Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Gamers: re-visiting final fantasy xiii

Once upon a time when I was 17 I started playing Final Fantasy X on my then-boyfriend's Playstation 2. Something like 200 hours later, it was decided. I loved the game.

Then the drive that my game was saved on was lost by his little brother. And I was sad. And I found that it was hard to replay the game when you already went through the whole story discovery and puzzle-solving process.

Quite a few years later, Final Fantasy XIII came out. And I fell in love with the strategy battle style, the story was interesting and the fights was surprisingly challenging for something that was admittedly, largely automated.

But then... I got busy. And it really is a long story why I stopped playing FFXIII, but long story short, I stopped playing.

But then one day... I got access to an XBOX 360. And I remembered FFXIII. I never did finish the game, and I regretted that. So I decided that I wanted to get it.

Took about a month to track the game down. It didn't help that I wanted to play it around the same time that FFXIII-2 was coming out around the time I was looking for it, or the fact that SquareEnix stopped producing FFXIII for the XBOX about two years ago.

But I finally got it.

The playing of the game is slow going though. Mostly because I've played a significant chunk of the beginning already. Granted the little details of the game were largely forgotten and I am enjoying bits of the lore involved, but overall I already know when and what happens and the puzzles involved in beating various "bosses" in the game.

(Except Odin. That guy was a pain in the ass to defeat and I kept selecting the wrong paradigm in my haste of quick flipping between them in order to keep Hope freakin' alive)

So in a way, I'm discovering the one giant downfall of role-playing, turn-based games. It's not easy to replay scenes and story. They're amazing and great the first time around, just frustrating the next.

I do still plan to finish and I'm probably going to try and log my gameplay here just to give myself some motivation and energy to defeat the "Big Bad" for the first time again. 

Nevermind the bloody bike fight with Snow and Hope that always ALWAYS require a precisely timed Gestalt mode ala Snow's Eidolon in order to not get wiped.

Not there yet, but I am completely dreading it.

But I really did miss playing Final Fantasy XIII and it is a great story.

Now... after perusing the FF wiki last night in order to catch up on Vanille's history and eventually getting to the plot of FFXIII-2 ... someone needs to explain it to me. Because it seems inherently convoluted and confusing as Sin.

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