[POLL] IS FINAL FANTASY 13 TRILOGY THAT BAD?

Poll

Is the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy that bad? - Results

Yes
11
28%
No
15
39%
Never played them so I don't care
12
31%

Posts

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I've noticed that the 13 trilogy seems to be very split, some people love it, some hate it. What's your all opinions on it?

I think the XIII trilogy gets a bad rap because of SE pushing Lightning as the face of Final Fantasy for half a decade; a character that many fans found a lot less interesting than SE was convinced that she was.

The games themselves are far from bad, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with XIII-2 especially. But I don't imagine too many people rank the games at the top of their FF lists.
I got to rewatch parts of Deep Space 9 while powering through FF13 so it wasn't all bad. It has its usual season 1 rocky start (although Duet is fantastic) and Dukat is a fantastic villain. I think I only made it through seasons 1 and 2 before I beat the game, did some turtles per hour, and threw the whole thing out.

I tried paying attention during 13-2 but failed around Augustus Tower and Academia 400 where there's a bajillion encounters and watched... GI Joe? There was an actually neat lategame area and I recruited a behemoth that I used in my party for the entire game and then there was Time Cop Snow so it wasn't all bad.

Every time I play Lighting Returns my brain tells me "why aren't you playing Metal Gear Rising instead" and my body complies. I think I beat up Noel and was never able to come back to it.

That's my hot take for a subseries I haven't played for ages and have little to no interest in returning to. I should go back to LR but maybe I'll cheat to get the boring combat out of the way so I can experience the best content:
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I personally liked it.
Melkino
solos collectors on purpose
2021
I've only played Lightning Returns because it was cheap on sale and supposedly the PC ports of the other two were pretty janky. And it was the only FF game on steam I was remotely interested in trying out anyway...
Although its story was kinda nonsense, I had fun with the timing combat (after setting the camera to zoomed out because the default was too close) and recoloring the different outfits
it's not. it just has some flaws that don't justify all the free hate, besides at least xiii but potentially all three are pure fun turn based strategical combat.

now we got kingdom fantasy xv
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Lightning Returns is in my top 5 favorite games. FF13 was a necessary meh note to give us Hope. I beat 13-2 while on drugs for cluster headaches, leading me to cry in pain and frustration at my head and the ending. 13-2 is a much better game than 13, you just have to realize that the story isn't trying to be serious in the least.

Minor spoiler, in that it's a major story spoiler but that the game is so goofy that the story isn't really important at all:

one of the main plot points is that vanille and fang are gonna die. this is happening because a bunch of flan are appearing in the jungle and marching to the base of cocoon and eating them in their crystal form. this is happening because there is a wormhole that leads to the jungle that is dumping out flan. this is happening because a giant dragon ate the other end of the wormhole and is now insatiable because everything it tries to eat is getting dropped in a jungle hundreds of miles away.

even more unfortunately, snow (with new slicked-up hair) is stuck punching a giant flan formed from all those flan stuck together from the hungry dragon, all while this butt emo-rock plays



real spoiler as to why i love 13-2 (actual spoiler this time):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyu8dMehdFg

^ one of my favorite moments in video games because it's so FUCKING BIZARRE and as poorly acted as everything else. i love it. i'd like to add that you must actually select the choice to yell at that character from a QTE menu in order to progress the story

edit: also i don't know why lightning was pushed so hard when vanille is the clear main character of the trilogy. verything that happens in the trilogy is because of her laundry list of bad ideas and bandaid fixes ;V
author=Craze
real spoiler as to why i love 13-2 (actual spoiler this time):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyu8dMehdFg

^ one of my favorite moments in video games because it's so FUCKING BIZARRE and as poorly acted as everything else. i love it. i'd like to add that you must actually select the choice to yell at that character from a QTE menu in order to progress the story


I forgot about this scene, it's the fucking best that can be summed up with "TIME TRAVEL" while throwing confetti in the air
I personally hated all but the third. Well, I say hated. 1 was decentish but boring. 2 was hell on earth (and that's despite liking the character and battles - the story was beyond stupid and fragmented and I just did not like it at all.) 3 was decent, but I wasn't very good at it. I appreciated it a lot more than the other two though. Design was on fucking point!

While I don't really -hate- them, I never liked them as much as the rest of the games in the series. Yes, this includes 10 which I actively have a hate/hate relationship with (at least it gave us 10-2).

That said, I can appreciate their existence since they helped Square grow a bit more, I just wish we had a good game to see that they have grown. (Well, at least 14 is pretty fun I guess. I need to play 15 before I can really judge it. One day...)
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
I thought that FF13 had a really cool combat engine, and I liked that status condition spells could deal damage, and not just be about the application of the status. Saying that, FF13's gameplay structure consists solely of combat. There's no minigames, or other distractions to the story to be had there. One can say the same about FF12, though, FF12 absolutely had more of a MMO feel to it's gameplay structure. There's also CodeBreaker cheat codes (or whatever device one prefers) for FF12 to alleviate the grind, but let's not dig too deep there.

As for the others in the series, all I can say is that I was never inclined to pick up 13-2 or 13-3 after experiencing 13-1.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Marrend
As for the others in the series, all I can say is that I was never inclined to pick up 13-2 or 13-3 after experiencing 13-1.

this is fair, but i'd say that they're all very different games.

13 is a navel-gazing field marshal sim. 13-2 is

So you think you can ride this chocobo?
Got Chocobucks? You better put them on this chocobo!
Saddle up, if you think you can ride in this rodeo
Are we in hell? I don’t know… to the dirt, let’s roll!
You’re loco if you think you’re gonna hide this chocobo
Everybody’s gonna wanna ride your chocobo
It’s choco-loco style in a choco-rodeo
Gonna ride him straight through hell in this chocobo rodeo!


and LR is an open-world mystery game with an excellent ATB-based brawling battle system.
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
FFXIII was the worst FF game ever made, until XV came out. Just like XII was the worst ever, until XIII came out. Just like X was the worst ever, until XII came out. Just like IX was the worst ever, until X came out, and so on.

It's always cool and edgy to hate on whatever the latest FF is, until a new one comes out and that becomes the new meme. When XVI comes out, you can guarantee kids on the internet will be whimpering about how they don't make great games like XV anymore, just like they've started to say about XIII.

The XIII trilogy games are all pretty different from each other. They all have good and bad points, and they differ by entry.
Like everything in life, FF peaked when I was an impressionable young teenager. So FFVI is the best.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I actually think FF13 is the best game in the Final Fantasy series in terms of story, and has probably the second-best combat after FF10, just in terms of making your choice of skills and targets actually interesting and giving you lots of different well-balanced options. (It actually does most of that better than FF10, but FF10 wins because you control three characters instead of one, and can take your time to think.) Some of the backstory is told through datalog entries instead of cut scenes, and the story is told very nonlinearly, so a lot of people think it makes no sense or is poorly presented, but personally I was completely enraptured by it. The dungeons suck though, and there's basically no element at all of planning and building your party, which is lame and makes it feel less like an RPG. It does have a crafting system but it doesn't really offer any choices, it's just a test of whether you can figure out how it works or not to power your weapons up. It's pretty poorly explained and I've heard a lot of people say they just gave up on the crafting entirely. Obviously the game's also really linear, but you knew that already. I'm not sure it's more linear than FF10 though. Maybe a little, since it has no towns. The main thing that makes it feel that way is actually the camera in dungeons, which automatically shifts as you walk, to always point in the direction you need to go. This means that unless you see a treasure chest to the side or you are trying to avoid an enemy encounter, you just hold up on the joystick for the entire game. The dungeons aren't actually any more linear than those in most other FF games, but the camera definitely makes them feel that way, and it totally kills the sense of exploration.

FF13-2 is like they took the basic elements of the combat from FF13 but forgot to balance any of them. So instead of every single battle in the game being a challenge, you fight three challenging battles and then gain enough EXP to kill every other enemy in the game in one hit. The story makes absolutely no goddamn sense - this isn't an opinion or anything, the fact that it makes no sense is literally a major plot point. Except they still don't explain any of it, or even pretend like there's any reason why things don't make sense, the entire game is just about collecting Plot Hole Crystals that are created every time something doesn't make sense (seriously). They removed FF13's confusing crafting system, and replaced it with a monster-catching system, which was a pretty big improvement gameplay-wise, but meant that the game only has two characters. Those two characters are both pretty boring and generic. I guess when you have to put up with them for the entire game, Square Enix felt like they couldn't risk them having any flaws, or any kind of character traits that not every player would be able to relate to. Some people prefer this to FF13's more diverse cast of five highly flawed, semi-annoying characters and Sazh. I didn't.

I haven't played the third game. They lost my trust with the second one, and I don't like games with action elements.
FFXIII is one of my favorite Final Fantasys. It just did so many things right. Removal of boring gameplay (towns) and focus on the interesting parts of an RPG (story and combat). It also has amazing music. The one thing that it's missing is good dungeon design, though. Dungeons are too simple and that one big area feels like a crappy open world game. Still, it was once of the last RPGs I actually played from start to finish without getting bored beforehand.

FFXIII-2 I just didn't like before of the monster catching aspect. FFXIII-3 I didn't even buy because I had games with time limits.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
rya, the time limit is extraordinarily generous. like, incredibly so. you would have to try pretty hard to not get the five main quests done.
Tau
RMN sex symbol
3293
I fucking hate these games, they're fucking horrible.
Dudesoft
always a dudesoft, never a soft dude.
6309
I never finished any game after FFX. I used to be hardcore fanboy. FFX-2 killed the series for me. Each game got progressively further from the Final Fantasy experience. FFXV is basically a Kingdom Hearts clone on steroids.
FF12 was really cool, but the corporate meddling ruined what could have been a magnificent romp in Ivalice.

I am somewhat enjoying the FFXV battle system, but it doesn't make me feel like FF. 9 was really my last favourite. FFX even was a bit of a chore.

FFXIII is a joke. It feels sooooo far removed from the series I can't even. The story may have been good? I got halfway through and stopped out of sheer boredom. I don't like playing an interactive cutscene. That's 90% of FXIII. Running through a tube and hitting a button to activate an automatic bad ass jump... is an interactive cutscene.

Anyway, the game looked cool, but damn did it suck. Even just as a game. The story was a mess if only from the bloody names. L'Cie, faLcie? I dunno. It was voice acted and nothing anyone said made sense.
It's like if in Joss Whedon's Firefly; if the Mandarin in the language was dialed up twenty percent. What the hell are they saying? Uh--uh--uh-- fantasy immersion! uh-uh-uh- take my money!
No. I love XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. XIII was only unpleasant for me because I strongly dislike most of the characters in the cast.

The first game didn't have enough silliness to make it fun, or something. It felt a bit drab. The other two are entertaining as well as stupid, although I genuinely like parts of the story, setting, and a handful of characters.

XIII-2 & LR have great soundtracks (probably including whatever music carries over from the original game).

I didn't personally take to Lightning (or Vanille). I much prefer the cheesy optimism of Serah and Noel. Fang is cool, and Caius is an acceptable tragic villain. Snow is also fun to hate. He is just so obnoxious.

They're not my favourite games in the overall series, but they are two of my favourite games.

I thought XV was truly unpleasant, though.
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