He’s known for a few
Let’s Plays, his God Hand LP well
among them. I haven’t seen his work
before, but I’ve known about him for a while…and by coincidence, ended up finding
out he and his posse did a blind LP of Final
Fantasy 13-2. And what started out
as a simple playthrough ended up becoming a 100% completion run. And they did it. It took them a whopping eighty-three hours,
but they did it. Indeed, in the final
video each member of the posse talks in turn about how terrible the game is and
why it’s terrible. That might have just
been a consequence of plunging head-first into the abyss of insanity, though
(which you can see just by looking
at the video titles and the descriptions).
Frankly, I’m surprised none of them are laid up in rubber rooms.
So you’re probably
wondering why I’m bringing up 13-2 after
I slammed the book shut on the game; making this post seems largely
unnecessary, and even harmful. It goes
beyond just beating a dead horse; it’s more like digging up a dead horse’s
corpse, performing black magic to turn it into an equine undead, slashing it to
pieces with Frank West’s paddle-saws, kicking the pieces back into its grave
King Leonidas style, and then doing the same thing after a five-minute recess
and a swig of root beer. I acknowledge
that. But I said I was going to finish
the game, and there’s been a part of me that regrets not being able to. It felt like I was leaving so much on the
table.
So it’s time for me to
fix that. Will Final Fantasy 13-2 find redemption at long last? Will there be a glimmer of hope in its final
hours?
No. No, it won’t.
It just gets worse.
Spoilers inbound. But whatever.
If you’re playing this game for the story, I would recommend a
reconsideration of your tastes and standards.
So, let’s take this step
by step -- and start with a little revisionist history.
1) Serah and Noel aren’t good enough to carry this game.
Looking back at one of
my earlier posts on the game, I’ve realized that I was really lenient when it
came to Noel. Having reviewed the
footage, I’ve realized that Noel is inoffensive at best…the reason being that
he doesn’t really have a character. He’s
got no story arc. He’s got no
personality. He’s got no role besides
“monster-killer” and “Serah-comforter”.
The most I can say is that he’s level-headed, but that’s not saying much
because his level-headedness comes from nothing happening for huge swaths of
the game (and considering the outright moronic choices he makes throughout,
it’s hard to say he’s even using his head).
He has a conflict with
Snow for no reason besides the fact that he’s there and he does have a
personality. He has a conflict with
Caius because…because. Even his
motivation is dubious, if you can believe that; he ends up getting thrown into
a dream world where his greatest fantasies become real, and as such you’d think
that the world he dreams up would be in line with his motivation up to that
point: to save the future, his present, and create a world where peace and
prosperity reign. So of course, he ends up imagining the same dying world he came from, we see
him living through the past, and a sequence that more or less becomes an origin
story that probably should have shown up ten hours earlier. I don’t want to think to heavily about the
implications here because they’re pretty grim (and stupid), so let’s just call
him a low-quality dual-wielding cipher and leave it at that.
And speaking of Serah,
she doesn’t fare very well either -- even in comparison to last time (my posts,
and her game of origin). I was under the
impression that this was her story, but apparently Squeenix didn’t agree with
me; ignoring the fact that the plot is more focused on Noel and his struggles,
you could argue that even with character development -- and I use that term as
loosely as a tire held onto a drag racer with scotch tape -- Serah ends up going
backwards instead of forward. She starts
off as a weak and helpless girl obsessed with Lightning, and every attempt to
make her out as a brave and awe-inspiring heroine ends with her looking like an
idiot, getting shoved into the background so Noel can have at it, and/or
failing.
She’s the exact same
person in the opening hours as she is in the ending hours -- except for two
facets. One: she ends up becoming a
self-sacrificing, messianic waif who’s only there to advance the plot (and even
then she does a shit job of it). Two:
even with all the justifiable rage she has against Lightning, she never even
bothers to call her out on it. Or Etro,
for that matter. She -- and Noel, to a
similar extent -- doesn’t act at all.
Only react…and even then, it’s debatable. Hell, in the final battle she drops to her
knees on the sidelines while Caius and Noel duke it out. And she keels over and dies for no reason in
the end. So long, semblance of
credibility. We hardly knew ye.
By the way, I found
this little nugget in regards to Serah’s clothes.
“In an interview in Famitsu, it
was revealed Serah's clothing from Final Fantasy XIII-2 was designed by Yusuke Naora, based on plugsuits from Neon Genesis
Evangelion, as requested by director
Motomu Toriyama. Isamu Kamikokuryo, the art director of Final Fantasy
XIII-2, has said the character designs
are built from the scenario and setting and the new designs for Lightning and
Serah are reflected within the environments they begin their journey. For
Serah, he said she was cute and girly in Final Fantasy XIII, but that she is a little more tough and
battle-ready in Final Fantasy XIII-2.”
Is that right?
Let’s…let’s just move
on.
2) Stop explaining things, you’re really bad at it.
The biggest problem
with Serah and Noel isn’t (entirely) the fact that they’re half-baked
archetypes, or (entirely) the fact that they don’t go anywhere as
characters. The problem is that huge --
HUGE percentages of their dialogue are devoted to trying to figure out what’s
going on. It’s a problem the game has as
a whole; it’s not all that difficult to come up with a basic outline of what
time travel entails and what the characters can and can’t do. But there’s not even a cursory effort to try
and sort out a framework -- and because of it, our leads are lost almost from
start to finish.
But they’ll try to make
sense of everything. Oh, they’ll try,
and they’ll try, and they’ll try, and delude themselves into thinking that
they’ve got their next objective in place.
But the explanations given are A) half-assed and unsatisfying, B)
oversimplified to the point of labeling every problem as a “paradox”, and C)
based on knowledge that the characters have NO REASON to ever have. Noel is especially guilty of this; Serah at
least tries to reason things out at times, but he’ll suddenly spout information
that comes from nowhere. At one point,
he says that the time gates strewn about are starting to disappear, which is
something he had no chance to ever learn because he just finished a fight with
Caius. It’s weird because a good half of
the cast can effectively see all of time, and Serah -- as a seeress -- could
have done the chrono-gazing if her powers had been properly explained and developed
throughout the story. Why they’d
bootstrap the world mechanics to Noel is just one of life’s great mysteries.
Then again, this is
just emblematic of the game’s major problem: it’s taking on a bigger challenge
than it can handle, and ends up taking a knockout blow as a result. FF13 fumbled
every step of the way in trying to define its world, and that was just based on
a thirteen-day time period; of course Squeenix
can’t handle multiple worlds across multiple eras and timelines. I would applaud their ambition, but given
that this is a complete and total rush job with more holes in it than SpongeBob
in iron maiden, I would keep this game and “ambition” on opposite sides of an
iron gate.
3) This entire system is built on bullshit.
And I thought the
fal’Cie were bad…
All right, let me see
if I can explain this in a paragraph or so.
According to the right-out-of-nowhere lore of this game, there’s a
seeress who possesses the “Eyes of Etro”, a gift from the goddess of the same
name that allows her to see the future.
As a result, she sees images of the future and has them recorded for
future posterity in machines called Oracle Drives; the tradeoff, however, is
that viewing the future inevitably shortens the seeress’ life, so that she’ll
die young no matter what she does. Still, she’s appointed a guardian that’s duty
bound to protect her -- and that guardian can only be replaced by another
guardian Highlander-style. And even beyond that, the seeress (Yeul in
this case) is set to constantly reincarnate as a new and largely-identical, but
slightly-variant Yeul, so that whatever society can continue using her
predictions as a guide. Or alternatively, she exists to dole out information to Serah and Noel -- i.e. they can't figure out the plot, so someone has to tell them where and when to go.
The game’s explanation
takes a lot for granted, and assumes that the player will never bother to ask
questions that should have been, but are never satisfactorily answered. Example: what society is upholding the Yeuls
in such high esteem? I’m asking because
not only do we never see the society that upheld her, but in the context of 13’s universe she’s a complete
non-entity, which makes it all the more confusing. Remember, in the last game Cocoon very nearly
ended up destroyed thanks to the efforts of some nasty fal’Cie, and it took the
last=minute efforts of a heretofore-unexplained super monster to save the
day. So why doesn’t Yeul’s role at least
pay lip service to a major, world-changing event? Why is predicting the future so important if
no one ever acts on it? You could argue
that it’s because the society that did revere her -- the Paddra, if I remember
right -- have died out, but if that’s the case why does Yeul get to wander
around the globe from one time period to the next unhindered? Why weren’t there other societies that tried
to get in on that oracle action?
And that’s not even
getting into the problems that Caius brings to the table. He’s supposed to be her guardian, fine; he IS
effectively immortal, after all. But
that just raises further questions. Why
can there only be one guardian, and why do they -- they in this case being
Caius and Noel in the endgame -- have to fight to the death to see who has the
right to protect Yeul? Why can’t there
be multiple guardians? Caius may be
immortal and the baddest dude around, but he’s still just one guy. Why not appoint a small army? Why give the job to someone who failed to
protect the civilization in the first place, and even beyond that lets the
reincarnated Yeuls wander around aimlessly across the ages? If the assumption is that Yeul is in no
danger of dying because she’ll die at a predetermined point, what’s even the
purpose of a guardian? Even if Yeul’s in
no danger of dying, why would any of the Yeuls ever come to like and respect a
man who’d let her wander around in a city under siege by magic crystal
zombies? Is emotional support just not a
possibility here? Is he not even going
to try and rescue her, or protect her, or anything? And what the hell is she doing here? Where is that (besides some random location in the first game)?
You with me so
far? Good. Because it gets worse.
4) This entire conflict is built on bullshit.
From what I can gather,
this entire game could have been avoided (besides what I pointed out last time)
by Yeul actually…well…to put it simply, having a personality.
This is the inherent
problem with Yeul, and a lot of JRPG waifs by extension; they’re not characters
as much as they are sketches, plot devices, and/or someone to pity. Yeul is supposed to be a seeress who’s out to
protect the sanctity of the timeline, but she does a tremendously shitty job of
it; the most she does in the entire game is spout exposition, spout cryptic exposition, act like a pretty
little sunflower, and die. That’s
it. If the intent was to have the player
sympathize with her, or try to understand her plight, there’s been a severe
technical error. All Yeul had to do to
bring this story to a halt is tell Caius to knock it off -- which is something
she should have done, considering that A) she’s effectively immortal, and B)
Caius’ end goal isn’t going to make her life better, but just ruin everyone
else’s.
We have no idea what it
is Yeul wants or what her desires are.
The Yeuls all tend to die with a smile on their faces, so you could
argue that she’s at peace with the idea…but considering that she helps Caius
anyway, it’s another case of conjecture =/= confirmation. And we have no idea how she feels about being
a seeress because she’s there to fill in this Mad Libs page of a plot. Like I said before, it’s guilt by association
of the highest caliber -- and if not that, then she’s the TRUE villain because
she’s content with letting Caius wreak havoc on the timeline. And if she can see the future and knows that
Caius is going to effectively shatter reality, why the hell doesn’t she stop it
as someone who has to “protect the sanctity of the timeline”? And on top of all that, Yeul -- one of the
ONLY main characters in this thing -- doesn’t even appear in the ending. At all.
From start to finish, Yeul is just a commodity -- a plot device used to
give Caius and Noel pathos and motivation.
That’s pretty fucked up.
But whatever. If Squeenix can’t be bothered to think about
Yeul (because -- say it with me now -- Squeenix hates women), I guess I
shouldn’t either. So let’s talk about
Caius for a bit.
I was about ready to
(reluctantly) name Caius as the best character in the game…not that that means
much, all things considered. But no, I
can’t give him that “honor”; that honor would have to go to Hope, who -- Subplot aside -- manages to at least TRY
to add some connective tissue between the two games and salvage whatever merit 13-2 ran through the trash compactor
once or twice or twenty-three times. But
I have to give Caius credit for at least offering glimmers of potential. There’s a good plot in there somewhere about
a man who was “blessed” by the gods and bound to a duty he doesn’t believe
in…but I’ll tell you right now that it’s not in here. Like Kingdom
Hearts 2’s Organization 13, Caius has no presence in this game except for
the beginning, a minutes-long taste in the middle-ish section, and crammed-in
plot details and “justification” at the very end. And in spite of all that, he still wins. Time ceases to exist, Serah’s dead, and chaos
seeps out from Valhalla into the world…and it barely felt like he had to do a
damn thing. This is in spite of being
the central villain.
Like Yeul, Caius’
motivations are hazy at best. You can
pare it down to the absolute basest description, “For a girl,” but if you think
about any of the circumstances surrounding it the whole plan falls apart. “In order to strip my dearest friend of a
fate that condemns her to eternal youth and effective immortality -- which she
seems to be okay with -- I’m going to kill a goddess so that time is wrecked
and my dearest friend will ________”.
Really, his end goal makes no sense; how in the world is ending time and
killing a goddess supposed to help Yeul in any way?
Previews for and
comments on Lightning Returns suggest
that because time has come to a stop, everyone who’s still alive will stay
alive, and everyone who’s dead will stay dead (though given how much 13-2 ignores the framework of 13, that’s subject to change). So if there’s a Yeul out there that’s still
alive, won’t she continue to be immortal?
If not, and if Yeul is dead, then aren’t you killing her permanently as
a result? How is that any different from
her visions of the future killing her?
And most importantly, what’s his plan afterward? Caius wins and gets everything he wants. So what, is he going to rule the
universe? Is he going to start killing
everyone? What is he -- well, I guess it
doesn’t matter, seeing as how the only characters that exist in this world
besides the main cast are quest vendors.
The implication here is
that Caius is -- again, like Yeul -- supposed to be a sympathetic villain. But I don’t buy it. In order for this Sephiroth knockoff to be
sympathetic, he has to be understandable.
Identifiable. There has to be
some method to his madness. It’s okay
for him to be an asshole about things, because he’s the villain -- but he can’t
be sympathetic unless there’s a good reason FOR him to be an asshole. If he’s just an abstract of a character with
an absolutely alien goal and alien concepts surrounding him, then he’s just an
outright -- and whiny -- asshole.
5) This game is about as defined as a six hundred pound man.
I would very much like
to know what the process is for building the worlds of 13 and 13-2. I would like to see video footage of the
discussions and construction of these areas the company expects us to wander
around in. I don’t like thinking of the
games as just a bunch of strung-together art assets (and again, in 13-2’s case they’re reused art assets), but more and more I find myself realizing that
there’s no other way to describe it. I
don’t know what goes on at Squeenix Keep -- or Tri-Ace Mansion, thanks to the
outsourcing at work -- but it seems like what we have here is a failure to
communicate.
I forgot to mention
this when I discussed 13-2’s “world”,
so I’ll go ahead and mention it here instead.
If you remember what I said in that post, I went on about how the
futuristic world of Academia -- which is four hundred years in the future, mind
-- is almost a point-for-point copypasta of any generic city of tomorrow you
can think of. I still stand by
that. But the thing that I didn’t say
was that in the context of the original 13,
it makes no sense. Remember, the opening
hours of the original game featured gunblades, super-empowering trenchcoats,
warmechs, bullet trains crashing into alls of what I can only assume (or hope)
are AR projections, machines that reverse or even nullify the flow of gravity,
jetpacks, rocket cycles, biomechanical attack panthers, and enough laser beams
for a thousand raves. The world of 13 is already futuristic enough;
Academia feels like a massive step backwards technologically, in that it’s too
identifiable with what you or I might expect a few decades down the line.
Too much information is
left either unexplored or banished to the godforsaken datalogs -- which is a
shame, because once again I can actually see the potential behind the
games. This game especially; instead of
going back (forward?) in time to see Caius’ past and how he became the
invincible Adonis he is today, we end up getting told all about his heroic
exploits…to some extent, at least. Again,
my brain has worked furiously to eject anything related to the game, but I
suspect that what I know about Caius came more extensively from a wiki than the
actual game. The one area that could
have offered insight into the world and maximized the time travel aspect ends
up becoming little more than a site for fetch quests and random asides --
doubly so, considering that the area is never given proper placement in the
timeline, as if the devs couldn’t figure out where to put it. There’s a subplot with Hope’s assistant
Alyssa that’s pretty much a dead end.
You know, I have a
theory: I think that for all future games, Squeenix should keep Final Fantasy and the like away from
science, technology, and any real-world mechanics. The franchise has been applying old-world
thinking to new-world situations without any forethought on how the two
mesh. FF13 could have been resolved almost entirely by a few phone
calls. 13-2’s eggheads think that just because they had one magic floating
space station means that they have to make another using their own
incredibly-faulty magic. And that’s
ignoring the barely-explained anachronisms of combat, like Vanille’s whip-rod,
Hope’s boomerang, and Noel’s double-antler swords. If they’d just explain why these things exist, or at least acknowledge that they
exist, then that’d be fine. IF they’re
not, they need to take these characters and ideas and put them in a simpler
setting. They need to put the fantasy
back into Final Fantasy. If they won't, they need to put some serious
time into explaining the worlds and how technology exists alongside magic. Right now, this shit ain’t flyin’.
6) Don’t go for hundred percent completion. Just don’t.
Eighty-three
hours. Eighty-three hours of wasted
time. I feel great empathy and sorrow
toward Kung Fu Jesus and his posse.
To their credit, they
had the foresight to grab the guide for 13-2
beforehand. Or at least A guide;
hard to say whether or not they found an online walkthrough, or just grabbed
the player’s guide -- a paperback that’s bigger than a lot of novels, based on
the times I’ve seen it at Best Buy. In
any case, if you’re going to go for 100%, the ONLY way to do so is with a guide
in your lap; there is no way for you to know exactly what you need to do in
order to get everything. The most
notable instance is a quiz minigame; there are questions that are based on 13’s lore and events you have no way of
knowing…and then there are questions where the right answer depends on whether
the two options are placed horizontally or vertically. I’m serious.
Your choices are “red” or “black”, with no contextual clues to even
begin helping you make a decision. It’s
like the Zodiac Spear all over again.
Even beyond that,
there’s a load of time-wasting that’s “necessary” for the “full effect” of 13-2.
You can pretty much measure your “progress” in this game by way of the
Fragments you collect -- little knickknacks unlocked by performing certain
tasks along the way. Kill off a giant
turtle after a dozen hours of grinding? Have a Fragment! Piss away your life with slot machines to
earn obscene amounts of coins? Have a
Fragment! Explore every inch of every
version of a map that’s been repurposed at least three times? Have a Fragment! Beat ALL the monsters? Have a Fragment!
It’s hard to say
whether or not 100% completion entails completing all the DLC
chapters/sidequests as well. I’m going
to give Squeenix the benefit of the doubt and assume that isn’t the case, but
then again I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
Even beyond that, the fact that DLC even exists and has the gall to
pretend that it adds anything significant to the story is like a slap in the
face from a giant squid on steroids. The
reason I say this -- and indeed, suggest that the whole concept of
hundred-percenting the game is pointless -- is because…
7) Accomplishment? Nah, man.
I don’t know if I
mentioned this or not, but whenever you turn on the game and load up your file,
you’ll get a brief cutscene. “Final Fantasy 13-2: The Story So Far,”
one of the game’s characters will say.
And you’ll get a menagerie of out-of-context clips from cutscenes you’ve
seen before. It’s supposed to serve as a
reminder of what you’ve done in the game so far, but it only reminds you of how
much time you’ve wasted. I say this
because even if you’re twenty hours into the game, you’ll see cutscenes from
the start of the game. And cutscenes that don’t really go
anywhere…which is arguably EVERY cutscene, but that’s neither here nor
there.
In any case, thinking
back on 13-2 and the KFJ LP, I’ve got
a theory. You can count the number of
significant events in this game on one hand -- one and a half if you’re
generous. They’re barely even full
episodes, at that; more often than not they’re just cutscenes that punctuate
huge swaths of nothingness. Serah and
Noel just wander from one era to the next with almost no connective
tissue, based on either happenstance of events or being strung there by one of the other characters. So, let’s see how many
significant, fully fleshed-out episodes there are. And before you ask, no, that twenty-minute dick-stroking
festival battle between Lightning and Caius doesn’t count.
Let’s see here. In relative order of appearance, Serah and
Noel…
-- meet and start on
their journey.
-- have to figure out
how to defeat the massive Atlas.
-- meet Hope and figure out what to do next have details projectile-vomited at them.
-- meet Snow, and have
to figure out how to beat a giant flan.
-- endure the siege of
Academia.
-- go through The
Subplot.
-- follow a chain of
events and crammed-in backstory/motivation through to the ending.
Off the top of my head,
that’s about it. The first meeting with
Caius isn’t applicable here, because it’s pretty much a random boss fight that
comes after wandering around an uninhabited town for a good hour. Nor can I count the sequences where the plot
comes to a halt and Serah and Noel waste time in some void, desolated version
of Valhalla. (Side note: why is there an
area named Valhalla if there’s no Norse mythology to speak of in the world of 13?)
The visit to the outer-dimensional casino is right the hell out because
it has no bearing on the plot, and is never even referenced by the leads after they
see it. The nomads’ fields have a
tangential relationship to beating the giant flan -- go here and kill this
dragon -- but you have no way of knowing that going in, and certainly no way of
knowing an hour later when you’re wandering the fields after you’re finally
allowed to access a weather machine that I’m pretty sure nomads wouldn’t be
using, especially if they’re supposed to be travelers that roam the land by
definition instead of building up these homes and this town and why do they
even have a weather machine what the hell is wrong with you Squee-
The devs were going on
in the past about the design philosophy behind 13-2, saying that it would be more “player-driven” instead of the
original game’s “story-driven” mindset (both of which are in contrast to the
upcoming Lightning Returns’ “world-driven”
mindset). There’s nothing inherently
wrong with being player-driven; the problem is that there has to be something
to drive the player. Wandering aimlessly across repeated
landscapes and doing arbitrary sidequests isn’t the way to do it. Nor is it blocking off the plot just to find
random knickknacks scattered across time.
And multiple knickknacks at that; if what I’ve heard is right, after The
Subplot you don’t just collect five out of seven possible Graviton Cores. You have to give Hope five WORKING Graviton
Cores, because there’s no guarantee that the ones you give him will work.
I’ve seen potato chips
thicker than the plot of this game -- and potato chips with more variation than
the worlds of this game, for that matter.
If you’re reading this, then you KNOW that there are games out there
that offer better plotting, better world-building, better worlds in general,
better progression, and of course better satisfaction. Pro tip: when Call of Duty is beating out your RPG in terms of offering the
player a sense of accomplishment, just go home and stand in a corner.
8) This game’s not just bad; it’s lazy.
It’s no secret that I
think vanilla 13 was a terrible game,
but to its credit, we can all see that some serious effort was put into
it. Misguided effort, without a doubt;
effort based on pandering and proselytizing, of course. But effort all the same. For better or worse they had a story to tell,
and they wanted to do it stylishly while simultaneously offering what they
hoped was the next evolution of the franchise.
It didn’t work, but at least they tried.
At least you know their hearts were in the right place.
Not so with 13-2.
It goes beyond just copy-pasting the same areas, or expecting
meaningless sidequests to substitute fun and progression, or the graphical
downgrade. The original game might have
had clunky and overwrought writing, but the devs knew how to make nearly every
cutscene look dynamic and animated (though they have a major problem with
dropping in unfitting music). I won’t
claim to know everything about the technical aspects, but at times 13-2 is downright sloppy and cheap. Right from the get-go, you'll probably find that framerate issues abound, even on the
technically-superior PS3 version.
But there's more. Instead of the dynamism you’d expect from cutscenes, plenty of them are
resigned to swiveling lazily around an NPC…assuming that the camera angle
changes at all. The character you aren’t
controlling will wander in and out of a frame with janky movements. Serah, Noel, Lightning, and even Mog will
resort to telling instead of showing ("Noel looked so sad," Serah remarks, even though the camera --however briefly -- doesn't show his face looking any different) whenever they can, and either allowing the
camera to pan over unimpressive landscapes or fade to black as the voice-overs
continue. And for supposedly
game-changing mechanics, neither the Live Triggers nor the Cinematic Actions
really appear all that much or have a genuine effect on the story or game…which
means that they’re as arbitrary as you’d expect from half-baked dialogue trees
or quick time events.
It’s almost as if this
game was rushed out to cash in on a brand name and recoup company
losses…naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, that’s impossible.
9) The DLC is problematic.
You know, I was about
to spout off about how all DLC is awful and a waste of money, but I stopped
myself before I could. I recognize that
there’s some good DLC out there. I’ve
never gone out of my way to get any, but I’d gladly assume that there’s some
good stuff out there. In my eyes, if the
DLC adds something substantial to the gameplay or the story at large (without
being required), then it’s fine. If arbitrary,
pointless, or blatantly ripped from the game, then we’ve got problems.
This game’s DLC has
problems.
Vanilla 13 veteran (and the best character)
Sazh is mostly strapped to the DLC; if you want to find out what he’s doing,
you have to pay additional money…and find out that he’s trapped in an
outer-dimensional casino. And you have
to gamble for an hour or two to save him.
What do we learn about him? That
he’s a good guy that loves his son. What
do we learn about the world? That if you
gamble enough, you can alter probability…in cutscenes at least, because good
luck with the slot machines. How much
satisfaction do you get out of this?
It’s proportional to how susceptible you are to a gambling addiction.
You can also buy
coliseum battles (that should have been in the game in the first place) that
let you fight against special enemies like Ultros, Gilgamesh, or even Lightning
herself. I think it’s pretty
presumptuous to assume that people would blow more money for a chance to hammer
Auto-Battle against more enemies with upwards of five million HP -- and to be
fair, a couple of them at a glance look like they require a bit more
strategy. On the other hand, the fights
aren’t so much “strategic” as they are “tricky”. Snow will charge up for his Limit Break and
instantly kill you pretty much no matter what you do if you aren’t
careful. Omega can’t be staggered, but
automatically goes into a stagger state after a few attacks. Gilgamesh will jump from having one million
HP to ten million on a whim, and when he’s down to 50% health he’ll go into
pissy-boss mode and cremate everyone. It
hardly seems ideal, especially considering that in the main story, it only
raises further questions about how Snow went from one era to the next, and what
he’s doing there if he was empowered by a fal’Cie.
As you can imagine,
that DLC is not too appealing to me. But
as bad as it might be, nothing could ever prepare me for --
Whoops. I think I’m going to have to save that for
next time. See you guys around. Be sure to check back soon, because there’s
something that really needs to be said about this game. And if nobody else is going to, then I guess
I pretty much have to.
Brace yourselves. It’s almost time for the end. And with it, The Truth.
I enjoyed your 13-2 posts (no matter how awful the game is/was), so i was initially bummed when you got that far only to give up. Glad to see the quality of the game was consistent, if anything.. right? Right? Yeahhhh, won't be playing this any time soon.
ReplyDeleteSmart move. It really is remarkable how so little can happen over such a huge amount of time -- up to and including the average cutscene. It's a pretty sorry sign when the number of "episodes" over the course of 13-2 pales in comparison to what you'd see in the first few hours of a comparable JRPG...or just a game in general, I'd bet.
ReplyDeleteThe minds behind this so-called Lightning Saga said (at one point) they were trying to make the game in the mold of Call of Duty. Remarkably, they managed to fail at that; they couldn't even make it to such a low-hanging fruit.