Dragonchasers

Well that’s done. I think my last save was around 55 hours. I think 55 hours is about 20 hours too many for the game’s systems. At least for me. Some spoilers in this post, not around story but around challenges and pacing.

Initially I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII. Even in the super-linear part I found being the ‘coach’ of the team was pretty enjoyable. I was at 26 hours when I got to where the game ‘opened up’ and the change of pace helped me stay interested, but not enough to be doing the same fights over and over again for so many more hours.

A lot of RPGs have grinding and I generally don’t hate it, but in FFXIII the fights take a few minutes each. Not all of them, but later in the game, a lot of them. When you fight a baddie and it takes you 5 minutes to beat him, then fight another baddie just like him again, and then do it 30 more times, it gets to feel really repetitive. You get to the point where you know you’re going to win. That makes the fights start to feel slow, dull and repetitive. Character progression slows too and of course Final Fantasy is known for having relatively few skills. You know how it is: first you learn Fire then you learn Fira then your learn Firaga. They’re the same spell just with more potency.

Early on there’s a lot of story bits to break up the monotony, but the farther in you get, the longer the stretches of just fighting, fighting, fighting get. Early on there are other characters around your party that you interact with, at least a little. Later on, you’re the only sentient beings for long stretches of a time. They only dialog you’ll hear is your party saying the same old things during battle. I bet I heard Fang yell “Eat this!” at least 5,000 times.

Honestly I almost didn’t finish. I kept asking myself why I was still playing. This came to a head at the very end. There are 3 “final boss” battles in a row, with no Save Points between them. You can Retry a battle, but Save Points also double as shops and crafting stations. There’s also no way to use a buff item between these fights. (These can be a huge help and I’d been hoarding them for end game, of course.) Final Boss #1 was pretty hard. Final Boss #2 was fucking ridiculously hard for me. It casts a spell that would insta-kill 2 of my party, leaving me frantically scrambling to Raise them and heal the last warrior standing at the same time. I failed that one after a 15-20 minute battle and the idea of doing it again, and then doing a third boss… I actually exited to the Xbox Dashboard on the way to just rage-quit/uninstalling.

But instead I jumped online and read some strategies and decided to try it again and I beat it by the skin of my teeth. All my party was blinking that particular shade of red that means “Death imminent” but the second boss finally fell. Final Boss #3 is a timed battle and gosh do I hate timed anything. I expected it would break me but I figured may as well try it one more time and…it turned out to be really easy. And that was it: Game Over.

For “Post-Game” content you just load back at the save point right before the final 3 bosses and can go do whatever you want. There’s no context to it that I can see; it’s purely grinding to max out your characters. No thanks, I’d rather go clean a toilet or something.

And yet…there is a sense of satisfaction that comes with sticking through adversity and finishing the game. I’m glad I did it, now that it is done. I can’t imagine ever wanting to replay Final Fantasy XIII, but in spite of all my struggles I am kind of curious about Final Fantasy XIII-2. For one thing it’s much shorter. HowLongToBeat lists FFXIII at 48.5 hours and FFXIII-2 at 28 hours. For another thing, I’ve heard the battle system is improved. And lastly, it’s on Game Pass so why not.

But not right now. I need a Final Fantasy break. Halo Infinite is out in 2 days and I have a bunch of stuff on the PS5 I want to get into. Plus that big Caves & Caverns update for Minecraft is out and I wanted to check that out. So I’ll put off the next Gran Pulse Grind Fest, at least for a little while.

Progress in FFXIII has slowed somewhat, mostly due to a very sick dog. Lola was at the emergency vet twice in the past week. Lots of late nights trying to make her comfortable, lots of time standing around outside while she worked through stuff. She’s a little better now, but ~$2000 later we really don’t know what is wrong with her and I’m not convinced the meds she is on are doing more than treating the symptoms. She goes in for another battery of tests on Tuesday and I’m hoping we finally find out the root of her problem.

Being ANOTHER $2000+ in the hole will be good for my gaming backlog though, right?

Anyway, in spite of all that I did finally make it to the end of Chapter 11! Chapter 12 started with a battle that forces you to use a pre-determined party and it comes in hot right after a cut scene: this was a problem for me because one of the characters (Snow) I hadn’t touched in probably 30 hours of playing. I hadn’t unlocked any Crystarium nodes or updated his gear in all that time. Fortunately, the other two party members (Lightning and Vanille) were totally up to date so they carried him and eventually we were victorious, but it took a LONG time.

Immediately following this fight, I decided I’d better get my ‘unused’ team members prepped in case there are more pre-set battles in the future, and that’s when I learned I’ve gimped myself. Snow, Sazh and Hope all had 999,999 Crystarium Points. In other words, there’s a cap on how many CP a character can store (after every battle all characters gain CP even if they weren’t in the battle party) and I’d hit that point sometime in the past, after which additional CP was being lost. After spending all their points they are still pretty far behind the three characters I’ve been leveling up as I went.

So moral of the story is, spend CP even for characters you aren’t actively playing. Don’t be like me! Now I’m worried there’s going to be some grinding sessions in my future.

And while I’m handing out advice, I’d suggest not trying to convert a character into a role they aren’t “born” with. I decided to make Fang a Synergist (her ‘native’ roles are Sentinel/Saboteur/Commando) since my main party (Lightning/Vanille/Fang) didn’t have a Synergist. Turns out leveling up a new role takes huge amounts of CP (a lot more than ‘native’ roles) and the attribute bonuses you get are puny compared to sticking to the roles given to you in the early game. Ergo my Fang is a bit gimped, too.

Oh well. I think the game is designed so that you don’t have to make all the right decisions to be able to finish. Honestly the story-dictated boss fights haven’t been as hard as some side-quest bosses I’ve tried to take on. There seems to be quite a bit of ‘post-story’ content out there designed to challenge the min-maxers. Or maybe this is all wishful thinking on my part.

I guess we’ll see! I don’t expect to be sticking around for post-story stuff, what with Halo Infinite coming next week, not to mention the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is now on Game Pass. So is Final Fantasy 12 which is another game I’ve never finished. I don’t think I have much need to squeeze every minute of playtime out of these games! Life is too short!

When we last checked in with our intrepid heroes they were 26 hours into their Final Fantast XIII adventure and beginning Chapter 11. They’d arrived on Gran Pulse and were enjoying the wide open horizon, even if it was littered with beasties that wanted to kill them.

Fast forward another 13 hours. At hour 39 our heroes are…still in Chapter 11. Now staring glumly at the wide open horizon, sighing deeply at the prospect of fighting these same beasties over and over again.

But at least they can ride chocobos now.

I’m painting a pretty bleak picture, I realize, but I’m still playing and that should tell you it isn’t as dull as it seems. There are still creatures that can flatten us so challenges await. The world is quite pretty and some of the creature designs are really cool. There is plenty to do: the “open world” of Gran Pulse has a lot of missions to take on. All these missions are given by Cie’th Stones. Wait, what’s a Cie’th Stone?

Time for a history lesson. Hopefully I get this straight. In the beginning there was the Maker who created the world of Gran Pulse and populated it with two races, the Fal’cie and the humans. The Fal’cie are weird demi-god-ish creatures who seem to each be associated with some kind of element. On Gran Pulse the Fal’cie more or less ignore the humans, and vice versa.

At some point hundreds or thousands of years ago, a group of Fal’cie created Cocoon, a hollow moon that hangs above Gran Pulse. The Fal’cie brought a bunch of humans to Cocoon and cared for/guided them. (One of your party members points out “We’re like their pets” although the truth is more malicious.) At the start of the game your group are on (in?) Cocoon. By this point in time the Pulse Fal’cie and the Cocoon Fal’cie seem to be at odds. Or at least the humans of Cocoon have a huge amount of fear of Pulse, to the point where anyone who has been in contact with anything having to do with Pulse is “purged”. Or as some might put it: murdered.

Sometimes the Fal’cie need an extra pair of hands. When they do they convert a human into a L’cie. (You still with me?). L’cie get magical powers! That’s the good news. The bad news is, they also get a “Focus” (a quest of sorts) that they have to complete for the Fal’cie. If they succeed they get turned to crystal. Wait, if being turned to crystal is the carrot, what is the stick? If they don’t complete their focus they turn into a Cie’th which is a kind of mutant zombie-ish monster bent on destruction.

L’cie who become crystal exist in a kind of suspended animation until the Fal’cie need them again, at which point they are turned back to flesh and given another Focus. Cie’th, assuming they aren’t hunted down and killed, eventually turn to Cie’th Stones where they exist in some kind of purgatory for the rest of time, UNLESS a group of adventurers comes along, finds out what their focus was, and completes it for them.

So yeah, we’ve been helping these poor Cie’th bastards by completing their Foci for them. Weird thing though: while this is supposed to release the Cie’th to ‘move on’ in practice the Stones don’t vanish and we can repeat the quests (sorry, the Focus), so who knows what kind of scam is being run?

Any way back in real life, I’ve done about 16 of these quests and there are 64 of them. Hopefully I don’t have to do them all to finish the game because ye gawds that’s a lot of running back and forth. There ARE some fast travel points and I’ll admit I’ve been ignoring them in favor of randomly battling my way across the landscape to level up my characters. If I focused on more efficient travel I might be progressing faster, but then I wouldn’t be as leveled up and fights would be hard so who knows?

In some ways, this section of FF XIII is reminding me of Fallout 76, in a bad way. Remember when FF76 launched and there were no other humans and you got all your quests from robots or computer terminals or something? It just made the world feel dull. Same thing here. You are literally talking to stones to get quests and there are no other sentient creatures in the world (so far). It’s just the six of you and any bits of cut-scene/story-building are few and far between. In practice I’ve been using the same three characters in the same configuration for all the time I’ve been in this chapter.

The fun at this point is trying to take down enemies as quickly and efficiently as possible while continuing to unlock nodes on the Crystarium. There is an upgrade system for gear but I still haven’t done much with that because I don’t feel like I have the ‘end game’ gear to focus on.

HowLongToBeat.com says FF XII can be completed in 48.5 hours for the Main Story. I’m note sure how that would happen because I don’t feel close to the ending, but maybe it all happens in a rush? I’m pretty ready for it to be over though, but not to the point where I’m ready to just say “Heck with it, I’m not going to finish.” It might be the kind of game where I have to just set aside a day of the week to play it and slowly push forward. We’ll see. That’s always a slippery slope because then you skip that day one week and then you forget all about it the next week and soon enough you’ve forgotten how to play.

Last night I crossed the 26 hour mark in Final Fantasy XIII. Actually I’m at 27. That’s 14 hours in about four days, which is a lot of gaming for me. Having days off for Thanksgiving helped, of course. So how’re things going?

Twenty-seven hours in I’ve just reached Gran Pulse and the start of chapter 11 which is, according to my vague memory of my last attempt to finish this game, where things “open up” and you start making some decisions for your party. Chapters 1-10 are very linear aside from some very short side-passages that generally hide a goodie behind a slightly more difficult than usual fight.

I haven’t really minded the linearity in and of itself. I’m one of those players who can enjoy doing battles and progressing characters just to earn the ‘rat pellet’ of another cut scene or chunk of story. In FFXIII I enjoyed the process during chapters 1-8. Chapters 9 & 10, though, were both slogs. They were both much too long or contained too little story, depending on how you want to look at it. The environments the party was moving through were monotonous, the enemies I was fighting were too familiar (slightly more powerful varients of baddies I’d been fighting for 8 chapters). Progress was starting to slow down. I’m hoping chapter 11 rejuvenates my interest which, I must admit, has been flagging.

One other point about Chapter 9. You’re on an enemy airship in this chapter and you’ve triggered an alarm. For almost all of this chapter there is a claxon blaring. I would like to find the person who thought this was a good idea and punch them in the ear in order to recreate the headache they gave me. This chapter literally cleared the room: Partpurple couldn’t take listening to it any more and left. I finally just turned the sound off and played in silence.

There was a tough boss fight at the end of chapter 9. I failed my first attempt on him after a long fight. This boss casts Doom 20 minutes into the battle. When a character has Doom cast on them, a timer starts counting down and when it reaches 0 it is game-over. To the best of my knowledge there is no way to remove Doom so basically it’s a time limit in the form of a spell. I am going to guess it takes 5 minutes for Doom to proc. Spending 25 minutes on a boss fight and losing due to a mechanic like this was discouraging enough that I didn’t want to repeat it. (Without the Doom spell I would’ve beat him; I was handling all his most potent attacks without losing characters; I just wasn’t doing damage fast enough.)

Before re-attempting the boss I did a small amount of ‘grinding’ by clearing a few encounters. That gave me enough experience to boost my character’s abilities a bit. Between that and some knowledge learned in the first attempt, I took him down the second time.

I wanted to talk a little more about character progression. You have six characters and there are six roles. Fairly early in the game each character receives three of these roles. You don’t level up the characters, instead you earn “Crystarium Points” from fighting. These points are used to unlock nodes on a ‘tree’, one for each role. Nodes provide either stats or skills. After a certain number of nodes are unlocked that character ‘levels up’ that role. Early on the game gates you in how far you can advance a role, which I think is meant to encourage you to unlock nodes in more than one role. A side-effect of this gating is that it is relatively easy to just unlock everything for each character, which is what I did for that Chapter 9 boss fight. I made sure everything was unlocked and that took maybe 10 minutes of grinding.

Only three characters at most can take part in a battle. In the early game the battle party is predetermined; again I think this is to force you to try different Paradigms and combat styles (see my post from early this week for more about Paradigms). Somewhere around Chapter 9 (going from memory) the game lets you start picking your battle party members. Then at the end of Chapter 10/start of Chapter 11 each character gets all six roles unlocked and the gates come down.

At this point my characters had their initial 3 roles all capped at level 3. I’m finding that progress beyond level 3 seems to slow down quite a bit. I’m not sure if maybe that is to encourage us to work on the other 3 new roles each character just received? (The Internet tells me characters are strongest in their original three roles, though.) I’m currently running Lightning, Hope and Fang as my party. Light is primarily damage. Hope is healer and buffer, Fang is tank and debuffer. I don’t really like Hope much, though, and would like to swap in Vanille, but she doesn’t have the buffer role (Synergist). Well technically she has it now but no unlocks for it. So the question is, do I spend a bunch of points teaching Vanille to be a Synergist or do I just forge on with whiny Hope in my party?

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for today. I’m just about where I abandoned the game during my first attempt at it. I can’t remember what Chapter 11 was like, so it’s time to go refamiliarize myself. If the pace doesn’t pick up from chapters 9 & 10 then I might be coming to the end of my time with Final Fantasy XIII.

Update:
Finally thought to capture a full battle. This was my first time encountering triffids so I need Libra to learn about them. At one point I popped a potion more to show off that there are potions than for any other reason. Fight was dicey for a bit, then we staggered the big flora thingie and juggled it until it was dead.

It’s been about a week since I started playing Final Fantasy XIII again. When I jumped back in I found I had a save file with 30-ish hours of playtime, but I couldn’t really remember how to play. I started a new game with my intention being to play the first 5-10 hours to get reacquainted and then switch to the 30 hour save.

So far I’m about 13 hours in. I think I’ve re-learned all the main systems and there’s no good reason for me to soldier on in this new save at this point. FFXIII is a linear game and it’s not like I can make different choices in this play-through. And yet, so far at least, I’m having too much fun to make the jump.

In truth FFXIII makes it easy to come back. There’s a ‘datalog’ feature that gives a textual recap of all the cut scenes and everything that has happened so far. I could read through all that and be totally caught up on the story. The various tutorials that you encounter can also be re-visited at any time. Kudos to the devs for offering these options.

I still might jump to the old save, but the vibe of the game is currently hitting me just right. Yup, it is super linear, and in some ways the game almost plays itself. But it’s awfully pretty and has a great soundtrack and I’m finding it quite soothing to play. With all the shit going on in the world, just easing into a mellow, escapist game is feeling really good right now.

It’s been a long time since I last played, but I think I am playing much differently than I originally did. FFXIII’s combat is base around teams of 2 or 3 characters with real-time, though not action-based, combat. There’s a bar called, I think, the ATB (Action Time Bar, maybe?) that you slot abilities into. During battle this bar fills up and when full your character performs the actions you’ve slotted. Then you slot new abilities in and wait for it to fill. The bar is broken into segments and different abilities take up different numbers of segments.

The game offers a way to automate this slotting of abilities into the ATB. I generally resist automation in games and I’m pretty sure I slotted things manually the last time I played, but this time I’m just letting the computer take care of that. I just pick the targets and the “AI” slots appropriate abilities. Honestly it does a better job than I do because it remembers what different kinds of attacks enemies are susceptible to. If an enemy takes double damage from Fire attacks the AI will slot Fire attacks whereas I’d probably never remember to do that.

In any case the AI always handles the abilities of characters 2 & 3; at best you can micro-manage the leader. There may come a time when I have to do that, but I haven’t encountered it yet and there’s a nice flow to battle when you’re just making the big decisions.

So about those big decisions. Each character can take on different roles. Roles are things like Commando (tank), Ravager (dps), Synergist (buffer), Medic (healer) and so on. You set up sets of this roles into a mechanic called Paradigms.

So maybe I have a Paradigm where Character 1 is a Medic, Character 2 is a Synergist and Character 3 is a Commando. That would be kind of a defensive Paradigm. Then I’d set up a 2nd Paradigm where Characters 1 & 2 are Ravagers and Character 3 is a Commando. That’d be be offense/assault Paradigm. You have have up to 6 of these Paradigms set up, and you can (and will) change them on the fly during a battle.

So instead of micromanaging the abilities my leader is using, I am instead constantly changing Paradigms and enemy targets. I guess the best analogy would be that I’m playing as the Coach of the team, calling the plays, but the AI is taking care of the moves each player makes. Here’s a short example video. Sadly the Xbox will only save 1 minute of video at 1080P so you only see the end of this fight when only a single foe is left standing. Need to start streaming then grab clips I guess.

I think this keeps me engaged. A lot of the battles are kind of trash mobs where my goal is basically “Kill them as fast as possible” (the game awards you for finishing battles quickly) with intermittent encounters where you have to think a lot more about what roles you need when.

And in between the battles, lots of anime-esque cut scenes where we learn about the characters’ backstories and watch the current story unfold.

So far, I’m digging it. There’s a lot more to the combat system but I’ve bored you enough for one post.