The music in this area (The Vile Peaks) sucks and shouldn't be in a Final Fantasy game.
Really? I never disliked this track.
The contrast between the pacing of this game and XII is remarkable. XII had long periods of exploration followed by a few fairly long cut-scenes, whereas this game has really short periods of, uh, following the linear path, followed by dozens of short cut-scenes. Neither feels quite right to me; something in between would be ideal. That's from the perspective of a first-time player, at least. On repeated playthroughs, I'm sure I'd appreciate having fewer cut-scenes so I can get on with playing the game.
I agree, the opposite extremes that XII and XIII occupy in several areas is pretty interesting. It makes it doubly interesting to me that Fangu likes both so much. Not that you can only like one type of game of course, but they are awfully different
It makes no sense that the enemies only notice the party leader.
Well...yeah, but would you really want them to? That would be a pain in the ass.
Is it really the case that some "jobs" (or whatever you call the individual roles within the paradigms) can't physically attack? That's... annoying.
Yes. I can't say I ever really thought about it though.
Also, why is it that when I switch paradigms, sometimes all three characters have their own animation, and sometimes they all happen at once? Is it just the first switch that is slower?
You are correct, the first transition is the full animation, after that they are instantaneous. They fixed this in XIII-2, where all transitions are instant. In some of the harder battles, though, you can exploit this to get a free full ATB bar without having to wait.
Are the jobs different for each character? It seems like the black magic spells learned by Ravagers, for example, are not the same across the board. It's frustrating to fight an enemy I know is weak to lightning and not have any characters able to cast it.
Yes, they are. Each character has their own affinities and...I dunno, style, I guess. Much later on, every character will have every role, but they're still not identical. Some characters are better at a given role than others. I see your point, but it does make them feel more unique than a true Job System does.
Finally, an explanation of what I can do with my loot. It only took 6 hours to arrive. But maybe Jason was right, this looks very complicated to figure out without using a guide. I'll just ignore it for now and upgrade stuff if I get stuck later.
Yeah, a lot of it is too arbitrary. I wound up being very familiar with it when I was going for the related trophy. But, basically, synthetic items (tech-sounding things, etc.) tend to give the most points, but decrease the EXP Mulitplier. So you want to use organic components to get the multiplier up to x3 or so, and then use your synthetic components until the multiplier is back to zero and repeat.
What is the point of the section where Hope is piloting the Dreadnought? I had the option to attack or trample enemies, but since they couldn't hurt me anyway, why bother? Also, the music playing during that part felt really mismatched and reminded me of the Flintstones theme. I know my brother has said the same thing about it before.
I do like that song, but I agree that it's an odd choice for that segment. Even the title of the song "March of the Dreadnoughts" sounds like it would be different than what it is.
As for the point, I think it's just more evidence of the unclear direction and mismatch of ideas the team was operating under for this game.
Got my first game over against Odin. And my second. And my third, fourth and fifth. He really is a massive difficulty spike over the previous enemies and bosses. I tried lots of different combinations but Hope just kept dying immediately, and I needed him to stay alive as a meat shield. The combo that eventually worked was Ravager + Synergist to get my defences up, using potions for healing, and then a switch to double Ravager. I had to dial my resolution down to 720p to get the descriptive text after using Libra on Odin. Without that, I don't know if I would have figured it out at all.
Yeah, that fight's a bitch.
Summoning Odin felt cool but Gestalt mode just seemed weird and slow. Will I struggle to beat certain bosses if I don't use it?
No. When it comes to bosses, the Eidolons are most useful the way Aeons are sometimes - absorbing attacks.
Not being able to move away when two Bombs are about to self-destruct is a major weakness of this game's combat system and makes the characters look pretty damn stupid. In many ways, this system feels like a degenerate version of XII's ADB, made because people said it was too complicated.
It is interesting that positioning matters while you can't change it. As opposed to FFXII where you could change positioning but it
didn't matter. There are moves you can exploit to move yourself, (most notably, Sazh's full attack combo moves him backwards quite a bit) but it's not fast enough for the bombs.
Another weakness is that my characters don't always pick the best options when auto-battling. Against Pulsework Soldiers, for example, Flamestrike clearly does more damage than Aero, despite the enemy having no resistance or weakness to either element, or to physical or magical attacks. So Sazh will use both when I tell him to auto-battle. This wouldn't be so annoying if the game had a true "memory" cursor position, but instead, I can only choose between defaulting to auto-battle or abilities.
Are you sure it doesn't remember the last ability you manually selected? I feel like when I was playing last night, when I would manually select Snow's Hand Grenade, the next round when I hit Ability the cursor was already on it.
And, I could be wrong, but I think the AI mixes up attacks for reasons of increasing the Stagger gauge faster? But someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that.
Is it even possible to escape battles in this game? If it is, I must have missed that tutorial.
Is it in the pause menu? If not, then no I don't think you can.
Cid Raines has possibly the most stereotypical Final Fantasy character face I've ever seen.
And people love him and I had the hardest time ever figuring out what the hell he was doing or why he was doing it.
What's a "role level"? I'm about to obtain one with both Lightning and Hope but I'm yet to see an explanation of what they do.
You mean your level in Commando, Ravager, etc.? It's just like...Job Levels in FFV, I guess. And it's what is capped in each chapter.
