Final Fantasy XIII Spoiler Thread (SPOILERS)

[Makoeyes987]

Snow is the himbo warrior of ditz of Final Fantasy. He does his best.

 

[Wol]

Honestly I can tolerate Snow better than Vanille, her voice and mannerisms are just plain irritating. Her moaning in battle also lmao.

 

[Leafonthebreeze]

My housemates wouldn't believe it was as bad as it is until I busted out this (which is the top result if you search "vanille ff13" on youtube...)

Love that it has to be marked as "no mature content"

 

[Makoeyes987]

Y'all just hatin' on her sunshine. She's living her best breathy life. Let her hentai moan suggestively in peace

Besides, Vanille is the noisy bottom of the relationship, it's her job.

Spoiler: In the future

Don't worry, when Vanille gets saddled with crippling suicidal depression, you'll never hear her be this noisy again. Ever.

 

[Leafonthebreeze]

Yeah tbf I cope by just assuming she's doing it on purpose to troll.

 

[Makoeyes987]

I mean, she sure as hell stops when she drops the whole pretending to be happy all the time.

Spoiler

The dark side of Vanille is she's a master manipulator, able to hide and mask her emotions easily in order to facilitate infiltration and mask her own negativity about herself. Her whole "genki girl" act is a sham, used to mask her guilt, self loathing and exhaustion at being a L'Cie. While Fang is a hard ass who lives in the moment, Vanille is stuck in the past and hides her feelings and shame.

 

[Wol]

I love how she keeps attracting enemies while walking and laughing at everything even if she knows the dangers of Pulse/Cocoon. Such care and worry for their comrades.

Liked her better in Lightning Revival or whatever

 

[Clement Rage]

Spoiler

Snow's not ditzy at all, that's a front

 

[Makoeyes987]

LOL yes he is. It is so not a front.

He's a very "act first, think later" kinda dude. And to his credit it actually inspires some people and can be endearing.

Spoiler: BIG spoilers for the rest of the XIII saga

It's why when Serah dies, Snow completely changes and has a 180 in character. He becomes completely morose, contemplative and pessimistic, until Lightning beats the depression out of him. He feels guilty, and second guesses if his way of doing things may have made him unable to be there for Serah. No, it's not a front. It's his whole way of life which he somewhat matures on when he experiences such a significant loss in his life.

 

[Clement Rage]

He lays it out in his first scene. 'People need heroes. If you keep your cool, they will too'. It's on purpose to keep everyone else from despairing.

Spoiler

Whenever he's alone, he's a lot more morose, and he is the first to get his eidolon, which is triggered by despair.
He's fully aware of how horrible the situation is, he's being relentlessly positive on purpose to motivate the people around him.

 

[Makoeyes987]

That doesn't mean it's a façade or fake, that's a statement of Snow's leadership and motivation style. He believes being positive and moving forward is a way of keeping a group organized and in control of a situation.

Spoiler

He was alone and morose because he stayed behind trying to somehow free and not leave behind a crystalized Serah. Which makes sense, that's his fiance. When he was unable to do anything for her and separate from everyone, yes he was on the brink of despair. I'm not saying he's unaware of how bad situations can be, but he's optimistic in the face of it.

 

[looneymoon]

Sarah should have gotten with the less annoying guy in that game I never played

 

[Torrie]

Stupid corridors, stupid Snow, stupid Shiva, stupid gestalt bar
You can tell I'm enjoying this game a lot

The game is actually visually attractive even if some things don't add up (yet), but the best thing about it is probably, just once again, the characters. They are very different and very human. It's always a fascinating psychological experiement when you have a very diverse crowd that has to cooperate in order to achieve a certain goal. I don't hate Snow. He's acting like a typical passionate 20-year-old who wants to make a difference and prove worthy. I don't hate Hope because he's just an unexperienced and immature young being. I don't even hate Vanille that much. I'm looking forward to seeing her cheerful defence drop and her breaking down. She has to. It's a storytelling axiom.

My current favourite is probably Sazh. Being surrounded by a bunch of kids and young adults makes you feel particularly old, and I know this feeling. I like the way he's open about his worries or fears and tries to stay reasonable. And the second best is, of course, Light, the epitome of natural coolness.

I'm gonna hope I can beat this stupid stupid eidolon soon. I've already looked up some strategies, but I still can't win.

 

[Makoeyes987]

The Shiva sisters boss fight confused the hell out of me too, don't feel bad.

The trick to winning the fight is not attacking.

Switch to the paradigm to Sentinel, and use steelguard over and over again. When you block with Steelguard the Gestalt meter fills faster, and that's the whole point of the fight. As soon as it fills, press the button to enter gestalt mode, and you'll be done.

So yeah, don't actually try to fight them. Just Steelguard for the win

 

[Leafonthebreeze]

God yeah I forgot how much that game handholds you through learning all the battle mechanics one by one. It's frustrating at the time but the end result is definitely why I like the battle system so much, it's one of the only games where I really feel like I understand it inside and out.

 

[MelodicEnigma]

Ah XIII, I'm always glad to see people still talking about it. I think I've seen more varying degrees of feelings for this series more than I have even for the Kingdom Hearts or Mass Effect series. Deep hatred to willful acceptance/love. This game is one of the only reasons to keep my PS3 around. I hope you have a good time with it, there's a section of the game that IIRC, I spent SO many hours doing and exploring, only to realize when I watched a full movie version on YT that the part of the game can actually be pretty short if you're blasting through XD Thinking back, I'm like "the hell was I doing the entire time?", but there was surprisingly a lot to do for how quickly you could get through it in retrospect.

So have fun with it. I played XIII right after XII, and I'll say I definitely liked the feel of XIII a bit more by that point. It takes a while to get use to knowing what's useful to do in what scenario for staggering and such, but like most RPG's it won't take long to put the grind in.

Spoiler: Character Stuff

But yeah, I absolutely enjoy the game the most because of the characters, no matter how often they're largely misunderstood to unreasonable degrees, especially Fang, Vanille, or Serah—the latter, it wasn't fun to see her get the "Raiden Treatment" for FFXIII-2 by mean spirited fans, though I do understand the disappointment of not primarily playing Light. Is what it is at this point. That's the wonder of perception I suppose. As for Hope or Snow, I've never had qualms with them—it's too apparent that the former is just a teenager with issues that predate the death of his mother. That's prime for angst and potential growth. That of his relationship with Snow and Light and that development was satisfying for me on what I can remember, but a lot of what I think is also meshed with the other two games as well in the grand scheme of their characters, so. Maybe I need to replay XIII, but I don't know, seems Hope's character was appropriate for what he was going through in the game.

 

[Wol]

In my opinion, characterization went a bit overboard and some dialogues are more melodramatic than necessary. I totally agree that the conflict of personalities is the biggest strenght of the party. Following them could be sometimes awesome or cringy, but it was never boring.

 

[MelodicEnigma]

Spoiler: Oh for sure

Take a drink everytime Light knocks Snow on his ass while he calls her "sis".

 

[ForceStealer]

God yeah I forgot how much that game handholds you through learning all the battle mechanics one by one. It's frustrating at the time but the end result is definitely why I like the battle system so much, it's one of the only games where I really feel like I understand it inside and out.

As someone who quite likes XIII's battle system, the way they stretch the tutorial out for like 2-5 hours is really ridiculous. It's not that complicated, Square, have some faith in your players.

 

[Maidenofwar]

I love how she keeps attracting enemies while walking and laughing at everything even if she knows the dangers of Pulse/Cocoon. Such care and worry for their comrades.

Liked her better in Lightning Revival or whatever

Uh yeah the whole problem was because Vanille DID care about people like (MASSIVE SPOILERS TORRIE DON'T READ )

Spoiler

the citizens of Cocoon and Dajh she didn't want to become Ragnarok while Fang didn't give a crap and would have destroyed everything and everyone, got no beef with Fang but yeah Vanille was explicitly on that train so she could escape so others wouldn't be hurt she was willing to become a monster for that, and she cared about Dajh, was trying to see if anything could be done before Fang punted her out of Euride

If Vanille was genuinely less caring or worried we wouldn't have a game.

Honestly the slander on my girl ?

Not that she isn't flawed, even Sazh is flawed and

Spoiler

he takes responsibility for that, as they all do in the end

Edit: Thought more about this and I suppose in her role as team cheerleader for the half of the game the encouragement and motivation to keep moving to look on the bright side despite bad things happening is the positive side while not being aware of immediate danger that might happen is the negative.

 

[Torrie]

@Maidenofwar, thank you, you're so conciderate
@Makoeyes987, I was able to beat Shiva in no time thanks to your tip! Much appreciated.

Sorry if you feel forced to talk in spoilers in a spoiler thread -- you don't have to. But I promise I'll catch up soon!

The longer I play, the more 13 feels very... Crisis Core-ish to me. Similar level design, similar vibes. Why oh why was it 13 and not CC to be released on console? Can you imagine playing CC with the same graphical fidelity? Woe is me.

 

[Clement Rage]

Take your time, soak in the atmosphere. I tend to talk in spoilers unless I have a reason not to, I have a stricter spoiler policy than most people.

 

[Torrie]

Fun fact: only around 45% of all FF13 Steam players make it to Chapter 5.

Running straight ahead still feels stupid, but at least I've learned to use paradigms efficiently enough. Or at least I think so.

Every time Fang appears on the screen I'm like Can't wait to have her in my party!
I'm also always low-key surprised she's not wearing sunglasses. Guess I have to thank @Fangu for that

 

[Leafonthebreeze]

Fang saves that cast, she's such a breath of fresh air.

 

[Torrie]

FANG That's it. That's the post.

Well, I'm still in Palumpolum, trying to make my way to Hope's house.
The characters are doing a great job being strong, desperate, and beautiful.

Light is so good at slapping faces I could play a drinking game.

FF13 feels a lot like a good TV series but instead of watching commercials you're just interrupted by gameplay once in a while.

At the same time, FF13 reminds me of the era of old PS1 RPGs like Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, probably because of the level design or strong female characters like Kida... Or, rather, Fang's outfit resembles Kida's in a way. I-I just love them both so much okay