Brobrah

Hope X and it's CEO/Owner dies.

...Didn't Steven Crowder also voice The Brain on Arthur? Are you Steven Crowder?

A bird in an executioner's hood says "Fred Flintstone, you have been convicted of treason. Any last words?" Fred, his head in a guillotine, defiantly says "yabba dabba-" The blade comes down and as his head is chopped off, it says "doo." The bird wryly states"*sigh* it's a living!"

to:noamchomsky@mit.edu

"are you dead?"

from:noamchomsky@mit.edu

"yes."

It's a shame really, because it's the one thing they want more than anything.

While I really do love this artstyle that they use for the Octopath Traveler series, it's very sad to see a Dragon Quest Game not use Akira Toriyama cover art.

By all accounts, these were both very well recieved games with critical acclaim that 13 and even 15 never recieved. And that's a shame, but this publicly traded nature of the company really explains a lot to me of why 13 and (spoilers for my thoughts on 15) are such bad games.

While playing this game, it was announced that FF16, and the second FF7 remake game both fell short of expectations. Meaning that the games were profitable, but if shareholders just invested in index funds, they would have made more money.

Final Fantasy 13 just feels like the big jumping of the shark moment where Square Enix became a bad video game company lead by a bunch of executives who jump on fads and buzz terms to generate interest amongst shareholders.

At it's absolute worst, there were moments in this game where it felt like a substantial amount of the game was designed by a modern AI like Chat GPT. Look at these characters.

That's another reason why FFVIII almost ranked below it, because 13 felt like it was a quicker, faster paced game. Boy did that early impression just completely turn to ash in my mouth.

Final Fantasy 2 took me 40 hours to beat, and I thought that was a horrible slog.

This game was fucking 80 hours long. Final Fantasy 8 was over 100!!!

Both games are worse than Final Fantasy 2.

Final Fantasy 2 is universally considered a bad game, but I think it's better than 8 and 13~

But this isn't a very high bar to clear at all, and ultimately it drops the ball completely at the end by introducing an RNG nightmare run ending mechanic, since if the party leader dies it ends the fight.

The reason being: The game actually seemed to have a story and characters with some kind of motivation.

Not a lot of motivation, and not a good story, but it was something. And the grind wasn't as unbearable as the junction system.

But like I said, the game *barely almost* ranked above FFVIII until I hit the final boss and it's complete bullshit.

There's a weapon upgrading system that the game doesn't really do a good job explaining. It's not really worth exploring that much either in my opinion.

There is a later portion where there's a wider open map with some sidequests, but it's mostly just a big empty area with some hunting sidequests. It's not really worth exploring.

And I harp a lot on the game's combat system, because that's basically it. That's the entire game. There is nothing else. No exploration. No towns. No overworld. No dungeon. Barely any NPCs. No resource management. The whole game is combat.

Like I've tweeted before. FFXIII just feels like a triple A budget mobile gatcha game.

In these terms you can basically describe any RPG game, but the real difference between this and every other RPG is the Auto Battle system reducing this meta to such simplistic basic inputs.

When you summon you then have to keep an eye on the purple gestalt bar, so that before it depletes to zero, you press square and go into gestalt mode. The more you hold off on pressing X, the higher number of gestalt points you have to get more attacks and decrease their hp bar, and oh my god stop.

And you do this by expending your ATB bar, and you can turn the ATB bar red and increase it's refill speed by casting haste, and you can make their ATB bar fill slower by casting slow. But if you're in a tight spot you can expend your TP bar to cast a summon.

The game is all about managing a bunch of bars.

You need to increase the characters yellow bar to stagger them, so you can get a damage multiplier to decrease his green bar, but you have to make sure your green bar doesn't deplete,

You still have to shift which role the characters take during fights via paradigm shifting. Mixing and matching which roles characters fill. Do you need to heal? Do you need to use buffs/debuffs? Do you need to attack? etc.

This is because the player would always have to scroll through menus to pick between decisions. FFXIII just autoselects using AI to choose actions for you. But it doesn't baby the player completely.

One of the major theories of game design is increasing the number of decisions per second. Turn based games and even older ATB titles in the FF series had a very high number of potential decisions via spells actions and abilities you could pick between in the menus, but a definitive cap on speed.