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Don't Hold Your Breath For FFXIII
IGN is reporting that the next chapter in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, has barely gotten into the production phase. "According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!" And remember, even if it's completed sometime late next year or early in 2009 folks in the states will probably have a wait while the game is localized.
It's the only way *I* can ever finish a FF game 100%.
Yeah, count me as among the ones who didn't like it.
I felt like they fixed some stuff, then broke some more, like forcing you to grind/dungeon crawl for hours between story events. Why did they put gambits in there to automate 95% of those fights? Because most people don't like the vast majority of the fighting in previous FF games, since it's dull. Then after, going to the trouble of automating it to make it less crappy, they made you do MORE of it! WTF?
I was hooked for about 10-15 hours, but just kept waiting for it to get cool. I continued waiting until I was within ~5-10 hours of the end, at which point I checked a FAQ to see how close I was to beating it... and promptly quit playing when I found out that there wasn't enough time left for them to cram a story in there. I really thought things would pick up when Larsa showed up, but then he disappeared for most of the game and they never really did anything with him. Then I thought that maybe the bunny people village or the fight with Balthier's dad would flesh out their characters a little... but no. I kept crawling through one long, boring dungeon after another, to be rewarded with 5-10 lines of pointless, wit-free, dry, emotionless dialogue. None of the characters, with the possible exception of Balthier and Fran, seemed to give a shit about one another. I don't just mean, "there was no love story"--though they certainly seemed to set up several and then do little or nothing with them--I mean that the characters seemed to have no connection with one another at all.
I could keep going. But yeah, some people didn't like it, and I'm not surprised to find out that a lot of other people quit playing like I did.
On the other hand, I'm now playing through Suikoden V for the second time, because once just wasn't enough. Awesome.