So I started playing FF13....

noodler

Just got to Barthelius.


Must say I am very disappointed - up until now the game's entire plus point was the battle system and how you didn't need to grind but I have lost twice and then went online to check out various strategies and they just have me holding for dear life without any hope of attack (cure keeps getting interupted by being thrown up in the air).

Real shame, up until now I can say that the boss fights were usually doable with the right class option.

Raze_them_all

well my calm replay through this has just been put on the back burner with the release of deus ex, mortal kombat collection, gears 3, battlefield 3,saints row 3, madden 12 all upcoming

Retr0gamer

noodler wrote: »

Just got to Barthelius.


Must say I am very disappointed - up until now the game's entire plus point was the battle system and how you didn't need to grind but I have lost twice and then went online to check out various strategies and they just have me holding for dear life without any hope of attack (cure keeps getting interupted by being thrown up in the air).

Real shame, up until now I can say that the boss fights were usually doable with the right class option.

You definitely shouldn't need to grind at all. Sure until you get to Pulse there's a level cap in place anyway so by the time you reach the boss you should have hit the cap. Barthelius is a big jump in difficulty but he just takes a bit of tactics. Make sure you have a team and paradigms what can change from pure defence and healing to all out attack and also remember that buffs are extremely important by this stage in the game. You should be buffing all your characters to the max before you go on the defence and replacing any buffs that get lost as soon as possible.

noodler

Retr0gamer wrote: »

You definitely shouldn't need to grind at all. Sure until you get to Pulse there's a level cap in place anyway so by the time you reach the boss you should have hit the cap. Barthelius is a big jump in difficulty but he just takes a bit of tactics. Make sure you have a team and paradigms what can change from pure defence and healing to all out attack and also remember that buffs are extremely important by this stage in the game. You should be buffing all your characters to the max before you go on the defence and replacing any buffs that get lost as soon as possible.

Its nothing to do with my strategy I am afraid - first time I got rid of his other parts and had him on his own and he wiped me out in one shot with Destructo (and I had my synergist buff).


EDIT:

Although two things:

1) I read when he is charging destructo you should attack and not buff as attacking him during this phase will reduce the attack damage by 50%.

2) I have never, ever sold an item in FF13. I have been using the credit chips, incentive chips to upgrade weapons and armour with a crappy 1 EXP per chip. And there was me wondering why I never had any money other than the cash I had saved.

Anyway, I have gone back to the chamber before Bart to fight troops I had skipped and am getting loads of chips I can sell to buy parts and upgrade my weapons (never seems to be any decent stuff to buy outright).

Will try him again later tonight.

Retr0gamer

Just before he does destructo make sure you are properly buffed up and make sure you have a team with a sentinel in it, two if you want to be sure, otherwise you will be killed outright. With a sentinel you should have no problem surviving. You really shouldn't be skipping any fights either or you will end up underlevelled. You should be pretty much at the level cap everytime you open up a new area in the crystarium or whatever it's called.

noodler

I never thought about a second sentinel - didn't know they bonus would be cumulative.

Retr0gamer

Well the other good thing about a second one is if the other non sentinel dies you've only one person to revive.

noodler

Onto Pulse now - god that Ark section was torture.

The story is absolutely gash - there is no way FF7 was translated worse than this.

Retr0gamer

noodler wrote: »

The story is absolutely gash - there is no way FF7 was translated worse than this.

FFXIII is a fantastic localisation. It's the original material that's gash. The kind of muck. FF7 is a dreadful localisation and much worse, make no mistake. 'This guy are sick'

Story isn't going to get much better I'm afraid.

noodler

Retr0gamer wrote: »

FFXIII is a fantastic localisation. It's the original material that's gash. The kind of muck. FF7 is a dreadful localisation and much worse, make no mistake. 'This guy are sick'

Story isn't going to get much better I'm afraid.

I find it very hard to believe that the Japanese dialogue had so many inappropriate reactions from characters, or so many people repeating points in a surprised tone that had already been raised earlier in the conversation.

Just because the words are all pronounced and spelled correctly does not make it a fantastic localisation. I dare say alot has been lost between the Japanese and English versions.

Also, Square have to learn to stop with the 90s American cathphrases and having characters making stupid arm movements before they make big awe-inspiring points (Snow).

Tidus was the major character in FFX with these kinds of issues but he has about 100x the depth of any of these soulless idiots.

EDIT: Retro, you once said a certain scene in MGS4 would embarass you if someone walked in....just about every 2nd scene in the game is like that. Amazing visuals, a decent battlesystem and good music (surprisingly perhaps) do not make a great game. The linearity is a nightmare. The way people say you don't have to grind but then say you shouldn't skip enemies unless you want to be underlevelled? (a serious contradiction in a FF game with no random battles). Also, I know you choose the classes strategically but you still only control one character - I am surprised more of the people who hated FF12 for its "automatic-ness" don't have the same gripe here.

Rant over for now!

Retr0gamer

Trust me, with what the localisation team had to work with they did a stellar job. Vanille is hateful in the japanese version I heard while in the english version she redeems herself in the end. Also Sazh's character in the japanese version is extremely racist in the japanese version yet the localisation team managed to make him on of the better more well rounded characters is stellar localisation work. The localisation team unfortunately had a crap cliched story to work with which is what brings it down.

FFVII is one of the worst localisation jobs ever. Having the spelling and pronounciation of words correct should be the basis of a good localisation job and FFVII can't even get that right. After that it's reworking the dialogue and text so the direct translation eventually transforms into something that makes sense to an english speaker and that none of the plot or emotion is lost, which FFVII manages to fail at spectacularly. Then you have to rewrite the sections that make no sense outside of japan due to cultural differences.

In all 3 of these areas FFXIII is excellent in stark contrast to FFVII. The english used is correct and doesn't sound ridiculous. The story and characters are translated well to english. Also the strange cultural differences have been localised to something that isn't confusing/offensive, such as Vanilles moe characteristics and Sazh's outright racist characterisation.

A good story doesn't mean a good localisation. A crap story can also be localised well. MGS4 is another good example. It's a great localisation of a god awful script and terrible story, but still a stellar localisation. Make no mistake, FFVII is one of the worst videogame localisations done by square, in fact it's probably their worst and represents a massive step backwards from Ted Woolseys work during the SNES era. In some ways it was as comical as the old NES translations with lots of nonsensical english that was obviously translated by a non native english speaker.

seraphimvc

I want Vanille die. and Hope too. i dont care about the localization BS, because nobody can tell which one is better unless you have played both, which i believe if anyone was able to do that, he wont be a gamer anyway.

ff12 story is sh!t. i heard the original novel is pretty good but the presentation by squaresoft (aka the game) is sh!t = ff12 is sh!t.

how would anyone compare ff12 to ff7?! :S retro you are so biased.

the only good thing of ff12 is the 'refreshing' battle system but yet they failed to deliver a satisfying one. I hated almost all the boss fight, so boring and lack of imagination. You used to be able to beat the bosses by many ways but in ff12 there is usually only 1 way(specific set of paradigms) to beat them. They really needed more balance/beta testing etc, which is why i will probably still be a s*cker to get ff13-2, hoping they can do it right this time

Retr0gamer

I meant 13, I made a typo and forgot an I.

blodvyn

ah, will a game ever be made along the lines of ff7 or zelda again!

seraphimvc

^ there are alot of good games out there are on par or at least they are comparable to the gold standards aka ff7/zelda etc but not ff13. ff13, no.

no.

shuyin1

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I used paradigm shifting in all the battles. You could beat all the battles much quicker that way. I can see people hating the game because they only autobattle through it because the battles would take too long without any player input, like the worst of FFXII.

This is so true, too many complaints of the auto battle while not utilizing the full extent of the controls. Buffs/debuffs and parashifting are there, its up to you to use it. If I remember correctly every 2nd shift fills your atb to full so it kinda encourages parashifting.

Mario007

shuyin1 wrote: »

This is so true, too many complaints of the auto battle while not utilizing the full extent of the controls. Buffs/debuffs and parashifting are there, its up to you to use it. If I remember correctly every 2nd shift fills your atb to full so it kinda encourages parashifting.

This is absolutely true. I heard many people on the internet complain about the battle system being all about auto battle and then complaining about the Cid fight and how tough it was. That fight, to me, actually captured the need of paradigms and changing them during the fight.

Aurongroove

another little niggle of mine is how they keep under powering summons.

How hard is it to get this right? I mean, holy feck, it's YOUR JOB to programme the damage!!
Right now there are better balanced systems in flash based RPG's then what square are chugging out.

seraphimvc

summons in 13 are so lame i remember their only functions is to bring down the big elephant lol oh that tiny bahamut.....jesus....

megaten

Yeah in 13 summons were pretty much there to replenish your health.

Aurongroove

there were literally two fights in the game I actually needed summons where the regular team wouldn't do.

fighting the big Oretoises when I was on low levels (knocking the legs off)

And using Odin in a surprise attack>summon>gestalt>Zantetsuken on a big gang of dangerous but low HP Fish monster dudes to get a good time on one of the hunting missions.


Literally two fight in the entire game. Every other time I summoned them (of my own free will) was basically just for fun because I had nothing to use my TP on and they gave no strategic advantage. Some time they even ruined a good stagger or preemptive by letting three out of the four enemies fall and recover while I buff them with faith/brave/haste, or buy not getting their moves in before the stagger ran out.

If the game is so caught up on speed, why not implement something like the following:

you get a preemptive attack. Now in FFXIII pre-emptive attacks are such an advantage that getting ones means fast, easy instant victory. It's basically you get to go first + crush defence + disable the enemy from attacking.

Why not let the summons in on this gravy train? the team are going to tear the monsters to shreds anyways why not let the summons at least be able to do something with a little bit of flair that your team can do anyways. TP for eye candy.

So you get your pre-emptive and immediately you summon. When you summon you immediately gestalt, and use the finishing move. this works early on with Odin, to try for instant kills but only very occasionally (like the fish battle mentioned above) from chapter 7 onward. and it's an element they should've tried to preserve.

Programme a stagger multiplier into your summon's finishing blow that if it's the first move cast on a preempted enemy, that the chain bonus goes nuts, giving you a decent 400-999% bonus, as opposed to the miserable 120-280 area you normally get for immediately summoning and finishing.

As the game is now, you're much better off using your team to quickly destroy each enemy. if you summon, the summon won't manage the enemies stagger gauge responsibly and will let them bring their defenses right back in and their finisher will be ****. Attacks in gestalt mode are usually **** as well. the damage is useless and the chain bonus is awful.

horribly misjudged. And they started off so well in the early chapters (balance wise with Eidolon damage).

Mario007

it seems this game is trying to pull a Chrono Trigger, will be interesting how that turns out: http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/09/06/ffxiii_2_time_travel_system/#comments_21384471

Aurongroove

also.
why not fix these minor issues with updates?

everybody else is doing it.

Raze_them_all

still plugging away at this. Still think it's a bad game just not as deserving of the hate i gave it first time round, close though

noodler

Raze_them_all wrote: »

still plugging away at this. Still think it's a bad game just not as deserving of the hate i gave it first time round, close though

Still plugging away as well, deep into Chapter 11 in that tower.

Wishing it would end if I am honest.

Its nothing but battles, a decent battle system it is but the number of 10 minutes battles you get is really annoying (yes yes even with using the paradigms etc).

If it was any other franchise I doubt I would have bothered.

Plus points are that after this I will start Dead Space 2 and get back to FF4 on PSP.

Retr0gamer

The end drags on a bit and the pay off is the stupidest ending ever with the worst deus ex machina I've seen used in a videogame story in a very long time putting even FFVII to shame in that regard! Actually that's an insult to FFVII.

noodler

Retr0gamer wrote: »

The end drags on a bit and the pay off is the stupidest ending ever with the worst deus ex machina I've seen used in a videogame story in a very long time putting even FFVII to shame in that regard! Actually that's an insult to FFVII.

In what sense was FF7's ending down to Deus Ex Machina?

Also, you just can't help reference everything to FF7! You love it really!

Retr0gamer

If we believe hard enough the world will be alright. Oh look because we all loved each other everything worked out ok and the planet saved us!

It's actually not that bad to be honest in FFVII. They should have stopped at

Oh look Aeris and Holy saved us

instead of going into sappy territory. Anyway I was joking, FFVII's ending isn't that bad at all, and I do love the game it's just overrated. Anyway, hurry up and finish FFXIII and we can have a proper bitch about some truly awful writing!

Mindkiller

FFVII's ending was ambigious. I wasn't clear that anyone was 'saved' at all.

Honestly, I'm sick of hearing the word 'overrated' being thrown around with regards to FFVII. 'Overrated' has become the word of choice for people who cba engaging in any sort of meaningful critique of something popular that they don't like. (I'm not necessarily singling you out retrogamer as I've read the stuff you've said about it already)

Retr0gamer

I'm leaving it at overrated. Don't want to derail another thread :P

I preferred FFVII as ambiguous. **** you Advent Children