WARP ZONE Game Club - Final Fantasy XIII

Tradegood · January 26, 2025, 5:30pm

I powered through the end of chapter 9 and chapter 10. I was paranoid reading Herb’s difficulty with the Chapter 9 boss that I spent all my upgrade chips maxing out Lightning and Fang’s weaponry, and ended up beating that fight in under 10 minutes!

Depending on your perspective I think one of this game’s strengths / weaknesses is how battles have timing thresholds built in. Things like enemies summoning other enemies in or behemoths standing up in the middle of battle and instantly getting their health back is frustrating, however it feels great when you kill them before they can pull off that maneuver. The problem is that the timing window for some of this stuff is so tight that the best strategy is usually to just go COM-RAV-RAV* and hope you don’t have to heal. Changing paradigms to debuff the enemy and changing back feels is a risk that sometimes isn’t worth taking in some of these more speed-focused fights.

In general, the game was giving me some fatigue the past week or so. There’s a small paradox here where it feels like chapters are a bit too long and driven home a bit too hard, but at the character development happens extremely fast. Like, it takes hours for our characters to come to terms with things and there’s hours in between them, but it still feels like the characters are going through so much so quickly. I think because the game takes a while to set everything up, and then knock everything down over the course of 3 chapters, it feels like it’s happening all at once. Also, the weight of Lightning, Snow, Hope, and Sazh’s development makes Fang’s confrontation with her summon look a little trivial/rushed in comparison.

Chapter 11 spoilers:

Coming to Gran Pulse always feels a little bit demoralizing. Maybe it’s just because I know I’m going to be here for a while. The game now slows down and spreads out, there are lots of enemies who one-shot you, and you can’t just continue the rest of the story. You have to meander and do some sidequests to get ready, which also get pretty tough pretty quickly. The sidequests are very light on presentation and almost de-emphasized compared to the breadth of Pulse. Pulse has never really been a place I’ve felt comfortable hanging out in.

On the upside, the feeling of freedom of having your party all together and really getting to customize my loadout in the crystarium is nice.

*- I read this as COMPUTER, RAVIOLI, RAVIOLI

Herb · January 26, 2025, 5:41pm

Yeah, I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to be worried about going into that fight unless they’ve also been actively avoiding the vast majority of encounters.

antillese · January 26, 2025, 7:02pm

I think I’m almost done with Chapter 7 and still don’t like Snow or Hope.

I also really didn’t like those flying motorcycles that can one-hit kill your lead party member unless you manage to physically navigate the menus fast enough to get sentinel up and the right sentinel ability up. It took me a few fights to figure out that was what the expectation was. And I don’t see monsters on the map, I just see a piñata full of Crystarium Points waiting to be cracked open, so my characters are nearly always at the top of their trees.

Tradegood · January 26, 2025, 7:12pm

I would recommend you hose your characters down with Fortisol before any fight that the party gets wiped! Using buffs outside of battle makes life easier.

Don’t feel like things are ‘too good to use’ on random enemies in this game. This game’s economy is such that you have a lot of money hidden in the form of duplicate accessories and ingots, nuggets, and credit chips to sell. So even if it looks like you’re short on cash, you probably have more than you think. Most important thing is to make sure you’re well stocked on Phoenix Downs (at least until you get 2+ characters with Raise ability) but other than that might as well spend money on consumables.

antillese · January 26, 2025, 7:17pm

I absolutely do not understand the interplay between the item drops, the upgrades, the weapons, the Gil, and “the economy”. Reading this thread hasn’t calmed me down about it with all the concern about upgrading the wrong items at the wrong times!

Example: I am excited about this new Gunblade (I cannot believe I’m excited about a Gunblade) and it’s a 30% reduction in stats. So now I need to figure out what I can sell, what I should just upgrade into the weapon, and what to spend money on to bring it up to parity so I can use it’s great new ability.

Do you have any suggestions to navigate that?

I’d also like to reemphasize that this has been a fun thread to be participating in with all you old-school Light-heads and all the others like me who are playing through the game for the first time. It’s been a delight! Very thoughtful, very critical, and very Insert Credit Forums.

captain · January 26, 2025, 7:30pm

I think I’m the caboose on this train so nothing new, but I’m in chapter 4 now playing as Vanille and Sazh. I appreciate that the game is forcing me to understand the different ways you can configure your team/paradigms and how to deal with different permutations of enemies, but I also don’t quite understand what it’s asking of me sometimes.

Sazh can be RAV and SYN, and Vanille can be RAV, SAB, and MED.

For one battle, a group of those robot wildcat things is fighting a group of junk robots. I started RAV RAV in order to gang up on the robots, which are ordinarily difficult to kill because of their high defense and RAV RAV’s inefficient staggering (attacks from the cats seem to have the same effect as COM attacks in terms of slowing the stagger gauge). When the robots were through, the cats became difficult to fight and made pretty quick work of both Vanille and Sazh, even after I SYN SAB’d everyone.

I started the fight over, still RAV RAV but starting with the cats. I had a hard time staggering the remaining robots. I made it through eventually (again switched to SYN SAB to make things smoother) but it still took so long that I got a 0-star rating. Not really sure what the lesson was supposed to be with this particular fight, but it did bring up some long-forgotten memories of bashing my head against the wall my first time playing this game 15 years ago.

Unrelated, what’s up with the target time on the Shiva fight:

captain · January 26, 2025, 7:36pm

Taliesin_Merlin · January 26, 2025, 10:49pm

In the Snow/Hope part of Chapter 7, I put together the lesson sequence that the game was offering me. It was something like this:

Base units - Just slop all over 'em
Flying unit - With my setup, better to start COM/RAV, go RAV/RAV to build up Stagger, and then back to COM/RAV because Snow hits harder with his physical attacks
Multiple flying units - same, with greater care to go COM/MED to heal, OR SEN/SYN at the start of the fight to get protective spells up to need to heal less often.
Bike - SEN/SYN is needed to soak the first gatling gun, after which it’s the usual rhythm of building up stagger and then switching to physical attacks for Snow
Bike + 1 flying unit - Soak the gatling gun with SEN/SYN, then take out the flying unit, then go for the bike, ready for a second gatling gun if time runs out
Bike + 2 flying units - The same, but with more use of SEN/MED or COM/MED when I need the breathing room to recover

There’s more to it than that, but it’s sort of like a fencing lesson, starting from basic attacks to building up to anticipating actions and deciding on a larger strategy to get through the encounter. It’s quite nice.

Also, this screenshot is totally Xenosaga Episode II. I’m having flashbacks to launching enemies in the air.

Also also, ads.

FishHead · January 28, 2025, 10:37am

Just got to that very part of chapter 7.

The Orion fight at the start was a bit of a headscratcher for me and while I won it closely with 5 stars I still don’t really get what I was supposed to do there.

The very first time going into that fight, Snow was very underpowered because I hadn’t put any points in his chrystarium since I last had him in a party, which was Chapter 2 or 3 maybe?

But even after I did that I could only hang on by a thread. Commando attacks did basically nothing against Orion and while Ravager attacks did some damage he started spamming some electric attack that killed me multiple times.

Auto-battling with the sentinel role seemed kinda useless since Snow would spam Provoke 4 times in a row while getting pummeled. Manually using steel guard only drew the fight out and while vengeance was supposed to do a strong counterattack I was very underwhelmed by it.

Ultimately I feel like I got kind of lucky because the RAV attacks sometimes stunned or interrupted the enemy. That didn’t feel particularly reliable though, so I can’t say I feel like I really did all of that right.

I’m kind of just glad it’s over but I’m not looking forward to the Hope/Snow segment coming up.

Herb · January 29, 2025, 2:09pm

I think I’m close to the end of Chapter 11. It’s sorta been a careful what you wish for kinda situation, the map has opened up significantly in areas, but I’m not liking the feel of things as well as the series of corridors. The openness just emphasizes how annoying the camera is and has really highlighted how cumbersome the map is – and the fast travel is annoying in the way it’s incorporated. Why can’t the save points just act as fast travel points like 95% of games? Why can’t the fast travel points show me where the locations are on the map instead of just giving me a list of names that don’t mean much to me? There’s also been significantly less character moments and movies this chapter, which has been a bummer for me.

The graphics continue to impress. I still can’t get over how the models and environments look so much more detailed than Metaphor:Refantazio, a AAA JRPG that just came out. Granted, I like Metaphor’s artistic direction better, but FFXIII just eats Metaphor’s lunch on a lot of technical aspects and it’s from 2009!

Blinded by Light is a fantastic song and basically every JRPG is guilty of this – but could we get multiple battle songs? This has peeved me since I was a kid: why do JRPGs insist on playing one song ad nauseam?

I’d been using the upgrade system sparingly, but I finally broke down and looked at a guide to see what is what, with the upgrades in this game and I’ve got to say, the upgrade system is heinous. It’s a pointlessly convoluted newb trap. Upgrading as you go along, as I’ve been doing is very inefficient and the game’s structure incentivizes sparingly upgrading and then blowing all resources at once. Basically there’s two upgrade item categories: organic stuff and machine parts. Organic stuff’s main function is to act as a multiplier for the big points of machine parts. If you use machine parts it lessens your current multiplier from organic stuff, after the use. So through this, the game is incentivizing the player to hoard materials and dump them all in one go for max efficiency. Each weapon has point thresholds too, which the game doesn’t give you any indication what they are, so you can either consult a guide every time you want to upgrade an item or risk spending excess materials. Very cool design. It’s all sorta annoying, the materials are a pointless abstraction, instead of having dozens of organic and machine parts the game could’ve just gave the player organic and machine currencies and there would be no functional difference. Or better yet, and simpler, they could’ve skipped all the bloat and just used gil for upgrades.

Herb · January 30, 2025, 1:56am

Every time I begin to waiver on this game, it hooks me right back in. As bad as chapter 11 was, chapter 12 just waltzed in and unleashed a salvo of some of the dumbest/coolest video game spectacle ever. Eye candy isn’t a proper enough descriptor. This is some eye-nose-candy. I just did a line of FFXIII with my eyeballs.

Herb · January 31, 2025, 11:20am

I finished FF XIII, with around 44 hours clocked on it. My feelings upon completion aren’t too different from my impressions I had of the game over the years. I think uneven is the best word I have for the game. It impressed me at times and just as often frustrated me, the highs were higher than I anticipated and the lows were lower.

When the combat is good I like how it’s a sorta vibes-based combat system, that has a fun push and pull to things. Managing yoyoing health bars, while efficiently swapping between paradigms can be solid fun. I like that a Final Fantasy, finally scratched at the surface of what could be done with the ATB system.

When the combat is bad, it’s incredibly annoying. Many of my frustrations come back to the inexplicable decision to fail state the game if the party leader dies. This game has some one-shot BS moments that would make most SMT games blush. Things would be more enjoyable if the game did a better job telegraphing different moves of the enemies, it’d be especially helpful if they created a visual language to help signpost different types of important upcoming enemy attacks. Many fights where I’d die it was a pure game knowledge thing and not a poor decision-making thing, like I’d die to some BS and be like, “well, now I know that’s a thing.” There’s too many binary situations like that, where the player dies from lack of knowledge or the solution to a fight is specific and you either have the right tools on hand or you die. Walk into a group of ice bombs and don’t have Fang in the party to silence them? Congrats you’re dead. Didn’t bring a sentinel to a fight against a flying motorcycle? Congrats you’re dead.

The game seems to expect you to swap out party members occasionally as the situation dictates, yet FF XIII makes it extremely cumbersome to do so. The fact that paradigms have to be reconfigured every time you swap party members is baffling. Why doesn’t the game just save my configurations for each grouping? It just leads to a lot of purposefully avoiding combat for me. Why would I spend 2 minutes swapping in Fang, setting up the paradigms, and updating her crystarium for a 30 second encounter? I’m just walking by that annoyance every time. I really wish the game would have allowed for swapping members mid-combat, as well as swapping of individual roles on the fly, would have made for much more interesting combat possibilities.

I expect most every Final Fantasy story to be fairly nonsensical and I mainly just play these games for the characters, so XIII was okayish story-wise for me. The cast was fairly likeable and I didn’t even mind Hope by about halfway through the game. Bonus points for being a Final Fantasy game and only having one character with amnesia – and it was just partial and not used as a narrative trick. While I try not to get too hung up on the content of the story in these games, there were definitely moments where the manner in which things unfolded was jank, to put it lightly. I will still never understand why within the world of FF XIII coffins are used as stretchers – I mean I do, it’s a contrivance by the writer for cheap shock, but just saying. Admittedly I only ever paid half attention to anything, but I don’t know how the events at the end with the final boss and thereafter are supposed to make sense. It goes basically like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB5ig6vpQug

just replace “newt” with “cie’th” – and later with “crystal.”

Speaking of the final boss, this is definitely one of the lamest antagonists to grace a Final Fantasy, they just have nothing going for them, not even a cool design. Exdeath was also a nothing antagonist, but I guess at least he looked sorta cool while being evil with little else of interest going on character-wise.

The decision to have nothing in the way of a traditional RPG town, and well hardly any interactive elements whatsoever was certainly a bold choice – one I strongly wish they didn’t make.

I could go on and on for a while with different nitpicks, but I’m tiring of my own negativity and sorta disappointed that I didn’t find more to love in this game. In the end Final Fantasy XIII is a visually and sonically gorgeous game of fighting enemies and watching FMVs. Sometimes those fights are good, other times not – and most of the time those FMVs are good, but some times not.

Taliesin_Merlin · February 1, 2025, 3:17am

I finally was able to finish chapter 7 and start chapter 8. Subjectively, I feel like an act has been turned in the game, since Hope has let go of his vendetta for Snow, Snow has actually accepted a degree of responsibility for what happened to Hope’s mom, and Lightning is relaxing somewhat as a character toward both Snow and Hope. Fang’s great; I don’t have any notes on her yet.

This section had some of the best battle transitions so far, blending the cinematics and battle transition. It’s harder to tell from a screenshot, maybe, but they played really smooth:

The section in Hope’s house is strange, because the game switched up its ordinary way of interacting with it. Instead of just cinematics and traversal, it gave a rare moment of exploration and descriptive text as Fang walks around. Are these supposed to be Fang’s thoughts, the player’s thoughts, or a sort of floating narrator’s thoughts?

The sense, hinted at but not explicitly expressed, is that Hope and his dad were estranged. But it’s odd that the game doesn’t touch on it more, odd enough that I don’t know if I’m reading too far into that. His father seems to step up in the moment that he needs to, very weird sci-fi tie and all.

Another strange part of the interaction is letting Fang see an open door with Lightning in it, but being unable to interact. Eventually a scene with Lightning and Snow does play, but the sense throughout - from the beginning to that moment and beyond - is that Fang is eavesdropping. Maybe she’s an eavesdropper in more ways than this?

Again, it’s a weird moment if nothing comes of it. If something does, then I’ll be impressed.

Tradegood · February 3, 2025, 4:37am

Chapter 11 is iinteresting. The open world is rough going at first and the change of pace is kind of overwhelming, but you eventually you get into the flow enough that taking down each of the quests is fairly easy and each crystarium pinata feels like a big pop. Knowing when to avoid the difficult enemies is key (since they don’t drop enough points to be worth it anyway). I found myself really enjoying the open world the more I hung out in it. But as soon as I went into the caves and started to progress in the more linear part of the level, it’s gotten a bit frustrating again. I spent about 40 minutes dying against Vanille’s Eidolon. and felt kind of annoyed I didn’t just spend that time grinding up my secondary classes to level 4.

I think I can comfortably say while this game pays off its narrative beautifully and consistently throughout, the pacing is very draining. Every time I boot it up I know I’m going to have to just power through back-to-back-to-back battles. Sometimes the intrinsic pleasure of these fights really connects and feels so nice. Other times it feels tedious, and I can’t really predict when or why that is. It’s a weird game to reassess, because I constantly feel like the more I think, the more I’m missing the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, among the joy and frustration, this game is overbearing in a neutral sense. It demands your attention and attacks you on all sensory levels in a way that replaying older FF games doesn’t feel. It is the opposite of a cozy bedtime game in that way. This part of the game in particular I think would benefit by being a lot more low-key.

Hunter · February 3, 2025, 7:00am

Yea I think there’s a certain level of type-2 fun present with FFXIII, which is why my feelings for it have only grown fonder over time. I remember feeling pretty exhausted at the end of some play sessions because of how ceaseless the waves of enemies were in some of the longer linear sections.

Not sure if we’ll get there but if anyone continues on to Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, wow, you’ve got a big storm coming. It’s like Majora’s Mask on speed. Overbearing doesn’t even scratch at the surface. That timer + all of the stuff the game demands of you makes for a very stressful experience. Also very much type-2 fun, but I could only play in short bursts before feeling a legitimate physical response to it. Maybe this comparison also softened my views on XIII as well

GameBeginnerGirl · February 3, 2025, 12:24pm

In case that sounds discouraging to anyone else, I would humbly submit to experience the FF13 trilogy the way I do when I replay them now: cheat. Trivialize the combat and remove the friction. When I play LR I play with a Cheat Engine code that stops the timer, for instance

Anywho just wanted to throw out there that if anyone is feeling intimidated or put off by that overbearingness, simply remove it by cheating!

This PSA brought to you by a shameless cheats user

sapphicvalkyrja · February 3, 2025, 1:30pm

What sort of party setup are you using? That can make a lot of difference to how battles feel, particularly when you hit the open world. Some of the zones out there are pretty rough, though. The sahagin particularly always irritate me…

Tradegood · February 3, 2025, 5:44pm

When fighting overworld monsters I’m running Fang - Lightning - Vanille, which leaves a gap at Synergist, but I’ve been doing fine without it for the most part. I kinda don’t love having my party leader be sentinel, but I do like the added control during tense moments since they usually default try to get aggro every time when I sometimes wait until the last second to switch and I need them to start blocking instead. I should probably edit the gambits but I’m afraid to mess something up there.

I’ll start an encounter with COM-COM-SAB if it’s a physical vulnerable enemy. If it’s a pre-emptive strike then I can quickly stagger or keep the stagger bar up while debuffing them.

COM-RAV-RAV to get that stagger or magic vulnerable enemies.

SEN-COM-MED or SEN-MED-MED if I need health or need to raise someone

SEN-COM-SAB if a fight is going a bit longer and I need to debuff the enemy or draw attention away from Vanille.

Herb · February 3, 2025, 6:01pm

That’s the same configuration I ran for 99 percent of the fights, except I had Lightning as party lead. I only had like two fights where I felt I needed a synergist and they both came back to back, oddly enough.

I would start out battles as COM-SAB-SAB and then the majority of time I’d either be in COM-RAV-RAV or COM-RAV-MED.

sapphicvalkyrja · February 3, 2025, 6:14pm

Those three are my preferred end-game party (probably surprising no one, really). While in general I find it best to avoid leveling secondary roles until the late game (each character’s primary roles get pretty big stat bonuses and the like from the higher crystarium levels), Lightning actually makes a solid Synergist (mostly because she gets Haste). If you’re not planning on any end-game activities, you can probably skip farming for it if you don’t want the grind, though

Something worth noting is that Commando and Saboteur both slow decay on the Stagger gauge (as does Sentinel’s Provoke, iirc, though this is less useful generally), so it’s often viable to run something like SAB / SAB / RAV as an opener with this party, since Fang and Vanille have some different debuffs they can apply while Lightning can work on staggering something quickly. Alternatively, SAB / RAV / RAV works well sometimes, though Fang isn’t as solid a debuffer as Vanille by her lonesome, so I favor the other combo. Either way, this also gets you away from running double-COM, which is usually not ideal, since it makes the two Commandos attack separate targets and most fights will flow better if you pick off one target at a time

I personally don’t like over-relying on Sentinel (outside of some particular bosses or hunt marks). It’s typically only on one of my Paradigms (usually either SEN / COM / MED or SEN / MED / MED), since for the most part you don’t want to spend much time in your defensive Paradigms: drop in, heal up, and then get back on the offensive as soon as possible. I will usually run some form of COM / RAV / MED or SAB / RAV / MED for a more “balanced” Paradigm for fights where SEN isn’t really needed, though