I’m about 18 hours into Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360, and I’m convinced I’ll never be allowed to explore a free city, enter a shop, stay at an inn, or fly an airship around. I did get to ride a mecha for about two minutes before reaching a pre-determined finish line. The game is on rails. You don’t so much explore as you go down narrow corridors with few, if any nooks and crannies. Treasures are so obviously hidden you don’t even have to look for them. Their treasure chests themselves fucking float and bob in the air, as if to say, “Hey there, I’m a treasure chest.” There hasn’t been a single mini-game yet, except for the mecha thing, which sucked, and the only chocobo so far is the one living in the black dude’s fro. One of the girls in the game has to be about fourteen to fifteen, and she’s completely over-sexualized in a Japanese anime pedo kind of way. The only shops are in the menu at save points, so you don’t walk up to clerks. The items offered at the shops only appear after you’ve already found the item in a treasure chest or off a monster. So why bother trying to buy one? They’re overpriced anyway. I’ve obtained the maximum about of gil I can at this point in the game, as it doesn’t drop off enemies, and you only find it in chests. Still, I can’t afford anything, as it’s always priced higher. I can’t fast scroll through cutscenes without skipping the entire cutscene. There’s one five minute cutscene for every ten minutes of play it seems. I have to sit and watch a girlish-boy called, “Hope,” whine about his dead mother and how he’s going to get his revenge on, “Snow,” who isn’t guilty in the slightest, every half-hour on average. I can’t level up my characters: ever. Instead I have to level up their “crystals,” giving them new stats and abilities. Only the crystals only expand so far until you reach a point in the game. So your crystal can be maxed out, and you’ll have points left over to spend. So you can never over-power your characters and mow through repetitive fight scenes with minor monster characters. Weapons have to be levelled up as well, but this uses vedor junk items, and you have a limited supply. So you never know what weapon you should chose to level, as a new one could be right around the corner. You could be maxing out a weaker weapon only to find there’s a stronger weapon out there that should have received that treatment instead. There is no armour: only accessories. Your teams is constantly being split-up by the plot, and you can’t pick and chose who you want on your team at any given moment. So my only tank: Snow, is up on an airship somewhere having constant flash-backs while I’m stuck paired up with the fucking kids, who are only good for status effect spells and healing.
I died about ten times fighting Odin, because I didn’t switch between pre-set, pre-determined battle attack modes quick enough, or often enough for the game’s liking. It’s been the only challenge so far, and it pissed me right the fuck off. I was trying to see if the cutscene beforehand gave me a clue about how to win Odin’s favour, since I was suppose to fill up his “Gestalt” bar, whatever the fuck that was. The scene mentioned protecting Hope, so I tried that. Didn’t work. I of course was supposed to use double Ravager, and only healing when needed, like every other fight so far.
Having Odin is completely useless too, as you only really need him for the boss battles. Only, I was in a boss battle, and I didn’t have enough TP points, because I was using them on Libra. That meant I couldn’t use Odin, and hence the fight lasted an annoyingly long time.
There’s more complaints, to be sure, but I’m tired now.
No comments:
Post a Comment