Final Fantasy XIII for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

Final Fantasy XIII felt like an attempt to remake FFX in terms of basic storyline and game play. However, it fails to even come close to fulfilling the legacy of this or other previous Final Fantasy titles.

Story: 1
You will spend the first several hours of the game at a complete loss as to where the story is going. In fact the story won't make much sense at all, unless you spend the time to read the majority of the entries in your glossary, as very little of its contents are actually woven into the narrative of the story. The revelations of the storyline that should be intriguing are painfully predictable.

Character: 2
The characters feel as though they stepped straight out of a soap opera: overly dramatic and emotional to the point where its nearly sickening. Always at each other's throats, you'll hear them reiterate the same speech again and again at each cut scene. Any development seems to be forced and fake, changing the character's personality without apparent reason.

Game Play: 1
The game plays itself, with little interaction from you. It features the "auto-attack" function which picks the best method of defeating the selected foe. While you can choose your own attacks, you'll waste time that could lead to your death. Instead, the game play tries to focus on switching the job classes of your characters to keep your attention. You will probably only use this function to bring out a healer or in a boss battle. The weapons and accessories have a leveling system, using items to give them experience and gain levels. This can be time consuming and expensive.

Sound: 6
The music is decent, and there are a few good melodies, but nothing comparable to past titles. The voice acting was decent for a JRPG, but the spoken lines are saturated with forced drama to the point they are laughable. This dampens the effect of the voice acting.

Graphics: 10
This is where the game truly shines. Its scenes are breathtaking and has some of the highest quality graphics to date.

2000 characters is far too few, here is the very short version.
The game looks and sounds amazing. It's like a cg movie.
The story is interesting and the characters are probably some of the most likable (as a whole) in a long time.
The gameplay starts off interesting. It's fast paced, real-time managed with action gauges. Characters have roles, which makes it feel a bit like an MMO (not what I want in my console rpg), but at first is very manageable. Teams start designated, but after 15 or so hours (I might have left my game on for a bit) you'll be able to use whoever you would like. Roles are managed by paradigms, prechosen role groups designated outside of combat. Unfortunately, it gets to the point where every combat is decided by your ability to have the right party members at the right time. Dying isn't too big of a deal with the "retry" option, which will put you at the point right before you died. A lot of the battles had me dying to something obnoxious when encountering a new enemy, retrying, changing paradigms and finishing the battle with a good rating. They also seem to love elemental/physical resistance mixups. Making it incredibly difficult to stick with a group you like or even a well-rounded paradigm set. Eventually it gets to the point where every combat is obnoxious elemental matchups, needed debuffers instead of buffing characters, needing tanks that can switch to specific elemental damage, etc. You only control the lead character, the rest are cpu controlled (based on role) and often take actions that aren't really the best choices. They won't make obvious mistakes like casting fire spells on fire immune monsters, but failing to 'tank' properly is a normal occurrence.
In the end, it just felt like work. This is the first FF game that I just got tired of playing. I don't want my relaxation time to feel like a second job. I love difficult rpgs (7th saga, wizardry series). This just felt like even when given a choice, there wasn't one.

First off, I did beat the game, put in a total of 80+ hours and even 5-starred about 1/3 of the missions before I just quit. The constant grinding got to me, and worse, it felt like constant grinding.

Okay, the first thing Square Enix did wrong with this game is commit one of the ultimate sins in storytelling. Very rarely can you toss a reader/gamer into a story mid-story and in mid-action and NOT lose interest. Check out any book on how-to-write or storytelling, and you'll see this listed as one of the worst mistakes a storyteller can make. It's often a fatal flaw. Not saying it can't be done, just that it's rarely done well, and SE doesn't do it well.

I didn't have so much a complaint about the paradigms or even the linear parts of the story, tho I must admit, one of the things I love best about jrpgs and rpgs in general is being able to explore outside the main storyline. Honestly tho, the paradigms to me, if you set them up right, felt a lot like turn-based to me, you still basically were deciding what each and every character did.

The one thing I think really ruined the combat system is how unforgiving it was to anyone that didn't toe the time limit. I tend to be methodical and slow in fighting, I get the job done, but I'm not fast about getting it done. More than once I had doom cast on me during a boss fight as a result. As a result, I grew frustrated because in the end, it wasn't tactics that ruled the day, but speed that became the utmost important. It was during the missions later that I realized, your tactics aren't graded at all, just your speed. The faster you kill something, the more likely you are to 5-star, period.

Still, I enjoyed the game, but I wish the developers had concentrated more on gameplay rather than CGI. As a graphic artist, I love CGI, but I don't play video games for CGI, I play them for good gameplay and characters I care about. And maybe that's why jrpgs are slowly dying, not for lack of fans, but lack of good storytelling.

It's simple really - Visuals are top notch and by far the standard now
- Voice overs are good but what they say is stupid
- Characters are whiny babies
- Game play is horrific, No open world, no open movement during battles, all you need to know is how to push X.
- The whole game is linear, even when leveling up characters.

Let me begin this like everybody else has by saying that I've been playing FF since I was in elementary school in the early 90's. For my birthday in 3rd grade I went and got FF3 (VI), if that's any indication. I grew up with Square games as a part of my childhood, and hold them very dear to me. So naturally, I was beyond excited when FFXIII arrived and expected an epic journey that transcended space and time and introduced you to a cast of characters that you'll remember forever. This game. Is beyond. Disappointing.

Characters/Story: Hands down the worst I have ever encountered. And yes, I managed to grasp the pointless, theme-less story and understand it thoroughly, it was just bad. The characters are probably what ultimately ruined the game for me, and made me unable to see past its inherent faults. Hope and Snow are by far the worst. So freaking pointlessly dramatic, I could hardly stand it. "Your hero is here..." and all of that. "Soap Opera" is a massive understatement here. They throw you into this dramatic love story without any reason to care about any of the characters and their struggles at all. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IN FRONT OF OTHERS; YOU WILL BE EMBARRASSED AND MORTIFIED BEYOND WORDS. So, so, so corny. I enjoy drama. FFX had drama and love and did it (most often) with TACT and a sense of purpose and meaning. None of that epic Square story-telling sensibility here whatsoever.

The music is awful and chaotic and is relatively melody-less. It sounds like it was written by an amateur. Similar to the way the script was written by amateurs. You will not be downloading the soundtrack and have fond memories of the OST like virtually every other Square game. The battle music is just... so. so. bad. Embarrassing.

Gameplay is an afterthought when you realize none of the characters even approach likeable and the story is meaningless. Battles are nothing but auto-battle button mashing.

I don't await the next FF with excitement. It's all a sequel or MMO. Awful.

Final Fantasy in high definition is amazing, first and foremost.

Games Design: It's rather well done; the highlights are the great atmospheres. They did a fantastic gob on designing the environments, but FF13 does hit some big issues in game design. That being the games linearity, I know.. We heard about this subject to death, but it’s not game breakingly bad either. You do lose a sense of replayability because you are “forced” to go on with the story, while you might have grown up doing some side-exploration like in Final Fantasy 10 (which is my favorite). FF13 is great as what it is, but a little lacking for hardcore fans, but more than fine for the majority (casual gamers).

Voice acting: Good for the most part. Only real complaint about this is that well, you feel like some of the dialog is very corny and seems a tad unrealistic (melodramatic). But that’s to be expected from a JRPG! They do an excellent job at telling you a story.

Location(s): The game takes place on Cocoon, which is threatened by Pulse’ invasion. Pulse is a land over Cocoon, filled with giant monsters. Pulse is also where your exploration will finally happen later on the game, and it’s very large.

Battle(s): The battles are well thought out, and enjoyable. You fight as one person in your party, but you also sub-manage the others in their jobs. Let it be healing or full on attack! Using the summons is awesome, though very little variety. One thing you should know, this game is hard. Some bosses are super tough!

Leveling: There is one huge flaw for big FF fans, who train for hours on end like myself. You will reach a cap, and the game bottlenecks you for a long time. For the majority it's hard to reach these caps. The traditional leveling system is gone, what you have is a spin to FF10’s (sphere grid). You can choose what path you want to take, while not so much in the beginning as it tries to introduce you to the system.

RATING: 9.1 (Story is a little flat; Combat and visuals are amazing)

expected alot from a ff game on ps3. totally dissapointed. been playing final fantasy games since they started and i can't believe how bad they made this one. graphics are good but game is too linear. that paradigram or whatever mode sucks. i thought they could have done an updated gambit system like 12. story is stupid, characters are lame, side missions are few. what happened to getting in an airship and flying around the world yourself (like in ff 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) and exploring a world map. maybe they should take less time on graphics and more on gameplay, character roles, and a world map.....like the old days but with better graphics.

I'll preface this by saying the only other FF game I have played extensively was 12, and I LOVED 12. It is seriously my all time favorite game hands down.

Warning there are probably many spoilers to come.

So 13 came as a big disappointment to me because the combat system is incredibly clunky feeling to me. It's the worst possible hybrid between turn-based and real time that you can get. The way the Action bar can't charge anymore if it "tops off" makes playing this game manually very difficult, unless you want to play on slow combat mode, which is SLOW. So most of the game is just selecting a Paradigm (think NPC AI setup) and just hitting Auto-battle button over and over again. The only "strategy" in this game is setting up Paradigms (limited role-based AI) because you can't control your other 2 characters, which also leaves for interesting times when the AI is completely stupid.

Also, you can't manually move your characters around, so be prepared to be eaten alive by any and all AOE. But the baddies you fight know how to avoid AOE and will spread out all the time--sigh.

Also, you lose the game if the character you are playing dies--no matter if the others are alive. Really. Annoying.

There are a lot more reasons why I hate the combat system, but this is getting long enough. Otherwise the game is OK but with a FF game I expected a lot more sandbox feel and exploration. The game is COMPLETELY linear for the first 2/3 of the story line, which is really boring.

You can beat the game in 20 hours, then spend 80+ hours farming Gil and experience to max out characters to beat the last few things in the game. Not really unexpected being a FF game, but also Gil is hard to farm even end game and it just gets tedious rather than fun. There's only like 2 options when trying to make gil. Not enough imo.

Overall, it was passing okay, but a big disappointment after 12.

And yes, the graphics are gorgeous, but to me game play is most important.

The Final Fantasy series has completely lost its way. Let's face it, later iterations of the games have never come close to approaching epically sweeping grandiosity of FFVII. Now five games further on into the twisted fantasyland of FF, we are faced with gorgeous graphics, but boring linear game play, and an overly tweaked battle system that makes this nothing more than a barely playable cartoon.

I didn't think it was possible for the series to go more astray than FFX when they tried to turn the game into an MMORPG (FAIL,) but I was wrong. Instead, they attempt to return the old formula with disastrous results. Cliche ridden characters that barely avoid racist connotations certainly don't help matters.

I can't imagine who is going to sit through hours and hours of this repetitious yawn-fest. I barely made it through three.

Final Fantasy is long dead.

Pros:
1. Graphics are nice.
2. The scenery is some what nice.
3. You can level up your weapons and accessories.
4. Save points are shops and upgrade shops as well.
5. You heal after every battle without using items.
6. If you die, you can retry fighting the boss either right before you reach a boss or enemies.
7. It is final fantasy.
8. It is challenging.
9. After using a summon, any dead characters revive.

Cons:
1. If the character that you are using dies it is game over.
2. You can not switch nor control your allies during battle. You can not change whom you are using to fight with during battle.
3. You do not get to choose whom you use to fight with until near or at chapter 11 (which is near the end of the game).
4. The limit breaks all the characters have are worse than one ordinary attack strike but cost 5 times more to use. Yes, the special that you get near the end of the game is terrible and it is not worth obtaining it.
5. A lot of the characters are not lovable, they are drowned in drama and they do not think straight and most of them look terrible.
6. The most maps are linear except for the map in chapter 11.
7. There are no safe towns, you are always on the run.
8. The game is pretty boring and seems like it is more of a soap opera than a final fantasy game.
9. There are a lot of items that have no purpose, I believe the items may have possibly have been used for something but due to space limits on the xbox, the game had to literally be cut in half for xboxs behalf, so the game is broken.
10. The bosses can get very hard and all enemies have a lot of hp and are strong.
11. You have to rely on using the stagger gauge for most (if not all) enemies because of how high of hp they have.
12. The only good items are phoenix downs and the shouds. Potions are worthless after chapter 5.
13. Not much items.

The HD graphics are AMAZING but the game play is nothing like the other Final Fantasy games. The battle system is superb but I would definatly not call this game an RPG. You don't have any of the other freedoms that you have on the majority of the FF series.

Overall:

Graphics = Amazing

Game Play = Completely Dissatisfying

The great thing about all final fantasies is that when you jump into any of them. Despite their differences, they have a sense of familiarity about them. Something comfortable. This has NONE of it. You have no freedom whatsoever. Whoever wrote the script to this game is either a highschool theatre student, a writer from disney, or should just be shot... The diaglogue is awful. I dreaded the battles due to the system. I dreaded the cutscenes due to the bad script. I dreaded the sluggish controls when running around. I hated the FF10 knockoff leveling system. If my main character dies... its game over... what!? I am a huge FF fanboy... but this game is awful. There is NO badass character... No Auron, or Sephiroth... nothing of the sort. After playing Mass Effect, i cant even say this game has good graphics... What the heck happened to my Final Fantasy?

Well I waited four years basically for a game that i almost mailed back to net-flix, yeah its good graphics, but thats all it is I would suggest renting this, dont accidentally put it in your dvd player though, ...even though your dvd player might get confused and actually play the $60 movie.

If this didn't have the Final Fantasy name attached to it, the average rating would probably be a 2.

Only thing I can say is this, if you've been a fan of the FF series and were disappointed with XII, you'll be really disappointed with XIII.

You literally walk down a hall or a room, attack random things, and progress the story line.

You have 2 inventory slots, control 1 of 3 members in your party, and really have no exploring at all.

Only reason I gave it a 5 instead of a 1 is the graphics are some of the best I've ever seen.

Ah, the downward spiral of the Final Fantasy franchise is like having front row seats to the sinking of the Titanic. Once the envy of the world and the basis for pretty much every JRPG (and most American RPGs pre-Baulder's Gate), Final Fantasy has hit some hard times.
In this iteration, right off the bat the game is so linear it might as well be a rail shooter. It never gets any better. Cut scenes galore, to the point that they outweigh game play for the first ten hours or so.
The game is always on rails, exploration is extremely limited, and the game still uses the same old turn based combat, though it is timer based rather than truly turn based, that involves going into a completely different interface to fight.

Final Fantasy 13 feels extremely dated. Tired Gameplay, Outdated menus, in a very beautiful but completely linear package. It isn't a game, it is a movie you move the characters around in with barely any input, defeating the entire concept of "roleplay".

This game looked awesome at first, but I kept finding myself skipping the cut scenes, and then just mashing X to battle. Then I found myself not playing it at all... Sure it's a 50 hour game, but I couldn't even get through 10...

I am a huge final fantasy fan and had a hard time waiting for FFXIII to come out. However, after receiving and playing the newest installment of the FF series, I was left with disappointment and moderately bored.

First of all, they took away any chance of free roaming by rarely allowing your character to interact with other people, i.e. talking. Second of all, during battle you only control one person directly and the rest of the crew through "paradigms" which assign different tasks to each other non-leading member. Third, you have to level up your weapons by consuming certain items either bought, found as booty or treasure, which makes it difficult to compare new weapons with existing ones. Basically, the game consists of a semi-cheesy story line via cut scenes with patches of linear enemy filled paths in between the cut scenes.

I did not finish the game as I was too bored with it. I can only be certain that about the first 12 hours of game play are not entertaining to me.

This game has really put a sour taste in my mouth when expecting the next FF. The FF series has been going down hill for sometime in my opinion, but I made a point to finish the game before I gave it a review. I finally finished the game and I will say it's by far the worst main stream FF ever made, even worse then FF8.

Where to begin with this junk of a game, I will start with the obvious, the linear gameplay. The game is insanely linear with very little free roaming (chapter 11), there is more free roaming in the original pac-man than this game. This made the game extremely boring and uninteresting, I actually think I fell asleep playing because there was no variety in how to play. Then, there is the camera which feels like it is controlled by a drunk troll. When I try to move it one way, then stop, it doesn't stop, but gradually slows down.

As for the battle system, what a joke. the "paradigm" shift is the biggest waste of time and the "new" name classes make me scratch my head. why would you name a magic user a "ravager" or a tank a "sentinel?" Was their someone sitting around saying "let's make up new names for simple classes?" The sentinel class is absolutely a waste, I only used this class once because it was completely useless when you need to damage a simple trash mob by staggering him and only have one dps'r. Then there is the "eidolons" and all I am going to say about them is, their freaking TRANSFORMERS!!! I was waiting for optimus prime to pop his head in the game at some point. Shiva is a stupid motorcycle, are you kidding me?

Now the leveling up system which is just like the game itself, very linear. You can only level up to certain points during the game before you have to move forward in the game to unlock more sections to level up. Plus, you can't even finish leveling up your characters until after you beat the game...completely stupid.

Graphics are great, story is mediocre. Game was a giant let down...again from square.

before i post this review let me just say that i am an rpg nut, they are imo the most satisfying type of game out there i havent met one i didnt like... until now. this latest installment of final fantasy was one of my more anticipated games and i put it in my que as soon as i joined gamefly, when i got it i immediately opened it and started playing. i was amazed, at first anyway, the graphics being displayed across my 55" high def television were breathtaking, i said to myself i am in for one heck of an experience and decided i would make it an all night affair. it didnt even make the honeymoon before i was struggling to keep playing out of sheer boredom. the story progressed very slowly but i always try to finish every game i start because i love seeing what happens next. however with this game i just couldnt do it. i trudged on for about three more hours, a total of 5 hours that i will never get back.at that point i said enoughs enough and ejected the disc from my ps3 put it in the envelope and walked down to the mailbox (at 2:30am) and put it in shut the door and raised the flag, i was never happier to see a game go away. if you value your time and love gaming please do yourself a favor and do not rent this one.

Ok let's list the obvious first. Visually this game is AMAZING there is no issue there. BUT, as was listed by previous reviews the best part of the Final Fantasy series (in my opinion) is exploreing an open world and doing side quests which is highly lacking in this game. Also for me the characters are hard to get attached to, the game doesn't do a great job of building a connection from the characters of the game to the gamer. This in turn takes something away from the story itself because if you're not into the characters it makes it hard to care about the trials they are going through and in my opinion there hasn't been a great FF game since FFX that did everything I'm complaining about in FFXIII. In short I think this game pulled an "Avatar" spent too much time worrying how the game looked and not enough focus on the story.

Seriously? I mean a 7.3 rating isn't great by any means, but this game deserves much worse than that. Let's get the good parts out of the way. The graphics, art, characters, and scenery look fantastic. You can tell they put a whole lot of work into making this game look good, and if you play it on HD its a feast for the eyes. AND.....that's all. The characters are obnoxious, the story is too confusing to be enjoyed, and the game is so darn linear for about 90% of the game. I list those things in particular because it used to be the things that make Final Fantasy games fun. The battle system is odd as well. While I did have some fun deciding what my team tactics would be for really tough opponents, most of the time you set one formation and do the auto-attack button until the fight is over (snore). My personal favorite part of FF games is getting the best weapons, and nothing is more annoying in this game than the weapon modification system. I never fully understood how it worked and never got close to maxing out my gear. I could have put another 20 to 30 hours into the game to get there, but I was bored of it long before then. Even if you adore final fantasy, there is no reason to every play this pitiful excuse of a Squaresoft game.

This game was awful. I have to admit i've never played a final fantasy game before, and thank God I haven't. The game looked great graphics wise, but good gosh was the gameplay pathetic and the characters were so generic. This title (and possibly entire series for that matter) is flat out garbage. This is probably one of the greatest selling games ever in Japan because it involves one of the following:

a: horribly generic anime

b: lame jumping robots with guns

The Final Fantasy series is extremely well-known and is at the top of the JRPG charts and probably just the RPG charts too. Each Final Fantasy game is different in it's own way, some are for certain people while other ones are for other people. Each one pretty much tries a different gameplay element, some for good, some for worse.

+ Stays true to the character and environment development.
+ Gripping and strong storyline/plot, like always.
+ Beautiful scenery, graphics, textures, effects and cut-scenes.
+ Stunning main-character designs.
+ Top-notch quality soundtrack.
+ Entertaining gameplay.
+ Lots of content with hours of gameplay.

+/- Combat is a bit more fast-paced than other Final Fantasy games.
+/- Introduces 'Paradigm Systems' in Combat which may or may not be liked.
+/- Save-Points are extremely common and plentiful, questioning the reason the game gives you checkpoints for retries also.

- Character personalities/voices are both repetitive and annoying.
- Extremely linear game design doesn't capture the "explore factor" at all.
- May have to die a couple times on 'boss fights' to understand how to live.
- Shops are integrated with Save-Points, eliminating the use of towns and buildings.

Overall Rating: 8/10