Final Fantasy XIII

The most under-appreciated mainline Final Fantasy. No other game in the series has the slick polish and gorgeous design of this one, and its characters and music are among its best. Yes, it’s mostly linear, but spectacular sights await on that railroad.

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At long last, my fourteen year journey with this game has come to an end. I really enjoyed it when it first released in 2010, but I hit a late game difficulty spike and bounced off. I’ve always wanted to go back to it, and I’m glad I finally did all these years later. It’s aged really well. The graphics still look fantastic, and the overall aesthetic, presentation, and music are superb. The combat system really flows well, too. It’s less about assigning actions (I used auto-battle for most of my time with it), and more about assigning jobs. Each of the six playable characters have access to certain jobs that grant them different abilities, and combat is all about setting up paradigms, or combinations of specific jobs for each character, to best suit your situation. You can go in to battle with all three of your characters in a class focused on offense, and when the going gets tough, switch over to a more defensive paradigm with medics, tanks, etc. It’s a really intuitive system. The only downside is that the game doesn’t remember your presets if you switch characters, so any time you want a different party set up, you have to go in and reconfigure all of your paradigms. This can get tedious later in the game when you’re fighting battles that really require strategic preparation and frequently have to switch characters. The game can also get really difficult in certain spots, and the plethora of game over screens I saw across my 50 hour playthrough is my main gripe with the game. I was usually able to overcome these obstacles by looking up guides that told me what the optimum paradigm configuration was, but these instances tended to grind an otherwise well paced game to a halt. Overall, though, I enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII quite a bit. It doesn’t reach the highs of the series due to the aforementioned difficulty curve, as well as a weaker cast and forgettable villain, but it’s still a solid entry worth experiencing.

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hope and snow are awful

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It’s "git gud or go home" because there’s not really a way to grind up levels before tough fights

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