What I Played Today: March 31

Final Fantasy XIII

I got really damn engrossed in this game today! The characters have finally started talking about themselves and revealing details and growing as characters! Hope is no longer whining, which, frankly, was completely understandable considering the circumstances. Sazh turns out to have the exact same damn motivation as Barrett, which makes me wonder what kind of odd stereotypes Japanese have about black people. I mean, it’s pretty positive, but they seem to assume that every black person is Will Smith. But otherwise, despite some really flub lines and some terrible dubbing, the story is heating up...as much as it can when the story they are telling doesn’t exactly scream “major conflict.” But yeah, keep it up.

I also started to really care about the combat system. I understand how it works now, understand what the flow needs to be, which characters I need to keep attacking and which combination of support classes I can run. I ran into a real stinker of a boss fight at the end of Chapter 5, which made me really have to concentrate on getting the paradigm system to work, and really? This is a good system. It will be a lot better when I have more options and more than two characters on the field, but I’ve been granted some really tough enemies that I have to strategize around. I spent a good 20 minutes tonight trying to defeat a certain enemy I ran across. The fact that I found myself going back to the fight, trying to figure out exactly when I need to switch classes and what classes I would need when I could have easily just gone around or given up tells me that I think I’m going to like this going forward.

I just wish it didn’t start so slow. Having to wait so long for Final Fantasy to set up the story when the actual story itself doesn’t need that long to set up have just made hate the game than actually give it a try. 10 hours is a really long time to wait before you start having fun, and I can understand that criticism. I only pulled through because I believed that I was going to have a good time with this, and I ended up being right, so...alright for me!