as mentioned, it’s so linear that it’s hard to really miss anything.
but going in knowing that really does help. there’s no random encounters or any combat encounter that is not explicitly designed. you restart each fight with full health so they are all self contained combat puzzles. the progression of mechanics is slow but incredibly intentional and the vibes are just perfect imo. it’s very rhythmic.
my favourite videogame
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echoing @woudww and especially @dedede69. the only gameplay aspect worth noting is that in combat when you shift paradigms (with a 12 second cooldown) your atb is instantly refilled. kind of a core mechanic that encourages aggressive play and continuous shifting (you can even set up duplicates of the same paradigm in your deck just to shift between if you want to stay in the same paradigm for longer) that is never explained or acknowledged in-game for some reason.
it’s a banger, an ultra luxurious willfully perverse ethereal bimbo game. it takes a few chapters for everything to come together but v much worth it imo if it sounds like your thing.
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I thank everyone for their advice, unfortunately I also went and read the game’s instruction booklet and now realize that the game has no wait option. That’s not great news! I’ll probably at least give the start of it a shot this week out of curiosity if nothing else but real time strategic choices are not quite my forte.
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fwiw the battle speed can be set to slow like in all atb ff games but yeah it might not be for you, iirc yoshinori kitase said it’s more like a tactical fps than an rpg and i sort of agree with that assessment
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it should also be noted (now that the most enthusiastic folks have spoke up in defense of it) that the first ff13 can accurately be described as 30 hours of tutorial with 1~ hour of actual challenges shoved in right before the last couple chapters. It doesn’t require much thought or effort until then because every challenge pretty much tells you what it wants you to do until those optional battles you can do in the open world segment.
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i disagree about at least some of the mid-game fights, and the (mandatory) endgame can be pretty difficult, but that’s not entirely unreasonable; my theory about this criticism is that ff13 is the only final fantasy game designed to be speedrun. encounters are dodgeable on the overworld* with instant retries, battles are rated on time and you instantly recover after each one, and strats are much more powerful than stats (which you technically optionally assign outside of battle anyway). the game becomes drastically more challenging and mechanics-engaging if you’re at least a bit underleveled and if you’re focusing on speed in each fight rather than just survival.
*another “hidden mechanic” which is more like an unintended abuse is that once you have one deceptisol you can skip almost every optional fight in the game by using it, running past the enemy until you’ve reached the end of its aggro zone, running back to trigger the fight, then hitting retry, upon which you’ll be placed past the enemy but with the deceptisol back in your inventory. on a first playthrough i definitely don’t recommend doing this though because if you really skip everything you will probably get hopelessly stuck.
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ironically, having the combat speed set to low makes the game harder, because it is, as you say, about speed. I did play the hell out of the game, just to be as fair as possible, and I did like when the combat system finally opened up near the end and I could pursue the wonderful challenge of defeating some of the hardest monsters in the game in less than 6 seconds (to get the best item drops)
the game has a lot of good ideas, but I prefer ff13-2 for refining a lot of the rough patches of the first game and for more fully focusing on the mechanics instead of dripfeeding them to the player over the course of the game.
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I’m sorry but I don’t think this is accurate at all. the game takes its time to unfurl all of its mechanics, and the line where the “tutorialization” ends and the “real game” starts is a lot blurrier than in most games. but I think it’s safe to say that around 10 hours in the game starts throwing meaningful challenges at you, and the game starts to be actually entertaining to play as soon as it lets you use paradigm shifts 3-4 hours in, even if it’s not particularly challenging at that point.
the challenges get very intense as you progress, too… sitting through the tutorials is a lot to ask either way, but my experience was that in the end it was easily worth the slow start. I don’t think there’s a single final fantasy game that is as fun as this game is moment to moment.
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It felt like they were getting a lot of playtest feedback that the system was complex, players weren’t understanding it, and they compensated by delaying the introduction of systems while remaining poor at explaining them. While the main combat goal is speed and the main agency is role-shifting, because it was wrapped in their legacy metaphors (the classes, the spells, even just damage when an enemy wasn’t broken) a bunch of players continued to read it in the older ways.
So it’s balanced during the first dozen hours, when you only have 2 characters and half the roles, but unlike a Dragon Quest it’s noticeably mechanically restricted. And since a lot of the balancing is done in the speed grading system, rather than a pass/fail death, I watched players not learn effectively as they were allowed through.
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Yeah FF13 is secretly a score attack game. It is all about the virtuous circle of getting a high score → getting better rewards to help you get a higher score in the next battle → etc, over and over
You’re never actually in real danger you’re not putting yourself in, since you can always fall back to a healer x2 paradigm and easily get a slow win against everything in the main game.
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the secondary roles don’t completely unlock until about 30 hours into the game, too, so the strategic palette is truly limited until that point.
In practice, I feel that the game is overtuned around giving player a 4-star rating at minimum in every battle unless they dramatically screw up.
This, I think, reflects a shortcoming of the grading system, in that it is saddled with two contradictory responsibilities: to assess how well a player understands the system, and to make the player feel good about themselves. I can see why many players failed to understand how paradigms worked when the game constantly tells them that they’re doing great even though they’re playing in a very inefficient manner.
Even if the player internalizes that the combat puzzle is about optimizing role switching, it still prevents the player from making too many mistakes until that 30 hour mark because of all the mechanical restrictions stemming from party composition.
For instance, only one character has access to the saboteur(debuff) role for the first half of the game, its capabilities are seriously constrained at low levels, and that character isn’t even in the party for long stretches. So the game doesn’t begin to teach the player what this role can do and how to use it effectively until the open world segment right before the end game.
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yeah i love a lot of what ff13 is doing but the way they constrain your party composition for so long really bothered me. let me play the game lol
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Finally getting around to listening to his first podcast and it’s kinda hard to glean exactly what happened, but he mentions:
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-He would have quit Giant Bomb two and a half years ago, til the pandemic hit.
-Doesn’t shit talk any of his coworkers, wishes them the best, but also mentions he hasn’t talked to Vinny, Alex or Brad since the split.
-He gets emotional quite a bit in that first podcast. He sighs at one point and mentions that after being away from Giant Bomb for two weeks, he started remembering his dreams again, and finally began to feel at ease. Says there was a lot of toxicity, so, makes ya wonder.
Anyway I dunno. Jeff’s departure came the same week I saw a lot of CNET/Gamespot people on Twitter say they got fired/laid off, and given the way he wasn’t given any sort of farewell or…anything at all, it feels more like he got unceremoniously pushed out than him humbly bowing out.
I kinda checked out of Giant Bomb proper a while back (kept up with the Beastcast but that’s about it), but two and a half years ago about lines up with when they started going hard on weird clickbait-y thumbnails and video titles on their YouTube channel (THIS IS LIKE F-ZERO ON THE XBOX was a horrifying thing to see a video titled from a group that’s better than that!). Seems like that sort of thing only got worse after the Red Ventures acquisition of the CBSi stuff.
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I also noted that the top of his stream was talking about continuing covid mitigations with young children and Giant Bomb have been doing live coverage in LA. I would not be surprised if Red Ventures wanted return-to-office as a feature of Giant Bomb and he balked.
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my read on most of this (and i think covers the nextlander crew too) is that red ventures ended up with gamespot and giant bomb and were like ‘wtf do we have two gaming websites for?’
the pivot of gb over the last year (with bakalar at the helm), and what they have basically announced as their future last week (exactly the same thing they announced a year ago, but maybe a bit more actual planning this time), is them trying to carve out an identity as more than another videogame website. unfortunately what it looks like is a podcast network (pejorative)…
i can totally see why gerstmann, who just says he wants to do this work, would finally jump ship. i hope there’s no bad blood along the way, but it was nice to see jeff’s stream of the xbox showcase having more than double the viewers of the gb stream.
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That hasn’t been my read of them for the past couple of years. This is all rumor mongering of course, since no one has straight up talked about stuff and there’s a million different things that could be going on behind the scenes that we’ll just never know about.
But the pandemic years has been tough for them. They’ve never found a solid footing or consistent schedule of features when they started remote work. Then they they lost a ton of staff during the move to Red Ventures which probably put a huge straight on their manpower, let alone the new expectations that come from the new owner who wants to see a path forward for the return on their investment.
Jeff G. said he wanted the new ownership to be an opportunity to try new things and to make the site weird again, with more “shows” that don’t even necessarily all have to be video game related (meanwhile, Nextland started up to continue the very traditional GB content of podcasts, quicklooks, and let’s plays). They very briefly ventured into trying to contract people as guest creators which resulted in short runs of shows like Guilty Treasures, Borne to Run, Reel Layers, GrubbSnax, and Albummer, but I’ve always wondered if part of that structure was born out of not having the resources to hire full-time staff at that time. But that had a very brief run and the site went back to having a very empty, sporadic content schedule. So I guess it never worked out.
All the while, I’m sure Red Ventures is hammering them on numbers. The site was due for a shakeup and I wasn’t really surprised when Jeff G. did eventually leave, but everything around it sounds like it came unexpectedly and both Jeff G. and the remaining GB staff were in a roughly 2 week rush to plan and setup their next steps. That said, it also sounds really difficult to get the planning and paperwork done for 4 new permanent staff members and solidify plans enough to announce a new content schedule and slew of shows all within a couple of weeks. So I wonder how long all of this had been in the works when it was decided Jeff G. was leaving.
All that said, as Grandpa mentioned, Jeff G. leaving Giant Bomb sounds like something he needed to do and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was having a hard time doing it without being forcefully separated by corporate. Sounds like he’s in a healthier place now. The way everyone involved has tried to quickly move past such a seismic shift probably means, I imagine, there’s some legal and/or political stuff in the background that no one really wants to or can touch.
Meanwhile GB sounds like it’s pivoting back to a old, traditional content schedule of podcasts, quicklooks, and lets plays. With Dan as creative director they should get some good video series as he was apparently behind a lot of GB East’s content ideas. But it’s probably not going to be “weird”.
I guess that’s just a really long winded way of saying no in the public really will know what happened any time soon, and we might not necessarily ever will, nor do we really need to since it’s not really our business. But everyone involved seems to have a path forward for their futures (well, Jeff G. is still figuring his out but he’s got some footing with his Patreon) so hopefully it works out for all of them.
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i did think this was true when they first went this direction - especially with his history doing public access tv and other weirder projects over the years - but everything in the year that followed (which as you mention, mostly fell apart or had inconsistent schedules at best) seemed very detached from him.
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I dunno when I’m gonna have the time in my life to play an RPG, much less (potentially) the same one twice, but are people who say “ya gotta play Persona 5 before you play Persona 5 Royal” just being weird sticklers, or is there enough story difference between the two that they’re fundamentally different?
I dunno, gut tells me to just play Royal and try to make a mental note of whatever feels like the original ending.
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It really doesn’t need to be played through once let alone twice. Maybe just play the first two palaces and wash your hands of it.
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i think i’m warmer toward persona 5 than average and i can assure you this is deranged
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