII and VIII, even down to the bad guys creating monsters that are sort of robotic (And doubtless weak to lightning spells).

And despite this, I'll probably still buy it. I just really hope it's more like IX and XII and less like VIII and X.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Tritoch

Thankfully it had no emo kid protagonist, but they've been recycling the other archetypes for a long time. Does Vaan get moodier later on in XII? I don't remember him being anything but upbeat.

He's never really moody but he does bang on about his dead brother a lot about halfway through.

Haha, by the one with swirly eyes, I meant Rikku was the annoying upbeat one in FFX, I just couldn't remember her name off the top of my head.

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

Originally Posted by That interview up there

The monsters that the militia own are designed with over-technology, thus are a fusion of beast and machinery

Originally Posted by Jagged

I don't remember Shinra, or Gabladia(sp?) fighting with monsters. Sure Hojo created some things here and there, but they were rare and never part of the company main force, and Gabladia just used machines much like FFVI's Empire.

So what about all those robots in the Shinra tower? And how about that stupid prison level in FFVIII where all the monsters were robots? In FFVII you actually have very few fights against Shinra directly on the vast majority of them are robots. Likewise, you spend the entire first half of FFVIII fighting enemy robots. A big evil corporation with robots for troops is a cliche, that's all I'm saying.

If you read that Edge article, on the sixth page it describes the battle system as being a return to that used in FFX and I don't remember the combat system in FFX being anything other than completely generic. Yes, the idea of having a set time to perform the moves is a newish one (Essentially it's like how in FFT different moves take a different amount of time to activate) but this is still at it's heart a turn-based combat system. You pick your moves, you press go and they do them.

I think for me, the battle system will succeed or fail based on how clever you have to be with the time planning to win the fights. There's nothing wrong with simple turn based combat in rpgs, after all, SMT:Nocturne is on the face of it a simple turn based game but it's also a game that doesn't allow you to just hit the "Attack" command forever to win the fights, whereas previous FF games have been pretty guilty of that.

From reading those articles, there's a possibility that there'll be scope for quite a lot of tactical thought in this game, working out how to synch everyone's various attacks together into combos but I guess we won't know until it comes out whether the potential has been realised or not. I suspect, based on previous experience of FF games that the vast majority of fights will be a case of just hitting attack over and over and there'll be a few optional bosses that require a bit more thought but even then, FF optional bosses normally require you to unlock all the best powers and grind forever to have a high enough attack power to wear down their 4 million hp, rather than requiring any particular cunning on the part of the player.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Timberwolf8889

Yeah, but that's just what bugged me about it. Any game that I can get up, make a sandwich and still win a battle is not a good battle system to me. I want to actually be DOING something when I play a game even if it IS just pressing the same button over and over. Navigating a menu and hitting a button is better than programming a game to play itself.

That and it felt so much like an MMORPG: bland environments, drab characters, dull story. Really didn't click with me. Why are menus so horrible nowadays?

Really? I suppose pressing buttons gives you some pretense of interactivity but personally, I just find it dull. The title "RPG" is a complete misnomer when it comes to much of the Japanese market anyway, especially the Final Fantasy games. A roleplaying game in my opinion should give you a choice as to how your character acts and approaches situations. In FF games you're told what the problem is, told how you're going to deal with it and often, there's very little choice in how your character develops either. It's a roleplay game only in the sense that you're playing a role, one prescribed to you by the designers but if you're using that definition then any game with a character in it is a roleplaying game which is pretty much every game except God-sims.

I see jrpgs as story books more than anything. You follow the path through they tell you and there are rarely any actual decisions to be made and it's the battle system that keeps your interest during the quiet bits of the story. I personally get more entertainment from crafting an awesome set of gambits which mean that I can just walk from encounter to encounter without having to press any buttons to win the fights than I do from a game where random monsters constantly jump out at you and you pick the same commands over and over to beat them.

Essentially I'm saying I liked FFXII's system as it meant I could play the game and do something else at the same time, there was very little need to pay any attention between plot events. FFX was equally dull between story bits but you had to pay attention a lot more, constantly pressing the X button to choose the same old commands over and over. I know that not everyone will agree with me that jrpgs are best enjoyed at the same time as doing other things but that's how I tend to play them. That's why I rarely have an opinion on the music as I play with the sound turned off so it doesn't clash with either the tv show I'm watching or the game I'm playing on the pc at the time.

And I prefered the more down to Earth settings to the outlandish cartoony stuff you get in a lot of jrpgs but again, that's just personal preference.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Do you get to actually go into the menu during the demo? From what you're saying about positioning being relevant in battles, I would guess that there'll be some form of formation option available, either something meaty like Last Remnant where different formations have different bonuses and weaknesses or something simpler like the old front/back row mechanic they've pretty much always had. Either that or perhaps a command that makes them move around to where you want, I'd be amazed if they allow free movement of any of the characters.

How ya doing, buddy?

December 18, 2009 (Rest of the World, torrent)

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

Haha, true that. I was playing Halo over the weekend and overheard some guy going on about how his mate is the best hacker in the world and he'd been playing Halo ODST all day as a result. I imagine it was actually a review copy (Or he was flat out lying) but you know how kids like to big up their stories. Either way I reported him for System Modding...

I was speaking idiomatically.

A bunch of annoying sounding American teenagers in an epic battle against a load of posh British guys, how very original. One of the reasons I hate FFXII's voice work slightly less than most of the others is that only a couple of the characters are whiny Americans, whereas the whole party seem to be voiced by rejects from Nickelodeon in this trailer. I really hope there's a Jap voices with subtitles option in this.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I think the current benchmark for crappy Square choices of voice actor is Rush's inncessant "Let's kick some A" throughout Last Remnant. At least though you could put a different leader in charge of the union and he'd shut the fuck up and there's a broad range of different voice types in the game rather than just Mouseketeers. Vaan and Penelo are pretty fucking annoying in XII but Balthier and Fran are hilarious, half the cast are British and there's relatively little actual voice acting, plus I mainly played through the game with the sound off anyway. FFX is painful as every time Tidus or Wakka speak it makes you want to smash their faces in, until that is you recruit that bint with the swirly eyes whose voice is so bad it makes the two homos sound relatively pleasant by contrast.

The problem of course is that being British, I find it harder to identify with American voices and having teenage American characters throw reams of high pitched, oddly pronounced speech at me is a real turn off in terms of giving a fuck what happens to the characters which tends to ruin a story. I think I would have enjoyed FFX far, far more if there had been no voice acting in it at all.

Japanese voices would be preferable to me because I can't understand what they're saying so dodgy pronounciation won't grate. The accent itself is less annoying than weird emphasis on certain words.

FELIPE NO

Actually I wouldn't mind too much if there was an option to cut out voice acting altogether and just have subtitles. I'll probably play most of the game with the sound off anyway to be honest as I tend to play games in the same room as my girlfriend is watching tv and I only bother getting out the headphones for games where the audio is essential, i.e. not rpgs.

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Originally Posted by a lurker

yeah, for real Shin. Who here didn't have a moment of embarrassment when someone normal walked in on us right when Sora embraced Riku, or when Tidus was laughing unconvincingly? I think it would be less embarrassing if I was caught watching He-Man episodes.

The first time I played FFVIII, one of my housemates walked in right in the stupid space bit where you have to catch Rinoa, watched for about a minute then slowly shook his head and walked out of my room again without saying a word.

Jam it back in, in the dark.