We Were All Wrong About Final Fantasy XIII

That’s a powerful “we” Please speak for yourself, I rode the trilogy from start to finish.

I have been a lorediver for the Trilogy for over a decade now, and I have devoted so much work and time to study these games, the details, the connections, the symbolism, the story beneath the surface. There are finer points in here that I would personally go over more in-depth, lore-wise, but I have been there and I know it would take much more than three hours, so your work will definitely reach much more people who might want to give the Trilogy a shot. For so long, we have been screaming into the void, and what we could do individually was very limited—but with people with a larger audience spreading appreciation for this criminally underrated and mind-blowingly complex and deep story, I believe there will be a day in which the finer points will reveal themselves by others' curiosity. So I thank you for taking the plunge and lending us your voice. :) <3

As someone who loves the lore of this whole trilogy, we need a 13-2 video. Fantastic work!

Just watching all the footage, it's astounding how good this game still looks. As good if not better than many games coming out today

This is it. This is THE FFXIII video essay. FFXIII has long been my favorite FF game for all the reasons you laid out. While playing it, the story and gameplay and legit woven so TIGHTLY that you can feel the intention of each character. I cry every time I play this game several times because of how much emotion each character has. Also the ending hurts my very soul knowing that in an instant, Lightning disappears.

You missed an important thing with the accessories system: Equiping similar accessories, or accessories in a set, can yield secondary bonuses (like physical wall +5 or +10). This actually showed up in your video while you were mixing and matching accessories. As an example of how useful this can be: In the section in Palenpoem where you control Snow and Hope, there is a regular enemy that can one-shot Hope with an attack that deals a ton of small hits. Preach in his recent playthrough had to deal with this and kept getting destroyed. Putting the Physical Wall ability on by mix/matching accessories made it much more tolerable for Hope to survive this ability.

The cost of secondary roles is criminal.

One point I'm glad you mentioned in this has been the fact that the characters are actually acting normal per their stimuli. I wholeheartedly agree with this. While this is not my favorite final fantasy, my favorite ff character, Hope, is in it. The way people treat him about his own stimuli on his actions baffle me. Honestly, he acts more like his age than anyone else. He is 15. That age, I was dealing with a l9t and ended up picking up this game as an ff fan. I found kindred spirit in him and his growth helped me quite a bit myself.

The game over music happens after Brynhildr fight. I think there's a 3rd one but I don't remember where. Also, a bit sad you didn't talk much about chapter 12's context. The hatred and fear against Pulse the governement put in its citizens heads came to fruition. 3 armies (our group, the PSICOM/Guardian Core and the Cavalry) that have the same goal (to save Cocoon) are against each other thanks to the Fal'Cie's manipulations. It's an all out war between 5 sides (Cocoon Fal'cies, Pulse L'Cie, Cocoon Army, Pulse Army and the Cavalry) whom I know no story that did the same. It's further shown in the gameplay with many triangular battles and unreachable fights.

Absolutely the best video essay on FFXIII on YouTube. This was actually my first Final Fantasy game and I love it to bits. I didn't think anyone else thought about this game and every aspect of it as much as I have, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. Great analysis and takeaways. Here's to a hopeful re-release of this game on PS5 and Xbox, even just with 4K/60fps options and a few quality of life improvements. Fingers crossed!

Oh, if anyone is going to replay this game... Two tips. Lightning: Look into making her a Sentinel. There's some nasty builds where she's practically untouchable. Snow: Funny enough, due to animation speeds, he's one of the best Ravagers in the game. He can fire off more spells per second because he finishes up his animations faster.

I'm gonna politely ask everyone in the industry to stop using the acronym "CP" for in game resources

It took time and a decade of exhausting open world games fatigue but people finally understand and started to appreciate XIII’s.

As someone who has multiple XIII themed tattoos, it's actually really gratifying to see someone that basically gets this entry in a pretty similar way that I do and appreciates this game for the Good and the Messy. There's so much to love on this game, a lot of heart clearly went into this game despite its troubled development and it always sat wrong with me how the game often has a lot of detractors repeating criticisms of the game that are actually factually untrue. Personal point of annoyance has been a bit of the music. The OST can be really incredible but it relies really heavily on motifs in a lot of it's tracks. The main melody of "Promise" features a lot and echoes around a lot of games areas. "Blinded by Light"s beats are repeated in a lot of basic tension tracks and Hope's theme feels universally applied to a lot of the more emotional scenes. It's likely the reason why the OST kinda blends together for myself, you, and a lot of others. Despite the sequel's flaws, I will give it to that game that it has a lot more track diversity that keeps the soundscape fresh (even if there is a lot of motif repetition in that as well). Another bit I really like is how the mechanics of progressing through the Archlyte Steppe and surrounding areas really reinforces the theme of Pulse. You are at the bottom of the food chain fighting for survival as you start off fighting easy plant-life, moving onto small wolves, needing to take advantage of 3-way fights to get the upper hand, to fighting behemoths and monstrosities unaided. I think it really does convey the feeling of rising to the top in a fight for survival in a pretty organic way.

I love FF13, I read all Ultimania, have the soundtrack listening nearly every week since its release, fantasize about living in the world. I like Oerba village a lot, I go there to relax sometimes

Pro tips: the auto battle commands puts in all the optimal battle commands depending on the targets. Meaning you and your A.I. controlled party might accidentally heal the enemies if they're using random attacks. To prevent this, LIBRA EVERYTHING. Libra and Librascope are your best friends. Unlocking weakness and knowledge on enemies will allow auto battle and party members to perform optimal actions and not throw out random stuff.

I started XIII on a whim after seeing it sit in my Steam library for a while, and I came out thinking "....wait, this was the FF title that everyone said was mostly a big interactive cutscene?" I loved the style most of all, and didn't mind the linearity since there was generally still a challenge that needed to be overcome. "Mash auto-battle to win" is a myth that got passed around by casual observers and others that wanted to be funny over factual. I mean, I told some of my family members, who weren't interested in FF to begin with, about this auto-battle feature and presented it in the way the memes did, and it was fun to watch their reactions thinking that it was "stupid" to have a video game where you click a button, click an enemy, and then sit back and watch the game play itself. I feel bad for writing this game off for the longest time as if the devs mistakenly thought that players just wanted to click a button and watch all of these flashy moves be performed by characters after offloading all thought and strategy onto the game itself. I'd love to see the detractors try to take down an adamantoise on their own without looking up a way on how to cheese the fight.

6:10 - In the example you gave about the man saying he's not a l'cie, the alternative isn't him describing the l'cie on screenーit is the story showing or hinting to us what a l'cie is or what makes a l'cie scary, thus indicating why the boy is scared. The guideline often cited is "show, don't tell". Of course, XIII eventually does that. People forget that this opening is meant as a narrative hook, to get the audience to ask those very questions, like "what is a l'cie?" or "why is this man saying he's not one?", etc. I do think the game's narrative has an execution problem regarding how much important info is relegated to its menu lore book. Of course, if you stay up-to-date with it, like reading, and are invested in the story the game is trying to tell, the game is probably one of the most compelling FF stories ever told (imo). But if you find any of these things hard, uninteresting, or perhaps were ignorant that you were supposed to be reading them, I think it's completely valid to find the overall game's narrative more lacking.

Once again I have to say "You mean, You/Yall were wrong about FF13 and or FF7 Advent Childen" Because I was all about it back in the day and tried to tell people how they missed the point on it. It's the same everytime, gotta let people sit on something for long enough until they see it differently. Wake me up when "We Were Wrong About: Final Fantasy Spirits Within" bro.

While FF XIII isn’t my favorite game in the series, I don’t think it deserves the hate. A lot of the complaints I’ve heard could also be applied to other JRPGs. Especially in the FF series. “It’s too linear!” So is FF X, but no one complained about that. Yes, you don’t get a lot of freedom to explore different towns like in X, but it’s like you pointed out: it makes sense with the narrative. Hell, even when you were a fugitive in FF X, no one really treated you like it, so it didn’t have much weight to it. “The characters are annoying” I’ve heard similar complaints about VIII and XII, but those got ported to modern consoles. “The combat sucks!” It’s not that different from the combat that’s been around since FF IV. Auto play? Don’t like it, then don’t use it