Does anyone else want to nit-pick the ff series too?

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I just got 5 hours into FF13, all I can say is if this is the best part of the game, then why bother finishing? It seems like the FF lineup has lost its mojo. I can list the reasons why.

1. The male protagonists look like metrosexuals. It was cool when they threw in a hint of it in ff7 with cloud and sephiroth, but they've been doing it in every game now, I'm no longer surprised by the main character's well groomed appearance, I just wonder what the obsession is, would the story not make sense if someone with average hair saved the world?

Why don't the character dress more practically? Wearing a sleeveless vest doesnt make sense when you're fighting armored bad guys and facing temperature extremes.

2. The personalities seem artificial. The guys either smile too much or are melodramatic, there isn't an in between. Don't they get bored, or anxious? I mean they live in the fantasy world, it couldn't possibly inspire a sense of excitement all the time, and people inevitably lose loved ones, being melodramatic isn't the way everyone in the real world copes and it isn't the only way to convey someone's sense of loss.

The female characters tend to go for all out timid, or all out stoic, and there's always a love story in the works, even from the beginning, we can see the tension winding up for an eventual love story.

3. The gameplay is the same basic concept for all the FF games, when is the series going to step it up and try other styles like shooters and hack & slash in thier feature games? There is only so much you can do with turn based fighting, and simply hitting a button repetitively to win fights is beginning to define the series. The sense of danger, urgency, and adventure weren't in ff13, just one dazzling landscape after another and a bunch of bad guys who didn't want to live dotting the scenery.

I've reached the conclusion that the FF team has spent too much time in their offices trying to think up the ridiculously impossible, and not enough time living with regular people or experiencing life for themselves. I also feel like a jackass for not buying Skyrim instead.

I intensely disliked the game, though for different reasons. Yeah, the characters are all artificial, seemingly have no reason to be together, and Vanille especially seems like she's on a different planet. There's also never any sense of urgency or purpose to your mission due to an overly convoluted and contrived plot with important exposition buried in text heavy submenus, set in a bizarrely underdeveloped, arbitrary world.

But I don't think that the absence of other styles of gameplay is to the game's detriment. The bigger problem is that the gameplay that is there is so threadbare that often you feel it's only there to pad out and supplement the game's story, rather than the story supporting the gameplay. That might have been ok had the story or its characters been interesting, but both were terrible.

There's still a ton to be done with turn based gameplay. If I had a Wii I'd be all over Xenoblade Chronicles right now. I think the main issue at the company right now is that they've lacked strong creative leadership ever since a large number of their staff left at the end of the PS2's life. They've been trying ever since to tap into a Western market for their games, not realising that their audience will always be relatively niche, and that their best creative output has been from when they've not been as eager to appeal to focus groups. There's a lot to be said that their main inspiration for the title was the Call of Duty series of games.

Like a large number of developers in Japan they also lack the technical skills to be able to compete with Western developers. It took them an extraordinarily long time to develop their White/Crystal Tools engine before they actually started any game development proper, and since development of that engine they've licensed Western engines and seen fit to redevelop a released game using the Crystal Tools engine on a new engine altogether (FFXIV). As it stands presently, the engine that they invested in, taking them ages to develop has only been used for the FFXIII games.

Try to trade in your copy at a store or sell it on ebay (since the release of FFXIII-2 some people seem to have become interested in XIII again), then look out for a cheap copy of Skyrim?

Or Dark Souls if you want something action RPGish like Skyrim. Or Valkyria Chronicles. Skyrim is also excellent though. I had big problems with the game's lack of balance and lack of difficulty, but that didn't stop me from playing it for over 100 hours.

I just got through FF:XIII-2 and it said "to be continued" at the end, so there may be a FF:XIII-3. I wonder if it will be for the PS Vita. By the way I liked the first one better.

Theres no plans for FFXIII as far as the company has come out and announced publicly. They plan to flesh out the story (read: release the content removed from the game) with DLC.