I tried 13 multiple times. Steam says I have more than fifty hours in it. I know the last time I got all the way to the open world segment. But I just can’t get into it and was mostly making myself play because I bought the entire trilogy on a sale. The game’s insistence on putting all the plot in a menu made it much more difficult to follow along or to get attached to any of the characters. I know I read everything as it became available and I honestly have no memory of the vast majority of it. I’m not even sure I could name the fully party.
On top of that, the gameplay itself just wasn’t great. Party composition was almost always dictated by the plot and character growth was completely linear, so there was very little opportunity to experiment with the game’s systems. And when I did get to experiment with it, encounters were so rigidly structured and my characters’ levels being capped by plot progression meant there was no wiggle room to actually experiment. Throw in traditional FF problems like debuffs being useless and new ones like AOE attacks being heavily luck based and it didn’t even have fun combat to fall back on.
The open world fights while easily cheesable offered enough spectacle to keep my attention, the trails were interesting to me (at least by comparison to the rest of the game) and the final boss was decent but given how little of the game that takes up it’s absolutely unacceptable.
It’s a shame too because all the elements of a potentially stellar game are in there but never given a chance to shine due to the reasons you mentioned.
I tried 13 multiple times. Steam says I have more than fifty hours in it. I know the last time I got all the way to the open world segment. But I just can’t get into it and was mostly making myself play because I bought the entire trilogy on a sale. The game’s insistence on putting all the plot in a menu made it much more difficult to follow along or to get attached to any of the characters. I know I read everything as it became available and I honestly have no memory of the vast majority of it. I’m not even sure I could name the fully party.
On top of that, the gameplay itself just wasn’t great. Party composition was almost always dictated by the plot and character growth was completely linear, so there was very little opportunity to experiment with the game’s systems. And when I did get to experiment with it, encounters were so rigidly structured and my characters’ levels being capped by plot progression meant there was no wiggle room to actually experiment. Throw in traditional FF problems like debuffs being useless and new ones like AOE attacks being heavily luck based and it didn’t even have fun combat to fall back on.
Agreed on all counts.
The open world fights while easily cheesable offered enough spectacle to keep my attention, the trails were interesting to me (at least by comparison to the rest of the game) and the final boss was decent but given how little of the game that takes up it’s absolutely unacceptable.
It’s a shame too because all the elements of a potentially stellar game are in there but never given a chance to shine due to the reasons you mentioned.