Current Events > I'm rewatching FFXIII cutscenes and I really want to play it again.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Maybe I'll pick it up on Steam since I don't have my PS3 anymore ;-;

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Do it

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literally just replayed it for the achievements on steam, game is not optimized well at all

As much shit as it gets, I actually liked it a lot.

Reis posted...

literally just replayed it for the achievements on steam, game is not optimized well at all

Have you tried with mods? I think GeDoSaTo fixes a lot of issues.

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I always wanted to try it but I only ever played 7, 8 and 10 and in afraid I wouldn't get the combat mechanics

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Reis posted...

literally just replayed it for the achievements on steam, game is not optimized well at all

Noooo!!

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Reis posted...

literally just replayed it for the achievements on steam, game is not optimized well at all

Freakin Square and their PC ports

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Legato-and-Vash posted...

Have you tried with mods? I think GeDoSaTo fixes a lot of issues.

i tried it with something called ff13 fix but it still has some issues, the main one for me being that you cant go windowed at resolutions above 1080p so you cant use something like borderless gaming without changing the resolution of ur monitor

Hexenherz posted...

I always wanted to try it but I only ever played 7, 8 and 10 and in afraid I wouldn't get the combat mechanics

The combat mechanics are easier to grasp than in other entries, especially using auto battle
You use the Ravager class to quickly fill the stagger bar. When it's full the enemy gets staggered and you switch to Commando to deal huge amounts of damage.
That's basically 99% of the battles right there.

Please don't

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TheSavageDragon posted...

The combat mechanics are easier to grasp than in other entries, especially using auto battle
You use the Ravager class to quickly fill the stagger bar. When it's full the enemy gets staggered and you switch to Commando to deal huge amounts of damage.
That's basically 99% of the battles right there.

That's only 99% of battles if you like repeating the same strategy all game while watching it get less and less efficient. The outline is fine, just back off on the details. You use a variety of methods to set up high damage multipliers and then you switch over to high damage output and exploit the damage multipliers. And also you avoid dying while doing this. Leaves room for nuance and there is a lot of nuance to be had.

https://youtu.be/494AENQ2SqI

Loved this scene. It was a decent game, I wouldn't be opposed to going through the trilogy again.

That was the scene that got me started lol

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tiornys posted...

That's only 99% of battles if you like repeating the same strategy all game while watching it get less and less efficient. The outline is fine, just back off on the details. You use a variety of methods to set up high damage multipliers and then you switch over to high damage output and exploit the damage multipliers. And also you avoid dying while doing this. Leaves room for nuance and there is a lot of nuance to be had.

The variety of methods being: start the battle in SYN/SAB/RAV to expedite the process. Oh and the 7 or so times SEN comes into play across the entire game. It didn't get any less efficient at all.

TheSavageDragon posted...

The variety of methods being: start the battle in SYN/SAB/RAV to expedite the process. Oh and the 7 or so times SEN comes into play across the entire game. It didn't get any less efficient at all.

Did you enjoy the combat?

tiornys posted...

Did you enjoy the combat?

That's kinda a loaded question for me.
Yes, I enjoyed the combat in the sense that the mechanics were interesting, the visual representation stellar, the increased difficulty for random battles and the sometimes split second timing required got the blood pumping.

No, I didn't enjoy the combat in the sense that, like everything FFXIII, it was far too restrictive for the vast majority of the game. The locked roles, not being able to create your own party,... played a part. The increased difficulty for random battles got negated by fully restoring the party after each battle which got rid of item/party management during dungeons in a game that was 100% dungeons.
The game being a 30 hour slog of a straight line with nothing but cutscene - battle - cutscene meant that the flashy battles got old and samey quickly.
Sentinel shouldn't even have been a thing if all they were going to use it for was Adamantoise farming and a couple of Cieth missions.

Vastly prefer FFXIII-2's version of this type of combat. The improvements like party leader death not meaning game over, early accessibility to roles and party composition and overall more open design of the game didn't make the combat wear out its welcome

I'm not saying the other installments in the franchise have generally varied battles as it's usually "select Attack" or in FFVI's case "Edgar, Tools, Crossbow". But let's not pretend that FFXIII's combat is any more nuanced.

Aeriis posted...

same lol, it looks confusing and kind of hard... 7, 8, 10 are so easy you normally don't have to think at all

Its not hard. The combat is actually pretty fun. It's everything else about the game that sucks, aside from the music.

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Aeriis posted...

same lol, it looks confusing and kind of hard... 7, 8, 10 are so easy you normally don't have to think at all

13 is exactly the same, but even easier in execution. Once an enemy's weakness is known by using Scan, autobattle will always pick the right buffs, debuffs and magical/physical attacks. It all revolves around setting up your Paradigms which are preset line-ups of FF classes given "cool" names like Commando (Fighter/Knight) to draw in the CoD crowd. And then you switch between these Paradigms in battle as needed while watching the pretty pictures with half an eye on your health bar

I didn't hate my time with it, but the cast is unlikeable for the first 70 or 80% of the story and the combat never grabbed me. I also just don't like the story, it buries all of its lore in codex entries which I do not give a single fuck about reading, ever.

My main beef with the combat is there is no real reason to ever stray away from just auto battling and using the exact same strategy, you'll complete the game just fine and maybe some boss fights might take longer than if you optimized. Start each fight with your buff/debuff classes, switch to your stagger gauge building classes, then after the stagger switch to pure DPS, rinse and repeat. So in the end you get something that's more or less just as mundane as old turn-based combat, just a lot flashier looking.

Probably one of those games I'll just never go back to. OST is good as hell though.

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TheSavageDragon posted...

That's kinda a loaded question for me.
Yes, I enjoyed the combat in the sense that the mechanics were interesting, the visual representation stellar, the increased difficulty for random battles and the sometimes split second timing required got the blood pumping.

No, I didn't enjoy the combat in the sense that, like everything FFXIII, it was far too restrictive for the vast majority of the game. The locked roles, not being able to create your own party,... played a part. The increased difficulty for random battles got negated by fully restoring the party after each battle which got rid of item/party management during dungeons in a game that was 100% dungeons.

I rather enjoyed the elimination of between-battle item/party management given that the FF series hasn't presented a credible "full-dungeon" resource management challenge since the SNES. I'd rather have battles designed to be independently challenging than lots of trivial battles that fail to present a challenge in aggregate. (I'd also enjoy a return to challenging resource management but I doubt the FF series will ever go that direction.)

Addressing a couple of things together:

The game being a 30 hour slog of a straight line with nothing but cutscene - battle - cutscene meant that the flashy battles got old and samey quickly. Sentinel shouldn't even have been a thing if all they were going to use it for was Adamantoise farming and a couple of Cieth missions.

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I'm not saying the other installments in the franchise have generally varied battles as it's usually "select Attack" or in FFVI's case "Edgar, Tools, Crossbow". But let's not pretend that FFXIII's combat is any more nuanced.

Where FFXIII has more nuance than most FFs is in what you can do to optimize your performance in battle. Where most FFs have simple formulaic approaches that are also highly optimal, a formulaic approach to FFXIII is going to be suboptimal for most battles. Sentinels are a thing because they have quite a bit more utility than you describe, although how useful they are can vary quite a bit from one playstyle to the next; I'm guessing you have something of a power gamer style? Also, why the hell would you use Sentinels when farming Adamantoise? Farming is all about maximizing efficiency and should look something like this: https://youtu.be/PsVzhw8ybjk

TheSavageDragon posted...

13 is exactly the same, but even easier in execution. Once an enemy's weakness is known by using Scan, autobattle will always pick the right buffs, debuffs and magical/physical attacks. It all revolves around setting up your Paradigms which are preset line-ups of FF classes given "cool" names like Commando (Fighter/Knight) to draw in the CoD crowd. And then you switch between these Paradigms in battle as needed while watching the pretty pictures with half an eye on your health bar

You overrate Auto-battle (it's good, but nowhere near perfect) and you're glossing over one of the most important points to FFXIII's combat: the paradigm deck is your primary combat menu. Yes, it all revolves around setting up your paradigms and switching between them. I didn't repeat "as needed" because that implies you would only shift if it was necessary to change what you have on the battlefield. Far better is to shift whenever it is advantageous to change what you have on the battlefield. With a good paradigm deck it should be rare to stick in any given paradigm for more than a round or two--and of course this approach to combat means you should be watching quite a bit more of what's going on than just your health bar.

Vastly prefer FFXIII-2's version of this type of combat. The improvements like party leader death not meaning game over, early accessibility to roles and party composition and overall more open design of the game didn't make the combat wear out its welcome

I like a lot of things that FFXIII-2 did--including everything you mention here--but it also made several small changes in ability balancing and enemy design that add up to a less satisfying experience overall for me. FFXIII-2 trivializes individual fights in a manner similar to how other FFs trivialize resource management. I'm sure that's better for players who generally prefer non-combat gameplay to combat, but for my preferences combat is the most important gameplay aspect of RPGs. FFXIII-2 is almost painful in how it undercuts what should be straight-up improvements to FFXIII's combat system.

MC_BatCommander posted...

My main beef with the combat is there is no real reason to ever stray away from just auto battling and using the exact same strategy

I don't agree. The reason to stray away from a repetitive strategy is because it's more fun and more interesting to change things up. This is essentially the same reason to do things other than just spamming some repetitive strategy in any given FF game. Unlike a series like Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy in general isn't difficult enough to force you to use strategy and tactics--it just offers excellent systems to play around with that allow lots of different strategies and tactics.

I'm thinking of playing 13 and 13-2 in the lead up to LR. But I dunno, because I think 13 is a fundamentally broken game, independent of the constraints adding to the narrative or whatever the fuck.

I don't mind FF13 as a $10 game, but over time I've come to regard it as a game with a cracked foundation. The corridors are one thing, but the level limiting is another - restricting level by story chapter is obscene, especially on the few chapters where grinding is even possible in the first place. Sazh's chapter in particular pisses me off, because that boss is a huge pain in the ass and you couldn't improve your chances of winning if you tried. It's like hitting your head against the wall.

I don't mind Lightning - I've heard someone legitimately say that the game would have been better if she died halfway through and nobody mentioned it because she'd been such a bitch to them. I also think Hope's arc isn't as bad as people make it out to be. I'm an apologist for the characters in that they all learn their lesson, but people hold their worst actions against them despite atoning for them over the course of the story with the characters they antagonized.

But I can't let the levelling go. I don't care if restricting everything adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the cast of doomed exiles, it's a flawed gameplay mechanic that makes the game a real fucking pain in the ass without a guide to tell you what combinations you need to be hitting to beat the story bosses that keep wiping the fucking floor with you because you can't level up past a certain point, once every chapter.

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tiornys posted...

I don't agree. The reason to stray away from a repetitive strategy is because it's more fun and more interesting to change things up. This is essentially the same reason to do things other than just spamming some repetitive strategy in any given FF game. Unlike a series like Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy in general isn't difficult enough to force you to use strategy and tactics--it just offers excellent systems to play around with that allow lots of different strategies and tactics.

The main problem here is FF13 doesn't give you any freedom to change thins up either. You get access to the entire party for what, the last 2 chapters of the game? Same with paradigm roles, everyone is locked into the same ones through the majority of the game - and even when you do allow them to branch out the points required to level those other roles are absurdly high.


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Love the civil discussion in this topic, wow. Usually it boils down to angry people calling each other names on both sides.

My opinion: auto-battle is like FF12's gambits. You're allowed to make the game as easy as you want it. I like not using autobattle (or too many gambits in FF12) because it's more fun and engaging. I don't hate people who use it and they're not wrong for doing so.

It's just whatever, dude.

Another thing I think a lot of people might have missed out on while playing the game was not using the minimap. The first time I played the game I used the minimap (and auto-battle! sue me!) and my second playthrough, I turned them off. There's soooo many neat environmental details I missed because I was just focused on the minimap and not on the world around me. Granted, it's still linear as all hell, but still, it's so fucking pretty!

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MC_BatCommander posted...

The main problem here is FF13 doesn't give you any freedom to change thins up either. You get access to the entire party for what, the last 2 chapters of the game? Same with paradigm roles, everyone is locked into the same ones through the majority of the game - and even when you do allow them to branch out the points required to level those other roles are absurdly high.

You have the entire party for 4.5 chapters which constitute over half of the gameplay (chapters measure story progression, not gameplay progression). You have access to secondary roles for 4 chapters, although yes the costs are very high on them.

With that said, there's plenty of room to change things up even when you just have parties of two characters with three roles each, what with weapon and accessory choices, equipment upgrading, and dozens of reasonable paradigm decks out of over 1500 possibly relevant paradigm decks.

MrMallard posted...

I'm thinking of playing 13 and 13-2 in the lead up to LR. But I dunno, because I think 13 is a fundamentally broken game, independent of the constraints adding to the narrative or whatever the fuck.

I don't mind FF13 as a $10 game, but over time I've come to regard it as a game with a cracked foundation. The corridors are one thing, but the level limiting is another - restricting level by story chapter is obscene, especially on the few chapters where grinding is even possible in the first place. Sazh's chapter in particular pisses me off, because that boss is a huge pain in the ass and you couldn't improve your chances of winning if you tried. It's like hitting your head against the wall.

I don't mind Lightning - I've heard someone legitimately say that the game would have been better if she died halfway through and nobody mentioned it because she'd been such a bitch to them. I also think Hope's arc isn't as bad as people make it out to be. I'm an apologist for the characters in that they all learn their lesson, but people hold their worst actions against them despite atoning for them over the course of the story with the characters they antagonized.

But I can't let the levelling go. I don't care if restricting everything adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the cast of doomed exiles, it's a flawed gameplay mechanic that makes the game a real fucking pain in the ass without a guide to tell you what combinations you need to be hitting to beat the story bosses that keep wiping the fucking floor with you because you can't level up past a certain point, once every chapter.

Two thoughts. 1) you can grind out more power than you might think by upgrading equipment as well as maxing your Crystarium. Maxed weapons and accessories are a massive boost in the early chapters where the CP cap is highly restrictive. 2) the main lever in FFXIII is strategy, not levels. Every boss (including the ones in Sazh's chapter) has multiple good strategic approaches at normal development levels.

Something I wish FFXIII had done better is on full display here: the game doesn't do a good job of informing players about most of their strategic options. It pushes chain & stagger hard, nods in the direction of Sentinel, and has almost nothing to say about the potential power behind buffs, debuffs, cut/keep disruption, how to effectively use AoE, etc. The game offers plenty of encounters that showcase the power of these various tools, but I'm pretty sure most players miss them on their first playthrough because they lack the background to appreciate them. I certainly did; I didn't even notice a lot of them on my second or third playthroughs.

How optimised are FF XIII-2 and LR? I'd happily play those on Steam if they run halfway decently
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teepan95 posted...

How optimised are FF XIII-2 and LR? I'd happily play those on Steam if they run halfway decently

FFXIII-2 is notoriously poorly optimized on Steam, but there's a fan patch that I understand does a great job of fixing the issues. LR on Steam is fine as far as I know.

tiornys posted...

notoriously poorly optimized

Are we talking Cyberpunk on PS4/Xbox One level? Or more Bethesda game level?
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I actually just replayed through the 13 trilogy a few months ago on PC. Grabbed a few mods to make it pretty in 4K and it was smooth sailing. The first game is fps locked unless you download FF13Fix, but it wasn't too bad overall.

I also used Cheat Engine to lessen the grind, but it was my 3rd time playing through 13 and Lightning Returns and 4th time playing through 13-2.

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teepan95 posted...

Are we talking Cyberpunk on PS4/Xbox One level? Or more Bethesda game level?

Not familiar enough with Cyberpunk/Bethesda to say. But here's a sticky thread on Steam that should give you an idea: https://steamcommunity.com/app/292140/discussions/0/451850020337278480/

tiornys posted...

teepan95 posted...

Are we talking Cyberpunk on PS4/Xbox One level? Or more Bethesda game level?

Not familiar enough with Cyberpunk/Bethesda to say. But here's a sticky thread on Steam that should give you an idea: https://steamcommunity.com/app/292140/discussions/0/451850020337278480/

I've bookmarked the link. Thank you!!
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literally had a dancing black dude with a chicken that lived in his afro

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teepan95 posted...

I've bookmarked the link. Thank you!!

The most important thing to note through all of that is that it's basically mandatory to disable cloud saves for 13-2. With cloud saves on, I was crashing every few minutes after reaching Bresha for the first time.

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NoxObscuras posted...

The most important thing to note through all of that is that it's basically mandatory to disable cloud saves for 13-2. With cloud saves on, I was crashing every few minutes after reaching Bresha for the first time.

This is important. Cloud saves would crash the game. Also, mods definitely fix most if not all of the problems. It's been a while since I played the PC version, but I don't recall having any issues after mods. I don't think LR had any PC issues.

Also, 13 had an issue where if you play on a resolution higher than 1080p (or 720p, can't remember which), the "enemy intel" text would be blank. I think the GeDoSaTo mod fixed that. In fact, GeDoSaTo works great with a lot of games.

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SSJ2GrimReaper posted...

literally had a dancing black dude with a chicken that lived in his afro

Sazh dances?

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Sazh does goofy poses but he doesn't dance

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I really want to play xiii-2 again. Really liked the monster system. But the steam port is apparently the worst of the 3.

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