I don't hate final fantasy xiii I think it was a great game in its own right. With the good graphics, music, characters, plot and battle system, I didn't care about the linearity.

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The Cie'th stone missions. I'm still not done with them. And not only are there 64 missions, but there a pain to find too.
Also, getting CP was such a pain. It was really easy in the beginning, but then it kept getting harder and harder until you need at least 10,000 CP to actually level up at least one ability.

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I, in general, really enjoyed the game and found it entertaining. However, like Caro said, towards Chapter 11 and on, Grinding becomes such a pain to do and it gets annoying. However, being a grinder at heart, I'm used to it and I've come to enjoy seeing myself pwn monsters for good CP. The music was great, esp the battle theme and Lightning's theme and more. Graphics were beautiful and awesome. For the gameplay tho, I don't really like how moving was kinda choppy in the world map, esp when you've been still for a while and just start moving. the camera is kinda choppy as well. But overall, I'd give the game a good 8.5/10

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June Member of the Month and 10000th poster of the 10000 posts thread

for me...I LIKE FFXIII for the same reasons that everyone HATES it call me un-western if you'd like but if a game doesn't have linearity then it's not worth my time

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I would like to have seen a lot more depth and emphasis on weapon and item crafting. It seemed like an ad-hoc add-on that was just there and really didn't add anything to the game as a whole.

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(November 06, 2011 04:30:41 PM)Vardant Wrote:  I would like to have seen a lot more depth and emphasis on weapon and item crafting. It seemed like an ad-hoc add-on that was just there and really didn't add anything to the game as a whole.

I have to agree with this. It felt sorta like it was just added into the game to push up your final hour count on the game to try to trick you that the playtime compared to some of the older titles in the series.

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I didn't dislike Final Fantasy XIII. I thought it was a good game that took the "core" of the Final Fantasy experience (if you will) and stripped away everything else that was fluff or smoke and mirrors.

The story could have been better, but lets be honest we can rip apart pretty much every FF story. They went the opposite way they went with XII in XIII. Where XII was all about places and events, XIII was all about the characters. And like them or hate them, the characters in XIII are probably the deepest and most developed group of characters we've seen in a Final Fantasy game. And while the first 10 chapters are very slow and they wait way to long to introduce the villian and main plot, the game did avoid that habit FF games have of slowing down and/or introducing weird plot twists about 3/4 of the way through to keep them interesting.

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I don't mind the game being on rails. Every FF has had to progress down a set path if you really think about it. You just didn't notice as much because you were free to explore the overworld and cities for the most part, which included finding side-quests, before you had to progress with the story.
I didn't like 10 so much because it had you go down such a narrow path and the side-quests were less plentiful throughout the game. 12 addressed the problem nicely. The overworld was missing but each zone was massive and fun to explore.
13 had the same problem as 10 but it was made worse because it didn't have blitzball or a card game or Gold Saucer and the occasional city where you could actually talk with people and learn useful things to break up the story segments. They seem to be addressing the problem in 13-2 just like they did in 10-2. It isn't on rails because you can hop in an airship and go anywhere, or in this case you can hop around time in whatever order you please. I don't think it's a great way to deal with it though personally.
Also, it only had two characters that I liked or at least found tolerable. Lightning is a cool main character. Leagues above Tidus and Vaan. Also, Fang and Hope were ok, so I count each of them as half of a person

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I have two beefs with XIII:

- It's not fun to play a second time. Yes, X was linear, but when I played it a second time I was at an advantage. I know now that Rikku needs to learn some magic, for example. You cannot play XIII any differently from how you played it the first time.
- You can't level up between Gran Pulse and Chapter 12. Gran Pulse isn't a difficulty curve, it's a difficulty BRICK WALL.

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