Final Fantasy XVI’s Success Proves FFXIII Never Deserved the Hate

The black sheep of modern Final Fantasy shares the most DNA with 'Final Fantasy XVI’s successful design choices.

[-Foxtrot]

Huh? XIII was just terrible

Even something singular like characters in XVI are better

[luckytrouble]

Even as someone that actually kind of likes 13, probably helped by the fact I expected to absolutely hate it, man it could not be more different from 16. There isn't a single element I can more than loosely correlate between the two titles.

[banger88]

The main difference for me is the characters. I love the characters in FFXVI, I HATED the characters in FFXIII with a passion. F****** hated them. Every. Single. One.

[RpgSama]

100000%

Every single character sucked.

[babadivad]

I liked Lightning, didn't mind Zhaz and Vanille. I HATED that kid. I don't even remember his name. I never bothered touching his stats to upgrade him. I hated him.

[shammgod]

Even Hope?!?! Lol!

[Terry_B]

What?

[Flawlessmic]

I really dont get this comparison at all, outside of them being linear that's where the comparison starts and ends for me really.

Ff13 is a weird one for me, it's actually one of the only mainline ff games I havent finished and didn't even bother with the sequels.

I don't remember even hating it at the time, like i thought it was ok, just yea never got into it like I normally do with a ff game.

Ff13 isn't on the same level as 16 not even close though.

Even if you hated 16s combat the story, world and characters are so fantastic you will push through just to see the story's end

[SegaSaturn669]

FF13: Mash X button - win battle. Walk thru straight corridor, repeat.

[Harkins1721]

I remember 13 having some thinking involved and not just mashing X.

[jwillj2k4]

The FF 16 demo was similar in that aspect. “Smash square to win” it’s why I didn’t buy the full game.

[MrBaskerville]

I wouldn't go that far, battle system does have it's moments. But maybe mainly in later boss fights. Start of game is pretty braindead though.

[goldwyncq]

XIII also has setting up paradigms in advance and switching to the most appropriate one during battles, but of course people who haven't played it think spamming Auto-battle is the only thing you ever do in combat.

[MrBaskerville]

@goldwyncq
While the paradigm system was cool, I do think it takes long before it amounts to more than spamming auto battle. And while I remember a great deal of good fights, there's also an awful lot of auto-battle spam fights in between which is easy to forget because of the more memorable moments.

Same might be said about older FF games, but I still think they had a little morr flavour in basic fights. XIII has the issue that you can choose between a couple of actions, but they all feel like they amount to the same outcome.

[shinoff2183]

Flawless
Even if you hated 16s combat the story, world and characters are so fantastic you will push through just to see the story's end

Me in a nutshell

[andy85]

@jwillj2k4 it doesn't work in the full game though, have to remember that's the very start of the game and all final fantasies are the same. If you do that throughout it'll take 10x longer to finish the game, the combos and eikon abilities are what's used

[jwillj2k4]

I’m sure there’s more you can do. My issue is that unlike FF7R there’s no reason TO do it. In 7R the game creates a feeling of making you want to do other moves since you’ll die if you just spam. In 16 winning just takes longer which makes it feel broken.

[Hofstaderman]

No, it does deserve the hate. This game left with such a hollow feeling after I first booted it up. The ONLY Final Fantasy game I have never replayed.

[jwillj2k4]

“Like FFXVI’s different Eikon abilities that become accessible to Clive over many hours, Paradigms slowly increase the complexity of combat and the freedom with which the player can react to battles.”

This is literally every FF with some type of job/class system lol…

[MrBaskerville]

Except in FFXIII paradigms is the only thing resembling depth and it takes forever to get going. It's like 15 hours or something before things gets just a tiny bit interesting. 20 hours before it starts for real. Rest is just one extremely long tutorial. Most FF games takes a while to get going, but it has never been that bad. Perhaps in FFx, but that still felt better paced.

[jwillj2k4]

Yup you have me remembering now yea they still had tutorials explaining what to do like 15 hours in 😂😂😂

[shinoff2183]

I gave ff15 35 hours before I said fk this chore. I'd be willing to give ff13 another shot.

Jwill
Tutorial stuff popping up in ff16 and I'm 35 hours in. Not to bad but I've had a few

[on_line_forever]

The last good FF game for me was X

XV and XVI it's ok not bad but can't beat 10 , 9 , 8 , 7

[shinoff2183]

Online forever

Thumbs up but gotta add 6. If you never played I'd highly recommend

[MrNinosan]

It absolutely doesn't deserve the hate, but comparing FFXIII and FFXVI is just plain stupid. They're nothing a like.

I absolutely loved FFXIII trilogy, but I also loved the other games in the francu.

FFXIII was a corridor game with no possibility to ever go back.
FFX had the same structure, but the difference was that you could actually get back to previous zones, and even had to if you wanted to defeat Dark Aeons etc
FFXVI is a semi open world game with 4 huge zones connected to each other where you can go back anywhere you've been, whenever you want.

FFXIII didn't have any towns or npcs
FFX barely had any towns but some npcs along the road
FFXVI has plenty of towns and camps with hundreds of npcs

To add to the mix, FFVII Remake is also a corridor game, with extremely limited possibilities to get back to previous zone without chapter select.

[shinoff2183]

Mrninosan

The towns in ff16 in the end feel pretty empty in the end. I wanna talk to every npc like back in the day. I just got through the desert area and titan stuff. The desert town had mad npcs but not many to actually talk to. Idc what they say tell me to jump off a fling bridge but talk to me damnit.

Personally I think square has went the cheap route on some of there stuff. Dragon quest 11 being an exception. Star ocean 6 felt similar sure the npcs would say stuff at a low volume and extremely small subtitles , but not many were able to talk to the actual character.

[shinoff2183]

I must say with ff13 I didn't give it much of a shot. After ff15 and ff16 I'd like to now. I know its atleast turn based.

[yeahokwhatever]

Meh. Uninstalled it after the demo. R rated language isn't final fantasy for me. The only purpose it serves is to make it to where I cant play the game in the living room around my kids. Thanks for nothing, Squeenis.

[shinoff2183]

og ff7 swore but it was blocked out do to the sensitivity of society back then. Not to much different. I know some people get turned off by it but I don't mind sometimes a swear word can be used to show more emotion idk if that makes sense. But I do get it with kids around and stuff.

[yeahokwhatever]

FF7 is innocent outside of the one mildly suggestive theme with the Don. I played it as a kid, with its "teen" rating and all, it was beautiful. it was art. this schlock we're being fed by squeenis these days is worthless.

[MrBaskerville]

They might share similarities, but FFXIII suffered from a nonsensical story and 15 hours of super slow introduction. The game gets better, but it takes a loooong time to get going. I find FFxVI a lot more engaging in the opening hours.

[goldwyncq]

XIII's story is very simple actually. If they ever remake it, they should definitely add the Active Time Lore feature from XVI to make it more accessible.

[MrBaskerville]

All the info was available, but I think it was a mistake to have so abstract a backstory and so many similar sounding words for different things. FFX is probably very similar, but I think they did a way better job of setting up the world.

[Walweeze]

I love 16 so far! The mature story compared to previous games and the combat is addictive

[spambot0815]

if you like ff12 and 16 chances are high that you don't like ff13 and vice versa as it seems

[AnotherGamer]

uhhh...no? FF13 had an over complicated story that made no damn sense at all, was poorly told and poorly implemented. Not to mention some of the characters were just badly written and annoying. FF16 has a consistent story, well written characters and so much lore.

[shinoff2183]

Speaking of lore. I haven't seen much for the ff9 references around the web. Vivi in the fields as a scare crow. The invincible

[AnotherGamer]

Those are the regular Black Mages class.

[NewTestDrive]

Edgy protagonists always deserve the hate😉

[northpaws]

FF16 did a lot of things right, and some things wrong, but what kept me going for sure are the story and characters, it just makes you want to protect your allies and fight til the end.

There are a few things that in improved would make this game so much better.
1. less fetch quests, too many picking stuff on the ground quests, not enough variety, if the side quests can be more Witcher 3 like, that would be awesome
2. dialogue, the quality is inconsistent, some time you get top notch performance, sometimes it feels like an old PS2 game, for example, horizon forbidden west did a very good job with dialogues with NPCs
3. equipments/stats... at any one point of the story, almost all gamers would be using the exact same weapons and armours, very little choices, forging is almost pointless other than a certain weapon.

Story, world building, characters, presentation...etc zero complains.

[yeahokwhatever]

if the voice acting isnt just random programmers from the studio then im not interested. yes you heard that right.

[Elda]

FFXIII is one of my top favorite FF games. So far I'm 16 hrs in FFXVI & I'm enjoying it.

[shadowknight203]

13 didn't have anything really memorable. So for an RPG, it was a huge miss. 16 while I only played the demo, made me feel immersed in such a way..oh yeah I believe that type of immersion that comes to my mind is what an RPG is capable of.

If call of duty made me feel that immersion into a role in the story, I too would classify CoD as such, however THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL. In regards to discussion.

[shinoff2183]

Ff13 came out at the wrong time to. All the hate that Japanese games started getting back then from dickheads in the west. Idk what kinda role that played back then but I imagine some. Hell that hate changed final fantasy to this day, despite what anyone says I link that to why ff15 and 16 are how they are.

[shadowknight203]

The combination of 14 failing( before the reboot - 14 Realm Reborn, and fan reception to 13 really hurt FF as a whole. Then 15 came with its incomplete half ass ending with later patches fixing and adding a bunch of story elements. So it's been a rocky road these last few miles. Clear pavement now tho.

[ManMarmalade]

Xiii was milked way too hard for a game that had content cut because it didn't fit onto the 360.

[gold_drake]

13 just had very dislikable characters.

i didnt care for any of them.

[Knightofelemia]

I tried to approach FF13 with an opened mind but once I started playing it I got bored. As for getting FF16 I am just going to wait until its cheaper I have a new Y's game I have to start, Trails to Azure to start, Trails into Reverie to grab, Star Ocean to play, Soul Hackers to starts, finish up Scarlet Nexus, and work on Trinity Trigger. And hopefully I will be starting on Super Mario RPG.

[TheLigX]

Nope. Final Fantasy 13 was a terrible game; final fantasy 16 is not. The second statement does not absolve the first game of it’s failures.

[DarkZane]

13 was entirely a corridor from start to finish. 16 had 4 giant explorable zones.

13 had absolutely no towns and you had to buy items from vending machines. 16 had towns and shops, plus an actual hub as your main base.

13 had terrible characters that were annoying all around. 16 had great characters.

13 had a terrible story. It was complete, but they weren't satisfied with the sales, so they made some crap up to continue it in 2 other games that frankly, were just not needed or wanted by anyone. The story in FF16 is actually pretty good, except for the ending. Did they really have to have an open ending left to anyone's interpretation instead of an actual happy ending?

13 had almost no side content and the one it had was trash. 16 had hunts, sidequests and also a new game plus difficulty (it's not really a new difficulty, just a different take on endgame).

[S2Killinit]

Some of the games during my time to get more hate than was deserved:
1) The Order 1868
2) that dragon game that came out with the PS3 that used the dualshock axes technology.
3) Days Gone

Im sure Im missing a couple more. I always felt the hate for these titles was a smear campaign. All of them had double standards applied against them.

[yeahokwhatever]

Lair was "that dragon game" and I LOVED IT, especially with the motion controls.

[S2Killinit]

Yes! Thank you.

I might be crazy but I felt that game was bashed by reviews because it was very anti-war and at the time we were at war in Iraq. It had some really big parallels with what was happening in the world at the time.

[Auron]

Uh no.

[Kaze88]

Inverse making some stupid claims to get clicks.

[tay8701]

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I can't see how anyone can rate FF16 below a 8 personally. The graphics are insane, tons of action, great plot, superbly voice acted and it is possibly the greatest soundtrack I have ever heard in a game. It is easily my favorite game of the yr so far.

[DarkKaine]

Almost every FF released after X deserves all the hate it gets lol. No clue what this article is trying to say.
X-2 was an abomination that doesn't need any explanation, XIII was the worst of em all to the point where I had zero interest playing the sequels. XIV is basically Backstreet Boys: The Game. I hear XII is good. Haven't played it myself, but XI and XIV are bland MMO's that drag on for way too long where you just step outside circles and watch enemies HP bars go down for 30 minutes, while no amount of gear will actually make you feel badass and powerful enough to make it go by faster, all the while dodging pathetic basement dwellers dressed up like catgirls DMing you that want to roleplay because they can't handle the real world, every single time you enter the bar to pick up a quest. I'm glad XVI is doing well and the focus isn't solely on making the characters look pretty anymore.

[X-23]

I'd like to think the enjoyment from FFXVI comes from them embracing a mature storyline and having a strong lead the combat system is pretty good too. I hope they keep the same energy moving forward, outside of FFT can't remember the last Final Fantasy that was just in your face with the harsh reality of things as this one was and the VA is great, probably my favorite Cid here.

[CrimsonWing69]

What? Like… how do you even make that connection?

These are 2 very different games.

[NukeDaHippies]

How does a good game justify a bad game. 13 is not only boring, but also some of the worst story telling i've ever seen.