Squidboard Dragoon Drei

It's like Space Mountain if it were redesigned by a gay mathematician

I'm enjoying it so far; it's just not blowing my mind and I'm really embarrassed for SE for having ever thought it would. The battles get progressively more fun the more access to your shit they give you and I'm actually pleasantly surprised to find Hope is a really okay character. He is the only instance in memory of that kind of whiny kid archetype being halfway buyable/tolerable, something I'm thinking owes largely to his English VA. You'd have to weigh in on that, Alex; I've only heard like 2 seconds of his Japanese voice and it was all high melodrama shit from the trailers.

Vanille in English, on the other hand.... to the moon, Alice. Fucking Australian trying to affect that cute Japanese girl thing. Augh, it's cringeworthy.

Interesting! I'd love to hear the English voices. I hated Hope and loved Vanille in Japanese.

The battle system is certainly the best part. Getting a good party combo working (and then SUPER TWEAKING IT) made Chapter 11 so awesome. I would almost recommend finishing off the mob hunts and then putting the game down before chapter 12. After that point it's just more YES WE CAN *COLORS, TEARS*

Fun from Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama.

"I call it a bento box system, where you have all of the different little things in there. So we had minigames or towns were you were able to talk to all of the townspeople. But with the HD console you're not really able to do that because it takes so long to develop,"

FFXIII was first shown at E3 2006, so they've been working on it for at least four years. I don't accept this explanation. It's just silly.

"Now that we have that base technology... The next time you see a Final Fantasy, we might be able to pack in more of those elements that existed in the past. And I also think that a game doesn't need to have all of those items in the future. We can create additional downloadable content for people to add, too. It doesn't have to come with that game itself."

If we have to buy DLC in order to get towns and NPCs, I officially quit. Square to god.

I'm limiting myself to only remakes of Square games at this point. It's just become silly.

Yeah, it's the voicework. When Vanille is just standing around looking cute I tend to actually find her cute.

Really? Because to me Vanille is the Vaan of FFXIII, so even when she's quiet, I'm sort of like "Tell me she's in this for a reason beyond being pointless loli eye candy?" and rolling my eyes (I'm actively working on leveling up another character as a combo saboteur/medic so I don't have to use her in battles anymore, because even her huffing and puffing in that is overly annoying).

OTOH, I'm actually liking Female Cloud a lot more than I'd been willing to before the game.

Female Cloud is surprisingly decent and also well-acted, with the same military flint as Jennifer's Hale's Cmdr. Shepard (something else I'm looking forward to comparing/contrasting in some douchey FFXIII vs. ME2 article I'll probably never write but can't help conceptualizing). Once in awhile though I have a hard time taking no shit from a take-no-shit woman in a miniskirt. I don't know why but her character design pisses me off. It looks super thrown-together, like Ashe's in FFXII, and while I'll buy the cute little outfits on characters like Vanille it just looks sort of random and silly on a supposed ex-military type mounting a suicide mission. Though, fuck, those PSICOM Hunter-type enemy wimmins are all sporting the bare legs, too.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not offended by sexualized girls in games (the layered male fantasy of Shivabike is awesome and entertaining); they just play Lightning so straight that there's a bit of a disconnect.

I find it funny that Vanille is the only character who can learn the Death spell. And you'll need it later on to grind for special weapon mats!

Because she's the death knell of this game! Bah-dum-dum!

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

In other news, my plan to level up a saboteur/medic has hit a snag with the high CP required to develop a character outside of their role. I know that people used to complain about the PS Final Fantasies not allowing characters unique roles, but if that was the case, why dangle the possibility of developing each character into every role if you're just going to make it damn hard? It's like someone saying "So you want X? Here's X" and then turning around and punching you in the gut. Why couldn't they tell us "suck it, you're going to use whatever we want you to use for this part, and you're going to like it!". It would have been more honest.

Also it's becoming manifest to me that between not needing to input commands for anything other than boss battles, and the Crystarium system, this game is sort of turning into "Final Fantasy: the Interactive Movie" in my mind. Too bad that as a movie, it's proving to be one of those shoddy "good concept, bad execution" types.